What music gets you into your zone the most?
		Before I answer that, a little detour by way of explanation. I said earlier that good musicians reach up "into the ethers" to download raw music files which then get filtered and developed through their musical training, skills, emotional availability in the moment and so on. Just as there are different possible depths of emotional abandonment in the listener, there also are different "elsewhere" heights that a musician can access. These different layers, perhaps, correspond to the different human dimensions of sexuality, vital, will, feeling, mental, visionary and cosmic as they relate to the Indian chakra system that itself corresponds to (but remains different from) our glandular tree in medical science.
		The way I personally react to music? The sexual/vital realm nearly always features a strongly repetitive rhythmic foundation. In cases like African or tribal trance drumming, that could be nearly exclusively so. A lot of Brazilian and Arabian music is peppered with overtly physical sensuality that automatically creates a bodily response. For the will dimension, I think of military marching bands with all their implied martial airs of pomp & circumstance. Most Jazz, especially freer experimental forms, hit my abstract mind to directly bypass the heart.
		One of my favorite musical styles is Gipsy, from Romani and Manouche to Gitan and Sinti. For me, Gipsy music is wildly emotive, combining audacious virtuosity with rule-bending, often ferocious insistence on emotional integrity. The improvisational technical elements appeal to my mind while the unhinged charge of raw feelings touches my heart - simultaneously. That makes it into complete music for me. When L. Subramaniam goes into deep alap mode on his Indian violin, he pierces deeply impersonal universal realms of the higher or visionary mind. Ditto for Japanese Shakuhachi. To access those realms seems to occur in the absence of rhythm. It creates a sense of unmoored flotation carrying this listener into far-out realms. Techno seems to speak to more primitive dimensions of the vital, as though it was a modern version of tribal rituals to connect with what the martial arts call the hara, the center of life force and will in the belly. Some of it gets too synthetic for my taste but if it combines organic elements like some trance/chill-out or ambient music, I like it very much. Italian arias? If I overlook the often soap-operatic silliness and dramatic tragedy of the action, this can be intensely emotional stuff, romantic rather than transcendental. I don't listen to much classical music anymore despite my upbringing. Too often, I hear the composer's internal conflictedness and emotional trauma processed and purged. As such, it gets dumped on the listener. Anti-therapy if you ask me.
		Got enough crap of your own to not want to assimilate someone else's?
		You're catching on. Very insightful! Incidentally, this isn't true for Roccoco or Renaissance music but clearly for haunted characters like Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler. Mozart's music seems more carefree, with an innocent happiness and elegance that are both more impersonal than personal. His Requiem combines transcendental reach with great emotional longing, very different from the more abstracted while not aloof but simply cosmically fluent mien of J.S. Bach.
		Do I detect a subliminal value system attached to this Indian chakra system transposed on music?
									Yes and no. The Japanese Zen tradition has a famous answer for it by asking whether the blade of grass next to the pine tree ever compares itself to feel small and insignificant. It's human habit to compare and judge and assign rating systems. It's all one energy, merely stepped up or down to different frequencies. Does where on the dial it resides make one radio station better than another? Surely it's a function of programming and content, not whether it's 84.7 or 101.3FM. Ditto for this. Well-rounded, complete and balanced human beings need to be alive and function on all of these levels for eventual integration. Great intellect without grounding in the body and heart becomes aloof, abstracted. Rampant emotionalism without a counterweight in discipline and will turns pathetic rather than attractive. And so on. All of these are just pointers, about how different music "comes from different places" and thus addresses different areas of the body-mind. From day to day and year to year, how and where we need to be triggered by music changes. However, what speaks to us the most in any given period most certainly will directly correspond to our greatest characteristic focus, the foundation note or frequency of our human chord I talked about earlier.
		Now consider my upbringing and subsequent escape from Germany. By tendency, I'm a brainy character. I needed to grope the other way for the counterpoint. When I listen to music, I do it to unbutton my mental straight jacket. I delve into music's emotional substance for balance. Hence my love of WorldMusic. I don't understand the lyrics so they can't distract me in the head even if they're only the usual "night on fire, higher and higher" crap. I just go for the innate emotive charge. It's a contact high.
		Do I detect a legalized drug angle?
		If by drug we mean a substance that alters mood and perception, absolutely. In the effect music can have if the right circumstances exist -- we're open to it, and the particular style of music speaks to us strongly -- it does work like a drug. And that's why one should exercise discrimination. Music is powerful stuff. Just because we don't notice on all levels how it interacts with our own vibratory being doesn't mean we remain unaffected. The wrong music can make you uncomfortable or even sick. What's detrimental in one setting can be energizing or profoundly moving in another. There's no recipe except to respond to the moment with intelligence and sensitivity.
		How about the hardware side of this equation before you lose your remaining readers in a dense fog of conceptualization and abstraction?
		Like Hollywood, you sorely underestimate the intelligence of your audience. But let's - talk audio. From the usual laundry list of must-have audiophile items, the one to top my chart? Emotional communicativeness. That term is pretty nebulous in discussion so let's explode it to look at the various constituents that make up this quality for me: Dynamics; immediacy directly tied to leading edge fidelity, i.e. how unburdened by electronic ballast sounds first arise out of silence; and harmonically correct timbre. Dynamic range is very important not in terms of how loudly the system will play, but how nuanced it renders the relief of tonal textures. Does it look like aged rock, worn smooth to display relatively few surface irregularities? Or is it young rock with lots of ruts, incisions, edges, clefts and pits? In the delivery of a melodic arc spanning 8 bars, how pronounced is the extent of subtle inflection and emphasis that subdivides this arc into different sections to create a subliminal meter? How alive or confined is this musical talk? In his February Stereophile column, Art Dudley ridicules the term microdynamics as another audiophile highbrow invention. Not, says I. From my perspective, the qualifier "micro" here merely hints at a more microscopic playground of dynamics - not the very obvious span between the loudest and quietest passage, but the less obvious fluctations accompanying different bow pressure or adjusted air speed, the scintillating changes of which voices lead in a mass chorus at any given time. Because of dynamic compression in recordings and the limited dynamic scope of much material to begin with, the micro-range of dynamic motility is far more important than getting blasted to smithereens by the unmitigated loudness of violent peaks.
								Leading-edge fidelity relates to the incisiveness and directness whereby sounds couple to air. Are the system's rise times up to this task? Do they put a damper on to strangulate this percussive energy? The explosive nature of much live music seems at least partially a function of this speed and its related precision of rhythmic timing. When approached well in reproduction, this and dynamic agility most strongly create the illusion of "live". When I say that, I don't necessarily mean like the live event. I mean it as in a living, kicking, wiggling thing rather than a stiff, inert, barely moving one. Next on my list? Midbass precision, attack and proper weight. This is the magic frequency band. When present in the right relation to the remainder, things get juicier and more exciting, more convincing. Ideally, this range is coupled to true low bass to convey that intangible but palpable sense of space. On a parallel rung of my personal Jacob's ladder to the stars? Timbre or tone. That's made up of fundamentals (just sinewaves) then rendered specifically instrumental or vocal through sub- and higher harmonics.
		It's in this area of tone where vacuum tubes seem necessary at least somewhere in the system to maximally develop this harmonic envelope. I call it bloom when stuffed to the max and sterile when flat as a pancake and mostly empty. The first two qualities (dynamics and leading edge fidelity) combine to what I call immediacy or emotional communicativeness. Timbre/tone add a dimension of beauty and honesty that I could live with to a lesser extent if the first group was well represented. Ditto for true deep bass - it's not as vital as proper midbass but far more important to the proper balance it brings to the picture than all the remaining visual aspects of the game - soundstaging, image specificity, localization and the other usual suspects. They're secondary but very enjoyable for a sense of completion. Call it the difference between a torrid love letter scribbled in barely decipherable hand on smudged paper, and one that was neatly fashioned, on special paper. What grabs your attention and sets your heart aflutter are the words and conveyed meaning. Poor grammar and spelling? Who the heck cares if the words are on fire? If the heat of passion is present, the quality of final presentation becomes an unexpected bonus. But if the conviction of expressed love were as weak as a rerun of trite phrases borrowed from Pop songs? Now the fanciest fragrance-laden designer paper and state-of-the-art ink delivered in meticulously flowing lines won't make up for the loss of substance.
		Which of these so-called secondary qualities is most important to you?
		Oxygen. Okay, air. That's not only extended treble and the concomitant sensation of light versus darkness. It's also a subtle quality of fluffiness that, like luminous auras surrounding the virtual performers, creates a sense for the spatial expanse they inhabit. To me, that presence of "audible space" is the opposite of dry and etched in stone, no matter how well focused. It's the secondary trait I value the most.