Tibetan Buddhist Religious Music from the Kagyu School

Phursung Kelak's life was characterised by disruption and change. Aged 13, he joined a monastery in his native Tibet. Eight years later, in 1959, he fled to Nepal after the Chinese Communist Party crackdown. He then worked in a road gang before joining the Karma Raja Mahavihar Monastery in Kathmandu. His extraordinary life perhaps explains this unusually intimate piece: for most of it, Phursang Kelak is the only performer, and the listener gets a sense of the musician as an individual that is highly unusual in Tibetan Buddhist ritual recording.

The first four tracks are a recording of a Chöd ritual. We hear only Phursang Kelak himself, accompanied by the rkang-gling (literally ‘leg flute’), a small trumpet traditionally made from a human thigh bone. Given the nature of the instrumentation, this isn’t music for providing light relief, but it is a high-quality recording and Kelak's voice is resonant and haunting. Tracks five to 12 are a succession of short pieces (all less than 100 seconds) of cymbal music performed again by Kelak without accompaniment, varying subtly in tempo, beat, resonance and volume. These variations prove engrossing, and culminate in track 13, ‘Expanding Sequence’, a four-minute long piece incorporating elements from all the previous ones. Tracks 14 and 15 are more conventional recordings of a meditation ritual from Kelak's monastery, but are still edgier and more unsettling than the average. A fitting soundtrack for troubled times.