By Reza Ganjavi
I feel incredibly high today, really light, as though having had a religious experience - or perhaps great sex. It's been raining and clearing and the spring seeping - and I've been on a search of a quiet church in the calm country sides of Switzerland for recording guitar. It is so difficult to find quietness - the main source of noise is damn cars. Anyway, there was an incredible sense of peace, joy, and inner quietness as one went from one village to another with the guitar backpack wearing a hood in the rain - feeling like a troubadour or a hermit who has joy inside despite the outer world and its innumerable problems. The problems are around the corner – but at a distance today as this other thing - this feeling ('feeling' may not be the right word) - this being - is too strong, too pure, too innocent to be touched by a problem. What made this thing come uninvitedly?
The fact is that I've played a lot of guitar - on my concert guitar which really vibrates and the only explanation I have is that 3 factors contributed to this "feeling": 1) lots of hand exercise which effects the brain in a very positive way (there's medical research that indicates the control area for hands occupies a very large area of the brain and those who work a lot with their hands are 'smarter' in a way) 2) the power of the music itself which is known to be therapeutic 3) last but not least, the vibration - as Pepe was describing the philosophy of sound, vibration, and resonance and how the guitar, the player, and the audience become one - one vibration. John Lennon in their early Beatles days said in an interview he is aware of everything humming, vibrating.