14/10/2026
Before there was a bowl, there was the sound. Before the sound, a cover.
My relationship with "singing" bowls began long before I actually knew what one was.
Sometime in the mid-1970s, I was browsing the progressive rock section of my local record shop when an LP cover stopped me in my tracks. It was in the progressive rock section and it featured Tibetan art on the sleeve and, knowing nothing about the record itself, I took a flyer and bought it purely because of the cover.
The album was Tibetan Bells, by Henry Wolff, Nancy Hennings and Drew Gladstone.
What came out of the speakers was unlike anything I had heard before.
Strange. Atmospheric. Sublime. Mystical.
There was very little information on the sleeve to explain exactly what these extraordinary sounds were, so much of what I was hearing remained a mystery. But something about those sounds completely captivated me.
For almost six years, Tibetan Bells became one of the most regular visitors to my turntable.
Then, in 1982, I travelled overland from London to Kathmandu in a double-decker bus....... yes the old hippy trail.
And finally, the mystery began to make sense.
On Christmas Day of that year, just inside the main gate of the sacred Boudhanath Stupa, I met an elderly Tibetan woman selling Himalayan antiques and crafts from a rug.
She was determined that I was going to buy something.
Among the objects she showed me was a bronze bowl.
And then she flicked it with her boney finger.
BOOM.
There it was. That sound.
The mysterious sound I had been listening to for the previous six years.
I can still remember the exhilaration of that moment; the recognition, the mystery and that almost indescribable feeling of having stumbled across something very special.
From then on, I became a collector and enthusiast.
There were no “singing" bowl shops as we understand them today. Bowls appeared amongst antiques, bric-a-brac and the occasional shop around places such as Durbar Square.
Interestingly though, a small supply chain was beginning to develop between Nepal and the counter-culture market in America, so some of my earliest bowls later came via “New Age” wholesalers in Sausalito, California.
A very different world from today.
More than forty years later, there are considerably more bowls around me; and considerably more knowledge available about them.
But I’m not sure the important bit has really changed.
A bowl can still stop me.
I can still sit with one, try a different mallet, play it gently and discover something I hadn’t noticed before.
There is still exploration. Still happiness. Still peace.
And, perhaps most importantly, still the simple pleasure of playing without needing it to become anything more than that.
Maybe that is all I’ve been looking for all these years.
Not the next bowl.
Not the next technique.
Just that feeling I had when I finally heard, in front of me, the sound that had fascinated me for six years, and ever since.
