Mickey Hart, the renowned percussionist for the Grateful Dead, is on a mission to awaken and expand our awareness through sound. He is gathering the universe’s deepest vibrations, mixing them with rhythm, and bending one’s sense of self. Indeed, mystics for millennia have used meditation and sound to merge individual consciousness with cosmic consciousness. Hart’s new Commune course, Sound Consciousness: Drones for Sonic Bathing, serves the same timeless purpose. In collaboration with tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, he has produced 10 sonic bathing experiences paired with mind-bending animations of his own artwork. On May 20, 2021, Sound Consciousness will be released publicly on Commune, a video course platform for personal and societal well-being. Everyone can experience the first five segments of the 10-day course for FREE by visiting https://www.onecommune.com/drones.
Sound Consciousness: Drones for Sonic Bathing invites participants to go on a 10-day journey, setting aside 15 minutes per day to leave their usual plane of existence and travel through the vastness of their mindspace, gently landing back on earth relaxed, renewed, and with a radically revised sense of self.
“This is a sonic wonderland that gets you into the moment, into the now,” Hart says. “It gets you to connect to the very center of you, the vibratory center of you.”
Each track mixes musical techniques old and new: traditional musical instruments such as the tabla, digitized rhythms of natural phenomena, sounds from Hart’s extensive collection of global recordings, and underlying and weaving through it all — mind-bending drones played on The Beam, an amplified Pythagorean monochord Hart has been refining for more than 40 years.
According to Hart, “A drone is a sonic miniature of the workings of the entire universe.” They are not simple sounds, but rather complex sonic architecture. Drones are the key to connecting you to different veins of existence and to the fundamental physics of the universe.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
About Vibrational Expressionism: The Art of Mickey Hart:
The artwork accompanying this program is not separate from the musical experience, but rather a visual extension of it. The paintings featured in each video were literally drummed and vibrated into existence using techniques Hart developed in his studio in Northern California.
“These visual representations from my sonic-driven world are snapshots into the music I am making. Painting feeds the music, and music feeds the painting. They are two halves of the same experience.”
Each painting has then been animated to the music, resulting in a mesmerizing experience akin to flying over alien landscapes or getting lost in a psychedelic interpretation of the infinitely complex organic patterns of water, wood, and weather.
Why Is This Program Unique?
There are many doorways on the path to investigating the true nature of the self. Our culture has refreshed and re-embraced the ancient lineages of yoga and meditation on this quest. In this course, however, Hart revives and reimagines one of the oldest portals to self-realization — sound. His creation of a 10-day sonic bathing experience represents a fresh-yet-timeless approach to healing that is needed more than ever in our constantly distracted and superficial modern condition.
Music as a Method of Healing:
Music has a profound impact on the brain, and thus is also a profound method for healing. This course is not only intended to bring you into the present but also as sonic medicine. You connect with the sound, and it releases you from the before and the after, which is where stress resides. Physically you begin to feel your pulse, your brainwaves entrain to the rhythms, and you become a different organism than you were before you heard the sound. From this point, you can engage more fully in life. You get to dance a different dance.
