The original release of this album, in the autumn of 1979, included a description of what you were about to hear. "Tibetan Bells II is a space-poem in two sections," wrote Wolff, describing the two sides of the LP. "Journey To The End and The Endless Journey. The music charts the progress of an individual soul or spirit as it proceeds through the last recognisable phases of existence …" So, right away, we know we're some way off the usual roadmap here. Wolff and Hennings first LP, Tibetan Bells I, had been a seriously popular gateway record into the emergent New Age and yogic musics back in 1972. Building upon the resonant, rubbed tones of Tibetan Singing Bells and Bowls, instruments that had been used for centuries as an aid in to spiritual discipline, the pair created new compositions that avoided traditional styles and used the most modern recording techniques available while aiming for something deeper and more esoteric. There certainly is a complex and questing sense of spirituality here, the pair are clearly reaching for something that's situated within an unimaginably vast and inky blackness, but the care and space they give each note means this remains a warm, enveloping album. There is a world of utterly brilliant, largely home-produced, often fantastically odd New Age music made between the early 70s and the mid-80s, music that is a long way from the washed-out blandness that term has come to represent. Hopefully we'll get a chance to return to records by Constance Demby, Kay Gardner and Peter Michael Hamel, but for now let's sink into Tibetan Bells II, as powerful an experience today as it ever was. (theguardian)
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