Bhajan Bhoy – Meditations

Cardinal Fuzz

For the last six years, music has needed to hit differently. Widespread anxiety, grief and isolation, as well as repeated knocks to people’s health have meant culture taking on extra duties.

For me, like many, lockdown led to an obsession with baking, daily circuits of my local hilltop, and seeking out music that might make my body and mind calm the fuck down. I listened to a whole lot of what would loosely be called ambient — soothing sounds to help me sleep, or at least unclench the knots in my shoulders.

Marconi Union, with their scientific precision about which tones and beats will induce unconsciousness; multiple volumes of Eno ambience; Max Richter’s massively popular snooze-fest Sleep; night after night after night of Juliana Barwick, Kelly Lee Owens, Éliane Radigue and the Covid-era hypnagogic maestro, Richard Norris, whose Music For Healing cycle chilled the whole house out — yes, even sent the dog to blissful slumber.

So that’s the context and the hope I brought to Bhajan Bhoy’s new LP, Meditations: years of deploying music as treatment, something between pharmaceutical and therapy.

Bhajan Bhoy is Ajay Saggar, who’s been making music of various genres for decades, from the raucous indie clatter of Peel Sessioneers Dandelion Adventure to the dreamy electrohaze of Deutsche Ashram, besides working as tour manager, promoter, sound engineer and, for the past decade and a half, production manager at Amsterdam’s legendary Paradiso. But despite a list of co-conspirators as long as you like, Bhajan Bhoy is just Saggar, a clutch of instruments — accordion, piano, yangqin, synthesisers, guitar, banjo and harp — and some deftly effective samples.

Meditations is made up of four tracks, all over ten minutes long, each woven around different found sounds and samples: the thrum of piano wires, tinkling keys, squeeze boxes, snores. These pieces are meant for immersive listening rather than dancing; Saggar calls them prayers, tying their purpose into the meaning of bhajan, the Sanskrit term for a devotional song. More spiritual practice than entertainment, it’s only right that the album is listened to and judged as such.

First track, “Yangqin Beach”, mixes the swoosh of waves against shore with a simple repeated melody picked out on the yangqin, a Chinese dulcimer, but the Xanadu vibes are gradually undercut by mechanical clicks of skipped vinyl and dark electronic growls. “Oh To Sleep Too” blossoms from a sample of a sleeping cat, a rough purr / yowl that is as surprising as it is comforting; the track drifts along to gentle, but insistent bells and alarms, blurred laughter, the sounds of a not-entirely-comfortable Sunday afternoon when you’d only meant to close your eyes for five minutes…

On “Vermona’s Piano”, the leitmotif of crackling vinyl is back, reminding us that sound is physical, is a process, something to feel in your guts as well as your brain. It’s as if music is breathing with the world, resonating with life rather than imitating it. The final track, “Stargazing”, sighs in and out in slow wheezy drones, but the sleep-inducing effect is tempered by skittering, squeaky keyboards.

What sets Bhajan Bhoy’s music-as-healing aside from most is its grain, its rootedness in the concrète. There’s nothing clinical about its therapeutic intent. Each of the tracks manages to find beauty and calm within the swirl, and it’s this intensely human, patient and inclusive side to meditative practice that I find both touching and effective.

These are the kind of meditations in which you’re guided to take notice of the cars outside the room, to acknowledge the clatter of feet, ambulance sirens, blackbirds singing, someone’s phone going off in their bag, grunting from the pilates studio next door — and let them go. It’s a world full of sound and motion, and yet the impression, all the same, is of stillness. All sound, whether synthesised or organic, intimate or expansive, unholy or divine, music or traffic, is just noise; Meditations lets you know that’s OK. Invites you to be still, unwind, and breathe it all — gently, gently — in.

And if the measure of prayer is not how loudly it is answered, but how exquisitely it expresses devotion, then Meditations certainly does the trick.

-Lucy Cage-