“We’re making music that tries to strike a balance, to provide pleasure to the mind, healing to the body and enjoyment to the soul,” L+R Wang Lu tells Apple Music. “A lot of healing sounds actually have little aesthetic appeal and may sound like noise, since they’re physical in nature rather than artistic.” On Resonant Stillness, the sound artist turns body-oriented sounds into ear-oriented music by pairing therapeutic goals with Brian Eno’s concept of calming, ignorable ambient music that provides space for thought. The album, which consists of two 30-minute tracks, is a follow-up of sorts to 2021’s 深·DEEP, which Wang created with singing bowl healer Lu Qiming. Joining the two artists is Wang’s friend and frequent collaborator, Wang Wenwei, the guitarist for Shanghai rock band Crystal Butterfly who records under the moniker WWW. “His specialty is in creating a space, a sonic ‘plane’,” Wang Lu says. “I was mainly responsible for the ‘points’ and ‘lines’, which I then strung onto Wang’s constantly changing plane.” Those points and lines take the form of nature sounds, chosen specifically to be as unobtrusive as possible. “With the broader audience in mind, I didn’t use standard ‘white noise’ like rain or ocean sounds because some listeners might be a little afraid of rain or the sea,” Wang Lu explains. “Instead, I used lighter sounds. One section has insects I recorded in Beijing’s Huairou district a few years ago. There’s also the sound of wind in the countryside. Mostly, I used the natural background noise of the wilderness—the wind, bird calls, the rustle of plants in the breeze. Overall, they’re very insubstantial, non-directional sounds.” The punctuated soundscape that results may sound like a structureless dream but is actually carefully designed to serve two therapeutic goals: sleeping and waking. “The process of healing is a little like hypnotherapy,” Wang Lu explains. “We divide it into segments. First, we determine how to make those divisions, how long each will be, what each will do, where we’re leading the listener, what our goal is and what instructions we will issue—to relax the scalp, the forehead, the tip of the nose, the lips, the cheeks, the neck, the shoulders. We only start the work once we’ve determined the course of treatment.” “You’re experiencing bodily relaxation at both an auditory and a tactile level,” Lu Qiming adds. “The sound and vibration of the singing bowl resonating with your body stimulates many things. While in this state, you’ll often find yourself reintegrating things you haven’t been able to understand or get past. That’s the healing process.” Historically found in Nepal as functional objects with occasional ritual purpose, the metal bowls Lu employs were first used for healing purposes by European music therapists. “They initially used seven energy centres, based on the seven-chakra system,” Lu says. “But I use traditional Chinese medicine’s five tones—gong, shang, jiao, wei and yu—to more efficiently put the body and mind into a state of quiet balance.” He prefers older bowls, whose sound is warmer and gentler than the raw feel of new ones. “You can hear the rise and fall of their sound,” he adds. “That soft feeling contains stories.” Lu singles out these singing bowls as being a particularly difficult part of the lengthy recording process. “A singing bowl produces sound in all directions in a spiral formation,” he explains. “If you’ve got a singing bowl in front of you, it’ll sound completely different if you move front to back or side to side. You can’t capture its sound simply by using left and right tracks.” Spatial Audio technology allows both Lu’s singing bowls and Wang’s field recordings to envelop the listener in healing sounds. “The advantage of Spatial Audio is that the sounds don’t have to be piled up into two speakers—it can distribute them all around,” Wang Lu says. “This means my points can appear in lots of different positions and from many different directions, making for a listening experience that isn’t merely flat. We wanted to construct a three-dimensional space with different instruments, effects and delays to sketch out a more interesting spatial experience.” Album producer Ruan Xiangbo goes into more detail: “Ambient music needs to be listenable under any circumstances—and it can’t be disruptive. So, when working with Spatial Audio, rather than pursuing razzle-dazzle or a single prominent element, we subconsciously built a broader, gentler sonic state. That breadth is Spatial Audio’s innate advantage, which makes it especially well suited for ambient music. Using AirPods and Personalised Spatial Audio, listeners can experience a precise distribution of sounds. We’re also dealing with issues we’ve never encountered before, like locating rain sounds in mid-air. It’s achievable even at the arrangement stage and the same effect is present in the final listening experience.”