Gymnosphere: Song Of The Rose

Before new age hit terra firma at the dawn of the 1980s, the classically-trained Bay Area composer Jordan De La Sierra's consciousness soared with cosmic concepts. A student of Terry Riley and La Monte Young’s “pure sound with shape” school of piano tuning, De La Sierra was not confined by Bach’s Western, “well tempered” tuning, instead incorporating the natural point of view, what Young called “well tuned,” where notes are not flattened or sharpened in order to fall into an octave of 12 equal semitones to simply bend within the player’s improvisations and textural sonic explorations. With help from the venerable public radio program Hearts of Space, De La Sierra tracked the four-song, 120 minute long album in a tiny Berkeley studio in 1976, then replayed the tape in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral to create a reverb-drenched atmosphere. Take an interstellar ride on the sensory engulfing space piano with this lovingly recreated double LP set, complete with De La Sierra’s India-inspired visual artwork and musings on the tableau of space.