Raoul Eden is a french solo guitarist in the American primitive tradition. Watch his new video for ‘Beat your Head with Glorious Songs’ – the Sufi visuals accentuate the meditative effect of his playing.
Raoul Eden is a new name to these pages. He is a french solo guitarist in the American primitive tradition initiated by the influential Takoma Records (John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke).
He started playing acoustic guitar in the psychedelic folk duo An Eagle In Your Mind with Sophia Djebel Rose; he discovered the American primitive style through ‘the brutal style’ of Daniel Bachman and, later, Jack Rose. Their music has clearly had a profound effect on his playing, so transformative that he relates it to a ‘blast or thunder from the sky’ that leaves you deaf afterwards.
Leaving behind strumming, he began playing fingerstyle guitar. Coming from the old European continent, Raoul Eden has singular influences, which he puts down to the crossroad position of his roots – between the eastern and western world, north and south. Arabic music has always been present around him; he is fond of Gnawa music and plays guembri (a Gnawa bass lute also known as a sintir, gimbri or hejhouj) in his spare time.
He has also modified his Guild D55 with an extra fret that allows him to play microtonal embellishments like in Tuareg blues or Turkish saz. A lot of western classical music was played in the house where he grew up, and that could be another hidden influence in his style, that lyrical flow.
Raoul Eden has a firm rooting in the spiritual world, from the transcendental materialism of the french philosopher Deleuze, which studies in detail, to the esoteric theosophy of Ibn Arabî the famous Sufi Master from Andalusia, or Master Eckart, the Dominican theologian.
In his own words, through his music, he tries “to put a foot in the door of enlightenment by driving a vertical temporality out of history. With his guitar, he tries to fold time and space in intensivity.”
The combination of his playing and the meditative Sufi whirling work so well together, the visuals accentuating the spiritual side of his music.
Currently, Raoul Eden is working on an EP entitled INCARNATION, which will be released later this year, with a full-length album about Chaos and Cosmos to follow.
Website: http://raouleden.com