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Posted: 27 Nov 2013 09:47 AM PST
In May of 1978, Brian Eno found himself subletting a flat in Greenwich Village in what would prove to be a fertile period for the man and his music. Within the next two years, he became a staple on the downtown scene, recording no wave bands for the epochal No New York compilation and collaborating with CBGB fixture Talking Heads on a series of records that moved their sound away from punk and toward a polyrhythmic groove that would power the band on into the ’80s. But late in 1979, Eno happened upon a busker while strolling through Washington Square Park. He was sitting in the lotus position, eyes closed, lost in the waves of sound he coaxed from his zither.
When Edward Larry Gordon opened his eyes, he found amid his donations Eno’s business card. He entered the studio with Eno a few months on and emerged with a new name (Laraaji), a new album (1980′s Day of Radiance, released as part of Eno’s influential Ambient series), and a new sound: his zither run through a patina of electronic effects. It was a relationship that would continue throughout that decade and into the ’90s, with Laraaji releasing a string of albums for Eno’s All Saints imprint. This music revealed a strain of New Age that could be by turns placid yet exquisitely psychedelic, mind-elevating and body-erasing.
Gordon’s life, in particular, serves as a definition and counterpoint. He was born in Philadelphia, where he learned to play violin, piano and trombone; he eventually studied composition in Washington, D.C., at Howard University. After college, in the early ’70s, he relocated to New York City, where he took up stand-up comedy and acting, in addition to playing music gigs. No doubt influenced by the Eastern spiritualism infused into the late-’60s free jazz of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders that still hung in the air of the Village, Gordon began to study with gurus like Swami Satchidananda and Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati. But it was when he came upon a zither in a pawn shop that he became attuned to his musical and spiritual calling.
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