The Four Immeasurable Minds is the newest release and seventh full length from Dallas, Texas based songwriter/composer David Karsten Daniels. It’s title refers to a series of four Buddhist virtues (or ‘sublime attitudes’) and the meditation practices made to cultivate them. Daniels takes each of these virtues--Love, Compassion, Joy, Equanimity--as a title for one of the album’s four tracks. An antidote to negative mental states in an increasingly busy and anxious modern world, the album presents itself as a collection of droning guitars, endlessly looping church organs, wordless vocals and wooden flutes that coalesce and detach over the album’s near 40 minutes. Guitar parts offer themselves again in mirror image, and the album can be experienced in one sitting or on repeat, as a loop. Attending to this music, the listener may have the perception that time seems to slow down, stop or move circularly (rather than linearly). Such elegiac and looping tones reflect Daniels interest in indigenous notions of circular time, while the impromptu iPhone recordings of a father/son nature walk document the Nowness of parenting (attending to a child’s ant bites and stray urine while trying to explain the meaning of the color blue).

The albums of David Karsten Daniels have always seemed to inhabit a private imaginary place where American folk, rock, jazz, ambient and field recordings bleed into each other seamlessly underneath musings on family, death, religion and love undeterred by distance and time. His music, which has been noted for its “rare and ethereal beauty”, tends to suggest a “spontaneous one-take atmosphere” yet boasts “lush production and recordings full of brilliant nuance”. NPR named his previous record, a collaboration with Matthew E. White’s Fight the Big Bull, one of the ‘5 best genre-defying albums of 2010”; DKD’s first foray into film composing, S. Cagney Gentry’s feature film Harvest, will show at film festivals later this year.

The Four Immeasurable Minds is David’s first release on his own smll thngs label. His previous 3 records were released by FatCat, a label to have also released recordings from such acts as Animal Collective, Sigur Ros, Frightened Rabbit and Bjork.

IV - Compassion

David Karsten Daniels