Collaborating with musicians across numerous genres and artistic styles, Michael Gary Dean’s FOREVER MEDITATIONS merges flowing ambient electronics with intimate instrumentation, drawing on reflective moods and long moments of deliberation. Organic and highly textural electronics simmer underneath delicate melodies and hovering tones from double bass, violin or piano.
Taking moderate influence from traditions like ‘Deep Listening’, FOREVER MEDITATIONS seems to have embraced a uniquely Canadian musical landscape that’s been slowly defined by a myriad of drone artists and ambient music makers alongside neo-classical composers and instrumentalists. With artists like Loscil, Sarah Davachi, Kara-Lis Cloverdale or Tim Hecker as a backdrop, FOREVER MEDITATIONS is the soundtrack to elongated moments for reflection while enduring the long and harsh Canadian winters.
“We lean especially into creating ‘raw moments’ in our process, capturing ideas as soon as they come out in order to express a sense of vulnerability and reject the hyper-perfection of today’s digital realities. It’s a reaction to a world spent indoors, on screens, and online in carefully curated digital spaces, especially emphasized during the Covid-19 pandemic between 2019-2022. We explicitly use ‘detuning’ as a way to create and encourage tension and uneasiness in many of the tracks. Since there are so few notes and the themes are based on the feeling of electronic music-style ‘loops’, a desire for some sort of resolution is present within the individual notes and through delaying the movement from one note to the next within the melodies, themes and musical sequences of the work.
Many of these pieces are meant to be experienced as ‘listening states’ rather than a complete story. They blur our sense of time and encourage a space of self-reflection for ruminating over old memories or emotions..” — Michael Gary Dean
Credits
Produced by Michael Gary Dean
Composition: Michael Gary Dean, Freddy Speer
Double bass, Voice: Freddy Speer
Piano: Michael Gary Dean, Gabriel Vinuela-Pelletier
Violin: Amanda Gibeau
Additional sound recordings: Christian Carrière
Mastering: Taylor Deupree [12k Mastering]
Released by Reclusive Strategies
The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
