Bardo

Day 3 of One Track a Day. Bardo takes its shape from the Bardo Thodol — the Tibetan Buddhist description of the intermediate state between death and rebirth — mapped onto four musical phases: Chikhai (dissolution), Chönyid (luminosity), Sidpa (seeking), and Return (threshold). Built entirely in Ableton Live using the Kumoi scale (a Japanese pentatonic), with hand percussion, struck metal, and a Wavetable drone as the only voices. The piece opens on an unresolved open fifth that collapses into dissonance, builds into a dense, overwhelming wall of interlocking percussion, falls apart into deliberately off-grid, disoriented rhythm, and finally resolves back to that same opening fifth — quoting its own opening bell figure as it closes the loop. Part of an ongoing exploration of Percussion Ambient — a genre built on rhythm that dissolves into resonance rather than groove.