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Story behind the album
Album Steps to Calmness seemed out of context from what Bent had previously released. With his band Köömes and as a solo artist, the songs had always fallen somewhere between blues, rock and punk rock genres. At the end of 2019 however, seemingly out of nowhere, comes this long new age electronic meditation album.
At that point, Bent had experimented with synthesizers and computer generated sounds for several years.
At first. Passionate about extremes and the fact that he stayed in Berlin, Germany for a couple of months Bent was striving to create a techno music album. The problem was, he couldn’t get the recordings to sound right. Bent himself ha commented this period as follows:
I was trying to come up with the pumping beats and flavor them with dark chord progressions, but somehow the recorded tunes did not resonate with me.
Suddenly he tried to bring the tempo down to as slow as possible and found a totally new kind of groove from around half the tempo than regular techno music. This meant more use of drones and focus from beats to sounds. Most importantly, this was something that actually did finally resonate with him, and seemed unique enough to collect together into an album and release in streaming services. Hence the album “Steps to Calmness” was born.
What is this Album about?
Bent is a keen mindfulness practitian himself. The main mission of the album is to introduce calmness and mindful lifestyle to people. These ~15 minute, mostly instrumental tunes were all prepared and then recorded in one go using different synthesizers and samplers. At first they were meant as a musical meditative trips that could be performed live and last forever. At some point Bent started to record them to the format heard on the album.
The repetitive progressions can at times result to a psychedelic experience and these tunes fit well as a sound background for mindfulness meditation. Also some use it when they go out jogging, which basically is a meditation itself.
Bent himself has commented this album as follows:
Seems like world a mess nowadays. People are getting tired of energetic rock music and need to calm down. Music is an excellent tool to ease our minds and I do hope songs on this album will help people find the calmness from within.
Next steps
The next step for Bent was to continue this path in exploring digital sounds. The next meditation, folktronica shamanic album “Tuul” is being released through the year 2020 as singles.
Read more about the next album Tuul (2020)