Music for a yoga event is something that seems hardly out of place in the world of Will Long’s project Celer. While yoga is not something I practice (and perhaps I should at this tender age and with these muscles). Celer created the music live, using two reel-to-reel tape machines and two tape loops of keyboard with similar time
structures, but each with different, overlapping chords. They create different configurations, and as such Celer is the best Brian Eno student; on his ‘Music For Airports’ he uses a bunch of loops of varying length, which overlap at different points. But whereas Eno chooses a variety of sounds, Celer here keeps it all very close
together with his organ sounds. During the performance various people fell asleep and it’s easy to see why. Not because the music is boring; for if it would be boring I would say ‘change the tune’ and play something less boring and prevent from falling asleep. This music has that tranquillity that fits the state of sleep. Now, I am not the sort of person to mix sleep and music; I know various people who like to sleep with music on, and there have been sleep concerts by Robert Rich and Steve Stapleton (soon pianist Max Richter comes with a music piece that lasts 8 hours soon; I wish I slept solidly 8 hours a night; sadly, a different story), but when
it comes to sleep I prefer the good old fashioned silence. However during the day I usually take a quick power-nap around half past three – no coincidence just when I was playing this CD and this music worked quite well for taking a quick sleep. The changes are very minimal throughout these nearly eighty minutes and I was thinking: maybe Celer should have go all out and done a 8 hour version of this, released as a single file
on a DVD? No doubt I wouldn’t still played that when trying to catch some real sleep. Maybe the whole sleep thing defies the reason of this being music for a yoga event, which, as far I know doesn’t involve sleep. There is not a lot change and the music goes on, almost ad infinitum – well that is 1 hour, 19 minutes and 44 seconds, but have this on repeat for a while, when you are meditating and you’ll soon be fast asleep or levitating – and that is a compliment. Celer is just one of the best students when it comes to Ambient lesson, and ‘Akagi’ is as such a masterpiece.