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by a river in Hampi India — film, 2004 more info: www.chisatoohori.com

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The points where Steve Reich's music crosses The Minimalism Within Tradition

I can't remember when I first listened to Steve Reich's music. It was probably Music for 18 Musicians. Incredible. The harmonic sensibility is just strikingly cool — I remember being hooked from the very first listen. I later heard Music for 18 Musicians performed live. About a fifth of the audience got up and left before it was over. What a waste. When I first encountered it, I'd been listening to plenty of music, so the minimalism felt natural to me right away. And as someone who records myself, what strikes me deeply is the extraordinary concentration these musicians must sustain throughout the performance. So I looked into it again. Reich came to music at 14 — or rather, everything arrived at once. Until then, he had grown up in an ordinary household with no exposure to music written before 1750 or after 1900. Then, at 14, three things hit him simultaneously: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, and bebop — Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Classical and jazz, at the same moment. That same year, he picked up the drums. He went on to study philosophy at Cornell while studying music on the side, then enrolled at Juilliard, where he studied under Milton Babbitt, a leading figure in twelve-tone serialism. He completed his Master's degree in composition at Mills College in 1963. Seven years later, this product of elite musical education would be in Ghana, drumming until he got malaria. In 1965, Reich was working with a tape recording of a Black Pentecostal preacher he'd made at Union Square in San Francisco. He ran the same recording on two tape machines simultaneously. Due to slight differences between the machines, the two tapes gradually fell out of sync. He could have corrected it. Instead, he listened. Two copies of the same voice, slowly drifting apart and back together — this was the discovery of phasing. "Actually the going out of phase was kind of an accident," Reich told NPR years later. The piece became It's Gonna Rain (1965). In 1970, Reich traveled to the University of Ghana to study Ewe drumming with master drummer Gideon Alorworye. Five weeks of lessons and transcription. Then he got malaria and flew back to New York. He began composing Drumming almost immediately after returning (1971). In the summers of 1973 and 1974, Reich studied Balinese gamelan in Seattle and Berkeley — specifically kotekan, a technique where multiple players interlock fast melodic patterns, each playing only part of the line, together forming something neither could play alone. This technique left a deep mark on everything that followed. Music for 18 Musicians came out in 1976. Eighteen players, a sustained pulse that never stops, patterns that gradually shift and overlap. The mallet instruments, the ebb and flow, the layered density — the influence of gamelan, absorbed and transformed. Reich himself was careful about the distinction: "The rhythmic techniques used in African drumming are not what I do, but they are related to what I do. The important thing is that there is a tradition of rhythmic counterpoint in Africa." He didn't bring it back unchanged. He encountered a tradition, and something opened up. I have nothing but admiration for the vast endeavor of taking the universality within tradition and creating something this extraordinary from it. Fifty Years Of Steve Reich's 'It's Gonna Rain' — NPR Steve Reich — Biography — stevereich.com Steve Reich — Wikipedia Steve Reich has always been able to hear the pulse — NPR (2025)

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Rocks Hampi India — film, 2004 more info: www.chisatoohori.com

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Sunday market Berlin Germany 2013 more info: www.chisatoohori.com

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Mugwort　ー　Yomogi

A roadside where you happen to stop. A park. It grows just about anywhere — mugwort. In Japan it has long been used for kusa-mochi and for all sorts of other things. A weed that grows everywhere is a weed that gets used everywhere. In Eastern medicine it is used for moxibustion. Pull one up, turn a leaf over, and the underside is white. It looks white because it is packed with fine downy hairs. Gather only that down, and you have moxa. In ancient China, pine, jujube, elm, mulberry, bamboo and cotton were all tried as materials for moxibustion. And every one of them was dropped. The reason: they burn too hot and scald the skin. After long years of trying this and that, mugwort was what remained. I wondered why it had to be mugwort, so I looked into it. The wax. Mugwort leaves contain waxy compounds, and these are said to work the way a candle does. The flame holds a constant size, and the burn rate stays steady. It doesn't flare up. Wood and cotton flare, so you cannot put them on skin. Fibrous, full of air, holding its shape, easy to light, and smoldering slowly without a flame. It burns something like an incense stick. A block of wood could never do this. The quality of the heat. The burning part itself reaches 548–890°C, and yet the skin does not burn. Mugwort's heat radiates as infrared, and in experiments comparing it with cotton and straw, moxa was shown to emit longer wavelengths that penetrate more deeply. FTIR spectroscopy finds two peaks, at 3.75 μm and 8.75 μm, within a band of 2.5–13 μm. It is said to reach 2–3 cm beneath the skin. And what does the essential oil do? Mugwort's essential oil contains 1,8-cineole, thujone and camphene. Modern pharmacological research has confirmed antibacterial activity in this oil — against E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Candida and others. Cineole has anti-inflammatory and expectorant effects. In the Lacnunga manuscript, mugwort is said to "have power against poison and against infection." The Lacnunga is a gathering of medical recipes and charms, compiled in England in the late tenth or early eleventh century. A single copy survives, in the British Library (Harley MS 585). That people knew, from experience alone, effects that hold up against modern analysis — human wisdom really is something. This is usable. Things like this are growing all over the place. Look down at your feet, and there is treasure. --- ## References - [Moxa comes from mugwort — Sennenkyu](https://www.sennenq.co.jp/labo/mogusa.html) - [Kameya, moxa makers since 1661](https://www.ibukimoxa.jp/) - [The Mechanism of Moxibustion: Ancient Theory and Modern Research — PMC/NIH](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3789413/) - [Characterization of moxa floss combustion by TG/DSC, TG-FTIR and IR — ScienceDirect](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960852419307461) - [Analysis of infrared radiation emitted by moxibustion devices using FTIR — Heliyon / PMC](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11239693/) - [Artemisia vulgaris Linn: an updated review on its multiple biological activities — Future Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s43094-022-00436-2) - [Modes of Action of 1,8-Cineol in Infections and Inflammation — PMC/NIH](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10301542/) - [Significance of Artemisia vulgaris L. in the History of Medicine — PMC/NIH](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7583039/) - [Nigon Wyrta Galdor: "The Nine Herbs Charm" — Mimisbrunnr.info](https://www.mimisbrunnr.info/nigon-wyrta-galdor) - [The Nine Herbs Charm: Plants, Poisons and Poetry — Herbal History Research Network](https://www.herbalhistory.org/home/the-nine-herbs-charm-plants-poisons-and-poetry/)

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breaking time with people of the desert India — film, 2004 more info: www.chisatoohori.com

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didgeridoo

Twenty-odd years ago, in a variety of communities I passed through, there were people playing the didgeridoo. It fascinated me — how such a variety of sound could come out of what is, basically, just a tube. When I was staying in India, I made one myself, out of bamboo. There was a maker in Rishikesh named Mukesh who taught me how. You play it with circular breathing, and at first I couldn't do it at all — but after a little practice it came quickly. Drawing out a range of overtones takes real skill, but even early on it was a simple, absorbing instrument, the kind that carries you toward a trance. Percussion, and instruments like this — repeat them, and the mind goes clear. It feels like linking to some other world. The didgeridoo comes from Arnhem Land, in the far north of Australia, and it may be one of the oldest instruments humans have. The rock art at Kakadu dates it to at least 1,500 years ago; some researchers say three to five thousand. But "made" is the wrong word. A didgeridoo is a eucalyptus branch that termites have eaten hollow from the inside. The bore isn't carved by a person — it's carved by insects. You find the tree the wind and the termites have already finished, and you give it your breath. (The ones sold to tourists are, of course, hollowed out by machine.) Either way, through this instrument that nature made, they express whole worlds. Into that unbroken column of sound you fold the noises of the living world — a dingo, wind crossing rock, the sea, rain drawing closer — and with overtones and the texture of the breath, it all comes through, vividly. A kind of ceremonial time begins to flow. It's one of the cultures I'd love to hear performed live in its own place, at least once.

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some lake UK 2013 more info: www.chisatoohori.com

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A guitarinst UK 2012 more info: www.chisatoohori.com

[mymadeleine]

Apuseni, Romania

January 2026

Zenit 122 + Kodak Gold

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The space between silence and sound

People have often described my music as ambient — though I've never consciously set out to make it that way. I write music with rhythm, music with bass, music that moves. But I've always loved what gets called ambient music, and at some point I found myself tracing it back to its origins. There were probably similar ideas before this, but the one most people point to is Erik Satie's musique d'ameublement — furniture music. I'm personally very fond of Satie's Gymnopédies, but furniture music is something else entirely. In 1917, Satie premiered pieces he described as music you don't listen to. Music that simply exists in a room, the way a chair or a lamp exists. Background, but intentional. Atmosphere, but composed. At the premiere, Satie walked around the room begging the audience not to pay attention. "Talk, move around, don't listen," he told them. They listened anyway. The idea was largely forgotten. Then in the 1950s, John Cage picked it up. 4'33" — a piece that is entirely silence, or more precisely, entirely whatever sounds happen to be in the room at the time. A lot of music lovers know this one. Not nothing — rather, everything is already music, if you decide to hear it that way. A genuinely radical idea, even if it's still not easy for most people to sit with. In the 1960s, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young began building long, slow, repetitive works from almost nothing — sounds that changed so gradually you couldn't tell they were changing. Then in the mid-1970s, Brian Eno was bedridden after a car accident. A friend put on a record of 18th-century harp music and left. The volume was too low, and Eno couldn't reach to turn it up. Outside it was raining. The harp notes drifted into the rain, hovering somewhere at the edge of audibility. Something shifted. "This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music," he wrote, "as part of the ambience of the environment, just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience." Discreet Music came out in 1975. Ambient 1: Music for Airports in 1978. Eno gave the genre its name — music that could be either actively listened to or quietly ignored, that induced calm without being merely pleasant, that had no meaningful beginning or end. I want to add something here, even though it has nothing to do with ambient music officially. João Gilberto. I can put on Águas de Março — Waters of March — and play it over and over without ever getting tired of it. Caetano Veloso once said of João: "Melhor do que o silêncio, só João." Only João is more beautiful than silence. Not music in general. João specifically. Placed above silence itself. There's a record label with a similar sensibility — ECM Records. Their concept: "The Most Beautiful Sound Next to Silence." What's interesting is that Manfred Eicher didn't come up with that phrase himself. He found it in a 1971 review in the Canadian jazz magazine Coda, and simply adopted it as the label's philosophy. A critic's words became a label's identity. Silence. The most beautiful sound next to silence. More beautiful than silence, only João. The space between silence and sound really is something.

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a monkey in the Forest in Nagano Japan — film, 2021 more info: www.chisatoohori.com

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on the way to Annapurna Nepal — film, 2004 more info: www.chisatoohori.com

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Growing Pains

When I was staying in Bahia, Brazil, I studied under various masters—and since there are percussionists literally everywhere there, I was always playing alongside people or getting shown how to do things. Among the techniques there's one called the slap. You snap your hand like a whip to produce a bright, cutting high-end tone. It sounds great, but it hurts your hand quite a bit. Percussion is a little different from instruments that have melody and chords. You play through rhythm and through voicing—wielding a whole range of techniques. Strictly speaking you can coax out something like a melody, but at its core I think it's rhythm. And precisely because it's so simple, you surrender yourself to that monotonous yet endlessly deep rhythm, and after playing for a long stretch you slip into a kind of trance state. The trance itself is a fascinating subject, but here's the thing: when you've been running on a flood of adrenaline for hours, deep in that trance, you forget the pain in your hands. And what happens then? You start peeing blood. The first time it happened it startled me, but I'd been told it would happen, so I was honestly a little pleased too. Still, the toll on the body is considerable—the next day I was completely wiped out. Now, this blood in the urine. It turns out it isn't just a "you overdid it and hurt yourself" story—it's an actual phenomenon with a medical name, something I only learned later. It's called percussion hemoglobinuria. Here's how it works. When you keep striking a drum with your palm, the physical impact literally destroys the red blood cells flowing through the capillaries in your hand. The technical term is hemolysis. From the ruptured red blood cells, hemoglobin—the pigment that makes blood red—leaks out. It rides the bloodstream to the kidneys, gets filtered, and ends up in the urine. That's why the urine turns red. So that rust-red color isn't "blood from the bladder or kidneys"—it's "the pigment from red blood cells crushed in the palm of your hand." Not blood from a wound, but the trace of a small destruction that happened inside your hand, traveling a full loop through the body and coming out as urine. When you think of it that way, it's a rather strange phenomenon. Among players this has been passed down for ages as anecdote, but apparently it only got a name in the medical world relatively recently. There are actual papers on it. A 24-year-old djembe player developed rust-colored urine after an intense practice session and went to the hospital. The urine test came back positive for a blood reaction. But once he stopped playing, the symptoms simply cleared up—that's the report. What's interesting is that this has been observed collectively, as a kind of culture. In a study of players of Uruguayan Candombe—an Afro-diasporic ritual music where drums are struck continuously for long stretches—a full 20% were found to have the same hemolysis. One in five. So this isn't the tale of a few overzealous oddballs; it's a relationship that arises quite ordinarily between the drum as an instrument and the human body. That said, it can get dangerous if it worsens. The leaked hemoglobin pigment can be toxic to the kidneys, and if dehydration and painkillers (NSAIDs, taken to mask the pain) pile on top of that, it can lead to acute kidney injury. Forgetting the pain and playing on in a trance is, musically, the most sublime moment there is—but for the body, it's a state with the brakes broken off. Being utterly wiped out the next day was, I suspect, a perfectly legitimate protest from my body. But it's also true that, somehow, it left me with a bit of newfound confidence.

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waiting a person Rishkesh India — film, 2003 more info: www.chisatoohori.com

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The Aboriginal Worldview: "Everywhen" and the Idea That Singing Keeps the World Alive

The Aboriginal sense of time lies in a feeling of time utterly different from the Western, linear one. Aboriginal people do not grasp time as a one-way flow of "past → present → future." It is described as **"All-at-once time"** (a time in which everything exists simultaneously); past, present, and future are said to exist side by side. (The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner named this "everywhen.") So for them, an ancestor who has died and lost their body has not "once existed"—they are still here, now. The ceremony called corroboree, then, is not about "calling back" that ancestor, but about making manifest a presence that is already there. A corroboree is a gathering combining song, dance, and body painting, and this is where the didgeridoo is used. Its content differs completely depending on its purpose—celebration, meeting, confirming the boundaries of land, seasonal rites, and so on. The names, too, seem to vary by region, such as "junba" and "yanda." The Aboriginal concept of existence is highly unique. The world, it is said, was brought into being by the ancestors singing. Mountains, rivers, rocks, waterholes... all of them are traces of the ancestors' songs. When their journey was over, the ancestors, exhausted, returned to the earth and took the form of rocks, stars, trees, and waterholes. These became **Sacred Sites.** This myth is not merely an "old tale." It is the idea that the world is still being maintained by that song. For people to sing in ceremony and retrace the songlines is a cosmic act of renewing and maintaining the order of the world. The didgeridoo is also used for healing Aboriginal healers use the didgeridoo to perform a ceremony of **"breathing" the songline directly into the body** of the sick person. The sound was believed to carry the ancestors' power into the body. The physical side is interesting too. The didgeridoo: - produces a low fundamental (roughly 60–100 Hz) and rich harmonics, vibrating deep into the body - As opposed to the harmonics that stack "above" the fundamental, the components that arise "below" the fundamental are called undertones (subharmonics). In the case of the didgeridoo, the low components felt in the body come mainly from difference tones with the voice and from the undulations produced by circular breathing, which spread downward in an undertone-like way. - that low sound resonates through the skin and acts like a "touchless massage of sound" - Modern research has shown an effect on improving obstructive sleep apnoea (a randomized controlled trial, BMJ 2006: circular breathing strengthens the muscles of the upper airway) It means that Aboriginal people have, for thousands of years, been practicing "Vibroacoustic Therapy." ◯ "Vibroacoustic Therapy" A treatment that applies the vibration of low-frequency sound directly to the body (established in the 1980s by Olav Skille of Norway). - Fibromyalgia: 40 Hz vibroacoustic stimulation significantly improved pain, sleep, and symptoms (PLOS One 2021, Bartel et al. of the University of Toronto). Some were able to stop taking painkillers. - Chronic low back pain: improved in a pilot study. - Mechanism = stimulation of mechanoreceptors (gate control theory) + activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. References - W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming (1956) — origin of "everywhen." Overview: The Conversation, "'Dreamtime' and 'The Dreaming' — an introduction" - AIATSIS — "The Dreaming" - Encyclopaedia Britannica — "Corroboree" - UNSW Music Acoustics (Joe Wolfe) — "The Didjeridu" - Puhan MA et al., "Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome: randomised controlled trial," BMJ 2006;332:266 - Skille O., "VibroAcoustic Therapy," Music Therapy 1989;8(1):61–77 - Braun Janzen T, Thaut MH, Bartel L et al., "Rhythmic sensory stimulation on fibromyalgia symptoms: a randomised controlled trial," PLOS One 2019;14(3):e0212021 - Lim E, Lim R et al., "Treatment of chronic back pain using indirect vibroacoustic therapy: a pilot study," J Back Musculoskelet Rehabil 2018 Photo by Rene Riegal

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My new page is available! You can jump from ‘photolog’ on my web page. Chisato Ohori's Website