Meditations by David Shea

 

David Shea who is an Australian composer based in Melbourne, Australia is coming back with a new album ''Meditations''.

Eight tracks which are beautifully and intricately composed to use for meditation practice but its slender shape and elegant set up is going beyond the meditation and touches on some deeply existential feel. 

The main instruments here being piano and guitar build up an elusive yet stable and deeply grounding basis for the whole soundtrack. 

It is nothing trivial, nothing merely ''entertaining'' but eight compositions which are both tasteful and transferring and elevating you to some deeply conscious state of mind and a deep listening process which helps you not to omit anything important. 

How much of this is just a façade? I think not much as the form and function here is so much intertwined that it is impossible to disassociate the reason and feeling, the mind and matter. 

A deeply reflective and elusively, and not outright obvious piece of music that I will definitely come back to again and again.

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.

The musicians on these pieces also are recorded live in a group setting listening to each other with a shared space and character I create and through this listening the connections that form the final piece are made.

The Heart Sutra which I read in the last piece of the 8 is a translation which has been collaged by many schools and cultures that adapted the teachings to their indigenous religions. Most likely first traded along the Silk Roads , and internet of its time 3000 years would have been written in Pali, a pan-asian language and transcribed from Sanskrit and Hindi sources and later translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and eventually Greek, Arabic, Latin and global languages in the 20th century.

The bonus track is a live mix (called a Metta Mix) of a performance and collage of all this material and other new pieces, performed in a virtual avatar world called Second Life for a live audience who listens and. attends in their own avatars, as I stream the concert. This music is closer to my personal experiences of meditation, with a collage of ideas passing through me, returning to the breath or vocal tones , distractions, physical pain , internal quiet, increased listening and sensory focus that moves from imagined , real and virtual connections with the technology. All pieces on this set of recordings are a version of this in some ways, with the mix being something both from me and for those that listen.

Meditations is both a document of practice, past and present and an experience of listening, both personal and the connective mix of us and all the things that are not us. 

releases January 9, 2026

Composed, Performed and Produced by David Shea

In Collaboration with :

Zheng-Ting Wang - Sheng

Holly Dunn - Electric Guitar

Hamish Larkman - Sampling and Spatialisation

Gully Thompson - Singing Bowls and Vibraphone

Steve Magnusson - Midi Guitar and Ebows

Pat Telfer - Vibraphone

Dylan Foley - Celtic Text and Spoken Voice

David Shea - Electromagnetic Piano , Piano, Crystal Singing Bowls , Voice , Acoustic Guitars and Spoken Text

Engineered and Mixed by Pat Telfer

At Sydney Road Studios ,

and Metta Studios Fitzroy

Composed over 2024-25

Bandcamp Link