So I was just looking over the list of this year’s Grammy winners – I…don’t…know…why… but anyway saw that Best Contemporary World Music Album went to Global Drum Project with Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain. Now to be honest with you, I think any year that one of these guys releases an album they give the World Beat award to ‘em, probably always a sure bet to the vote casters. In fact, I’m pretty sure this album came out in 2007, but must have slipped by last year and this year they must have not had any worthy competition. I doubt Mickey Hart is pulling off the genious move that Radiohead did of releasing their physical U.S. version of In Rainbows on January 1st, 2008 so that way it tops everbody’s lists last year and then gets another ressurection an entire year later when it finally gets nominated for a grammy. Anyway, I went back and pulled the album out and it actually is great – not so much of a new-agey feel as one would think, more of just alot of polyrhythms bouncing off one another.  Parts of it actually sound alot like My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. But if you’re looking for a good mid-day stare-at-the-ceiling album, Global Drum Project should top your list. It’s definitely modern trance, along the lines of Soundtribe Sector 9′s Peaceblaster from last year, but obviously alot more drum-focused.

Which also reminds me, if you’ve never read Hart’s Drumming at the Edge of Magic, it’s an incredibly interesting book. Not just for Deadheads and stoners, honestly. I think alot about one chapter where he talks about how rhythms naturally want to align – that juxtaposed beats will pull towards one another. Supposedly, if you take two analog watches that are off from one another by half a second, and put them next to one another in a drawer, within a couple weeks they will become synchronized. He thus claims that all the modern anxiety in the world stems from the thousands of radio waves and power cables surrounding us that are all vibrating at very large rates. So our own bodies’ natural clocks are trying to speed up too much to align with the super fast rhythms all around us. Here’s a clip that shows the idea, however coupling crossover and flexible oscillation speed up the process enormously: