Branches by The Dream of Being
                   copyright 2007 Alexander J Caruso

Out of  everything I've recorded, the song Pathlessways from the album Pathlessways remains one of the most meaningful and sacred to me. Branches is an album founded on the central theme of this song, which itself is the central theme of the three-hour series Arundas.

It took me a good amount of time to finish the song Pathlessways - I spent weeks recording different parts that for various reasons didn't fit into the overall sound I was going for, but were worthy little vistas in and of themselves. Eventually I got what I was looking for and went on to finish the rest of the album, but forgot about all those little unmixed song bits hanging out in the abyss of the "pw trk 3" session.

A year or two later I had an idea to create an album specifically for meditation and was perusing some old stuff looking for material when I rediscovered those little song bits just hanging out in the shadows of my hard drive. So I polished them up a bit and remixed them.

Interspersed with the branches of Pathlessways are little ambient passages called Entrainments. Each of these tracks has sonic patterns designed to stimulate the production of Theta Waves in the brain. Theta Waves are brain waves associated with transcendental states of being, and the entrainment patterns blended within each of those four tracks get progressively more intense as the album goes on.

The album is composed of sixteen short tracks and runs 40 minutes. I've found that for music meditation, having shorter tracks can be helpful, because often the biggest obstacle to clear presence is the wandering mind, and when the music pauses the mind will often pause with it, prompting the listener to come back. But, although the tracks themselves are short, the overall mood of the album is thematically steady and subtly hued throughout - almost monochromatic, and as the album goes on, the tracks grow longer to accommodate a gradually slowing mind.