The other parts of this ongoing music project can be found here.
The middle, and longest, part of the Bardo journey is the soul's passing through various heavens and hells. The Tibetan Book Of The Dead advises that all of these apparitions are merely projections of the journeyer's own mind. The spiritual task in this realm is to avoid grasping on to the delights of the heavens, and also to refrain from trying to escape from the horrors of the hells. It is a practice of remaining in a state of calm acceptance, no matter what occurs.
The metaphor that occurred to me to express this experience of alternating between dramatic highs and lows was “The Roller-coaster of Doom”. My musical vision for this section is to have a long, chaotic mix of all sorts of different sounds, rhythms, fragments of lyrics and moods varying from joyful delight to scary...
Although I have not actually started the "real" recording yet, I have a huge collection of ideas and bits of sonic material for this section. And after being somewhat overwhelmed by the scope of it for a long time, I have recently realized exactly how the one and a half hours should be structured, and I have specific ideas for each of what will be seven sub-sections here. My plan is to complete Part 4 before Burning Man 2018, and to start recordings for this part after that...