Lanterns Lit For New Star Travis Wernet
Travis
Wernet creates a sound quite unlike any other, exhibited beautifully on new
album Lanterns of Midnight. Multi-instrumentalist and transcender of genre
Wernet creates an acoustic soundscape, mixing didjeridu, Native American
flute, Tuvan-style vocals and an array of stringed instruments.
From the driving and trance-like 'Shimmer' (a song used in the acclaimed
Spanish documentary film Becoming Aware), to the ethereal, otherworldly
'Cloud Hidden', the album hits the listener on a deeply emotional level,
along with the pulsing rhythms of tracks like 'There's A Hole In My Earth'
and 'Heaven's Escalator'. Lanterns of Midnight is truly the sound of a poet
and musician's vision being fully realised.Life
changed for Travis at the age of 23 when he picked up a didjeridu for the
first time. He says: "Nothing could have affected me like didjeridu did at
that time. It grabbed me and wouldn't let go. So I taught myself to play."
"I would go out to the cliffs on the Pacific Coast near San Francisco whenever I could. More often than not, I went at night, and it was just so beautiful, the ocean and the moon shining at me from far away in space, upon these vast waters below the place where I sat and practiced." Travis Wernet
Travis
would find a kinship with similarly inquisitive musical outlooks in and
around the Bay Area, playing in bands such as Pele's Tears and Axis Mundi.
In 2004 Travis had an artistic breakthrough - fusing his burgeoning
didjeridu expertise with spoken word. He explains: "It is rare in it's
weaving of a typically wordless form with language to suggest participation
in a deeply felt realm. This attracts me, after exposure to the authentic,
non-commercial side of electronic and tribal music - the kind which has used
technology to 'channel' and re-create the ancient wisdom of world percussion
and indigenous people."
Throughout
his career, Travis has met with considerable critical acclaim: "The album's
journey is through other realms, parallel universes as it were, past new and
ancient streams and temples and firesides, as we traverse the inner
landscape of the soul… seeking. At points along the path our guide lifts us
on visionary wings, weaving rich and transcendent spoken images, dramatic
yet enticingly subtle. Consider Dreams Haunting Desire, whose very title
both sums and animates the work's powerful inner moving parts; or Yearning
To Come Be Feathers Again – a rapturous ode that beckons to be experienced
somewhere beyond the describable." - Steven Miller, Phenomaly Arts
"Mystical rhythms, didjeridu and sitars succeed in creating an atmosphere
that gives me the feeling that I'm in an exotic place during the middle
ages." - Mushroom magazine
Lanterns of Midnight is available at
www.soundclick.com/traviswernet.
Travis
Wernet P.O. Box 8651
Emeryville, California
94662
phone: 510-301-6165
didjfish@sbcglobal.net
travis@intuitivesound.net
www.intuitivesound.net
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