ANANDA
Deep Listening
"Ananda" is Sanskrit for "bliss," and this is the experience our music provides. Ananda features soaring violin melodies, soulful guitar chords, energetic tabla rhythms, and ethereal soundscapes from crystal singing bowls. We take listeners on a journey into deep inner peace, joyful abandon, heart-breaking sadness, and a felt sense of connection with all that is. So put your headphones on, make yourself comfortable, and get ready bliss out with Ananda!
Raji Malik plays the acoustic guitar like a sitar and a drum, and he believes that music is medicine.
Radha Gopinath das Marinelli is a life-long percussionist, playing a wide variety of Indian and Middle Eastern instruments such as tabla, kanjira, shri khol and doumbek. He has performed with many groups, including Spoken Hand, ONE, Animus and Ananda.
Zoana Gepner-Muller believes that Sound is a beautiful and potent force of healing and uses Crystal Singing Bowls as one of her healing Arts.
Joseph Arnold is a violinist, award-winning author, and Director of the Soulforce Arts Institute, living in Philadelphia, PA. www.SoulforceArts.com
Ananda “Deep Listening” Technical Notes
This is a single-mic, pure DSD recording.
This album was recorded in one session on February 8, 2025, with a pair of AEA R44 ribbon microphones in the Blumlein configuration (crossed figure-8 pattern). Recording was done at D.W. Fearn Studios in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
The performers were arrayed around the mics, placed to best capture the sound of the instruments while still preserving the most comfortable arrangement for seeing and hearing one another.
The mics went through a D.W. Fearn VT-2 two-channel vacuum tube microphone amplifier and a D.W. Fearn VT-7 vacuum tube compressor. Only a slight amount of compression was used, to slightly reduce Ananda’s 80dB dynamic range.
A Merging Technologies Hapi analog-to-digital converter was used, recorded with Pyramix software in DSD256 (11.2Mhz sample rate). Reverberation was added by a Bricasti M7 hardware digital reverberation device.
Ananda’s music is entirely improvised, so each piece on this album is the first and only take. It took about an hour to optimize the recording setup to achieve the proper balance between the four instruments (and occasional vocal), while maintaining a realistic stereo image of the performance.