Sunday 1 March 2009

FULL WORM MOON (10 March 2009)

The musick dedicated to this Esbat is:

RASA

COMING INTO FULL BLOOM


Original Issue: 1979 Lotus Eye (BBT S-17)

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Margot-meter: 4,5 moons / 5

I must admit I bought this one in a flea market just for the cover artwork (never heard before about this Hare Khrishna guys). Exquisite ethnic-fusion mantras inside!!!

An unusual entry for the Moon Musick blog but I record I often put on my plate

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1 Eternal Spaceman (7:15)
2 Maha-mantra (8:55)
3 My Wasted Life (6:30)
4 Six Wonderful Men (7:50)
5 The Jewel Quality (6:30)
6 Childhood Pastimes (6:52)

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from Wikipedia:

The group RASA began in the summer of 1978. Robert Campagnola, then known as Harikesa Swami, had been playing devotional Sanskrit bhajans in a joking manner on a large organ recently donated to ISKCON Germany. Some of these songs were recorded and the tapes passed around. Jorgen Sundsvall (Vegavan das), heard these tapes and decided it could be potentially profitable to record an album and distribute it. He invited Robert into a room in the building where they stayed where he had secretly arranged a recording session with a drummer (Dattatreya), piano player Madhava Puri Das (Mats Olausson), electric guitarist (Stig Sjoberg), bass player and a recording engineer (Sperling). Robert sat behind the piano and started spontaneously playing Cintamani while the others gradually joined in. This became the first track on the extremely successful album, Oasis, which sold many hundreds of thousands of copies throughout Europe[citation needed]. Subsequent RASA albums were released, some with the same original musicians, and the band grew so popular they were requested to play the large open air concerts in Germany before huge crowds.

To facilitate the recording of the material, Robert built a recording studio in Korsnas Gard, Sweden, with the help of Ekhardt Matz (Ekanath das) and others. Together they learned the art of recording, mixing and mastering, and custom built many of the facilities within the studio that were used to record other albums and shows for bands and Radio Krishna, a popular Narradion production for Stockholm.

The music and lyrics were either adaptations of traditional Indian songs or original compositions by Robert. The band ceased to exist in 1984 . From 1987 till 1995, Robert recorded under the band name of BLISS.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Charming, margot!
Thank you
jan

goinsidemyhead said...

...this is pretty cool....no sharp edges...Sunday morning coming down and I can smell spring and the sun and better times...

Anonymous said...

sounds perfect: thanks

Teenage Riot said...

Margot The link doesn't seem to work for me. I keep getting an invalid key error message. This album is really interesting to me as someone who was in the hare's in the 80's. Have heard some wild stories about Harikesa!

Margot F. said...

Very strange...no problem has been highlighted so far...

Teenage Riot said...

Ah it appears to work for me today and am d/ling the file now. Thank you very much Margot. I'm going to travel tomorrow and should meet up with one of Harikesa's ex-disciples and get the skinny on the guy so next time I pop by I'll have some info for you.

Margot F. said...

I'm happy you were able to get it in the end...enjoy the vibe :)

Teenage Riot said...

Margot, I never did meet my friend as he was away at the time however I came across the following site that has some more recordings by Rasa and thought I'd post the link here. I haven't listened yet so can't vouch for their quality but hey it's free...

http://www.iskconmedia.com/?p=Music/Rasa&option=com_zina&Itemid=62

Enjoy!