Album Notes

As an acupuncturist, I often listen to the same CD for hours and hours. I was always looking for music that would be both interesting to me and soothing for my patients. I've played alot different styles of beautiful music in my treatment room: Tim Story, Liquid Mind, Chakra Music, Miles Davis, Sun Ra and Eno. Finally, I decided to create this one hour CD. It's funny that after decades of playing rock and jazz and making little soundtracks my first CD is this New Age number.

The tracks are named after the 14 main acupuncture channels but in truth this was just so I could identify the different songs while creating them. I don't claim that the tracks have mystical qualities or follow the standard Chinese tonal systems. No, I just wanted to make a nice and relaxing record.

MAKING THE CD
Acupuncture puts me in Theta like state between sleep and dreaming so I found it very interesting to find the right overall tone for the CD. Some patients are virtually asleep during a treatment while others have their eyes wide open wondering about what they are going to cook for dinner. Melodies have to be just a little interesting but nothing too jarring. I needed to re-mix this several times because the worst thing that can happen is to have a loud passage wake a patient up. A lot of New Age music will be very quiet for a long time but then the composer feels the need to make a dramatic statement. I really tried to avoid that. I thank Spike Marlin for helping me with technical issues and mixing advice.

Doug Eisenstark 2006


About Doug

Douglas Eisenstark has a long standing interest in Chinese Medicine which was solidified while living in New York's Chinatown. In the early 90's he moved to Los Angeles to study and graduated from Emperor's College. In 1995 he went to Shanghai, China for two months deepening his appreciation of Chinese Medicine. Subsequently he has made two other trips to Beijing, studying Traditional Chinsese Medicine at the Beijing City Hospital in the hepatitis, dermatology and oncology wards.

Since 1998, Doug has been employed as a clinic supervisor and teacher at Yo-San University and Emperor's College. He has been the associate editor at the original Acupuncture.com founded by Al Stone and now serves as a moderator of the yahoo group, Chinese Herbal Academy.

Before he was a licensed acupuncturist Doug spent decades he has been working both deep in the middle of and on the outskirts of the art world.
His travels have taken him to Slovenia, Peru and more recently in 3 trips to China.

In China, he purchased his first Erhu, a traditional 2 stringed instrument, in Shanghai. On his trips to China, he spends a lot of time watching blind erhu street-players. Some are bad and some like the one next to the Forbidden City will abandon the traditional songs for Coltrane-like improvisations.

Music for Acupuncture shows just a little of Doug's Erhu playing integrated subtly within the textures of the songs. He continues to create with music, painting, writing and photography. His photography and paintings are frequently shown at the Cafe Balcony in Los Angeles. His photography books can be ordered through Lulu.com.

This is his first album although he is featured with 2 songs on Where Have All the Tenants Gone? Songs from Lincoln Place produced by Spike Marlin.

And finally, Doug says Hi! to all the friends who are checking this out. Please leave a review or note on the web page here. Thanks!