Music of the Five Elements

John Michael Greer recently wrote a post on Music as a Magical Language. Towards the end of the essay he writes that “it wouldn’t be too hard to work out classic rock numbers for every planet and element.”

There is classic rock that I enjoy very much, but it’s not really my main musical interest, so in the spirit of dissensus I am going to make an eclectic list of songs for each of the elements. A later list will contain music for the planets, and still another will go further out into the empyrean to share music about the zodiac.

For the element of Air, Brian Eno’s Music for Airport’s comes to mind. At this point there are many different versions based on his original. I am rather partial to the Bang on a Can version, but there is also one from Psychic Temple the project of Chris Schlarb, a Long Beach jazz guitarist. Air is an element we associate with thoughts, thinking. Sometimes we call someone who gets lost inside their head flighty. What is great about Music for Airports is the way it allows thoughts to land and take off to many different destinations while listening in an orderly fashion. This jazz version of the ambient classic does it up right. I’ve always found jazz to be great music for thinking and writing, and this rendition really does allows the higher qualities of the element of air to circulate within the mind. The Psychic Temple version is also nice in that the album also features a track called Music for Bus Stops.

enry Flynt’s mixture of hillbilly-cum-rockabilly fiddle music overlaid on topic of electronic tanpura drones takes the listener deep into the burning flames of creativity on this revelatory album long cut, Purified by the Fire. This is an exultant combination of the high lonesome sound heard in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, that gets a hard edged rock kick when the electrified strings are distorted. Henry Flynt was one of many students of the classical Indian singer, Pandit Pran Nath, and this work shows that element, not just from the drone, but also from the tones that leap like flames out of the fiddle.

For the element of Water, I suggest Watermusic by William Basinski. It’s a quintessential liquid ambient album designed to be listened to at low volumes. As it moves through the space it will seep into every available crack and pore. The title appears to be a homage to George Friederic Handel’s Water Music, from 1717. Beyond that, and their evocation of the element of water, the two pieces appear to have little in common. This Watermusic is on the tranquil rippling side, and a perfect way to quell the more turbulent manifestations of water. It cools the emotions keeping them in calm equanimity. Basinski did a reworked version called Watermusic II and it is just as elementally essential.

Some people like to make music with the very stones of the Earth. Among them are Scott Gibbons and he did just that on the album Stone for his Lillith project in 1992. Scott got his start in performance with a group called The New Elementals. The sounds on this album are all made just with stones that have been struck, stones that have been smashed, grated even, and includes both granite and clay. The recordings were taken and remixed as raw materials in the studio. This is probably the most experimental of pieces in this list, but the experience of listening is still grounded. Listening is a way to do just that, ground oneself in physical presence.

If we look at the Chinese elements, than the topic of Wood might come up. Many instruments are made from wood of course, but Timber, a cycle of percussion works by Bang on a Can founding member Michael Gordon takes the cake. It is mesmerizing music and I would love to be able to see it performed live someday because he figured out a way of tuning blocks of wood in such a way that when the musicians play them it creates a sense of movement of sound around the room.

Percussion in particular seems to correspond strongly with the element of Earth. The late industrial musician and legendary percussionist Z’ev explored the properties of metal with his homemade and scavenged drum kits. As a Qabalist and mage, he was also very in tune with the elementals and worked with them deliberately in his music. His piece Elemental Music which exists as an early recording from the 80’s and as various performances, captures his connection to the elements. This short filmed performance from a show in Milan, Italy gives a visual example of just how connected he was with his instruments and the elemental metals they came from.

Songs for the element of Aether are a bit harder to pin down. “Structures from Silence” by Steve Roach comes close. Perhaps its just because this album is one of my all-time ambient favorites, or the fact that I use it for meditation and other practices, or the way the title suggests structures emerge out of something beyond, something silent, something still that gives birth to what we might call spirit. The whole album is like that, with “Reflections in Suspension” being my favorite track.

Another piece, and one greatly contested over the decades since it was first performed that I think epitomizes the element of Aether is 4’33” by John Cage. Cage taught us to really listen to the sounds going on around us, the sounds within us. Cage is also responsible for popularizing a saying he got from Indian musician Gita Sarabhai, that the purpose of music is "to sober and quiet the mind making it susceptible to divine influences." When we turn off the music and embrace the silence, we might just began to hear our own thoughts and get in touch with the parts of ourselves that are beyond the physical.