Rasa: Serene Timeless Joy

Bassist and producer Bill Laswell has tried his hand at just about every kind of music, and has always been especially drawn to the exotic and the esoterically spiritual. Whether it's mystical dub, ecstatic trance, or the poetic celebration of ancient assassin cults, if it's music that draws on archaic religious traditions (preferably originating far away from his home base of Brooklyn), Laswell will probably take a crack at it. This album is somewhat misleadingly titled; Rasa: Serene Timeless Joy is probably not what most listeners will feel while listening to its single hour-long track, which draws heavily on gamelan influences and combines field recordings with a variety of electronic sounds to create a musical experience that is certainly beautiful, but more eerie and unsettling than joyful. The recurring element is that of metronomically chiming clay bells, which come and go throughout the piece and alternate with arrhythmic chordal washes and wispy cloud formations of sound that sometimes resolve themselves into recognizable guitar or tambour parts before dissolving again into abstract musical impressionism. Nice stuff, but not necessarily soothing or relaxing.