Magnificat: The Vortex That Sang

And so when I was there at the at the bottom I felt very clear direction record everything every second of this.

I'm here. I don't know why. Tell me why I'm here. I said yes. I don't know. And so I'm saying, please sing to me. Hi welcome to the loving this podcast my name is michael gunger and i'm so excited to share with you my new album magnificat and this album has been such a journey for me over the last couple years, there's been so much weird magic and synchronicity and adventure in this album and in the making of this album that I wanted to really let you into some of the inner chambers of it.

So I decided to put together a short run of a series here that's going to explore this album in depth. And I'm not looking for this just to be like trivia about the album or even just like music ideas. Like I want to get into musical ideas and stuff like that. But for me, the whole mission that I have with all of my work, whether it's podcasts, books, retreats, music, whatever, is all about what I might call spirit remembering itself.

And maybe that sounds out there or woo-woo or mystical or something to you. And that's okay. On the surface of this, we're going to talk about music and an album being made.

But even in that, what I'm inviting you into the experience of this album is to invite you into the depths of your own heart and life, which to the ego feels like a sort of death to who you think you are when you're actually present to life in the fullest, as it is the small ways that we so often fragment ourselves can feel like they're dying. So this album is really just part of the funnel into a vortex of death, if you will. Music.

So what we're going to be doing every week here is taking a song of the album, and using that song as a diving board into not just the making of the song, but sort of the spirit of the song. Some of the ideas, the themes that are part of the lyrics of the song and really sort of sitting in the energy of that. So I encourage you to listen with an open mind, open heart, and to even do so meditatively. And then I just hope that this podcast helps you enjoy the album even more.

So I guess let's jump in to talk about this album, though, is funny because it feels like it made itself in a strange way. That's how a lot of things that I've made have kind of felt, but I think maybe the most of anything I've ever made, this thing, it feels like it's had a life of its own and it just kind of tells me what it wants to be, or sometimes not even tells me, sometimes it just does it.

For instance, even the release of this album, I had planned on this album to come out 10-10, and I had just switched distribution companies. And on my dashboard, it says that the album was coming out on 10-10. But on 8-8, when there was supposed to be a single coming out, I looked on Spotify to see if the single was out yet. And behold the album was fully out no marketing plan in place yet no real assets to speak of.

But apparently i heard it was the lion's gate portal that day and it just, it just wanted to be out apparently so i'm like okay here we go so the current plan and we'll see how the album responds to my current plan. But my current plan is to do a song a week on the podcast here and really take a dive into each song. So this first week is the song La Date.

And to talk about this song, I got to get a little meta about the album name and kind of maybe one of the primary themes of the album, which is the divine feminine. And so this title, Magnificat, is the title of Mary's Prayer in the Bible, her song. And Mary shows up a lot in this album in different ways. And in one of the most unusual ways, I even for so long have wondered if I would talk about this story at all publicly because it's so weird.

And my guess is most of you probably won't believe it. But that's okay. But I just feel at least to understand the. My experience with this album, you have to kind of know the story. So to tell you this story, I'm going to introduce you to my friend, Hope. Hello, beautiful messenger from the heavens of the heavens, of the earth, of the cosmos, of all that is. Thank you. Thank you for the gift you bring.

Magnificat. Now, I got to say that if you're really attached to what mainstream society would call normal or sane, Hope might not be your cup of tea. But if you like the stories of the mystics who speak with animals and levitate and that sort of thing, you're probably really going to like Hope. She might end up being one of your favorite people you've ever met.

Continue being here and in this gratitude while there are ants crawling on my face and all along the ceiling edging turns out and in my nose in my nostril yeah, and um that's a lot and so be it there they are okay so the crazy thing with hope that i wanted to talk about that happened happened at the mystic hymnal retreat the songwriters retreat that happened last year, in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado. And by the way, we have the second one coming up this October.

We have a few more slots if you'd like info on that. Just email us at info at gungormusic.com. This retreat was this amazing experience. We had all these songwriters from all around come together to explore group spiritual singing together. And Hope was one of the songwriters that came. And I remember when she first got there, she ran up to me. We were out, you know, this beautiful picturesque area by a castle in this really beautiful area of Colorado Springs called the Garden of the Gods.

And she got there and she saw these magnificent rock structures. And one of them had this sort of like indention in it that she saw as a vortex that she needed to go to. Here's a conversation with a couple of friends where Hope is talking about the story with us. So when she first got to the camp, like the first thing she said was, I was like, hey, Hope, I'm good to see you. And she's like, do you want to come up to that vortex with me?

First thing. First thing. It was like a cave up in the mountain. First thing was I jumped and hugged you. And then I realized my butt had split and I was wearing that blue jumper and everyone who I hadn't met yet was behind me. And I was hugging you like butt cheeks spread. And I was feeling like my asshole was exposed through my now split blue jumper. So my first thing was, can you see my ass? To Steven, speaking of,

to Steven. That's how I met Steven. But then you asked if we could go see the vortex. And then I asked that, yes. Yeah, so. Had to clear that. And I said, I was like, I got a lot going on. I'm sorry, I don't have time to go to a vortex. I showed you idiot. I'm telling you my thoughts for you. You think I would project idiot from you onto me? Hell no.

Okay. So then let's fast forward to the end of the retreat. This is the last night of the retreat and we're sitting around a campfire and all of us just sort of enjoying each other and talking about the week and, and what had all happened. And I noticed that Hope was sitting by herself and crying by the fire. So I went and sat by her and was like, is everything okay? And she began to tell me this story that started a few hours earlier at one of the sessions that we had.

So one of the songs written from one of the groups that were writing songs there that weekend was this song called Can You Hear Us? And we spent some time singing it as a group and kind of playing with it.

And one of the things that ended up happening during it was we really wanted to let in this grief and in this lament, and this open space to allow ourselves to be almost like channelers or transmuters or alchemizers of suffering so that we could bring suffering willingly into the heart, into the space of just non-judging, loving awareness and allow that to be felt and then to use that, to breathe that back out as love to the world.

So this was like sort of the meditative, beautiful practice that was happening, but it ended up being incredibly intense. I'm going to play a little segment of what happened live just so you can get a little taste of the vibe. So we can let it slowly build and just see how wide you can open your heart and how big that channel can be, that vessel can be to let through whatever wants to come through to express the grief of God, as God to God.

Music. Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, so for clarity there are people in this meeting that were grieving things that had been long,

either repressed or just unprocessed deaths and breakups all sorts of stuff that was happening and this like channeling of the suffering of humankind. And then we ended up moving into a space of actually say, let's invite Mary, like let's channel mother. To now sing peace. So anyway, this is a very intense experience. So let's get back to Hope's experience of it. Are you familiar with verses of the Bible? So there's the faith is the substance of things hoped for.

So as I'm seeing, like by remembering this idea, and it's not like I'm meditating or thinking about the word faith or Bible or nothing, okay? I am there in the belly of the whale absorbing the vibrations of pain and suffering. And so in this moment, what was happening was, I thought I was opening my eyes, but I saw the video and I'm not opening my eyes and I'm not doing anything that it looked like in here. It was very weird to see that video. And then I could see what faith looked

like. And almost like by seeing what faith looked like, that's maybe when my eyes look close. And I opened my eyes and then the suffering also had the substance. Okay. So we're not actually even to the really weird part yet, but I just want to clarify. So we're in this really intense moment, collectively singing this, can you hear us grieving? Hope is really into this experience. As her eyes are closed,

she feels like she can see faith. And then when her eyes open, she feels like she can see suffering. And remember, she's telling me about this all at the campfire. So she's crying about this whole experience and telling me. And so far in the story, I'm kind of like, yeah, you know, beautiful. Thanks for sharing hope. You know, hope's again, hope's an eccentric character. So I'm just kind of taking it with all a grain of salt. Okay.

I haven't talked about it like since. So I like out loud, I've tried, but it doesn't work. You're doing great. So you see the substance and you feel urged by mother to collect the substance. Yes. With none of those words within these three and a half years of. Covenant after covenant after term after term of update of different experiences that result in what my active covenant with the Spirit is, which is I will say yes no matter what. I do not have to understand.

I will not ask why. I will do it the second I hear it. So that's the process of three and a half years, which are very full. And so here in this moment, it's not like I don't have to be asked. I don't have to be asked, and I don't ask about what's happened, you know? So Hope had been experiencing for three and a half years what she describes as the incredibly bizarre, miraculous, and very clear experiences with mother or Mary.

And she has many stories that she could tell you for days, probably, if you ever get a chance to talk to Hope. But the long and the short of it, like she said, is she just developed this relationship when she hears mother ask her something, she just does it without question. And what she heard during this song was collect these burdens. And so she collects them. Yes. I say yes without saying yes.

And I collect the burdens and then I have all these burdens and we're like. Music.

Right and then i'm looking down and then i open my eyes and i see like i what am i gonna do with these and are is like do are they to me like they they must think i'm crazy for carrying all this shit slash none of these things are happening in my head it's just this feeling of like what do i do with all this shit okay i'm gonna warn you here what she's about to say has a good potential to lose like half the audience but also just

keep in mind like if you're gonna try to get somebody to believe this story you don't put this detail in and i'm not trying to get you to believe this story but i'm just going to tell you the story as it was told to me by hope at the campfire so here we go here's here's quite a detail and then the spirit says put it in your butt you know where shit goes put it in your butt okay that's what the spirit says so i put it in my butt all right i do I picked this bird ice, but, but yeah, it was joyful.

It was joyful. It was joyful. But the burdens are still sounding themselves around, you know, like in their dissipating post-coital kind of way. And then. Okay. So again, remember Hope's telling me all this by the fire and I'm just sort of like laughing. and still being present to Hope because she's crying and she's feeling a lot about this. And I'm delighted at Hope's strange story, but also can see that there's something really real happening for her.

And honestly, there was something about it that was not that surprising because the feeling in that room during that whole releasing grief moment was so palpable. Afterwards, I felt at the end, I was just like, I just got to go get my feet. On the ground for a second. I want to put my feet in the grass and just kind of ground like that was so intense. And then, yeah. And then you were like, I need to go put my foot on the grass or something like that.

You were like, we're supposed to start again in five minutes. But we needed time. We needed time, yeah. And when you said that, the spirit said go. Right? So when I hear go, now I'm go. There's no, I have burdens in my butt. There's no, there's no things happening like that. There's like, I can feel everything that is vibrating inside of me through the experience. I can feel it. and it's like now it has direction and now it's time to submit to the direction.

So the direction that she gets is she feels like she needs to go to that vortex that she's felt called to the whole time, but she needs to do it now. And she wants to find somebody that could go with her. And she'd already asked a bunch of people through the week and this guy Dave had said yes, but she couldn't find him. So when I couldn't find Dave, I was like, shoot, Dave's the only one who said yes. And then Jonathan was sitting against the wall and he was like,

what do you want in Dave for? Can I help? And I was like, well, I need to go climb that vortex and I'm going to do it, but I can't find Dave. Do you want to come? So Jonathan accompanies her on the whatever five-minute walk from the cabin back into the Garden of the Gods. And then we got to the bottom. I was like, come on, let's go. And he was like, no, I'm not going. And I said, okay, okay, I'll go. And he stayed there at the bottom.

I felt very clear direction, record everything, every second of this. And then I get up there and then I video everything that I can when I'm not moving and audio the rest. So Hope climbs all the way up into the vortex and sort of introduces herself. So that's stage one, like introducing myself to the vortex. I'm here. I don't know why. Tell me why I'm here. I said yes. So, again, Hope has climbed up to this little opening in the mountain.

Above the base to which Jonathan is sitting there waiting for her at the bottom. And she begins to sing. She begins to sing into this vortex. I'm also listening. So my ears against it and I'm listening to the interaction of the frequency inside the rock with the nose I'm doing and paying attention to the waves and their frequencies and their vibrations. And I'm looking for an entry point into where I feel here. She's calling there.

I felt I met her here. At this point, it's like all my body weight's on the rock. So the rock's holding me, and I feel the rock is breaking. And if the rock breaks, I fall down. I crash. And the mama said, She said, don't let my baby drop. Don't drop my baby. I was like, who's your baby? I don't have your baby.

She said, you have my baby. my baby you just birthed my baby out your butt it's the burdens you put in there earlier don't you remember now that rock has energetically absorbed those burdens it's broken because the rock is broken and the baby is born give me my baby and so when i'm like she when i'm in that split second which felt like an hour when i'm like deciding not deciding i don't know what verb it is but it is action so hope tells me sitting by the campfire

that she does deliver this baby to the mother and then that the mother sings back to her. And i'm like okay cool you know i mean all this the the burdens going in her butt and being delivered to the mountain and the mountain singing back i'm putting it all kind of in this, poetic hope, you know, trying to describe mystical things that can't really be described with words. And then, but then she kind of like gets a little bit more scientific with it and says, and she sang in perfect 432 pitch.

And I was like, Well, what are you talking about? Like, for those of you who don't know music theory at all, let me give you what saying someone was tuned to 432 pitch means. Most music that you hear today is tuned to A440, which means that the note A vibrates 440 times a second. If you slightly, slightly detune that A so that A isn't 440 times a second, but only 432, then this note A becomes this note A. So in other words, not a big difference. Here's a familiar little melody in 440.

And here it is in 432. So again, not a big difference, but there is a lot of chatter about this sort of thing that you can find on the internet if you'd like. And many people kind of consider it woo-woo, but people are like, no, 432 just resonates better and more naturally with the body and the universe. And listen, I like it. I feel like I can feel it a little bit. I made my whole record, my whole Weiwu record in 432 because of that. But anyway, to just hear it as 432 is crazy nuance.

And I was like, Hope, you know, she's a musician. I'm sure she's got a good ear, but I was like, she doesn't have that good of an ear. And we'll come back to that in a little bit. But Hope is telling me all this, that Mary sang to her and after taking all the burdens away. And then she just keeps talking and telling more of what happened in the afternoon. I'm like, wait a second. You said you were recording this? She's like, yeah, I got it recorded.

I was like, you can hear the voice on the recording?

She's like, yeah, can I hear it? So here you go. Here's the recording. Music.

I'm just responding like thinking i mean i don't know what the fuck to do, i'm thinking are we talking you take your turn i take mine it's a duet are you hearing it you're hearing it through the rock i'm hearing it in the rock and i am baffled and i am i don't know what's happening i don't know that the camera's picking it up which is what made it feel so important to sing the notes because the the feeling was was this is you're trying to translate it yes This is the song that you sing.

So she tells me that night at the campfire, this boy started singing to me and it was in, she was singing a perfect 432 pitch. It was 432 hertz. And I was like, how would you know that? You don't have a good mouthfear. Sorry. I am not offended. I tested it. So we've isolated the audio and I'm using the audio in different places in the record. We'll see what happens to be done. But I tuned everything to 432. It was like, it's in 432.

She's singing in 432. so anyway when i told her later i was like it was like holy shit oh it's 432 she goes yeah i know i told you so yeah it's just like you figured it yeah is it just me or the voice sounds close and far i feel that too i feel a stereo set it feels like a record an old record we're not at a trail there's nobody there no everybody was at dinner actually everybody was at the bottom of the rock this jonathan we asked him we

asked him later did you hear somebody singing that walked by he's like i heard hope singing and then we played in the recording he's like whoa no i didn't hear that that's yeah unbelievable okay so you can think what you want about what it is but i did have a feeling about the voice as well as soon as i heard it i kind of got chills.

And for some reason that voice just really kept coming back to me and I kept playing with it at different points in the record and that voice sampled and you know reverbed out and put all different sorts of places in the record it's really throughout you're going to hear a lot of that in different places of this record but to just let you hear it again here's it with like a little reverb and some of the notes stretched a little

longer so that they can you can kind of sit in it but here's just all that Mary voice and in this little file that I edited together. Music. I don't know. I still get goosebumps sometimes when I listen to it. I can feel it. And I just love the feeling of it, and especially in relationship to so many of the themes on this record, which a lot of it is about the divine feminine. And I'll get way more into what that means to me in future episodes here.

But in essence, what happened at that rock, whether you believe it literally or not is sort of a metaphor or almost like an archetype for this whole idea of the album which is essentially inviting all that we consider to be not sacred whether that's our sexuality whether that's our playfulness and absurdity whether that's our pain, our doubt, our nihilism, whatever it is, can we invite it into this space that is already love? Can we recognize the sacredness of the entirety of it?

And to me, that is the work of Mother, and this is in a Christian way, I think, the work of Christ. The willingness to receive this suffering into the heart, into the sacred heart. And what happens there is it transmutes, it alchemizes, it's transformed. And we don't bring it in in order to do something about it. We don't bring in the suffering in order to stop it or to kill it. We bring it in because it's already part of what is. It's already mother.

It's just mother unremembered. And when she's remembered, when she's re-brought to herself, when her baby comes back to her and is offered through praise or through the receiving of love, then, alchemy, that magic happens. And what we thought was pain, what we thought of as suffering, is suddenly seen as glory, as love. Music. So I knew I wanted that voice to be through the album, but I didn't exactly know how to start the album. I was playing with so many ideas.

There was one version where I tried to actually tell the Mary story at the top. And another, I started with the big instrumental string swell that now is in Remember. And this is one of the interesting things about being an artist, is this trying to imagine how you want the music to feel before it makes you feel that. So I was like, how do I want to feel at the beginning of this whole process.

Like I knew we were moving into the transcendent and into wonder and into love, but I was like, we're starting in a little bit more of a mysterious place. We're starting a little more kind of out in the wilderness here, but I also didn't want it to feel like too despondent or I wanted to kind of foreshadow where we'd be going. And then it was actually the end of the album that sort of gave me the first clarity of like where it needed to start.

So here's where the album ends. Music. So I liked that it ended with the divine feminine there, the ma, praise ma. I also liked where we first begun. And I could feel something in that, that I was like, okay, where are we going to go from here? I knew that where we would go needed to be where we started. So that little melody, I wanted that to be at the top somehow, but I also wanted to introduce Mary as a texture and as a character throughout.

So I was trying to figure out how to combine those two things. How do I combine that melody and all the Mary stuff? And that's when the third character of the album, The Forest, presented itself. I had actually been in Los Angeles making the record for quite some time, like a year and a half. Then Los Angeles, as many of you saw in the news, set on fire at the beginning of this year. And it was insane. And at the same exact day that the city set on fire,

my face went numb. I got Bell's palsy and half my face was paralyzed. And so as the fires roared and my face was shut down i fled the city and went to the forest to get away from the fires and to just take care of myself and that was a real turning point for the album actually here's me and some friends getting some sounds from some great sequoia trees.

So we used a lot of these sounds for drum samples and for percussive sounds i actually used it in not just the intro song but in several places of the album i just really liked how these sounds felt and it just had a vibe with it that almost felt like another character to bring into this album so we had this mary character this forest character and then there's this other character that's sort of a mystic or as will become

clear later sort of a clown of a character And I like thinking of the one singing the Amen. It's kind of in that spirit, like this silly mystical clown. You know, you've got to love threes. Spirit, soul, and body. Father, son, and spirit. Electron, proton, neutron. So why not add, you know, mother, clown, forest? Let me play you now Laudate, which is a Latin term meaning praise.

It's often, you know, glorifying the divine feminine. And in the context of Mary, it's often used in hymns and prayers dedicated to her. It also kind of sounded to us like what she might be saying in the song that she was singing. La darte. Who knows, but that's kind of what it sounded like. So that's the name of the intro track, and here it is. Music.

Okay well that's the first track i'm excited to uh dive into this next one next week will be same sky and hope you'll be back i hope you'll listen to the album share it with friends and uh most of all i hope that you'll spend as much time deep in your heart and deep in. Music.