Beyond Karma

Reviewed By  Janet Mawdesley       August 4, 2016

 

Artist – Gyuto Monks< Kim Cunio and Heather Lee   

           Distributor:         

           Released:             2016

           Running Time:    55.14mins

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Thanks go to the ‘The Creative Services Company’ for the information provided to accompany the blessed and sacred music in ‘Beyond Karma’

To be able to review this magnificent work is far beyond my capabilities as a reviewer of sound and words, as in order to do justice to the recording of this sacred chanting, drawn from wide a range of cultures and sacred sounds based in tradition centuries old, is something that needs to come from within the soul and not from simply what you are hearing. It is something that will touch every person who listens to the album in a deeply personal manner, therefor is specific to each and every listener!

But so saying, and making no excuses, this is indeed a work that, for those who are involved in musicology, the power of sound, deep meditation and reverence, will touch a spiritual chord within and add to the purity of meditation and worship.

The Gyuto Monks of Tibet came to the notice of the Western World during the 1960’s, as a strong fascination arose with the deep spirituality of the chanting of the Tibetan Monks; tantric masters whose strict daily practice is at the very heart of Buddhist tradition.

On this album, they have been joined by Australia’s noted sacred music duo in Tim Cunio, musician, musicologist and composer and his wife Heather Lee, an acclaimed multi-lingual soprano whose voice joins with the Monks on Beyond Karma and then again on Lament for a Lost Home creating an  incredible purity of sound.

Blending seamlessly, the deep, six beat chanting of the Monks in the Lament, with the purity of Hall’s Soprano voice takes chanting to an completely new level of worship and reverence. That the work is based on a poem by contemporary Iraqi poet Bader Shakir Al-Sayyab, melded into a composition by Tim Cunio, establishes without precedent, the  emotion expressed in symbolism felt by all those who have fled their homelands for other lands.

A solo piano piece, ‘As The Sun Sets’ written  in response to Cunio’s time spent with the Monks, makes a refreshing pause and prepares you for the gentle chanting of nine year old Samurai (Babu) Cunio as he chants the prayer The Suffering of the World, based on a favourite prayer of the Dalai Lama.

Dedication, the final sounds we hear from the Monks is simply that, the words sacred, secret and thousands of years old.

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