Lama Lobsang Palden & Jim Becker

★★★★ Compassion DRAG CITY. CD/DL/LP Buddhist healer and postrocker connect. Transcendence ensues. Diligent students of linernotes might recognise the name of Jim Becker, a Chicagoan musician and producer with lengthy shifts in Iron & Wine and Califone prominent among his credits. Lama Lobsang Palden, however, will be a new one to even the most esoteric rock scholar, a Tibetan meditation and yoga master and “practitioner of holistic energy medicine” who treated Becker some years back. The music they make together can be initially forbidding: begins, ostensibly, like a field recording of a Tibetan Buddhist ritual. But gradually, an artful and spiritual meeting of worlds is achieved, as the chants and bells evolve into beautiful drone-folk tunes such as Blessings, Oneness and Purification. Better yet, when Becker picks up his trumpet on Calling The Spirits (Emptiness), the results resemble a kind of Himalayan adjunct to Jon Hassell’s Fourth World soundscapes.