Original instrumental music made for Darshniks: slow pieces, most of them organ-led, that rise and settle like a long thought. Each one grows out of an idea on the site, from the creation hymn of the Rig Veda to Plato’s cave and Musashi’s ten thousand days. Press play and keep reading, or download the MP3s for a walk, a meditation or a quiet evening. Every note was composed and synthesised by Darshniks, so nothing here is borrowed from anyone else’s recording.
The creation hymn of the Rig Veda (10.129) ends with a question: perhaps even the one who watches from the highest heaven does not know. The music rises out of silence over a held low note, a bell asks its question six different ways, and the piece ends without an answer.
Goes with: The Vedas · Cosmology
Download MP3A slow piano figure circles like an orbit, six notes turning against a four-beat bar. Organ, strings and a deep pulse gather into a full climax that stops dead; then the orbit returns alone and settles on a major chord.
Goes with: Our Place in the Cosmos
Download MP3Plato’s prisoners watch shadows until one of them turns towards the fire and climbs out into the sun. The piece begins in the dark on soft low pipes, climbs through the organ’s registers, and walks out into the light of E major.
Goes with: Plato
Download MP3In Indian thought, akasha is the space in which everything else appears. Wide open chords hang over one low note, distant bells flicker like stars, and the sound is left to ring in a very long hall.
Goes with: Cosmology · The Darshanas
Download MP3Camus ends The Myth of Sisyphus with “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” A rising organ figure pushes the bass up step by step, rolls back to the bottom and climbs again, fuller each time. On the last climb the minor key turns major.
Goes with: Albert Camus
Download MP3For the books we know existed and will never read. Dark reed pipes in an old, shadowed mode, a bell tolling in the distance, and a slow line that searches and never quite finds what it is looking for.
Goes with: Lost Texts
Download MP3Musashi wrote that a thousand days of practice forge a skill and ten thousand days polish it. A deep pulse keeps exactly the same pace from first beat to last while the organ and a breathy five-note melody slowly gather strength.
Goes with: Miyamoto Musashi · Self-Discipline
Download MP3Darshan means seeing, and being seen by, the sacred; it is the root of this site’s name. A tanpura-like drone sounds Sa and Pa, temple bells mark the time, and the organ unfolds a slow alaap in the notes of raag Yaman.
Goes with: The Darshanas · Deep Meditations
Download MP3The Buddha said pain is the first arrow and our worry about it a second one we shoot ourselves. One bell strikes; then the organ breathes, swelling in for four seconds and out for six. Breathe along with it.
Goes with: Overthinking and Anxiety
Download MP3“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.1). One high note in the half-light, then a slow sunrise in D major on ever brighter stops.
Goes with: Marcus Aurelius
Download MP3A diya is the small clay lamp lit at dusk in Indian homes and temples: one flame against the dark. A slow, tender song without words in F minor for a bansuri-style flute, gliding between notes the way Indian flautists do, over warm strings and a soft tanpura.
Goes with: Bhakti · Deep Meditations
Download MP3Sandhya is the meeting of day and night, the hour of evening prayer. A santoor-style ripple of hammered strings flows under a bansuri-style flute in D minor; the melody climbs higher in the middle and comes home to a long, held note as the light goes.
Goes with: Yoga · Deep Meditations
Download MP3Prarthana means prayer. The brightest of the flute pieces: a hopeful melody in G major over strings, a soft tabla keeping a gentle beat and a temple bell every few bars, ending on a calm major chord.
Download MP3Viraha is the ache of separation from the beloved, a great theme of the bhakti and Sufi poets. A lone flute sings a free, unmetred alap over the tanpura, sliding between long notes in A minor; then soft strings enter and the longing settles into a slow pulse.
Goes with: Rumi · Heartbreak
Download MP3These pieces were written as code: each note, chord and swell is set down by hand, and the sounds (organ pipes, strings, piano, bells, a bansuri-style flute, santoor-like hammered strings, a soft tabla, a tanpura-like drone and the echo of a large hall) are synthesised from scratch. Their mood owes something to the great slow film scores built on the church organ, but every melody is our own.
Free for personal use: listening, studying, meditating, or sharing with a friend. Please don’t sell them or upload them to music services as your own. See Copyright and Reuse.
