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In 1997, with the world music craze in full swing, a guitarist from Minnesota created an international stir with a remarkable album of Tibetan Buddhist chants paired with atmospheric soundscapes of guitar and percussion. The guitarist was Steve Tibbetts, and while he’d built up a bit of a reputation through his critically-acclaimed albums for ECM Records, he created something profound, and profoundly different, in Chö, a collaboration with the Tibetan Buddhist nun Chöying Drolma. Rather than a slick piece of Western dance music with appropriated Eastern melodies, this was a carefully produced, deeply felt sonic environment built around and in response to an ancient practice of visualization and meditation. The Tibbetts/Drolma album was unlike anything else that was happening at the time, and it’s taken seven years for anyone to follow in their footsteps. Finally, in their Six Degrees Records debut, Steve Tibbetts and Chöying Drolma have released a new recording, called Selwa, which expands on the work they began in that first groundbreaking album. Selwa (which can mean “luminous”, “clear,” or “awake”) is an album with 11 tracks, but it unfolds as a single, unified expression. Tibbetts’ instrumental work reflects the spiritual and meditative nature of Drolma’s songs and chants, and grows out of his own long-standing interest in the sacred music traditions of north and south Asia. If that sounds like a recipe for yet another album of New Age noodling, Selwa will be a bracing surprise. Chöying Drolma practices a form of Vajrayana Buddhism that involves cutting through the various physical and spiritual obstacles to enlightenment (the title Chö means “cutting”), and that practice can take the form of a fairly vigorous meditation, often undertaken in provocative settings like graveyards. Tibbetts approaches this sort of source material with an uncommon humility and a healthy amount of respect. Selwa is about understanding – not a literal understanding of the Tibetan meditations themselves, but an understanding of the practice of undermining the machinery of conceptualization; creating a space of non-thought, clarity, compassion, and bliss. Selwa offers an unexpected connection to a tradition that’s over a thousand years old.