Ten Laws with East Forest

Julian Treasure is a sought-after and top-rated international speaker. Collectively his five (yes five) TED talks on various aspects of sound and communication have been viewed more than 80 million times. His talk How To Speak So That People Want To Listen is in the top 10 TED talks of all time.Julian's first book, Sound Business, is the seminal work on creating effective business sound, now in its second edition and also published in Japanese. His audio branding company The Sound Agency works with major brands worldwide proving that good sound is good business and pioneering the use of generative soundscapes instead of mindless music in spaces like airports, shopping malls and offices.His second book, How To Be Heard: Secrets for Powerful Speaking and Listening, is a practical guide to improving the vital personal communication skills of listening and speaking (both public and private), which have been eroded by our ocular culture, including our obsession with screens. The book includes many simple exercises; interviews with experts; and potent, transformational concepts gleaned from 30 years' experience as a speaker with a passion for listening.Julian has been widely featured as a sound and communication expert in the world's media, including TIME Magazine; The Economist; The Times; and many international TV and radio stations and podcasts. He is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Marketors, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a long time musician, remembering with affection his two 1981 BBC John Peel sessions (the bands were Transmitters and Missing Presumed Dead). He lives in Orkney, Scotland with Jane and their daughter Holly.http://www.juliantreasure.comhttp://www.thesoundagency.com

It's that time of year again - the annual "Ask Me Anything" episode.  I got questions around what are meaningful rituals and traditions, how to hold space for someone in a psychedelic journey, and questions around navigating single life after leaving a relationship.   Plus a message to our brothers and sisters in Australia facing fire and intense change.   Final song, "End Of The Road" from Music Meditations.  Remember, you can reach out anytime with your questions to info@eastforest.org.

Mona Haydar is a young Syrian-American Muslim who gained national and international press for her and her husband’s “Ask A Muslim” project- a booth that invited dialogue and questions in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks. The Boston Globe, NPR, People Magazine, The New York Times and others all covered the project and the collaborations that followed.  In 2017 she broke into the hip hop music scene with Hijabi (Wrap My Hijab) whose video- featuring Haydar seven months pregnant with her second son- went viral. Billboard Magazine named Haydar’s track one of the top feminist anthems of all time (alongside hits by icons Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, and M.I.A).For the last four years, Mona has been performing her poetry and music, leading writing and activism workshops, and speaking at universities and colleges about art, Islam, feminism, hip hop, theology, and inter-faith dialogue. She has performed internationally, spoken at churches, synagogues and conferences, and has been invited to speak at such institutions as Smith College, MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley and the Parliament of World Religions. IG - instagram.com/themostmonahttp://eastforest.org/podcast

With tender hearts we share that Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert) died peacefully at home in Maui on December 22, 2019 surrounded by loved ones.•He was a guide for thousands seeking to discover or reclaim their spiritual identity beyond or within institutional religion.•We are grateful for the heart to heart connection we have cultivated here and appreciate all the love that has poured out today. Thank you.-Love Serve Rememberhttp://eastforest.orghttp://ramdass.org

Folks often ask about how the song, "Grandmothersphere" came to be, or what it's all about, or where the vocal field recording came from - or just who is that?  It is one of the most popular East Forest songs to date and it most certainly was birthed out of unique circumstances.  In this episode, East Forest tells the story of the song, complete with the original full field recording from the fateful ceremony that started it all.

The Houston multi-instrumentalist Matt Kidd, who writes pastoral, deeply felt compositions as Slow Meadow.  Despite initially having minor recognition outside Houston — where glacial, melancholic, piano-centered sound experiments aren’t the city’s chief concern — Kidd’s 2015 debut was still eagerly received by critics like Echoes’ John Diliberto, who elevated Slow Meadow on the same storied Public Radio International show that’s featured Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, John Cage, and other lions of experimental music. The record also garnered him an entrenched and growing following on Spotify and Bandcamp, where Slow Meadow listeners were treated to several two-song “singles” between Kidd’s full-length ruminations — setting the stage for Costero to be greatly anticipated in ambient, modern composition, and experimental music circles. www.slowmeadow.com/www.eastforest.org/podcast

East Forest joins Radha to recount his recent tour to China -- they traveled there to perform outside Shanghai for the At One International Festival.  Listen in for stories, insights, and high weirdness abounds!http://eastforest.org/podcastmarisaweppner.com

Peter Broderick is a prolific, genre-defying American musician, composer, and producer. He is known internationally for a diverse range of solo projects, collaborations, and compositions for cinema and dance. A gifted multi-instrumentalist who is equally versed in a wide range of styles, Broderick's extensive discography -- on a range of labels including Bella Union, Erased Tapes, Staalplaat, and Beacon Sound -- is appended by a massive list of credits that reads like a who's who of 21st century independent, classical, and experimental music.Growing up in a musical household in Portland, Oregon, Broderick learned to play several instruments. After graduating high school, he became a session musician, contributing violin, banjo, musical saw, mandolin, and other instruments to recordings by M. Ward, Zooey Deschanel, Dolorean, and Norfolk & Western, among others. His self-released debut EP, 4 Track Songs, appeared in 2006. Via his MySpace page, he befriended Danish band Efterklang, and in mid-2007 he moved to Copenhagen to work with the group. That same year, Docile, his first album of solo piano pieces, was issued by Kning Disk. Float (Erased Tapes) and Hope (Bella Union) followed in 2008. While in Europe, Broderick met and worked with a wide variety of composers, singers, and songwriters including Nils Frahm, Greg Haines, Laura Gibson, Yann Tiersen, Olafur Arnalds, and Lubomyr Melnyk.Broderick was by this time an in-demand session player, engineer, and producer, but kept up a steady stream of his own work on EPs, singles, and film scores, and he accepted composition commissions for dance and the theater. Broderick provided half of many split recordings, including 2009's Blank Grey Canvas Sky with Machinefabriek, 2010's Apple Bobbing At ___ with Penelope Joy, and 2011's Glimmer with Takumi Uesaka. In 2010, Bella Union released his full-length How They Are. From 2010, Broderick's level of activity was matched only by the number of requests for his time from other artists. He contributed to 19 recordings in 2010, 12 in 2011 (including Oliveray's Wonders, one of his projects with Frahm), and ten more in 2012. He and Frahm also completed and released the first album of a three-year undertaking entitled http://www.itstartshear.com. (Interestingly, the artist withdrew from having any kind of social media account.) Broderick also issued the EP Two Songs for Banjo and Voice and the single "I Will Play This Song Once Again" b/w "These Walls of Mine" that year.Broderick was equally prolific in 2013. Among the ten recordings he contributed to were Mark Kozelek and Jimmy Lavalle's Perils from the Sea, Melnyk's Corollaries, and Nadja's Flipper. He also issued the Broderick & Broderick EP and the full-length Float: 2013 Addendum, and he scored director Rodney Evans' award-winning film The Happy Sad. The following year saw the artist move back to Portland for a time and play on recordings by Portland Cello Project, Aidan Baker, Sharon Van Etten, and Sean Flinn & the Royal We. Erased Tapes issued the Broderick and Haines split dub offering Greg Gives Peter Space, The Album Leaf (Featuring Peter Broderick) was self-released, and the eponymous Peter Broderick + Gabriel Saloman was issued by Beacon Sound.While Broderick played on over a dozen records by other artists in 2015, his own recording and touring activities were equally intense. He collaborated with French artist Félicia Atkinson as La Nuit to release Desert Television and issued the EPs X Luzern and COTN RMXD and the acclaimed full-length Colours of the Night. In 2016, Broderick cut the stripped-down piano-and-voice album Partners with Tucker Martine. (Inspired by John Cage's writings, it featured a reading of the composer's "In a Landscape.") He also produced Brigid Mae Power's acclaimed self-titled Tompkins Square debut album. The pair were married shortly thereafter and moved to Ireland. Broderick continued his productive work rate into 2017 with the release of All Together Again, which collected his commissioned works from the previous decade. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi PeterBroderick.net

When Rob Lowe and Michael Muller founded Balmorhea in 2006, their goals and expectations were modest, as they created music to share with friends and family, and slowly developed a following in their hometown of Austin and beyond. They couldn't have anticipated that their music would take them on multiple tours of the US and Europe, and even to Asia. Nor did they expect the praise their work would receive from such well-respected publications as Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic among myriad others, and that their work would become quietly ubiquitous, doing the emotional heavy-lifting for national TV commercials, films, radio and cable programs, and countless documentaries. Lowe and Muller had developed a wordless language with a seemingly limitless potential to stir the listener's soul. Over the course of 5 full-length albums and a 7” EP, the duo pushed their work to its outer bounds, concluding the first chapter of their career with their maximalist, genre-leaping full-length Stranger (2012). Now five years later they return with their most fully realized album to-date, Clear Language. Almost a decade on the road, near-constant musical output, and shifting creative priorities caused Lowe and Muller, to soberly assess the band’s future. What, in the form of Balmorhea, was there left to say? And did they have the energy to say it? To answer that question the duo decamped to their east Austin studio, where they worked simply and with restraint, letting intuition guide them as they molded 30-plus raw ideas into the 10 elegant, spacious gestures that comprise Clear Language. Co-produced and engineered by David Boyle in Austin’s Church House Studios, Clear Language finds the duo returning to the simplicity of their roots. They eschewed complexity for complexity’s sake, allowing a watery, sand-hued mood to settle over their use of analog synthesizers, piano, vibraphone, electric and bass guitar, violin, viola, field recordings, and, for the first time in the band’s history, trumpet, performed by Tedeschi Trucks' Ephraim Owens. A relaxed, clear-eyed sense of reflection flows gracefully through the album as these two old friends transmit unfettered meaning through simple sonic gestures that resonate with the cosmos as much as they echo the pulse of a human heart. In a culture dominated by the loudest, ostentatious voices, Lowe and Muller continue to prove the power and importance of restraint and minimalism. This fall, in cities across the U.S. and Europe, Balmorhea will bring Clear Language to life with a full band of multi-instrumentalists, and the ensemble will be enshrouded in a light/video projection that’s being developed to mirror the emotional tone of Clear Language. Audiences can also expect to hear classic works from All is Wild, All is Silent, Stranger, Constellations — the spareness of which invites comparisons to Clear Language — and more from Balmorhea’s dense catalog, dating back to 2006 Listen to LOWER RIVER

Synthesis offers legal, medically supervised, and scientific based psychedelic retreats in Amsterdam. They make the psychedelic experience accessible for curious individuals who want to utilize moderate-to-high doses of psilocybin truffles to catalyze creative breakthroughs, explore consciousness, find meaning, improve confidence, and search for a mystical experience. Martijn is the Co-Founder of Synthesis as well as HighExistence and Apotheosis; he has a background in interdisciplinary science and philosophy, and with a strong foundation in coaching and entrepreneurship, he aims to make psychedelic tools accessible in a safe, legal, and modern context. Martijn has been writing and speaking about psychedelics, interviewing experts in this field, and helped organize The Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelics Research 2016 in Amsterdam. He first reached out to psychedelics when he was in search of new perspectives and clarity to reorient his way of being. Today it is his mission to lower the barrier for deep transformation. synthesisretreat.comeastforest.org