The Transcendence of Laraaji

By Amanda Petrusich

In 1969, Edward Larry Gordon—a standup comedian, part-time jazz pianist, and aspiring actor—walked into a New York City pawnshop, hoping to hock his guitar for rent money. Instead, Gordon found himself preternaturally drawn to an Autoharp, a type of zither popularized in the nineteen-forties by Mother Maybelle, of the Carter Family, and prominent in the folk revival then going on in Greenwich Village. He lugged it back to his apartment in Harlem and started tinkering, eventually prying off the chord bars (which allowed him to more easily experiment with pentatonic, modal, and minor tunings) and adding a contact pickup (which electrified the instrument). Soon, Gordon was playing the Autoharp through effects pedals, and cramming various odds and ends, including chopsticks, mallets, and pedal-steel slides, underneath the strings—a technique popularized, for piano, in the nineteen-thirties, by the experimental composer John Cage. Gordon's Autoharp no longer sounded dainty or sweet. It was now fierce, glimmery, and extraterrestrial.

Gordon, who was born in Philadelphia in 1943, was perhaps compelled toward the Autoharp by some Elysian force. He had recently become interested in mysticism and Eastern philosophy; years later, he would describe himself as "a conduit, a channel, and a medium." He started busking with the modified Autoharp in Washington Square Park, and brought a kind of tranquil, rapturous energy to the downtown scene. "As best I can recall, during the seventies, I was very much involved in the cannabis, barefoot dancing, new age experimental, meditation circle, and improvisational music culture," he has said. In 1978, he released "Celestial Vibration," his début album, on a new independent label called SWN. In 1979, Gordon changed his name to Laraaji Venus Nadabrahmananda and started working with the electronic musician and producer Brian Eno, who heard Laraaji playing in the park and dropped his phone number in the collection basket. The following year, Laraaji and Eno released "Ambient 3: Day of Radiance," a hypnotic, pulsing instrumental album featuring a thirty-six-string zither and a hammered dulcimer. More than four decades later, the record still feels like an emanation from another plane.

Laraaji will turn eighty later this year. He has put out more than fifty albums, and continues to make new work. In addition to his music, he has taken to spreading the gospel of laughter as a transformative force. Every Thursday morning, on Dublab, an Internet radio station based in Los Angeles, Laraaji leads a three-minute "laughter meditation," in which he chuckles, hoots, and guffaws, sometimes over pinging, atmospheric sounds. He has said that he thinks of laughter as "a luminous language, a language of lightness, of brevity, of vulnerability." For the past few weeks, I have tuned in to the meditation with my one-year-old daughter in my lap. She finds the broadcast strange and hysterical. Laraaji believes that even a forced smile can open something up in our brains. He has described a good laugh as a "ventilation of your system." My daughter giggles; I giggle. She removes her tiny socks and tosses them in the air. Maybe something shifts in us. It is a nice way to start the day.

"Segue to Infinity," a new four-disk boxed set from the Numero Group, collects some of Laraaji's earliest work, including "Celestial Vibration" and three LPs of previously unreleased studio recordings. The new material comes from four twelve-inch acetates—lathe-cut disks that are used to make the molds for vinyl records—that were purchased on eBay, in 2021, by Jake Fischer, who was then a twenty-two-year-old college student with a hundred and twenty-seven dollars in his checking account. (He paid $114.01 for the lot.) The provenance of the recordings is uncertain; they might be outtakes from the "Celestial Vibration" sessions, which took place at ZBS Studios, in upstate New York (the disks are credited to Edward Larry Gordon, not Laraaji, which suggests that they date from before or around 1979), but a label attached to one of the acetates says that they were made at Crest Recording Studios, on Long Island, which would mean that they were culled from a different session entirely. Laraaji himself has offered a vague recollection, that they were possibly done somewhere in Queens. It is difficult to say for sure. (This is the sort of arcana—unsolvable, potentially meaningless, wildly tantalizing—that keeps amateur archivists and rare-record fiends up at night.)

The acetates were originally discovered in a storage-locker auction. The first buyer sold them at a flea market; from there, they were offered online. As with any story of almost-lost recordings, it feels miraculous, if not fated, that they didn't end up slowly deteriorating in a landfill. These days, record collectors are often the only people willing to take on the thankless job of rescuing the idiosyncratic, usually noncommercial music released decades ago on vinyl by local independent labels (the so-called private press), thus building and preserving a kind of outré canon of the pre-Internet era. Fischer, now twenty-three, has been collecting records since he was a teen-ager. "Growing up with the notion that music always should be a click away on YouTube or Spotify spawned an obsession with finding the music the Internet left behind," he told me recently. "I became fixated on finding as many acetates, private pressings, and home recordings as I could get my hands on, from thrift stores, dollar bins, online shops, junk yards, warehouses, abandoned barns, boxes left on the side of the road, suitcases full of master tapes found inside Craigslist furniture." The eBay auction for Laraaji's acetates ended at 10:30 p.m. on a Wednesday. "I was driving home from McDonald's when I got the notification that I won," Fischer said. "The burger seemed to taste better than usual that night."

In the liner notes for "Segue to Infinity," the guitarist and producer Vernon Reid, who founded the rock band Living Colour, remembers once meeting Laraaji at a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. "I suddenly perceived the most remarkable, shimmering sound I’d ever heard, emanating from the living room," Reid writes. "There sat a spare, enigmatic gentleman in a meditative posture, strumming what appeared to be a small horizontal harp plugged into a very clean-sounding Fender Twin. I was utterly transfixed!" Soon afterward, Reid saw Laraaji perform at the Atlantic Antic, a legendary street fair in Brooklyn. "In that moment," Reid writes, "I realized I was with one of the world's great musicians, a leader of a still-formulating movement."

That movement, referred to as "New Age music," is both maligned and rightfully lampooned. Musically, New Age exists somewhere between the intellectual avant-garde and wellness hooey—between sound art and the pan-flute pablum that tends to ooze forth from the massage room at the spa. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in New Age, perhaps because people have grown increasingly desperate for anything that might help them calm down, dissociate, space out, drift off, unwind, or crack open. Yet the genre's most critically celebrated practitioners tend to be radical. The music on "Segue to Infinity" is not exactly soothing. It's hard to imagine enjoying it with cucumber slices cooling your eyelids. Laraaji occasionally included sharp or abrupt noises to "shock the consciousness," an idea he said he borrowed from Tibetan sound rituals.

My favorite disk in the collection is probably the most dissonant. It contains two long pieces, "Kalimba 2" and "Kalimba 4," each taking up an entire side. I’ve found it impossible to do anything else while listening to it, which is perhaps the point. In the early eighties, Laraaji was experimenting with the kalimba, an iteration of the Zimbabwean mbira, a wooden board with staggered metal tines, designed to be played with the thumbs. (The kalimba was brought to the United States by the British ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey, who also produced and sold the instrument.) When I listened to "Kalimba 2," a careering, rhythmic piece, too late at night, I felt dizzy and disoriented. Yet, if you listen at the right moment, it can feel as though you’re surfing a mile-high wave. "Kalimba 4" is gentler and more mesmeric. Its repeating figures can induce a sort of trance state. I became different on a cellular level: softer, more neutralized.

"Segue to Infinity" can sound heavy and profound, which makes it easy to forget that, before he was Laraaji, Ed Gordon was hosting standup-comedy revues at the Apollo Theatre and taking bit parts in such satirical movies as "Putney Swope." But buried in these pieces is a kind of insistence on joy and transcendence. It is as though Laraaji is trying to teach us that, with help and focus, it is possible to exhale and unclench, even if it's only for the length of a song. ♦