Certainly music can move. There's little question it can groove. Without a doubt

it's the great communicator.

And, if you ask the Dylan Group's Dylan Cristy, it has certain powers of healing

as well.

"It's a philosophy I embrace, the idea that music and sound can be used for

healing purposes," said Cristy, 26, a New York jungle DJ and co-founder of

New York-based Bubble Core Records.

Along with partner Adam Pierce, Cristy has put that philosophy to work by

compiling and releasing The Corners of the Mouth, an 11-track CD

benefitting the School of Sound, a currently defunct Colorado-based

organization which uses ambient music as a healing agent for people suffering

from anything from heart disease to hypertension and even cancer.

Joining Pierce and Cristy on their healing mission is an international group of

ambient musicians including Moby/Voodoo Child, Scanner, Oval, Germany's

Mouse on Mars and England's E.A.R. (Experimental Audio Research), along

with Pierce's group, Mice Parade and the duo's ambient project, The Dylan

Group. All contributed previously unreleased material to the benefit album.

"Partially the reason I'm involved in making music and being a DJ is to find a

way for the audience to heal," Cristy said.

About 40 percent of the proceeds

from the album will benefit Jonathan Goldman's School of Sound, which

focused its efforts on developing a semester-length course on healing

modalities. Pierce and Cristy said they hope to revive the school with the money

raised through the album.

"Before I began to travel the world giving seminars," Goldman said, "the School

was where I used to teach courses on sound as hearing modality."

Goldman, the author of Healing Sounds, which he described as "the

bible of sound healing," said he was happy to collaborate with Bubble Core on

the album.

"We had the idea to do a benefit CD and thought it would be fun to do it for

something we believed in," Cristy said.

After contacting a number of organizations, including homeopathic medical

groups which declined to be involved, Cristy, who has a Tuesday night gig at

New York's Den of Thieves party, said the pair were turned onto the School of

Sound. "It didn't necessarily fit with the record," he said, "but we liked what

Jonathan was doing."

For his contribution, under the name the Dylan Group, Cristy created

HREF="http://media.addict.com/music/Dylan_Group,_The/Decay.ram">"Decay" (RealAudio excerpt), a vibes, tribal drum and

chanting piece he said ended up being more morose than he intended.

"It's kind of sad that I named it that in retrospect," Cristy said. "It ended up being

about decay, though. If you think of life in terms of cycles, even though this is

supposed to be about healing, there's an element to the life cycle that is about

decay. Plants can't grow unless they have decayed material to feed off of.

Adding that he wouldn't have been able to write the song if he had set out to do

it, Cristy said he wanted to sing on the record as well, thus giving it a more

natural, more human feel. "Since I knew there would be a lot of electronic artists

on the album, I wanted a more human element," he said. [Sat., Nov. 8, 1997, 9 a.m. PST]