Artist: Gabrielle Roth
Genre(s):
Other
New Age
Discography:
Stillpoint
Year: 2000
Tracks: 8
Endless Wave Vol 1&2
Year: 2000
Tracks: 22
Zone Unknown
Year: 1997
Tracks: 8
Gabrielle Roth, known as the "urban priest-doctor," is euphony theater director of the Mirrors. Her key trance-dance music grew from her involution with concert dance, drama, movement therapy, ritual, and shamanic principles. The cultural melt flowerpot of New York City and the emerging knowingness scene at California's Esalen Institute likewise helped form Roth's panache. As Roth encouraged her dance students to move and emote, she noticed a natural rhythmical progress, which she calls The Wave or the 5 Rhythms. She saw that many of life's events, such as childbirth and love, stirred from flow to disconnected to chaos to lyrical and then to still. Dancing to these natural rhythms could move beyond the ego's personality and help catalyze and release the emotions of venerate, wrath, sorrow, joy, and peace -- conclusion with the state of go.
Roth's slogan, "Travail Your Prayers," epitomizes her approach to both her movement workshops and recordings, released on her Raven Recording tag. "We canful dance our prayers and sudor our pain in the neck," says Roth. "Prayer is like letting go of everything that impedes the internal secretiveness, of the look, the OM, the essence of self and soul. Each of the five rhythms represents a body politic of being, and existence is the nomenclature of cosmos. Movement, then, is our medicine and our course to ecstasy. So The Wave is how I beg. "
Roth's recordings began from her work with the rock & roll band of her New York ritual dramatics company, the Mirrors. "The first two albums I wrote were tribal john Rock and roll," she explains, "merely then we distinct to do simpler, primeval recordings, care the euphony I used for my motility workshops. That's how Totem was born in 1985. This album was a groundbreaker; at that time the New Age stores could non pertain to rhythms and drums as a spiritual way of life. Totem changed that." Roth seldom plays on her albums, just as music managing director, she assembles musicians appropriate for each concept and "conducts" the medicine by moving. Longtime Mirrors regulars include drummers Sanga of the Valley, a scholarly person of master Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunje, and Roth's husband and producer Robert Ansell. Over the long time, other contributors get included composer/guitarist Lenny Kaye (of the Patti Smith Band); Allison Cornell, strings (of Joe Jackson and Pat Benatar); Jai Uttal (Indian fusion musician); place music composer Raphael; and percussionists Gordy Ryan, Arthur Hull, and Cyro Baptista (of Paul Simon and Laurie Anderson).
Respective of Roth's albums present melodic workouts of intact 5 Rhythms: Initiation, Finger cymbals, Trance, and The Endless Wave: Vol. I, (the soundtrack from her video dance exercise, The Wave). Other albums underline single rhythms: Stillpoint (still), Waves (chaos), and Ritual (flow). Luna, a finalist for the 1994 INDIE Best New Age Album, explores women's mysteries, piece Tongues incorporates primeval vocal intonation. 1997's Zone Unknown uses techno tracks for the number one time. "You'll inactive know Zone Unknown is the Mirrors," says the group's drummer and producer Robert Ansell, "just we will push to raw territory." For more information around Roth's regular recurrence work, read her book Maps to Ecstasy: Teachings of an Urban Shaman (Nataraj Publishing).
