After the success of his debut album, Cosmic Flute, its follow-up Cosmic Flute Rides Again and the number of other new age, ambient and experimental electronic releases flutist and multi-instrumentalist Jacob ‘NTHNL‘ Rudin has done in the last five years, his newest album Ontogenesis may be his most deep-delving work to-date. Literally; it’s meant to delve deep into the mind from both a musical and scientific perspective.
Ontogenesis is the third in a series of albums called the Tranquility Studies. The idea was born in 2020 around the beginning of the pandemic as a way to formalize my explorations into making music to affect feelings of peace and introspection in listeners. This music combines electronic binaural frequencies with performances on a variety of instruments to create soundscapes that are at once calming, poetic and musical. The music uses a technique called brainwave entrainment, which uses certain frequencies to sympathetically vibrate the mind.
As an avid meditation practitioner and lover of expansion and healing, ambient work has always been a central theme to the music of the Brooklyn-based Rudin, who also performs and hosts soundbaths throughout NYC. When he hooked up with friend, fellow musician and yoga instructor Leslie Graves as he was beginning work on Ontogenesis, he and Graves decided to take is a step further with the binaural beats and Solfeggio frequencies. They worked together to create an album whose main purpose was to be a meditation accompanying yoga work.
Originally, this “Music of the Body” (the original title) was conceived as a meditation on and through the body. Over the course of the next year, as I spent more and more time with the material I realized that the album’s progression should exist in time as much as in space.
The way the pair worked was quite unique, with Graves giving keywords for each of the chakras which Rudin would interpret through sound on the piano. The album runs in order of the chakras from top to bottom and even beyond, connecting with some of the extra-corporeal chakras. Ambient and mystical yet highly grounded because of the binaural frequencies, Ontogenesis is indeed an excellent accompaniment to a yoga practice or meditation. It also happens to be an extremely well-constructed and produced piece of music. Its composition is extremely complex, yet deceptively simple, with many layers of music creating that peaceful vibe whilst the heavy lifting (or grounding) is done by those deeper frequencies.
For Rudin, Ontogenesis mirrors not only the chakras but the journey of a life as written in our DNA, taking a cue from Schrödinger.
I came upon the word ‘Ontogenesis’ in Erwin Schrodinger’s ‘What is life?’ A book written before the discovery of DNA which attempts to find the physical basis for life existing and reproducing itself and coming upon many deep and beautiful ideas. Ontogenesis means the progression of an organism from conception through death. As we move up the body, we move through a life: from before the beginning to after the end, reflecting and accepting at every stage.
Fans can reflect on this beautiful work on its release date of July 12, with the single “Synthesis, Memory” already available to preview on Spotify.