Artist description Meditation Music/2001 is the second installment of Meditation Music, the music of Richard Freeman-Toole. I write music for the promotion and enhancement of altered consciousness states.

Music Style electronic minimalist fusion classical/jazz

Musical Influences Zappa, Ives, Isham, Gershwin, Varese,

Similar Artists Isham, Tool, Adams

Artist History Meditation Music is concerned with spirituality and altered consciousness states. I would like my music to put people into a head-space that promotes a super-accelerated appreciation of psychic energies. Success at this ambitious endeavor is accomplished through the rapid and dramatic juxtaposition of stylistic references (idioms); a process which places those references in abstract (spiritualized) relationships to each other. When these abstract relationships are exposed the hyper-stimulated mind neccessarily calls forth the power of the collective unconscious to interpret and verbalize the symbolic values of the expression into the terms of contemporary language. Thus, familiar vocabulary is imbued with a new meaning, a new vitality; there is made manifest a divine presence suffused with the anomalous energy of the quitessential "now" of existence.My background includes years of college teaching, orchestral conducting, new music concertizing (violin, viola, piano, with tape) and jazz playing and recording. I have been a pro composer for thirty years and have accumulated a fair number of honors and distinctions in the in the world of mainstream academic new music performance and composition; yet I have always existed on the periphery of the establishment. This has cost me dearly in financial support and professional connections, but it has afforded me the freedom to work, create and teach out from under the shadow of the bureaucratic mind set which dominates all academic life and thought. I have had many deeply transforming psychic experiences which have illuminated my work and teaching, and which have enabled me to mobilize energies in my students and ensemble players which many people have described as "miraculous."A description of the sounds my music employs might include, "avant garde noises" "perverted jazz riffs" "sentimental melodies" but it is the way these elements are combined and juztaposed which is the real essence of my art—always there is a striving for the dissociative gesture which results in an effort of psychic restructuring.As I turn to the internet for my audience I am attempting to bring all these disparate experiences under a single umbrella and find a musical medium which is both deeply transforming yet accessible. I am possessed by the conviction that I have a young popular audience out there just waiting to discover me, hungry for what I have to give them.

Group Members Me, Myself, I, Doppelganger, Alterego

Instruments Synthesizers, computers, violin, viola, voice

Albums Death and the Teetering Note, Astral Jazz:3rd Stream Vapor Trails, Astral Jazz II:Blue Hopes, Star Bach

Location Pullman, WA - USA

Copyright notice. All material on MP3.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties. You may download this material and make reasonable number of copies of this material only for your own personal use. You may not otherwise reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or create derivative works of this material, unless authorized by the appropriate copyright owner(s).