Truly a transcendent experience: the shadow of the moon rushing across the land toward you, the air suddenly cooling, the sunset horizon in every direction, the ring of the sun's corona surrounding the silhouette of the moon... There's no other natural phenomenon like it, and video/photos truly don't do it justice!
Perhaps a total solar eclipse? Especially so when seeing half the solar system lined up neatly in a row with the sun and moon (and a comet in case of the recent April 2024 eclipse in the US), and truly feeling that one is riding on a chunk of rock hurtling through space, tethered invisibly to that impossibly distant mass of gas and plasma like a ball at the end of a rope...
Thanks! That's the best Fratres performance I've yet to see (the "wincing frisson" in her facial expressions) -- but this Gidon Kremer performance from 1984 is the best I've yet to hear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmUE8b5kAQ4
As a complement to the adjacent comment thread on Shoegaze music, I find a similarly dense, soothing, blanketing effect from some recent noise/drone music genres (especially on good headphones, or out loud with a subwoofer), for example:
The pulsing deep noise of Tim Hecker's Piano Drop:
Everything by Carbon Based Lifeforms is also very soothing, albums like Interloper, World of Sleepers, Hydroponic garden also really give me that feeling and with just a bit more beat and melody that I love.
The first track of Interloper just soothes me real quickly:
For those wanting to generate some sounds like the above, I made what is effectively a noisy synthesizer / visual demo a while back that can be played note by note on a PC keyboard (or will play itself if left untouched, see attached readme). But to get it into "wall of sound" territory you need to hold down the up arrow and/or space bar for quite a while to speed up the bike until the visuals start distorting:
Truly a transcendent experience: the shadow of the moon rushing across the land toward you, the air suddenly cooling, the sunset horizon in every direction, the ring of the sun's corona surrounding the silhouette of the moon... There's no other natural phenomenon like it, and video/photos truly don't do it justice!