LEVI, LOUISE LANDES & BOMBAY LUNATIC ASYLUM - Behind the Buddha's Mask/Reading at Tangine 11/20/2022

Limited to 60 copies, includes color j-card with two inserts.

"A stunning effort, largely built around the unique recordings made by Christophe Albertijn at the Middelheim Museum in May 2021. While the pandemic forced poet, writer, sarangi player and global wanderer Louise Landes Levi to reside in Japan, her voice – reciting poems from the “Behind the Buddha’s Mask” poem – was transported to the confines of Bruce Nauman’s site-specific installation named Diamond Shaped Room with Yellow Light, hosting the hypnotic, ritualistic playing of Bart De Paepe (Harmonium, Shruti box) and Koen Vandenhoudt (Sarangi, bells), under their Bombay Lunatic Asylum guise. Flirting with the outer-reaches charted by Buddhist music, “Behind the Buddha's Mask” is a trance-inducing, meditative, cosmic world of sonic interplay. On Side B we find Louise Landes Levi recorded live at Restaurant Tangine, NYC on November 20, 2002 with Ira Cohen, Kelvin Daly, J.D. Parran and assorted mysterious guests."

Louise Landes Levi is a poet/performer-translator/traveler and a founding member of Daniel Moore’s Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, America’s first fusion orchestra. After receiving a BA from UC-Berkeley, and studying at Mills College with the sarangi-master Pandit Ram Narayan, she traveled alone overland to Afghanistan in the late 1960s and to India, to research North Indian sangeet (classical music) and its poetic tradition. She has published more than a dozen books of poetry and autobiographical prose. Her recordings include: From the Ming Oracle (Sloowax, 2014), an instrumental and spoken word compilation of her works from the late sixties to the near present; City of Delirium (Sloow Tapes, 2011); and the LP Colloidal Love Poem (AudioMER.). John Giorno writes: “Her poems sing in the mind and dance through the heart and throat, and arms & legs, w. great clarity and bliss. Louise is Saranswati, goddess of poetry.” Levi has studied with such masters as Annapurna Devi, Ali Akbar Khan & La Monte Young. When not performing, she lives in a stone tower in Bagnore, Italy, with winter quarters in New York, her birthplace, and elsewhere.