Photo: Moyan Brenn / Wikimedia Commons
CC BY 2.0
Velvet Ashes is not only a gothic or post-punk project.
At its core, it is an attempt to create a space through sound － a place where atmosphere, memory, shadow, silence, and perception quietly overlap.
For me, music has always been connected to the experience of entering another space.
Certain songs do not simply play in front of the listener. They open a landscape inside the mind.
I first felt this through music such as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bauhaus, and the architectural depth of Johann Sebastian Bach.
A piano intro, a distant guitar, a deep echo, or a dark empty atmosphere could suddenly change the emotional space around me.
This feeling later connected with my interest in consciousness and perception.
Through writers such as Emanuel Swedenborg, Robert Monroe, and Joseph McMoneagle, I became interested in the possibility that human awareness may contain spaces beyond ordinary perception. Hemi-Sync recordings also left an impression on me, not only as a method of altered consciousness, but as sound environments that could shift the state of the mind.
At the same time, ideas close to Zen, breathing, posture, relaxation, and the Japanese sense of space also became important.
When posture is aligned, breathing becomes calm.
When the body relaxes, the mind also begins to quiet down.
In that state, perception changes naturally.
This is not far from the traditional Japanese understanding of space.
Japanese architecture has often valued emptiness, placement, light, shadow, impermanence, and the idea that things eventually return to nature.
Over time, these influences began to connect.
Music, consciousness, Zen, architecture, martial awareness, silence, and memory were not separate interests.
They were all part of one continuing question:
How do human beings perceive space?
Velvet Ashes was born from that question.
Its sound is not meant only to be heard.
It is meant to be entered.
Related Books
Robert Monroe
・Journeys Out of the Body
・Far Journeys
・Ultimate Journey
Emanuel Swedenborg
・Heaven and Hell
Joseph McMoneagle
・Mind Trek
D. T. Suzuki
・Zen and Japanese Culture
・Essays in Zen Buddhism
Related Albums
・The Beatles – Let It Be
・Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy
・Led Zeppelin – Physical Graffiti
・Led Zeppelin – Presence
・Page and Plant – Walking into Clarksdale
・Bauhaus – In the Flat Field
・Bauhaus – Mask
・Johann Sebastian Bach – The Well-Tempered Clavier
・Johann Sebastian Bach – Organ Works
Return to the Velvet Ashes official website
