It’s an interesting concept. Two trains pass in opposite directions, each carrying a potential soul mate who will never meet but for this fleeting, unknown passing. It makes you wonder how many people you might pass every day that might have changed your life dramatically and, for the better, had fate only seen fit to allow you to meet.
That is the concept behind Mahamaya Experience’s 2 Trains. And if the idea is interesting, the execution of the music is doubly so. We get so used to modern songs being planned, rehearsed and delivered uniformly, unrelenting and unwavering. 2 Trains, like all of Mahamaya Experience’s music, is improvised, the art of turning one fleeting musical idea and perhaps a handful of notes into florid and fluid outpourings of musical expression.
The opening theme uses hurried tabla beats to picture the trains as they hurl towards their liaison that is not to be, and the sitar layers some gorgeous free-form melodies over it. Variations of a Theme, see some of those early ideas take more solid form, and the themes and motifs now solidify into familiar and recognisable sounds.
Conclusion Cadence sees the journey’s conclusion is built on more intense and ornate musical arrangements before fading off into the distance taking the two would-be soul mates into their new lives, ones that don’t contain the other person.
2 Trains is not only a beautiful and heady concept but also a brilliantly delivered and wonderfully improvised song. The perfect musical accompaniment to a philosophical idea that gets more profound and more demanding of your thoughts the more you think about it.
[…] remember writing about 2 Trains, a previous musical outpouring from the Mahamaya Experience, and musing that there was nothing I could think of that would make a useful reference point for […]