I don't know that there has been anyone quite like Peia. Sinéad O'Connor perhaps, in her soulful vulnerability; or Loreena McKennitt, with her immersion in Celtic music. Peia tracks a path that leads her back, beyond the fads of popular tunes to the music of our ancestors, and beyond them to their ancestors, all the way back.
I was dancing on a grassy knoll in rural Vermont at a retreat centre called Spirit Hollow. The morning playlist, echoing through the forest from a portable boombox, drew us from our tents, inviting us to move as the sun cleared the tree line, to begin the day in our bodies rather than in our heads. That twenty minutes of morning movement alone would have been worth the price of the five-day program, whose actual focus was on something else. But at the heart of that playlist was one song I listened for every morning.
Ironically, most modern meditative music, despite its ethereal aspirations, is generated by electronic keyboards recorded in windowless studios where the sun never shines and the recycled air is never fresh. The percussive beats produced by those keyboards are impossibly dry and precise and the swirling synthesizer sounds are lush but soulless. The sampled singers' voices never pause to draw a breath and the digital stringed instruments never make a squeak as when a finger slides up a fretboard.
Such music is meant to be evocatively soulful. Instead, being electronic, it goes straight to the head rather than to the heart, missing its target by about a foot and a half. But given its driving beat, projected through good subwoofer speakers, it can make for very good dance music, trance dance in particular. The body doesn't seem to care if the sound is vapid.
But within that morning mix this one song shimmered like the dew, not with New Age pretension, but with true, soulful, resonance. It began with a drone-like progression of chords, created by a human-operated wind chamber, not an electronic keyboard, perhaps the bellows of a harmonium. Layered over that were the plucked notes of a real classical guitar, soft but distinct, suggesting a tentative melody. A clear female voice emerged from the ether, claiming the high ground, floating and wordless. Then the words found their way out, slow and beguiling, like the call of a Siren:
Blessed we are to dance on this ground
with the rhythm of saints to carry the sound
We hold a prayer for the earth, for the ones yet to come
May we walk in beauty and remember our song
Remember why you came here
Remember your life is sacred
Remember why you came here
Remember your life is sacred
The rhythm changed, hand drums rising now from behind the other instruments to drive the song, while a stringed instrument was strummed like a balalaika. The song repeated, taking us deeper, from the ears to the heart and down into the body. It was difficult to know how to respond, whether to dance, or to weep. The song was Blessed We Are, by Peia (pronounced Pēe-ah).
Reflecting upon that experience in the weeks that followed, and finding other songs by the same artist, I wondered what the difference was between her music and so much else that passes as "spiritual." For years I had played a particular song to lead me into meditation. The singer was Chinese-Malaysian musician and producer Imee Ooi, and the song, Meta, was a Buddhist prayer sung over a simple keyboard arrangement that took me to a very still and peaceful place in my mind.
But Peia's song didn't soothe me. Instead, it woke something deep within me. It was, in a sense, soulful rather than spiritual, connecting me not with the ethereal heavens but with the solid earth beneath my feet, with my body, with my heart, and also in a strange way with my memory. It was nothing specific, though much of her music has Celtic and Western European roots, which I share. It went deeper than that.
If I had to choose an image, I'd say Peia’s music was grounding me as if I were an ageless oak tree, rooted in my primordial past while reaching out into my beckoning future. On that grassy knoll in Vermont, her song made my body move that way. But even then, that doesn't say what it did to me. I needed to know more, I needed to discover the source of such soulful music. So, I contacted her.
To listen to my conversation with Peia, and hear a sampling of her music, including Blessed We Are, click on the Play button below. To learn more about Peia and her music follow the More Info button to the show notes.
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