Don’t Call It ‘Healing’
Konstantin is a gong master based in Ibiza who goes by the artistic name Kosma Solarius. He was born in 1972 in the Bavarian Forest, and is a mix of German and Greek roots. I interview this legend on Ninu Nina, and we discuss in great detail his background, how he grew up with music and later on as a teen ager how he became more and more interested in how to create and produce sound. We discuss his inspirations and life in Ibiza and the turning point in his life in the late 80’s when he booked the Star Sounds Orchestra, a legendary psychedelic trance live act, where he discovered and heard a set of symphonic planet gongs on a stage for the first time. Through research he found out that these instruments had a special way of being tuned to the orbital frequency of the planets of our solar system. From that point on he would always produce music tuned to planet frequencies.
We interview Konstantin again but this time we get a little deeper with the magic of gongs.
Science & the Magic of the Gongs
Konstantin: I was very lucky to meet Jens ( Star Sounds Orchestra), because he is the father of planet gongs. He had the initial idea to tune symphonic gongs to planetary sounds, which they had experimented with already. Steve was the first musician ever to compose a planetary tuned music track, working together with the Swiss mathematician Hans Cousto, who discovered the so called cosmic-octave calculations, in which the time a planet needs to travel around the sun gets translated into a sound frequency.
Turns out, that each planet has a very unique tuning and this was a very big discovery, that these tunings are the soul of music.
If you take for example a guitar, and tune one string slightly up and down, but within the same key, you will realize, that each new tuning has a different character to it. So, the same key, but just slight changes of tuning seem to make a big difference. This is how the idea was born to use these gongs for gong meditations.
In fact, these gongs were the first instruments ever to be tuned to natural frequencies and four of my gongs are from this very first series of planet gongs. I like to see them as the Stradivarius of gongs and I feel a great responsibility towards my work as gong master.
I never use the term…
