Posts Tagged ‘David Shea’

David Shea – Meditatons

Posted: 21 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room 40 – 7th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Today, December 21st, is the Winter solstice: in terms of daylight hours, the shortest day of the year, and the longest night. As I write, we’ve had cloud, fog, mist, and rain most days here in York for weeks, so it’s essentially felt like one perpetual night for nigh on an eternity. I’m certainly no summer sun lover (I have fair skin and suffer with hayfever), but do struggle with this time of year – always did, but personal circumstances have accentuated the struggle. Watching Shutter Island with my fourteen-year-old daughter earlier (it seemed like a good idea to avoid conventional ‘family’ ‘Christmas’ fare), she commented on how the ‘man with dead wife is troubled and has wild dreams’ trope is perhaps disproportionately common in movies. She’s absolutely right, of course, but the observation hit hard and brought me back to the reason we were avoiding the schmaltzy family Christmas shit – and reminded me that there’s simply no escape from my personal narrative, that my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer just before Christmas in 2021, and died just after Christmas in 2023. These facts not only make it hard for Christmas to be happy, but dealing with all of the stuff like Christmas shopping, present-wrapping, arranging seeing relatives, etc. – stuff that was primarily her domain – on my own is a significant source of stress.

And this is why, on seeing this release had arrived for my attention, it made sense to do myself a favour, for a change. Music is, after all, one of the best therapies. While I’ve little to no interest in new age cack or pseudomystical bullshit, and have generally failed at any attempts to mediate with the limited assistance I’ve had, the idea of a method of achieving mental calm still holds significant appeal.

As David Shea explains in the album’s accompanying notes, ‘Meditations is a set of 8 works based on the experience of meditation practice. Music made for both meditation and reflecting the realities of a life of daily practice. The breath, the quietness, the listening, the distracted dissonant and consonant thoughts that pass through. The texts throughout the pieces are fragments of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, the shortest and created from a mixture of traditions and sources, produced long after Buddha’s death and meant to be chanted or sung as a ritual and personal meditation. The experience of meditation, so often covered in mythology and one dimensionally peaceful symbols, is in fact a complex set of traditions in all cultures and has roots in indigenous cultures world wide and involves the limitations of thought as well as the quietness of the mind as a source of understanding and health.

‘The Buddhist teachings that are in focus in this album are in a sense a sequel to the record Rituals of 2015 in that they are adapted as Meditations that cross and combine traditions with any attempt consciously to synthesize them into a new whole. A conversation between traders, in the form here of musicians, languages, sound sources and the peace and struggle of maintaining a real meditational practice and living in the chaos and violence of society as well as accepting the world as it is, with all of the internal conflicts and release and rise of tension.’

Each of the eight pieces is around eight minutes in duration, and are centred around Shea’s piano, with a host of musicians bringing a range of electronic and acoustic additions, ranging from singing bowls and vibraphone, to samples and midi guitar. The resultant work is gentle, subtle, and sedately-paced. There are tweeting birds flitting around notes which hang, suspended, resonating for substantial durations. Hums and drones. Hints of melodies. Any structures are not based around motifs or repetition, but a flow. That flow is not a linear trajectory, a passage from A to B, but a flow which weaves into the places where the calm is residing.

As much as I’ve always struggled to work with visualisation in guided meditation, Meditations somehow conjures mental images through its abstraction – perhaps because of its abstraction. Being told to visualise a stream, a woodland, a beach, is too much direction, too much ‘relaxation to order’, the meditative equivalent of mandatory of fun in a corporate environment. But with open-ended, non-specific assistance, the channels seem to open more freely. Just as I find ideas and words come to me more readily while out walking, when my blood is oxygenated and my lymphatic flowing comfortably, music which invited free interpretation and successfully evokes images without directed prompts unlocks doors and presents access to unknown passageways.

Piano and acoustic guitar ripple and trickle and ebb and eddy. On ‘Sitting in a Painted Cave’, which ventures more overtly into experimental and Eastern-influenced territory, picked acoustic guitar weaves a textured tapestry. The spoken word interjection is something I find proves to be a distraction in terms of the flow, but I feel this is more because my ideal tranquil space contains no evidence of human existence whatsoever. As a human being myself, I do accept this contradiction, just as I accept the irony of my rage at the presence of others when out for a walk seeking solitude. The track’s second half is rather more dissonant and difficult, with muffled voices adding an unsettling edge. It’s rather less relaxing.

The harmonics, drone, and piano-led ambience of ‘Stillness’ is rather more tolerable, but still wailing drones and tapers quaver before the rippling piano rises from the dissonance of amid-range feedback.

I might have expected ‘The Morning I Awoke’ to be more uplifting, and more… hippy, but it’s largely piano and calming acoustic strums and brooding strings. ‘Tye Heart Sutra’ more than compensate, and offers a spiritual trip and then some. But how to differentiate between business as a need to maintain production? It’s felt like It’s felt like the longest night of the year for about 2 months now.

‘The Heart Sutra’ arrives unexpectedly, before ‘Svaha’ arrives boldly but swiftly tapers into a droning serenity. The sound is dense, a resonant ‘om’, and it leads the listener – at last – to slow, deep breaths, as an undulating vocal –a folky, almost shanty-like lilting quaver- comes to the fore.

Despite its intentions – as specified by the title – Meditations is not quite the sonic still water is first implies. There are dark currents, difficult swells amidst the soothing flows. But for that, it feels more honest, more real.

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David Shea – Piano 1

Posted: 4 September 2016 in Albums
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ROOM40 – RM476

Christopher Nosnibor

We seem to have been inundated with piano-based works here at Aural Aggravation recently. If that’s not remarkable in itself then the diversity of the music they contain is. David Shea’s Piano 1 is by far the most conventional-sounding of them. This is by no means a criticism: much as I spend the majority of my time immersing myself in and hugely appreciating experimental works, spanning the most abrasive noise to the murkiest of ambience and anywhere in between – even near-silence has its place, to appreciate any one thing, exposure to its polar opposite is invaluable. Piano 1 isn’t strictly a polarity against works like Antony Burr and Anthony Pateras’ The Long Exhale, Angelina Yershova’s Piano’s Abyss or James Batty’s Sanctuary, it is a very different kind of record in that it focuses largely on musicality over experimentation. It would also be erroneous to suggest musicality and experimentation are at offs with one another: even the most extreme avant-garde anti-music is born out of music, and often works best when its creation involves a purposeful breaking of the rules rather than an ignorance of them.

In the notes which accompany the album, Shea explains the significance of the piano throughout his life, that he grew up exposed to classical and jazz piano works, as well as the greats of the avant-garde, and, while his career has been centred around music, his primary focus has been on composition rather than performance, admitting that his compositional works often exceeds his ow technical abilities. As such, Piano I documents Shea’s repositioning himself in the role of musician, testing and pushing beyond his limitations. ‘I spent a year unravelling my past approach to composing for piano and explored my own phyucal technique,’ he writes. ‘No preparations, no samples, no extended electronics or reliance on overdubs or reliance on my past sample acoustic techniques. The result of this year of practice, writing, listening, exploring and recording is this CD’. As such, it’s a very honest and sonically unpretentious album which finds Shea exploring his relationship with the instrument in terms of composition and musicianship, and an album on which the piano sounds like a piano.

The first track, ‘Mirror’ is a sedate, rolling piece which is as much about the way the notes sustain and the spaces between notes as the notes themselves as he skips between the octaves unexpectedly, Shea exploiting the full span of the keyboard. The imaginatively-titled ‘Suite Pts 1-8’ manifests as a sequence of elegant, delicate pieces, the majority of which are short and fragmentary, yet feel like more than mere sketches. ‘Magnet’s represents the least overtly ‘pianific’ piece on the album, with a sighing, quavering drone.

The album’s second ‘set’ of compositions, the four-part ‘Tribute to Mancini’ (Henry, not Roberto) reflect a different style, also demonstrates not only the versatility of the piano even when played conventionally, but also Shea’s awareness of and ability to utilise the instrument to convey different mood.

At times, the lilting flow of the playing halts abruptly, and the sense of real-time playing, of rehearsal, is conveyed, and this gives the album a strong sense of intimacy. While Shea explains at length that he does not consider himself to be ‘a pianist’, the performances here demonstrate he’s an adept musician.

 

 

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