And so, Phurpa are back. Like Russian Cenobites stepping slowly from the shadows and wreathed in a thick fug of juniper smoke, they are here once more to bathe us in their power and resonate our chakras in sympathy with the universal vibration.
For those not already familiar with Phurpa’s low-end majesty, they are a “roving monastic choir” from Moscow, led by the enigmatic Alexey Tegin and comprising a slowly-revolving cast of participants. Importantly, they are also devotees of a schismatic form of Bön, the ancient shamanistic spirituality of Bactria, in Central Asia.
Their music is a reflection, or probably more accurately an expression, of these beliefs, a transfer of spiritual energy and meaning shaped in sound and given form through a style of overtone singing called rgyud-skad, or “tantric voice”, all supported by an array of traditional Tibetan instruments: the dungkar (a horn made out of an enormous conch), the dungchen (a three-metre-long horn / trumpet), the silnuyen (flat cymbals), the nga (a double-sided drum), the damaru (a drum made from human skulls), the kangling (a human thighbone trumpet), the shang (a Bön tambourine) and an assortment of other cymbals such as the rolmo.
Powered by their physical and mental commitment both to Bön and to its musical embodiment, Phurpa are a band who do not dabble in half measures. Not only is their musical practice intense, but their life and lifestyles, their whole approach to physicality and mentality, are all tailored towards supporting the essential performance of the rites of Bön. This extends right down to the exercise and diet regime, Tegin once stating that:There is power in food. If you want to feel wild like a tiger or shark you need raw meat, maybe a little salt and pepper. I like horse meat, in Moscow this is possible. When you eat it, there is fire inside you. Sometimes your body says ‘stop fire’, then you drink yoghurt. This is for PHURPA, action aspect – if you instead want information from space you drink only water and eat vegetables.
And so, like their namesake Phurpa Drugse Chempa, the God of resolved action, Phurpa’s live shows are more ceremony than gig per se, combining the hypnotic and transformative power of the music, with ritual, darkness, costume and smell. This is very much a Gesamtkunstwerk designed to overcome and still the restless conscious mind and allow the body to open up and receive the liturgy unmediated. In the correct setting and with the right approach, as Tegin explains, “if doctrines are powerful enough, they’re universal and can settle in other cultures”. LTA ZOR captures one such ritual, spread across two dense, intense twenty-minute slabs of performance. And as with all such live moments transferred into the recorded medium, it pays dividends to approach it in the right way: put on some headphones, turn off the lights, lie on the floor. If you want to burn some heavy, musky incense whilst you’re about it, I think Tegin would probably approve. And a horse meat dinner beforehand? Well, that’s at your discretion.Part I is almost entirely vocal driven, the mesmeric tones of aural energy pulsing with power, battering themselves slowly against your consciousness like a siege engine. When listening to this, I closed my eyes and decided to ponder the illustration given to explain the duration of the kappa, the Buddhist eon: “Suppose there were a city of iron walls one yojana (about 15km) in length, one in width, one yojana high, filled up with mustard seed. Therefrom a man were to take out at the end of every hundred years a mustard seed. That pile of mustard seed would in this way be sooner done away with and ended than an eon.” That is scale on which it seems fitting to imagine Phurpa’s resonances and messages.
Part II begins with a startling flurry of horn before giving way to an eerie passage of low drones and deep drum hits – for some reason redolent to me of the quiet yet foreboding shots of the Nostromo travelling in deep space at the beginning of Alien – and thence a collision of voices. This really is Phurpa at their absolute best, organic, acoustic, yet with such controlled power, operating at frequencies to which the body, however swaddled under the vestments of the modern world, cannot help but respond.The voice and the drum are the primal instruments; they were our modes of musical expression before we even had language or the written word, and thus, when we attune ourselves to them, we can travel back into our own deep time. This is, I think, more than anything Phurpa’s message.
Given that none of us are likely to be getting back into a live venue again any time soon, LTA ZOR is the closest anyone will get to seeing Phurpa’s incredible ritual in the flesh for now. With our enforced focus inwards during these times, turn that from a necessity into an opportunity and embrace the power of Bön.
-David Solomons-
