Oceans of Light
Reviewed By Janet Mawdesley March 12, 2025
Artist – Ilka de Gast
Distributor: Bandcamp
Released: February 2025
Running Time: 1 hour 3 mins
Website: https://ilkadegast.bandcamp.com/album/ocean-of-light-music-to-soothe-the-soul-2
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Music to sooth the soul
To be bathed in beauty is to listen to the most relaxing and delicate music created by Ilka de Gast with her debut album Oceans of Light.
Eleven songs transport you to the most mystical of places, as you allow your mind to open to the delicate, carefully woven sound of tonal singing backed with subtle electronic wash and delicate, meaningful chants, each song inspired by the ebb and flow of the Pacific Ocean, a place where Ilka draws her inspiration.
The softly melodic Spirit Eyes begins a journey into sacred healing and meditation which offers a soothing and gentle moment to simply begin to relax before the almost monotone Ocean Waves Overtones allows the transcendental meditation to commence.
Each song is uniquely part of the whole, each piece allowing the next step into deep mediation to commence, or should that not be the desire, to sooth, calm and relax the mind for a short moment in time.
Desert Dance brings in a vastly different technique of tonal singing in the traditional style of the Tibetan and Mongolian Chants and when backed with gentle up-tempo percussion, brings this ancient art form into the modern world, offering a encompassing change of vibration.
The beautiful Light Sacred Connection is a song which can easily be used as guided meditation but is more of a gentle soothing chant to connect to ‘Source’ as de Gast refers to the world of the spiritual and divine.
Concluding a deeply immersive work is the chant Healing, sung with gentle precision asking for healing and gentle blessings from the Universe.
Ilka de Gast is a psychologist, singer songwriter who became fascinated with the field of Cymatics, the effect of sound on matter and began to combine her natural singing voice with tonal music in 2021, discovering this unusual combination became a profound and deeply relaxing vehicle for meditation. Oceans of Light places this music firmly in the world of New Age music with a flourish.