The paradox of meditation is that it requires an immense amount of training and concentration. It isn’t easy to discipline the mind and body, teach them to quiet, to exit their pursuits and let space and time be ends in themselves. Getting to the meditative state Jon Mueller reaches on The Whole demands an intensity rarely found today. Technology has made discipline old-fashioned, has made losing focus too easy, weakened contemplation into a glorified stint at daydreaming.

Against the loose, arrhythmic ambience often associated with “meditative” music, Mueller is a percussionist digging deep into the physical spaces where the mind travels when it really lets go, listens and is transformed. Known for his exceptional work in Pele, Collections of Colonies of Bees and Volcano Choir (with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon), Mueller has also released several excellent solo albums, including the bone-crushing Metals (I recently drove through the Texas countryside with it blaring and boiling my nerves).

More sculptural and resonant, Mueller’s debut on Type charts a path into the heart of rhythmic trance. Bookending the album are the cuts ‘Remembered-As’ and ‘Remembered,’ both played on hammered dulcimer. This melodic instrument upends the conventional idea of “percussion”: the “forcible striking of one esp. solid body against another” (OED). The visceral qualities of percussion are heard at their most melodic, and Mueller’s titles situate the listener within a memory space defined in the past. Mueller catches the listener in the space between the physical striking of bodies against bodies and the aural fluidity of sound.

Between these two memory pieces, Mueller reveals his mastery of discipline. Establishing clockwork patterns on a limited drum kit of snare, floor toms and cymbals, Mueller’s voice rises through and around the surges of percussion — thunderous, trance-inducing, glorious physical pounding — so that the pieces ‘Hearts’ and ‘Hands’ find their bodily machinations reaching outward through speech. That one cannot definitively make out the words only makes the spaces Mueller creates more engaging. Hammered dulcimer, the instrument of memory in this world, comes in with Eastern-tinged melodic tension to ‘Hearts’: heavy metal double-time speed work entwined with the remembrance of things past.

Mueller delivers his intricate pieces so effortlessly and consistently, both in tempo and repetition, that you can feel his discipline reaching its final stages: immersion, wholeness. The Whole reveals, once and for all, that body and mind are indelibly linked, not separate entities. And aside from the implicit philosophy of the album, it is quite simply an amazing look at the varieties of percussive experience. When the times are right, bang your head along. What better way to set body and mind free.