Laraaji still remembers the line that changed his life. It was a “lovely afternoon in Harlem'' and he was walking past a church with a sign outside that read, “Free Poetry Reading: All Are Welcome.” This was 1970 or ‘71, so Laraaji was still finding his feet in New York. He’d been working under his birth name, Eric Larry Gordon, doing stand-up at Greenwich Village hootenany spots and acting in the occasional commercial. The highlight of his career so far had been a small part in Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 film Putney Swope, a controversial satire on race relations and the advertising industry. But Laraaji wasn’t an actor at heart. He’d graduated from Howard University, where he’d studied piano, theory, and composition, and he still dreamed of life as a musician.

It was a weekend, and Laraaji didn’t have anywhere to be. “I decided to walk into the church and sat down just as this young, rather angry, passionate poet was reading a poem of his,” he says now. The poem had a rhythm to it, a beat, but one line stuck out: “The n****rs who did Putney Swope should be offed.”

It brought Laraaji to a sort of “sobriety.” He started to question himself. This young poet wanted him dead. Had he caused harm? What emotion did he want to inspire? And how far would he be willing to go for the sake of entertainment anyway? Would he do a nude scene? Would he play the part of a murderer? “I needed to do some grounding to get a sense of what my base of values are in life in general” he recalls. He started to research meditation as a way to “get some answers for myself,” and he soon found more than he’d set out for: “It opened me up to deeper musical creativity, a deeper sense of contentment and comfortability in the universe, being a resident in the universe.”

He began experimenting at the intersection of music and meditation, using a kalimba and a zither (which he’d found at a pawn shop and then electrified himself) to trance-inducing effects. One day in 1979, after busking in Washington Square Park, he found a note, torn from a seemingly expensive journal, beneath the small change in his zither case, inviting him to a recording session. It was signed by Brian Eno. The next day, they started work on Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, the third installment of Eno’s seminal series of ambient albums.

Day of Radiance, released in 1980, ensured that Laraaji would always be considered an ambient music pioneer. Now almost 80, he’s released dozens of musical projects, expanding his sound to find new paths to meditative peace. He incorporated gospel into the bedroom-recorded Vision Songs, Vol. 1 in 1984, for example, and, more recently, returned to his first instrument with Sun Piano and Moon Piano.

Segue To Infinity, a new box set from Numero Group, goes further back in time, to some of Laraaji’s earliest work. The collection includes his debut album, Celestial Vibration, which was limited to a very small run on its release in 1978. But most fascinating are the three albums’ worth of never-before-heard recordings. Long-forgotten, the near-mint acetates were found in a storage locker a few years ago before being put up for sale on eBay, eventually landing with record collector and college student Jake Fisher, who paid just $114.01 for them.

Recorded around the same time as Celestial Vibration, music on Segue To Infinity is a revelation. It foregrounds a young artist at the limits of his own suddenly expanding consciousness, experimenting with new rhythms before casting off rhythm entirely, testing out new melodies before resting on one phrase for entire minutes. It doesn’t sound ahead of its time so much as it seems completely unmoored from time.

When I spoke with Laraaji a few months ago, though, he was more focused on his Laughter Meditation Workshops. He still lives in Harlem and talks about New York City as a spiritually enriching place. He speaks with the reassuring serenity of a person devoted to his meditative practice, but he still tells stories with the energy and flair of a stand-up comedian.

The FADER: You’ve built a very strong relationship with New York, living for so long between Park Slope and now Harlem. What do you find spiritual about the city?

Laraaji: It's a very strong spiritual experience, being on a crowded subway train and looking at the different ethnic representations huddled together peacefully, each one focused on their destination. There is the spirituality of seeing unity in action here.

New York is a good walking town for me. I get to be in the parks to do Tai Chi, sit and meditate, or just be in bliss in any season of the year. There's a wider range of dance experiences here. Especially dance meditation — for me to be able to dance with shoes off, that's spiritual practice.

Years ago, you spent three or four days living on the subway, partly by choice. Why?

I was in between homes, and the idea of sleeping on the subway seemed like an adventure that I should put in my portfolio. It was very eye-opening. It was in the winter months, so I learned which subways were the warmest. I got to also see the evolution of the train's life depending on what time of the day it was to see people in rush hour and to see them focus on their jobs while I didn't have a job, see them get off the train and see the train take on a different personality when I reach another area of the city. It allowed me to see the contrast between a houseless person and those who have a job, have a life, have an apartment, have clothes to wear.

That was also a time when I left the subway for a day to hang out in Prospect Park. There, I had a very intimate experience with the sun, just sitting on a park bench and letting the sun drench me. I was sitting comfortably on a park bench with no sense of residence and feeling… well, I would say alone, but feeling myself as a point in the universe with no obligations, no agenda. The sun seemed to be the only energy there at the moment that noticed me and was showering all this warmth, energy, rejuvenation and light into me, impersonally. I had this connection to the impersonal love of the sun and it imprinted me as a beautiful model for what I'd later on would do, take that model and represent it in the way that I share music and workshop energies on the planet, impersonal love. After that, took the name Laraaji, which represents the sun.

Is this where your affection for the color orange comes from?

Yes. The color of orange also was a color I began wearing shortly after having a mystical hearing experience in the '70s, hearing music in a way that I never had before — a music that opened up my emotional imagination to have an experience of eternity and to grasp the idea that everything is now. That experience shifted my direction and musical expression from less of a linear kind of music to more of a vertical music, a music that represents the wholeness of the omniverse at every point, and also the music that collects, that recognizes the unity of the universe at every moment that I'm performing.

Your last two albums, Sun Piano and Moon Piano, were both improvised pieces. Does improvisation lend itself more to that vertical music?

Yes. With improvisation — we may also call it channeling or revealed music — it allows me to be in the moment without linear thinking of where I'm going. Of course, I do some preparation of surrendering to the moment, do some breath work, maybe do some yoga stretches, and I'm in the best place when I'm at the piano to free associate and to listen and to feel. The music just happens. Sometimes I call it pulling music down from the sky. In that moment, I feel non-separation from creation. That's one of the beautiful experiences of improvisational creativity, is I feel no separation between myself and the creation. I'm in a universal creative moment.

You came to laughter meditation as a practice in the late 1970s. What inspired that?

Someone presented me with this Rajneesh Osho book of meditations, and on one page the suggested meditation was laughter meditation. I thought, how unusual that I've been practicing meditation, I've been doing stand-up comedy, but it never dawned on me that the words laughter and meditation belong in the same phrase. I took the suggestion, which was upon awakening in the morning, don't open your eyes. Do some stretches. Dive into your laughter for 15 minutes. I attempted to do that and discovered how difficult it was. It took about five minutes to really find my authentic laughter and be with it. I also observed how unique it was to be lying down while laughing so that the entire body was released into laughter mode. I observed how, for the rest of the day, my laughter, my natural laughter was closer to the surface, how much more I would appreciate hearing laughter in public places, how much more available I was to support people in laughter wherever I found it during the course of the day.

What was your stand-up comedy routine like? Who were you influenced or inspired by?

Well, I was inspired into the comedy realm by people like Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and Dick Gregory. Their style of comedy was different from mine. I was going more for offbeat, silly, ridiculous one-liners.

Is it possible to compare that to the response you got from your audiences then to the response you get in your laughter workshops?

With stand-up comedy, the idea is to polarize the audience, or to have the audience laugh at the expense of someone else's folly. In that situation, I'm standing at a mic on a stage, really a distance from the audience. Doing laughter workshops, we're freeing laughter up from an external cause and using laughter as a medicinal activity to release, to heal, to open. We're using hands-on laughter to apply to our internal, endocrine system, our heart, our head, our abdominal organs, and our lungs. In that way, laughter meditation or laughter workshops is a more mindful use of laughter.

Do you watch television?

It's mostly internet. I don't actually have a television now, and I watch more of these internet highway experiences. Though I do listen to Pandora on my device, and there's good comedy programs on Pandora whenever I want. I’ve become acquainted with more comedians like Lewis Black and Dave Chappelle. I've become a connoisseur of new comedians on my internet.

So, you do still see a benefit to being able to laugh with comedians?

Oh, I can get in uproarious laughter by tuning into these comedians. Since I did stand-up comedy, I have a special sense of intimate connection and appreciation for stand-up comedy, how they rapport with an audience, their shtick, and how they move, how they do what they do. I have a deep appreciation for the art of stand-up comedy as a result of my having explored it. That appreciation is still active. I prefer, myself, to get people into the laughter zone without depending on jokes, although I know quite a few good jokes and I, at a party, will let some loose.

It’s great that you’re connecting with a younger generation of comedians, and I think that's true of your music as well. I was listening to a radio interview recently where Nick Hakim was discussing how much he loved your music; Eddie Chacon cites you as a foundational inspiration. How important is it for you to stay in touch with this generation of musicians?

It's very helpful, because they're into technology too that I get to take advantage of! I have never heard of Ableton on my own. There are technologies, especially for the electronic music end — the younger generation is exposing me to a technology that has been helpful in releasing more of my ambient creative compositional side. The younger generation has lots of energy. They're also very supportive of my music. They send me emails of wanting to collaborate or ask questions and get interviews. That helps me to know myself better and to reexamine where I am. It keeps me on my toes.

Do you feel optimistic for the younger generation musically and spiritually?

It's more that I feel optimistic about the omniverse. The universe, I believe, is a self-balancing universe, and there is always a divine plan in progress. I do sense that artists are still exploring and looking for inroads. I was blessed to have a vision experience in the 1970s, and I think a vision experience is necessary to have a strong vision that ignites and initiates people and gives them a sense of what it is they want to do or to accomplish in their artistic life.

The question boils down to, do I believe that the younger generations have access to an inspiring vision? I believe that maybe I am an inspiring vision to some of these artists. Currently, the legality of psychedelic exploration has made it more comfortable for artists to delve into psychedelics. My belief is that psychedelics, in combination with a lifestyle of disciplined inner exploration, can be very useful. If it's used in a disciplined spiritual way — whether it's yoga, meditation, or organized religion — that inner doors can open and have a higher etheric spiritual experience, which will compel artists into, I think, a more beautiful, inspiring artistic life.