Newgrange is a megalithic passage mound in Ireland, built around 3,200 B.C. and aligned with the rising sun of the winter solstice. A 62-foot stone corridor leads into a chamber with three alcoves. Once each year, for roughly seventeen minutes, the solstice sunrise enters through the roof-box opening, travels down the passage, and fully illuminates the inner chamber. For those few moments, the living and the ancestral converge in a single shaft of light.
As an audio engineer and co-founder of Sacred Acoustics, I traveled to Newgrange to work directly with the energies of the site. I meditated inside a nearby stone chamber while listening to experimental frequencies I had created for the purpose of attunement. Using an EEG device, I recorded my own brainwave responses inside the chamber; those patterns were later reverse engineered into the binaural architecture that became Passage.
These are my notes from the meditative experience during the sound journey and from the ancestral vision that informed the track.
Throughout the year, the ashes of the dead were placed with ceremony into the three stone basins inside the chamber. Flowers were laid around them daily by the Shaman, honoring the continual presence of the ancestors.
Outside, the Shaman watched the sun’s shadow travel across the posts and beams that had been erected to mark the Earth’s slow tilt toward winter. When the shadow crossed its midpoint, the Shaman knew winter was half over — the return of the sun had begun.
Several days before the solstice, he blew a conch shell three times. This alerted the people that the sacred days were beginning. He then entered the stone passage and sat in the center of the chamber, fasting, meditating, and preparing himself for the moment when the world would shift.
As the days passed, he watched the sun’s light creep a little deeper into the passage with each morning. Sitting in trance, he felt the warmth move across his face stone by stone, marking the slow approach of the solstice beam.
Outside, knowing the Shaman had not emerged, villagers gathered with flowers and offerings. Ceremonies, chants, and rhythmic drumming began as they awaited the rebirth of the sun.
At sunrise on the solstice — when the beam was about to enter the passage — a conch shell was blown again. As the first ray crossed the threshold into the chamber, the people outside intensified their drumming and ecstatic dance.
Inside, the Shaman lay down with his head aligned toward the central altar, arms extended toward the side altars where the ashes were kept. He wore a headband with a green stone in the center and a gold spiral on either side.
As the sunbeam traveled the length of the passage and washed over his body, he enacted the ancient journey of the soul.
In that moment, he traveled with the spirits of the dead toward the sun. His task was to accompany them to the solar fire, release them there, and return — renewed, transformed, and carrying the messages of the ancestors into the next cycle of the world.
The audio track Passage draws from this ritual architecture — the movement from darkness to illumination, from the vestibule of the ancestors to the living rebirth of light.
The binaural structure was derived directly from my EEG patterns recorded inside the stone chamber. These waveforms were slowed, stretched, and mapped into layered frequencies designed to simulate the Shamanic progression:
entrance into trance,
alignment with the solar axis,
union with ancestral presence, and
return to embodied consciousness.
The result is a sonic reenactment of the solstice experience — a contemporary echo of an ancient ritual in which light, sound, and the human spirit converge in the narrow stone passage toward the eternal sun.
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Meditation can help us find moments of peace and offer a gentle reminder that we are not alone, even in our darkest times.
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Kevin Kossi
Author