AUDIO LETTER

NETI-NETI (REMIXES)

An album of remixes (as well as a few other tracks) taken from Audio Letter's 1987 release 'It Is This It Is Not This'. 
  1/  Neti-Neti: The Hear and Now Remix          (Audio Letter)                7.01
        Remix by DJ Cheb i Sabbah
  2/  Sound Is God                               (Gannon,Run,Reeves,Keith)     4.00
        Reverend Run, Sharon Gannon, Boy Wonder and Davy-DMX
  3/  Paracelsus Paradigm                        (Audio Letter)                3.37
        Remix by Sean Dinsmore aka DJ Cavo
  4/  Is This a Bridge Exactly?                  (Audio Letter)                3.53
        Remix by Latch Brothers
  5/  Liberation from Samsara                    (Audio Letter)                6.58
        Reconstruction and mix translation by Bill Laswell
  6/  Smoke and Mirrors                          (Audio Letter)                6.42
        Remix by Roderick Romero and Jeff Greinke
  7/  Fading Greene                              (Audio Letter)                6.59
        Audio Letter

          Track 1 engineered and protooled by Gamar Raina Punditz at Shanti
            Studio, San Francisco
          Track 2 recorded, mixed and mastered by Boy Wonder at Solo Sound
            Studios, NYC
          Track 3 engineered by Nathan Lasker at BK Lounge Studios, Brooklyn, NY
          Track 5 engineered by Robert Musso at Orange Music Sound Studios, West
            Orange, New Jersey
          Assistant on track 5: James Dellatacoma
          Track 6 engineered by Jeff Greinke at Another Room, Seattle
          Track 2 produced by Davy-DMX and Om Mas (Boy Wonder) Keith
          Executive Producer on track 2: Russell Simmons
          Track 4 produced by Mike D
          Track 6 produced by Roderick Romero
          Album produced and directed by Sharon Gannon
          Assistant Producer: Janet Rienstra
          Remastered by Michael Fossenkemper at Turtle Tone Studios, NYC
(4) John Robbins: voics; (5) Bill Laswell: bass; (6) Jeff Greinke: additional rhythms and sounds; AUDIO LETTER - Denis Charles: drums, African hand drum, cymbals, bells; Don Cherry: pocket trumpet, flute; doussn'gouni, berimbau, whistles; Sharon Gannon: words, vocals, violin, echo-plex, Tibetan bells; Sue Ann Harkey: prepared 12-sring guitar, train whistle, percussion; David Life: sarangi, steel drums, African lyre.

          2003 - Jivamukti/Meta Records (USA), Jivamukti CD561 (CD)

REVIEWS :

In 1987, "futurist folk" guitarist Sue Ann Harkey and avant-rock violinist-vocalist Sharon Gannon recorded It Is This It Is Not This with their band Audio Letter, featuring jazz artists Don Cherry (on pocket trumpet, flute, doussn'gouni, and berimbau) and Denis Charles (drums and percussion) as well as multi-instrumentalist David Life. Gannon and Life, of course, went on to great fame in the yoga world as founders and directors of New York's Jivamukti Yoga Centers. Now, more than 15 years after its initial release, this underground classic reappears in a glittery new high-tech guise that updates the original amalgamation of Indian and jazz instrumentation, Sanskrit lyrics, and sacred imagery through the electronic wizardry and beat-heavy consciousness of techno, jungle, hip-hop, electronica, and drum 'n' bass. Tapping the talents of acquaintances made through remix maestro Bill Laswell and Jivamukti, the Audio Letter Remix project finds Laswell, DJ Cheb i Sabbah, Reverend Run (of Run-DMC), Mike D. (of the Beastie Boys), and others participating in the drastic reconfiguration and tweaking of six original Audio Letter tracks. (Only the closing track, "Fading Green," appears as it did on the 1987 recording.) In the vocal department, from Gannon's Sanskrit scatting and metaphysical poetry to a 1999 talk on the global ramifications of a healthy, socially responsible diet, Neti-Neti wears its world-as-Gaia sentiments explicitly. But it's in the music—luminous and ethereal here ("Smoke and Mirrors"), polyrhythmically pounding there ("Sound Is God")—that global unity is achieved.

Derk Richardson (courtesy of the Yoga Journal website)