Eternity ring
The be-robed laughter meditation guru’s 1978 debut, accompanied by three discs of early recordings. By David Sheppard.
Laraaji ★★★★ Segue To Infinity NUMERO GROUP. LP
PERHAPS INEVITABLY, any narrative about Laraaji (including this one) must involve Brian Eno and the 1979 Sliding Doors moment when the producer happened upon the musician known first as Edward Larry Gordon, then Larry G (a pun on which led to his enduring fauxmystic moniker), busking in a corner of New York’s Washington Square Park. The chance meeting would result in the endlessly transporting Eno-produced Ambient
3: Day Of Radiance, released in 1980, which alerted the wider world to the free-flowing caresses of Laraaji’s music. However, as this release verifies, there is a significant prequel to this oft-repeated origin story.
Born in Philadelphia and raised in New Jersey, the young Gordon graduated in piano and composition from Washington DC’s Howard University before moving to New York in the mid-1960s, dabbling in stand-up comedy and acting when not playing electric piano with jazz-rockers Winds Of Change. Becoming enamoured of Eastern mysticism and the healing potential of sound, in 1976 he enjoyed a first moment of cosmic kismet when, on a hunch, he acquired a 36-string zither-autoharp spied in a Queens pawn shop, which he’d only visited to exchange a redundant guitar for grocer y cash. Weeks spent exploring open tunings and strumming styles, using plectrums, brushes and sticks, would transform the quintessential North American folk instrument into a thing of empyrean exotica: part Indian tanpura, part Hungarian cimbalom, capable, when ameliorated by amplification and reverb, of dispensing enveloping clouds of arpeggiated rapture, a sound that Laraaji dubbed ‘Celestial Vibration’.
He would give the same designation to his 1978 debut LP, recorded in a New England studio and issued under his full given name as a private pressing. Heard today,
Celestial Vibration’s two lengthy, improvised tracks evince an artistic signature still materialising. While it eventually settles into familiar cumulonimbus banks of plangency. Side one’s Bethlehem reaches elevation only slowly, with woody scrapes and metallic clangs, alongside passages of near silence, prefacing a second half in which kalimba, bells and burbling electronic processing frame vaulting waves of shimmering autoharp. Side two’s All Pervading is a more propulsive essay, its overlapping episodes of delicately hammered strings wreathed in a narcotic swirl of phasing – sudden changes in the chordal centre meaning the music keeps asking questions, never succumbing to blithe
New Age bliss-out.
The six other lengthy pieces gathered here feature previously unreleased works from the late-’70s Edward Larry Gordon archive. If nothing else, they provide a clear indication of what attracted Eno to this music: the slow, inexorably unfolding Ocean is a close cousin of his Discreet Music, while the contemplative, flute-decorated Segue To Infinity and delightfully rippling Afromeditation Kalimba 1 demonstrate that Laraaji’s gift for the mellifluously hypnotic wasn’t confined to repurposed autoharp ambience.