Meet Barry and Reggie

I met my brong Reggie Hubbard — brong being short for “brother in gong” — during an artist residency at Kripalu in May 2025. I had the chance to record his wonderful collection of gongs there, and came home with hours of pristine recordings. For a long time, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with all that beautiful material. How do you turn so many gongs into soundscapes without losing what makes each one special? Eventually, the answer felt obvious: keep it simple. Gong after gong, one gong at a time.

What I discovered is that every gong has a personality. A gong is a large and complex resonant structure, and there are so many ways to play it: how hard you strike, where you strike, which mallet you use. You never quite know how it will respond. Spend enough time with one, though, and something changes. You still cannot predict exactly what will happen, but you learn how to move through its sonic space. What first felt random slowly becomes more like a guided tour: the musician gives it a direction, while the gong keeps opening unexpected landscapes along the way.

The gong you hear here is the very first one I recorded with Reggie. It is an Indonesian nipple gong. When I asked Reggie to introduce it to me, I expected to hear about its type, size, or tonal qualities. Instead, he simply said: “This is Barry White.” I burst out laughing, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t. That was the name Reggie had given this gong. So much for instrument personalities. ;-) So, this is Barry: deep, rounded, and low voiced.

Let Barry become your new meditative friend and your source of sound-healing frequencies. Interesting bits: the whale-like tones are produced by rubbing a rubber friction mallet against the gong. The last three sliders introduce regular patterns that work particularly well for breathing practice or slow relaxation. Their timing can be adjusted using the Tape Speed Control feature.

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