Mike Lazarev - Sacred Tonalities (2023)

Sacred Tonalities is Mike Lazarev's debut album with Past Inside the Present. Mike is an incredible ambient and modern classical composer who also runs the fantastic online informer Headphone Commute.

Mike stated that his last two full-lengths were all about exploring time. Entering time, exiting time, and finding yourself within time. "I think that for Sacred Tonalities, I wanted to be present with time. It's a very meditative state of mind. Like the ocean. Like breathing." Mike wanted the music on Sacred Tonalities to become a mantra during introspective moments.

"I decided to create a sonic aid which could be used as a guide through these meditations. The music features a wide spectrum of frequencies, allowing the listener to pick and choose what they want to focus on or lose themselves in. It starts off pretty timid, almost frail, and grows into a textural and spacial soundscape, which tells its own story, sometimes a bit different on subsequent listens. I spent a lot of time peeling apart these layers myself, picking this or that slow-beating vibration as the focus to see where it leads and changing the emphasis of the melody so that the listener can ride any sound wave they want. And so, the tonalities become a device in themselves, to escort the meditator during their journey."

Mike further describes how he cultivated and created Sacred Tonalities, "On the technical side, I often started by painting the ground layer with super wide brush strokes, always using a hardware synth, ranging from analogue modular to wavetable or granular synthesis, including a lot of gear from the late 90s. If you're familiar with these synths, you may be able to pick out the classics, like Roland JP-8000, Clavia Nord Lead, Novation Nova, Access Virus C, and some newer ones, like Argon 8M, Waldorf Iridium and ASM Hydrasynth. I enjoy designing sound from scratch here, playing with modulated harmonics, gritty and soft. If you listen closely, you will hear layers, layers, layers, moving, fluctuating, and constantly rearranging themselves. Then, when this amorphous blob is nearly finished, I start drawing the outlines of the main melody, accentuating it with bass, piano, and lead arpeggios to give it some rhythm. Finally, when this sonic sculpture is almost complete, I chisel away and remove many things, stripping some structure and polishing off the edges."

About the style, Mike says that "if you listen closely, you may even pick up on some post-90s progressive trance in there, which I've completely reduced down to its bare essence (for example, on Tonality Number Five) - this is a nod to my early days when I used to produce hard acid trance back in the mid-90s - if you were into that type of music, especially from Platipus, Noom, or Time Unlimited labels, some aesthetics here may trigger a flashback. So, we're talking about travelling back in time again... where our past is always inside the present..."