Bhajan Bhoy – Meditations

Bhajan Bhoy – Meditations

(Cardinal Fuzz (UK) / Feeding Tube Records (USA)

DL | Streaming

Released 17 April 2026

Buy here

Another healing release from Bhajan Bhoy: four deep cuts that travel far into the psychedelic hinterlands.

A serene record for difficult times, and those in need of succour could do a lot worse than give Meditations, the latest release by Bhajan Bhoy a spin.

The work of Bhajan Bhoy – aka Ajay Saggar – has always had a spiritual side, but his last few releases have taken a markedly reflective bent: the glorious Summer In St. Mary’s (a work made on the church organ of the 15th-century church of St. Mary’s, in South Cowton in North Yorks) being a great example.

In contrast to Summer In St. Mary’s, Meditations uses a veritable heap of stuff: accordion, piano, yangqin, synthesisers, guitar and bass, banjo, and harp all get a look in on the four ten-minute tracks. Despite this, there is a great “quality” of stillness about the record that can really loosen your moorings. The patient timing and instrumentation combine to create a softer and richer sound overall, one that needs a bit of listening time to digest.

Saggar is no fool; he knows when to give the listener a marker. Each track’s structure is initially drawn from the strangest things: the crash of the waves on ‘Yangquin Beach’, a cat snoring on ‘Oh To Sleep Too’, some sparse piano notes and static interference on ‘Vermona’s Piano’, and some strident synths – or synthesised guitar lines – determine the course of ‘Stargazing’. It’s enough to give you your bearings. Elements appear just at the point they should. For instance, the strange samples that sound like the croaks of extremely drugged frogs, and a “stoic” banjo line, halfway through the languid opener, ‘Yangquin Beach’. The banjo gets looped, and we find ourselves happily entangled in a tropical mesh of sound that starts to slowly melt away.

We drift further into inner space with ‘Oh To Sleep Too’, a wondrous raga built around said snoring cat and some strange, EMM-style noises that nestle alongside a warm guitar riff. It has a very Pink Orange Red-era Cocteau Twins vibe, which, of course, is great. Things fade in and out, and we get a beat of sorts, built from what sounds like an amalgamation of delayed samples. There’s also a synth part adding a trippy counter melody, which takes the track into Glide territory, though the snoring is never far away.

‘Vermona’s Piano’ is the aural equivalent of time standing stock still; nothing happens that hasn’t happened before and with the warm, minimal setting, there’s a feeling of Spiritualized in their zonked-out early-nineties phase; a guitar circles round like a chopper over a crime scene and the irradiations of phased and sampled sound rise like heatwaves from the earth.

Last up is ‘Stargazing’, which is driven by gloopy synths and what sounds like a guitar given the sustainer treatment. The track has something of early Tim Hecker about it. It’s possibly the most lively of all the numbers and, the rattle employed near the end is surely there to bring us out of our trance.

Regardless of what Ajay Saggar has released over the years, and there is a lot, the listener will often note a sense of being wholly submerged in a sound; something that, given the state of the world, is a Very Good Thing. You could do a lot worse than listen to this, if you’re in need of some heartspace.

More about Bhajan Bhoy can be found here.
Cortizona’s site is here.

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All words by Richard Foster. More writing by Richard can be found at his author’s archive.