Strum Those Strings – Mahamaya Experience (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

This first section of Strum Those Strings features a wonderful cross-cultural blending of sounds. You Cannot Silence Our Song is a strange mix of East and West, and given how naturally they blend together, it perhaps proves that the Occident and the Orient were never as far apart as people like to claim. After all, people are people. We think alike and express ourselves in similar ways, especially when it comes to art.

And this becomes more and more obvious as you listen to this piece. As the trademark tabla beats and bass rhythms begin to take shape, the angelic vocals that float across the top feel more akin to Western opera or early Christian devotional music traditions than what we might expect from the sound of the subcontinent. But that is what is so great about the music that Mahamaya Experience makes; it is entirely unburdened with the expectations of the audience and is instead focused only on the finished musical result that they have in their consciousness.

When We Focus on the Notes, We Lie Outside of Ego, the section which follows, perhaps pushes things back sonically more towards the east, musically speaking, and the flurry of sitar sounds and the burr of tabla drums seem more in keeping with what we might expect. But even then, it is easy to appreciated that the message is universal, advocating that to focus on creativity, to be consumed by and totally lost in music, provided it is being made for the right reasons, we are able to leave our ego behind and enter, however fleetingly, a more graceful, less burdened state. And it is such realisations that lie at the heart of this heavenly music.

Mahamaya Experience has always been more about music, and for more about the messages behind the music, the higher purpose beyond the surface sounds, read more HERE