A few strange things happened during my conversation with Laraaji. First, about halfway through (at the part where he's talking about Switzerland), he smoothly transitioned into clipping his toenails without ever breaking eye contact. Afterwards, in my car, he spent several minutes questioning me intently about the protective capabilities of some Magic: the Gathering cards that I had left in a cupholder. Lastly, and almost without me noticing, he brought me around to his way of thinking. It's not a particularly objectionable one (nor am I a particularly disagreeable interviewer), and yet I realized while transcribing this that the man absolutely projects a conviction that fails to come across in text. Unintentional, or at least not malicious, it was a sort of mystique that made me particularly docile if only to find out more about him. It was helped by his habit of bringing sentences to a quiet end, punctuating not with a period but with an intense stare that would snap me back to the next question.

We linked up during this past May's Moogfest, at which the new age icon had been booked to give an eight-hour improvisational performance designed to explore, enhance, and accompany the audience's sleep, which would take place on makeshift nests around the concert hall (unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend). Joined by Laraaji's collaborative partner Arji OceAnanda, we dipped our toes in a hotel pool in full view of the oppressive sun - not ideal, but now the only scenario in which I'll carry out any similar future conversations.

How would you classify your occupation? What about your music? I’ve never quite figured out if categorization is a useful practice for musicians.

A musician, creative… I don’t really do this that often. If I had a business card, it would probably say composer, creative workshop teacher, recording artist. That’s normally how I tell people about myself. For music, it’s useful for marketing. I make transportative music, beautiful music, improvisational-experimental-exploratory music, with intention of uplifting and soothing, and providing space for listeners to have positive and supportive experience.

Does improvisation get easier with time?

It does - learning how to open space for improvisation. All of my music work is improvisational now, so it ends up being an easier life than it was with remembering music. It dovetails with my spiritual life practices - being present in the moment and trusting in the new. Keeping the head as light as possible, not giving thought to what I’ve done before or trying to mimic it. Even my music that sounds familiar is built around a direction or suggestion or a lead sheet that leaves room for improvisation. I guess that’s what jazz is about. So yes, it’s gotten easier - learning and un-learning and remaining in the moment with fresh inspiration.

How do you improve or evolve as an improviser? Is it about a greater ability to picture where you want to go, or increased confidence that you’ll end up there?

Both of them work. Picture, for instance, if a dancer says I’m going to do a movement about water, so you have a theme - I know that I want to tap into my memory of water and explore it. When I go into a recording studio without a theme, usually I’ll start with tuning my instruments and in doing so exploring and inventing a new tuning. Images come up from the chord, and it suggests a mood to be investigated. So I’m exploring a mood, a sensation, an intuitive feeling and vision. It might be a vision of ages of civilization around the planet, it might be a vision of imaginary beings from other planes dancing to my music.

Are you able to effectively capture the improvisational spirit on an album? Can you maintain it as your listen to or perform the piece repeatedly?

I have done that, although not intentionally. There’s music that I recorded spontaneously that I can listen back to and have it sound new and fresh. I haven’t examined why that’s so, other than going back to the state that I’m in when I’m recording - not knowing where I am going, and transmitting that state of fresh listening to the listener.

What moves you to record or release an album these days? I suppose its been primarily collaborations lately.

Requests, usually. Someone who has heard me play and will ask afterwards if I have a recording of what they just heard. Generally the answer is no, as nothing is repeated. Song material can sound similar, as with recorded songs I will tend to dip into those themes again in a new way. So if somebody says they like something that they’ve heard, but I haven’t yet recorded that particular tuning or style, that will inspire me to go into the studio and experiment with recording that for long stretches; that is, to make it into an album or a song.

Do you have a particular medium over which you’d prefer your music to be heard?

I appreciate the live experience a lot, but when I record and I edit, I tend to focus on how this music will be enjoyed if somebody’s on a yacht somewhere, where I wouldn’t be able to do a live concert. Somebody in their car driving down Highway 101 in California, and how the music will fit with the scenery. Or how someone in a remote village might use this music as background for massage or energy work. I enjoy the fresh listening experience where I’m imparting music to a live presence, and I also recognize that I can’t be everywhere at the same time. I enjoy knowing that there is music I will never play live for certain amounts of people on the planet, but I hope to edit a recording that can provide them a jouissance and an enjoyable listening experience.

I'm a huge chaser of interplay between music and one’s environment, especially while driving. Have you had any particularly memorable experiences like that?

The sun plays a large part - when I’m listening to music while the sun is shining or I have a visual connection to the presence of the sun. Another one is the presence of mountains, when I’m in outdoor scenery and listening on headphones or in a car. Europe has some interesting scenery - I guess every place has it - but going through Switzerland, on a train through the great mountains, I had that experience. Gazing at mountains… clouds are another one. Cloud formations moving alongside the music.

From a compositional standpoint, what can you do to pre-dispose your music to that sort of connection?

I can feel and imagine someone either reclining in a chair, or someone walking through nature. Feeling as if I was there, and what sounds would support or help me to derive a different slant on that experience. A Cave in England is an example, an environmental one where water is dripping and I’m playing a kalimba. It’s a kind of trancey, timeless experience. To answer the question, I can go for a trance/drone experience that allows the listener to relax and move through the veils of consciousness to experience their present moment in a different way.

Would you say that a lot of your music is derived from specific experiences or places, even if they’re non-obvious to the listener?

So much has impacted me from listening to music around the world. The strongest experience is listening to what is called inner cosmic music, a vibrational current that wafts through the brain. It registers to my awareness as a high-frequency sound - sometime as ocean surfs, sometimes as a celestial orchestra. It’s this music that I have the highest respect for, because it’s portable, it’s timeless, and it’s music that I can share with the whole world without doing anything. I can frame the music in sound - I can play music out here and let it slowly subside, leaving the listener to listen to the inner music. In Sanskrit, this music is called nadam - in other traditions, it’s called music of the spheres or the word. It’s this music that has had the strongest impact for me.

A lot of your music is made for assisting or soundtracking guided meditations. Is it important for you that music have a function?

It might be important in the purposing of the artist who performs it - it gives them a sense of direction, which can then be heard or felt through the playback experience. However, I jumped into improvisational recording without knowing what’s going to happen, just to warm up, and listen back to the warm up and find directions in there, suggestions or sometimes a whole completed piece that can be excerpted for an album. Music that happened without me having anything other than a harmonic, open-tuned sense of where I was going, at the level of major or minor chord selections.

I suppose that all music is functional insofar as it serves as a creative output for the artist, but I’m particularly fascinated by the idea of function driving form - I interviewed someone who was fascinated by lullabies because their entire being is directed by their intended use.

If I do an album in that direction, or I’m thinking that the music will lend itself to background for yoga or deep relaxation, I’ll specifically stay in that zone. Sometimes, I find that going with a specific intention doesn’t work right away - I have to jump in and mess around, and in a half-hour or so I’ll begin to feel the direction.

Can you talk a little bit about the performance from last night?

It’s been a vision of mine for a long time to explore the idea of playing for people who are sleeping, to see how it would affect their dreams. It was Matthew McQueen (a.k.a. Matthewdavid) in Los Angeles, from Stones Throw records, who pitched the idea of my being involved in Moogfest. I guess he brainstormed with someone here to figure out how my music would fit in, and they came up with the Sleepfest idea. It sounds reasonable because my music isn’t so Moog-y [laughs]. Someone probably said this doesn’t sound so Moog-y, but the music is interesting, so let’s put him out of the box. Sometimes I intend it, or sometimes I only find out about it after the show, but it always feels good to hear that people have had visions, or that they’ve gone somewhere that they don’t usually go in their imagination or in their feeling-body.

How do you conceptualize an eight-hour piece of music? Were you thinking about a sequence of falling asleep, dreaming, waking up?

I think of sleep as a rising through different states, the REM states and the waking up state where someone might be halfway in the twilight zone and then slowly come to as they hear music. At times I would allow the music to be ambient rather than literal, a sound-being that was simply sharing the space with them. Other times, I imagined that they were in very deep sleep and would make sounds that wouldn’t draw anyone out of unconsciousness. As if they were in a deep state of meditation, and setting a meditation-friendly space for that. Other times I would get a little active, sensing that someone might just be waking up - if they didn’t feel like sleeping, they would want to hear something that would hold their attention for a while. Then the music could shift to an entertainment function - not overwhelming, but something they could focus on with rhythm or progression.

What’s your relationship with sleep? Are there particular sleep-like states that you find advantageous for composition?

Arji: Do you know the term shavasana? Shavasana is, in the traditional yoga class, the period that’s dedicated after all of the postures and breath work to simply being. It’s a surrender position. Some yogis will say that it’s the most important part of the yoga practice. It’s the letting go, the surrender, so envisioning and playing for a shavasana-like experience… shavasana loosely translate to corpse pose, and Laraaji has a Laraaji line, one that I’ve heard over the ten years that we’ve been together collaborating, where he’ll say ok, folks, what agenda does a corpse have?

Laraaji: It’s a state of loose enough connection with thoughts to be able to experience the space between thoughts - the silence.

People talk a lot about album construction - creating a coherent body of work that’s naturally divided into songs or movements. Given how explicitly you consider mood, energy, etc. in music, how do you apply that to forming an album?

Well, if I’m working with a record company then I allow people’s ideas into the mix - they’ll hear a direction, and if they hear it bigger than I do they might suggest that we edit the music to fit that direction. A record company is thinking marketing. I, on the other hand, am always working towards that shavasana function. I think of the phrase honoring the next seven generations on this planet, and I think of my music remaining on this planet for the next seven generations - what would I like them to get from it? I think the greatest thing that I can offer is the music that allows them to have uplifting, guiding visions, deep relaxation, that allows them to feel beauty and therefore open their hearts, and music that allows them to breathe more comfortably regardless of what’s going on in the world at that time.

How did you choose your name? While researching this I found Celestial Vibration, which you had put out under your given name Edward Gordon - what spurred the change?

During a time when I wasn’t exactly homeless but acted like I was, I had no apartment and was living on a subway train in New York for about four or five days. I had the option of staying with friends, but suddenly here I was without an apartment due to a shift in my relationship at the time. Living on the subway, I observed people at rush hour, watching people come on with their focuses while I might just be waking up from sleeping. This total contrast, and then the train would empty out. On one particular day, I came out of the subway in Grand Army Plaza, in Park Slope, New York, and I just sat on a bench observing the world going by with its business. Suddenly, I became expansively aware that there was this sun up there just smiling, being gentle, and I bonded with the sun - there’s my buddy, my friend. That was the inspiration for wanting a new name further on down the line, and I felt ready for a spiritual name that would help me solidify my sense of direction.

I knew that I was looking for a three-syllable name that related to the sun, and around 1978 or 1979 - I had become familiar with the zither, and was performing for psychic fairs or meditation groups, there was a bookstore in Harlem called Tree of Life, owned and operated by a man named Kanya McGhee. He would open his books open to anyone who wanted to read for free, and at times I would play on the sidewalks outside of the store. After a year of this, two of the members of the community came up to me and said we’ve been listening to your music for so long, and we feel that you should be wearing a different name than this Edward Gordon. We came up with a new name for you. I said ok, let’s meet in Central Park and you can reveal the name to me. They revealed the name as Laraji, which they said roughly referred to the divine energy of the sun - the divine being that comes down to Earth to support, heal, and bless people and then moves back up into the celestial world. I said wow, three syllables having to do with the sun! I only made one alteration, adding one a to their spelling so that the name Laraaji would have three a’s and thus three triangles in uppercase. Later I realized that in Egypt, the sun god Raa does actually have two a’s in it. It’s a name that celebrates my bonding with the sun and my respect for it as a divine being.