Before sitting down to listen to Bright Angel, I was not in the mood to listen to over an hour of piano music. Harlan Mark Vale had other plans for me though. Two minutes into the opening title track, I was in the mood because he put me there.
The entire album has wonderful piano playing and arrangements, and though Vale’s music is labeled as ambient, it will certainly hold your attention. Vale never lingers on one theme too long and each movement the music takes is wonderful.
The songs of Bright Angel were composed while Vale visited the Grand Canyon and stayed at the El Tovar Hotel. Vale’s playing does an excellent job of capturing the view he saw on a daily basis. There is a majestic quality to the songs and he isn’t afraid to stretch out the space between the notes. After all, the Grand Canyon is really a big space. It’s clear that Vale is trying to evoke and create emotions and visions with his music, unlike some instrumentalists who sound as though their only goal is to prove their technical proficiency.
Another interesting aspect of Bright Angel is that Vale believes it to have healing powers. On his MySpace site, he writes, “The Bright Angel CD has been shown to calibrate at over 700 on Dr. David Hawkins' consciousness scale. This is the level of pure consciousness. Hawkins theorizes that anything at this level can produce healing effects.” He goes on to say that, he has performed at-home tests on listeners’ muscles and claims that they test stronger after listening.
How one determines the level of pure consciousness, I don’t know. And I don’t know if that is supposed to prove that Bright Angel is somehow better than other music. Luckily, most people don’t need a calibrated scale to tell them something sounds good and Bright Angel most definitely does.
Dennis Mersmann MuzikReviews.com Staff
December 23, 2008
