Joanna Brouk - Healing Music (2021/1985)

Joanna Brouk's first ever release, Healing Music, featuring Maggi Payne on flute and originally issued on tape in 1981 - pretty much impossible to get hold of for realistic dollar.

It’s a set of enchanting new age flute compositions featuring Payne’s effortlessly mesmerising flute playing, culminating in a final side-long / 23 minute composition 'Healing Music’ that features Brouk on Synthesizer and Piano that quite simply - and in the truest sense - dilates time.

Flowering from studies at the esteemed Mills College with Robert Ashley and Terry Riley in the ‘70s, these breathtaking and little-known recordings are testament to the lush, earthly beauty of Brooks’ privately issued new age tapes made between 1981 and 1985 in The Bay Area, west coast USA.

Channelling parallel strains of ambient and new age with a clear appreciation of classical minimalism, Joanna’s music is focussed on a spiritual essence yet it is mercifully shy of the sonic baggage that comes with new age’s more cloying facets. This statement from Joanna really says a lot about her music, too: “I realised that, in many instances, it didn’t matter what you said, it mattered how you said it: the tone of the voice, the rhythm, the sound… Because sound has an incredible effect on other people, it can make them dance, put them into trances, it can control emotions by a certain pitch, a certain depth.”