This Rhythm Is Not Mine, released on December 5, 2005, is a thirteen-track album from John de Kadt, a musician, poet and storyteller whose work is organized around one aim: slowing the world down, even for a moment, and returning to the tempo of nature. The facts available to me place the album early in a long arc. De Kadt has spent more than 25 years telling ancient myths from indigenous cultures and mystical traditions, and he has since built DrumStory, a practice of telling those stories while playing percussive and melodic instruments from around the world. He is also a founding member of The Rememberers, a trio that weaves myth with original songs, and the creator of BlessFest, a music, healing and sacred arts festival.
Read against that background, the title becomes a statement of purpose. "This rhythm is not mine" is the posture of a player who understands himself as a conduit rather than an author, and that sensibility runs through everything else he does. The album is a useful door into his work for anyone who knows him mainly as a storyteller or kirtan leader.
I can't offer a track-by-track inventory of instruments or credits, because none are listed in the material I have, and I won't pretend otherwise. What the biography does establish is a toolkit of percussive and melodic instruments from across the globe, and a stated devotion to unhurried tempo. Those two facts shape what to expect: rhythm that behaves more like breath or walking pace than a drive toward climax, and a voice that serves the material instead of performing over it.
Approach the album as a work of pacing. De Kadt's whole project is deceleration, so the mood you should anticipate is spacious, grounded and ceremonial rather than ornate. Give the first few tracks time to recalibrate your sense of how long a phrase can last. Albums like this reward the listener who stops waiting for something to happen and begins noticing what is already happening.
The track titles for this album are not included in the facts I was given, so I won't name specific songs. I'd rather be honest than hand you invented titles. Instead, here is what to listen for across the thirteen tracks, and you can map these onto the sequence yourself:
- The opening track. In a record built around slowing down, the first piece sets the contract. Notice how long it takes before you feel your own pulse adjust to it.
- Any track where voice and percussion carry the whole weight. Because De Kadt's practice joins story and drum, the moments where rhythm and words lean on each other are the clearest window into his method.
- The closing track. Note whether the album resolves or simply releases you. Either answer tells you how he thinks about ceremony.
De Kadt is identified as a kirtan leader, and his storytelling treats myth as ritual and ceremony, a vehicle for remembrance. That puts this album at the meeting point of several lineages: devotional call-and-response practice, world-percussion traditions, and oral storytelling. It isn't ambient music in the strict sense, but it shares ambient's patience and its interest in altering attention. Its closest relatives are other sacred-arts and gathering-centered recordings, the kind of music made to hold a room and not to dominate it. The title's disclaimer of ownership echoes a common devotional idea: the musician is a vessel for something older than any single performer.
This album is best suited to listeners who already feel overscheduled and overstimulated and are looking for an instrument of reset. It will suit people who practice yoga, meditation, or ritual, those drawn to myth and oral tradition, and anyone in a transitional season who wants steadiness rather than stimulation. If you need hooks and momentum, it may feel slow. If you are tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix, it may feel like exactly the right speed.
Choose an evening when you have nothing to finish afterward. Use headphones or a quiet room with good speakers, and listen alone first. Dim the lights, put your phone out of reach, and play the album front to back in sequence, all thirteen tracks, without skipping. Treat it as a small ceremony: arrive, settle, and let the rhythm set the terms. Afterward, sit for a few minutes before returning to your day. A second listening in company, perhaps as the backdrop to a gathering or shared silence, will show you a different side of the same record.
