Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass
Passages

1990 

Ravi Shankar meets Philip Glass.

That is, the virtuoso of the sitar who had the merit of introducing the enchanting Indian instrument's sounds to the whole world, one of those musicians who just by looking them in the face make you understand what world music means, who don't make music a matter of appearance, who consider it a sacred art, an essential anesthesia for the psychic transcendence to which meditation can take you, meets the Master, the mathematician, the father of minimalism, the Dream Theater of minimalism, one who was capable of composing music for any damn instrument, who has explored all the most tortuous and virgin paths within tonality, one of the greatest representatives of contemporary classical music, meaning the humans of the eighteenth century had Mozart and we have Glass, I absolutely don't want to compare them, but Glass's music makes you think of a futuristic key, where in a world increasingly filled with technology even the elusive magic of melodic composition begins to schematize into tangles of closed circuits, almost representable with an equation.

The Oriental Classical meets the Western Classical.

"Passages" emerges, which sounds even more mystical and transcendental than Shankar's solitary works, because to the sounds of those strings and winds that taste of earth and rattlesnakes, joins the hypnotic power of numbers, the feeling of a truck always moving in the same tonality carrying strongly hallucinogenic elements, a true album for the "lotus flower" position, perhaps with headphones in a beautiful floral garden. "Sadharipa" and "Prashanti" are the most suitable tracks for this type of situation. In "Offering" and "Channel and Winds" prevails instead that strong and cynical emotion of Glass, capable of letting you enter even an assembly of trains of melodic composition. "Meeting Along The Edge" and "Ragas In Minor Scale" are the tracks where the influences can very well be a 50 and 50, thus a perfect fusion of the two styles to give a unique imprint to this project.

The Sacred meets the Profane Technicism.