Just strolling around Ojai’s Meditation Mount is like a sacred journey to a mystical land of spiritual connection. Coupled with a meditative musical “sound bath” by Jim Trotta Davis, a visit to Meditation Mount is even more of a transcendent experience.
Every Sunday morning at 10 a.m., Davis eases listeners into a state of deep relaxation on top of a grassy promontory overlooking the entire Ojai Valley. Many lay prone on yoga mats and blankets to deepen the musical connection to the earth and all its beings. Performing as “Suburbanoid,” Davis creates improvisational soundscapes that feel spiritually enriching and healing to many listeners, playing instruments including metal Tibetan singing bowls, koshi chimes, sitar, gong, synthesizers and guitar modified with the haunting sounds of an electric bow.
“It definitely is a journey within. I do think it’s a very sacred space in that people come in a very vulnerable space, they’re all lying down, they all get very vulnerable. But in that vulnerability, there is a lot of power,” Davis told the Ventura County Reporter on a patio at Meditation Mount, explaining that the connection goes far deeper at Meditation Mount than he feels it would if he were playing for people in a more typical environment such as a concert venue or a stage at a farmer’s market. “I feel like an audience is almost separated from you. They’re watching you and judging you, where here I feel like we’re all joined together in the music.”
Deep Resonance Sound Meditation
Davis and Meditation Mount recently launched a modified Suburbanoid event one Saturday a month called Deep Resonance Sound Meditation that further combines music with the institution’s goal to create an enlightened and compassionate world through the power of creative meditation. This experience happens indoors, starting at 1 p.m. in Meditation Mount’s serene Tibetan-inspired auditorium. The building itself gives a feeling of being inside a giant wooden bell and features acoustics that resonate perfectly with the additional instruments Davis chooses, such as crystal singing bowls and stringed acoustic instruments, including a Turkish baglama and the charango from Peru. The next Deep Resonance Sound Meditation is scheduled for April 13.
Admission to the special meditation experience was sold out on a recent Saturday, and people traveled from near and far to take part and escape to a place that seems to leave the world of traffic and cell phones far behind. Many listeners laid back and kept their eyes closed. Others gazed beyond the glass-surrounded room at mountains cradling the Ojai Valley, swaying eucalyptus trees and colorful flowers along the International Garden of Peace spilling down the mountain’s edge from the auditorium.
Another difference between the outdoor Sunday performances and the indoor Saturday Deep Resonance Sound Meditation is an extra focus on Meditation Mount’s mission to harness the power of collective intention to manifest world peace. Participants are given a card with the simple phrase “Let peace prevail on earth” and contemplate those words for a 15-minute collective creative meditation, guided by sound. The aim is to create a ripple effect of harmony and unity.
“Alexa” is from the East Coast and visited Meditation Mount during a trip to see a friend from Ventura. She told the VCReporter that she enjoyed the scenery, music and tranquility.
“I think it’s very refreshing to be here. The natural beauty is just breathtaking and the experience is really calming even though I wasn’t able to turn my mind off completely,” she said. “I think it’s very calming to be still for an hour and listen to beautiful sounds.”
Music and meditative influences
Davis was born and raised in Queens, New York where some of his early memories are of his grandfather’s interest in various musical instruments. That exposure is likely what led Davis to start “tinkering” with piano at age 9, acquiring his first electric guitar at 12 and even teaching music by the time he was 19. But Davis was drawn more to the path of a composer than a music teacher, and “ambient music” in particular, a genre focused on atmosphere and tone rather than more traditional compositional structures.
Jim Trotta Davis playing a crystal singing bowl at Meditation Mount. (Alex Wilson)
Davis has collaborated with Germany’s Hans-Joachim Roedelius, considered a “father of ambient music” who co-founded the influential group Cluster in the 1970s and worked with English musician and composer Brian Eno, who is credited with coining the term “ambient music.” Davis played in concerts and recorded with Roedelius in 2017 and 2019. But one of the biggest inspirations for Davis’s music didn’t come from another musician at all. Rather, it was an introduction to meditation class he took at a local college about 20 years ago while he and his wife, Bettie Bergeron, were living in New Orleans.
“I did a lot of ambient music so I took my inspiration and started making it much gentler and softer and trying to create music that helps me to meditate,” he explained. “That’s how I started doing sound with meditation. It was specifically for me, and then I found out it helped people.”
While in New Orleans, the couple made another decision that had a profound impact on their outlook and lifestyle. They bought a retired 1991 diesel school bus in Canada and converted it into a home that runs on recycled cooking oil, naming it “Rocket.”
Finding peace in Ojai
Davis and Bergeron were forced to flee New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck during 2005. Fortunately, Rocket was parked in an area that was not severely flooded, and they were later able to retrieve their home on wheels.
They landed in Santa Barbara where Davis played his music at a farmer’s market. Davis said Bergeron encouraged him to try new kinds of music and they incorporated his grandfather’s accordion. When they started playing at Ojai’s farmer’s market, it was clear that the sounds were resonating with people of that city, which is cherished as an artistic and spiritual haven to many.
“Ojai kind of took us in and we started playing this kind of music right in front where I was playing the guitar with an electric bow so that it sounds like a flute,” he said. “I had Bettie doing the drone with the accordion.”
People from Meditation Mount heard them and invited Davis to play there as well. “We wound up staying in Ojai for six months doing multiple full-moon ceremonies.”
On the road with Rocket
The couple then spent several years traveling the country in Rocket, managing seasonal Christmas tree and Halloween pumpkin lots and working as campground hosts in Colorado. According to an amusing video of their travels told from the vehicle’s point of view and posted on the Suburbanoid website, Rocket also had lots of fun meeting other converted busses, watching New Year’s Eve fireworks over San Francisco Bay and visiting the record-setting wooden airplane built by Howard Hughes on display in Oregon. In the video, Rocket describes the plane as “My Hero.”
Tibetan-inspired auditorium at Meditation Mount. (Alex Wilson)
“The newspapers called him the ‘Spruce Goose’ but he prefers the ‘HFB,’ the ‘Hughes’ Flying Boat,’” Rocket says in the narration. “He is a marvel and inspiration to modern day aviation.”
The travels were transformative for Davis as well. He refined his meditative music at spiritual centers and yoga studios across the country. “That kind of music has always been something in my makeup, but I’d say it just kept evolving much more into the meditation reality simply because the music first and foremost is how I meditate now. On Sundays I’m going into a meditation and the people go into it.”
The power of sound
Davis was inspired by the writer Alan Watts, who said the quickest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening.
“Really, to me, what meditation is is nothing more than us truly learning to relax our bodies and relax ourselves to just get ourselves to return to our natural state of being,” he said. “So, on a physical reality, it calms us, but by calming us physically it also calms us mentally. It calms us in so many ways.”
Sound has been used by people for healing for at least 5,000 years, and transcends language and culture, Davis believes. “Music on the big level is like the international language because it’s something you can’t explain, it’s something we just feel. That’s why you can listen to something that you can’t even understand or something that’s completely instrumental, and that has an effect on you because it has an effect on you physically.”
Rising from the ashes musically and spiritually
By 2017, Rocket had settled into a space in Malibu where Davis was playing music at recovery centers and Bergeron stayed busy with her “Betties Baked” bakery and making unique tie-dye items. That’s when disaster struck again and the Woolsey Fire forced the couple to relocate. This time, folks at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts made the couple artists-in-residence at the upper Ojai Valley studio where Wood’s pottery kilns are still fired up by new creators. Davis played the center’s beautiful Steinway piano on an album titled “Malibu Fire Sessions at Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts,” with help from Meditation Mount board member Brian Ziegler, who also invited Davis to play regularly after Meditation Mount reopened following the pandemic.
“I started recording my first piano album under Suburbanoid, and the person who helped me record this album is a director of Meditation Mount, so he became a fan of my music,” Davis recalled. Four Suburbanoid albums are currently available on Spotify including the pandemic-inspired “Virtual World Tour concert for Japan” and “Sound Bath Meditation Volume 1.”
Last year, Davis got one of his biggest breaks yet after a top executive of APM Music happened to hear him play at Meditation Mount and bought an album. American Production Music LLC is a joint venture between Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing, licensing over 1,000,000 tracks of various genres for use in movies, TV shows and advertising.
Davis reached a deal with the company to distribute his music and potentially find it a home on the screen. In addition, APM just released a work made up of over three hours of tracks from previous albums called “Sound Bath Meditations.” It’s sold as a USB drive and includes a small rose quartz crystal and a cotton hand-tie-dyed gift bag made by Bergeron. The drive sells for $49.99 and also includes videos, such as a “Virtual World Tour for Japan” movie filmed at Meditation Mount.
(L-R) Jim Trotta Davis, Michael Lindfield, Brian Ziegler. (Alex Wilson)
Davis seemed ecstatic and grateful about the good fortune of meeting someone at Mediation Mount who could propel his musical journey into new realms. “For me that was an amazing thing because that’s what I was always told to try to get into, but it’s a hard industry to get into and it fell in my lap.” He is still waiting to hear what production will be the first to incorporate his music.
But even more than the recognition his music is gaining, Davis is focused on how it’s impacting the individuals who hear it. “It allows people to experience a depth within themselves that they’re familiar with but they don’t get to experience enough. And you need to experience more of that, of yourself, so we can be more peaceful people and more balanced with the world we live in so the world can be more balanced.”
Music on the Mount
Brian Ziegler has been participating in conferences at Meditation Mount since the early 1970s and has served on the board for 15 years. Music was only occasionally performed at Meditation Mount over the years before severe damage from the Thomas Fire and pandemic closures led to programming and admission changes. Prior to the fire, people generally visited Meditation Mount at random times of the day, and now it’s open only by appointment during two hour “visitation experiences” or for events like sound baths and the location’s long-running monthly full moon meditations.
Ziegler told the VCReporter meditative music like Suburbanoid fits in with Meditation Mount’s mission. “Sound and music have a way of communicating and reaching in a way that thoughts do not,” he said. “What I really appreciate about music is, it’s transcultural. You don’t have to all know the same language to appreciate and be moved by a piece of music or a sound experience, which is how we tend to frame this, as a meditative sound experience.”
Ziegler said he gets a lot of interesting feedback from visitors after they experience sound baths.
“I think the ideal situation is that they’re put more in touch with their own soul, their unique gifts and power,” said Ziegler, mentioning that Suburbanoid music and Meditation Mount are both like magnets in some ways. “Some people are drawn here and they’re deeply moved, and they’re deeply touched. Others, they love it, they find it beautiful, but it’s one more thing they do during the day. But there’s others where this is the turning point. This is an inflection point in their life. And these kinds of music experiences can do that for people.”
Meditation Mount board president Michael Lindfield told the VCReporter that music is playing a bigger part than ever for the organization.
“We brought it in a number of years ago, like a doorway in, so that people could understand that, first of all, you’ve got to relax yourself, get in touch with your true nature, and then choose to live a life that’s more in harmony or resonant with your true self. Rather than giving them a lecture saying, ‘You need to do this, you need to do this.’ So, Meditation Mount is an invitation to people to discover their own essential nature,” he explained. “We don’t tell people who they are. We create a space where people can come and take time just to deepen their own relationship with themselves through the beauty, through the peace here.”
Ojai’s Meditation Mount hosts meditative sound experiences every weekend. (Alex Wilson)
The space and the music show people there’s much more to life than what they see around them day to day, Lindfield said.
“You realize, ‘Oh. There is a whole other world. There is a whole other experience of who we are waiting to be explored.’ So, first of all, you sense it and then you encounter it and then you actually live in it,” Lindfield noted. “We’re also wanting to create a space that is magnetic and full of hope and possibility for others. You can’t just talk about this stuff; you’ve got to live it. So that’s really why Meditation Mount exists as a physical space, to be a place where people can experience peace.”
Suburbanoid performs at 10 a.m. every Sunday for the Sunday Morning Sound Meditation and once a month for the Deep Resonance Sound Meditation at Meditation Mount, 10340 Reeves Road, Ojai. For tickets, full schedule and more information, visit www.meditationmount.org.
More information on Jim Trotta Davis and his music is available at www.suburbanoid.com.
