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sunpath - dream music - leaving records - tapes

Genre: Techno / Electro - Electronics

1. Jasmine
2. Snowflake Dragon
3. SunPath2-1
4. SunPath2-2

SunPath is the 1980s outsider Alternative Realities music of Jeff Berry. Self-released and privately distributed from Northern New Mexico in 1980 and 1984, the coveted material is now seeing the light of day again in this double cassette offering. Each composition is a thirty minute journey into other realities and other spaces.

Currently living in rural Wyoming, Jeff reflects on the Dream Music to Leaving Records:

“In 1980 several unique events prompted me to jump from the edge of my known world into other spaces and other places … during the early 80s, each year I chose a vision or theme and created a work of music based upon it.

One of the many things that made working on the SunPath music compositions so interesting and compelling is that in order to evoke visual images I would spend considerable time searching for specific sounds. To do that I constructed many different kinds of instruments and devices - the following details some of this process and how I combined these acoustical sounds electronically to create a blend of music not really describable from either medium - all treated with experimental tape-transferring to induce artifact and generation of overtone sequences.

*Prophet synthesizer *Silver flute acoustically recorded and then electronically processed *Peyote ceremony water drum *Crystal glass bells *Aluminum and brass chime bars *Bass viol *Self built wire-strung harp *Rebuilt/retuned Native American cedar flutes *Mexican dove ocarina *Chromatically tuned sitars *Field recordings of streams: one outdoors & one inside a cave *A field recording of a raging snowstorm captured under a full moon outside of the cabin window *Divine intervention, etc.

In the years that followed, I became more acutely aware of walking upon the borderline of other dimensions of reality. Even as I write at this moment if I step outside into the snow and look at a single pine needle or twig, it glows and shimmers as if flickering in and out of the solid reality we most normally inhabit. Everything in the natural world has this quality and I am most perplexed and astounded at every moment of my being.”