To the memory of Marian Zazeela (1940 - 2024)

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Sound, growling behind the door, an unknown source of noise, the seduction growing, my whole body anticipating total surrender. It reminds me of the time I was taken on a super-fast rollercoaster ride, and I was scared I’d pee my pants if I lost control in the thrill of the experience. Now, as I stood outside the door of the installation, I felt something similar. Today, the loss of control felt more expansive. The entire surface of my skin was being tickled by the aura of the deep bass. I’ve heard that level of bass lurking outside some of Berlin’s famous nightclubs. A mysterious throbbing melting its way through the walls, awakening a deep craving for something as it penetrates unsuspecting bodies. As I stood there waiting in the corridor, I felt the moisture of my pores waking up to suckle at the spreading cloud of sound.

***

In early February 2024, I went to New York, to visit the Dream House, the sound and light environment, that brings together the work of composer La Monte Young, considered by many to be the founder of minimalist music, his long-term collaborator and partner, visual artist, Marian Zazeela, and their artistic protégée and ‘disciple’, Jung Hee Choi. Along with visiting the installation, I would attend masterclasses with Young and Choi in the Kirana singing tradition of Indian Classical Music, which was brought to New York in 1970 by Young and Zazeela’s guru, Pandit Pran Nath. The trio had also agreed to let me show them an electronic instrument I’d developed over the course of my doctoral research project.  

The Dream House, presented by the MELA Foundation is a long-running installation, now in its thirtieth season. It was first conceived by Young and Zazeela in 1962, and at one point was commissioned by the Dia Foundation (1979 - 1985) and installed in a six-storey building. Today it’s located inside a narrow unassuming building on the third floor of 275 Church Street in Tribeca, Lower Manhattan. My first impression is of the quaint analogue quality of it all. In some ways, it almost feels fringe, like an underground project you’d only hear about through word-of-mouth. Outside, no enticing signposting, just a photocopied sheet stuck to the wall above the entrance buzzer. Inside, no shiny brochures, just a few thumbed copies of books and the faded covers of CDs and DVDs of the Dream House and some compositions by MELA Foundation associates. The lot is placed on a low wooden bench next to the installation door where I was standing right then, waiting to be let in.

The door opens, (Micah) the invigilator emerges. The time has come to discover the source of the growling. Leaving my shoes outside I cross a threshold: from everyday familiar (manifest) reality into the dark magenta sinewave cavern that is the Dream House. I already felt giddy when I arrived on the outer landing, no doubt the excitement, the effort of climbing the steep staircase, and the lingering jetlag – I’d arrived from London the previous evening. It gave me the sensation of hearing my heartbeat almost uncomfortably foregrounded in my consciousness. Now having been admitted to the Dream House, my heartbeat was submerged by an overwhelming pulsation coming at me from outside my body. Because the sound of the Dream House plays at a decibel range that straddles the wafer-thin edge between comfort and assault. My whole body was on high alert, ready to pounce back at the beast I anticipated I’d meet here: Choi later told me that there are people who aren’t used to such deep bass, and find the environment too uncomfortable to bear. For me, the force of the sound generated the eerie intimacy of an embodied encounter with an unknown presence.

To the right of the door, I’m drawn into the East Gallery. Blue curls of smoke rise from a thin stick of incense consuming itself. A delicate process occupying the fulcrum of the sound and light environment created by Jung Hee Choi. The light work entitled Color (CNN/Twitch): live realization v.2, is an arrangement of mirrors and projection. A live CNN/Twitch newsfeed is projected onto the smoke, so that the news images are unseeable except when the projection and the smoke overlap for a brief synchronous instant. Then, intermittent snippets of familiar shapes and letters appear, the way drifting debris might give a glimmer of hope in the moment before drowning. On the end wall a blue and pinkish pattern quivers and accretes in live voronoi symmetries that resemble bubble bath. The room vibrates with Choi’s sound piece, The Tone-field: perceptible arithmetical relations in a cycle of eight Indian raga scale permutations, 23 IX 23 - 24 VI 20, New York, described by her as an audible numerical field composed so that the “listener's body is completely enveloped by sound and shares its dimensions with the numerical structure of the present intervallic ratios. Any continuous movement of one's body causes a continuous modulation of the chords in the space."⁽¹⁾

With the low lighting, the sound, the jetlag, I’m already in a state of disorientation. I’m wobbling, and as I do, the room feels like it’s moving with me, but slowly, with a quality of viscosity. How does this work? It seems such a simple arrangement, no ‘high-tech’ immersive gadgetry in sight, yet I am immersed. This sensation defies my understanding. I mean on a cognitive level, because the sound/light, when I’m fully attuned to it, does in fact seem to hold me; yes, unctuously. It’s a milky reverie of being suspended in a colloidal fluid, that feels safe, motherly – could this be la mer of ‘oceanic feeling’? – inducing me to let go, to loosen my balance, to allow my body to quiver in sympathetic attunement with the sinewaves of Choi’s tone-field. Now I’m hearing the continuous modulation of sound through proprioception. I’m gradually losing control of my thoughts as I merge with the numerical ratios of the harmonics. The water is welling up in my eye sockets, as the grip of my gaze softens. I feel unsteady, drunk, like I’m about to fall, in love.

“This is the heavenly wine to which all the Sufi poets refer, which is totally unlike the momentary intoxications of the mortal plane.”⁽²⁾

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Those first moments in the Dream House were intense, and the emotions I can recall, rather than being overwhelming, were intense with a strange familiarity: the tearful joy of a reunion, as if I already knew it, I’d known this, without any hint of nostalgia – not a personal memory – but as something clear and present and knowable. In those moments of dizziness, because that is what it was, I was pulled into the vertigo of ‘self-remembering’.

You may have gathered that I’m a true practitioner of synchrony and chance. Much of my artwork and my spiritual research is about finessing my intuition, to better tune into what the Daoists call the curvilinear logic of cosmic law. On this occasion, I won’t venture too much into Daoism, but rather meander you along the Sufi path, to discover some of its psychotechnologies of remembering.

The Sufis are an esoteric practice-based tradition within Islam. The poet known as Rumi (1207 - 1273) is one of its principal mystics, and the Mevlevi Order was formed by his followers after his death. As an aside, I got to know Micah, the Dream House staff member, because by some ‘cosmic’ synchrony, I bumped into her a few days later at the nearby Sufi ’dergah’ Lodge, where we were both attending the weekly dhikr practice: ‘dhikr’, also spelt zikr, means ‘remembrance’.

What is ‘self-remembering’? I’m familiar with self-remembering because of my link to Colet House, London, home of The Study Society (for Non-Duality). The Study Society is an organization set up by Dr Francis Roles in 1951 to continue the teachings of his teacher, the mathematician, philosopher and mystic, Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky, himself a one-time student and scribe to the controversial spiritual teacher, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c. 1846 - 1949). I became associated with The Study Society in 2019 when I began to learn the dance of the dervishes of the Mevlevi Order. And gradually it has become a central practice in my embodied research methodology. The Mevlevi Sufi lineage was transmitted to Colet House in the 1960s by one of its last Turkish Sheikhs, Sheikh Resuhi. Since my graduation in 2020, most Friday evenings, I’m there, whirling in the Top Studio, either for the practice or as a dancing dervish in the Mukabele ceremony, which is a type of Sufi sama ritual – ‘sama’ means listening.

The Mukabele is conceived as an immersive artwork. Perhaps the most potent technology apart from the physical technique of turning, is the circular skirt worn by the dancers. As the dancers move across the floor, their skirt edges trace smooth, regular curves that create air turbulence. According to scientific research, Sufi robes (called tenure) obey the natural laws of hurricane physics, being affected by Earth’s Coriolis effect – a surface force that affects spinning bodies on a rotating planet and influences the way water whirls down the drain of a sink.⁽³⁾ Witnesses to the Mukabele are not spectators, they are called ‘lovers’: the hypnotic swirling of the skirts is a psychotechnology enabling the lovers’ intimate immersion in the artwork. In this moment, disorientation is longed for, because it enables union with the (unmanifest), “the divine Beloved… beyond the limitation of name and form”.⁽⁴⁾ In the artwork of the Mukabele, dizziness allows dancers and their lovers to converge, through the active attention of (self)remembering.

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‘Self-remembering’ was central in Gurdjieff’s spiritual teaching known as ‘the Work’ which included forms of speech, the Movements, and even drinking rituals. Gurdjieff framed the Work through ancient and often obscure Sufi practices and schools, though the lineage of these connections is not evident, and Gurdjieff appears to have wilfully created opacity around the origins of his teachings.⁽⁵⁾‍

Ouspensky, distanced himself from Gurdjieff, as he pursued his own inquiry into self-remembering. This inquiry was later taken on by (Dr) Roles, who researched it through the path of Nondual wisdom traditions which continue to be studied at The Study Society (London) and include Advaita Vedanta and Sufism. This is how I discovered that the Sufi Mukabele is an application of self-remembering.

In his quest for self-remembering, Ouspensky perceived that:

“When I observe something, my attention is directed towards what I observe—a line with one arrowhead:

When at the same time, I try to remember myself, my attention is directed both towards the object observed and towards myself. A second arrowhead appears on the line:

Having defined this I saw that the problem consisted in directing attention on oneself without weakening or obliterating the attention directed on something else.”⁽⁶⁾

My interest in La Monte Young’s work was sparked during my doctoral research, when I found myself co-creating a ‘musical instrument’ with female electronic textile collective, Kobakant, without really knowing it. ‘Not knowing’ (the outcome) was baked into the process. I’d been devising a mode of free form improvisation as a way to breach disciplinary boundaries, working with numerous(human and nonhuman) collaborators. I found that Kobakant’s sympoietic hacker mentality was of this ilk: they subvert ‘high-tech’ gadgetry by handcrafting computational technology using needle and yarn.⁽⁷⁾ The process relies on (temporal) commitments to making without there being a clear telos or outcome in mind: free jazz and Indian raga musicians also work this way. The emergent product – the instrument – that emerged from a two-year fabrication process with Kobakant was not immediately ‘playable’. We’d created an electronic (sound) suit out of crocheted copper yarn, which makes music from numerical data captured from bodily movements. Because of its intricate fabrication, which features long web-like conductive circuitry, the suit generates noisy data, meaning it doesn’t function according to an efficient and immediate cause and effect logic. When I wear it to compose with my body, it demands that I listen, very sensitively to the (largely inaudible) ripples spreading out in time, as my body-mass ‘intra-acts’⁽⁸⁾ with external forces – air currents, gravity, the shuddering of my body as each breath stimulates my heartbeat. The Crochet Resistance Suit makes music of the ‘incalculable causal echoes’ genre.

To understand how to approach such an uncontrollable instrument, I looked to Young’s magnum opus, The Well-Tuned Piano.⁽⁹⁾ The title is a reference to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier composition which popularized equal temperament, a method of tuning which forces an equal division of the octave meant to facilitate the transposition and modulation of notes. Though it is intended to add a degree of ‘rationality’ to sound and can even be considered the musical system that introjected rationality into the human ear, it results in irrational number frequencies and harmonics.

In contrast, The Well-Tuned Piano follows a tuning method called just intonation which is mostly used in non-Western music and is especially elaborated in the microtonalities of the Indian system of tuning. In just intonation, harmonic ratios remain as whole numbers, arising from an implied fundamental frequency. Pianos are notoriously hard to tune. First the tuning is fixed for each key – there’s no gradient of sound like there is on a stringed instrument. This in combination with the material components and the dimensions of the instrument make for inharmonicity. Young’s original tuning of the piano, a European/Western instrument, is ground-breaking and unique. Instead of forcibly harnessing the piano to (post-Bach) human aural habits, his tuning prioritizes the piano’s limitations as the generative affordance of a nonhuman body.  I adopted his approach as I began to know my instrument; instead of trying to make it efficient, I would learn to listen to subtle patterns swirling in the clouds of noise, and then compose with them.

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Choi’s compositional logic is inspired by her guru, La Monte Young, whom she affectionately refers to as ‘Dronacharya’, a warrior character in the Mahabharata Hindu epic, but Choi really means ‘master (charya) of drone’.

In the Dream House, the narrow corridor, between the two main spaces, forms a gradient of sound where Choi and Young’s compositions intermesh beneath one of Zazeela’s sculptures. In the larger space is Young’s sound environment which goes by a title that says it all: The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above andIncluding 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to ThosePrimes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119. The work is composed of 36 stacked sinewaves which emanate from four large speakers placed in each corner of the room. In the ‘empty space’ of the room is a humming field of movement.

Here as in the previous room (and even the toilet), the windows are covered with magenta filters, darkening the space to perpetuate the effect of an endless twilight – one which I remember having glimpsed in dreams and hallucinations. This effect is accentuated by large old-school parcan theatre lights casting a blue and pink glow over Zazeela’s sculptures, which are suspended on either side of the room. She has arranged the lights so that the two colours of the gels overlap over the aluminium slivers of her abstract calligraphic shapes, somehow colouring their shadows, and there by adding an incomprehensible dimension to their presence. This illegible cursive floats in the glistening ocean of invisible waves, a writing I might understand were I to grasp – I mean to know –the nature of the relationship between form, light, and shadows. Zazeela offers a clue: “Light and scale are manipulated in such a way that the colored shadows, in their apparent corporeality, can become virtually indistinguishable from the mobile forms, engaging the viewer in a continuing dialogue between reality and illusion.”⁽¹⁰⁾

At the far end is a large scale Light Point Drawing by Choi which glows with the trick of mirror reflections and their promise of form, face, recognizable shape. Gradually asymmetries become apparent. I realise I’ve been seduced: what if all form is just an illusion perpetuated by symmetry?

When the 1993 Dream House opened, Young wrote the following about this work:

“This is my newest and most radical sound environment; the Rayna synthesizer has made it possible to realize intervals that are derived from such high primes that, not only is it unlikely that anyone has ever worked with these intervals before, it is also highly unlikely that anyone has ever heard them or perhaps even imagined the feelings they create."⁽¹¹⁾

I had sunk to the bottom of the sinewave ocean, and found myself crouching low, noticing that the entire colour spectrum appeared to be dancing inside the carpet. Unconsciously, I was musing on the location of the benthic fundamental to which all the harmonics were tethered. Was I hearing the reputedly inaudible frequency of the ‘undertone’ in the shimmering colours?

“With the music of the absolute the bass, the undertone, is going on continuously, but on the surface and under the various keys of all the instruments of nature’s music the undertone is hidden and subdued.”⁽¹²⁾

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“They are getting old…” Jung Hee seemed to be tempering my expectations as I removed my shoes for the second time that day. I was about to cross the threshold into the second-floor apartment and enter La Monte and Marian’s residence, located just below the Dream House. I was there for the first of three singing masterclasses.

I walk into a grey zone of indistinct objects, which I vaguely identify as boxes and filing systems extending all the way across the horizon of the open plan loft apartment. The sound from upstairs continues to vibrate through the ceiling. I am led along an approximately 20 cm wide clearing between the mass of things, towards where La Monte and Marian are lying in two single beds, set no more than 50cm away from each other. Marian opens her eyes briefly; she seems to acknowledge me from a faraway place. I’m embarrassed. Nothing could have prepared me for this level of intimacy. I realize that my anxiety might be the one predicted by Heidegger, the kind that foreshadows the uncanny moment of staggering into dasein. Because by the logic of sedimentation, being a floor below, I should be that much closer to the secrets of the undertone.

The lesson begins. I’m offered a wobbly office chair to sit on. If I lean too far back, I might fall over. This could well happen because I’m already nervous and still a little starstruck at being in the presence of such artistic luminaries. Jung Hee starts the drone: a recording of Young and Zazeela playing two Pandit Pran Nath style tamburas, which will accompany us over the course of the next two hours. La Monte sits up a little in bed. He scrutinizes me and asks me why I came all the way to New York. I tell him I study Hindustani vocal with a teacher in London. He tells me that according to the tradition I should stick with one teacher. Should I leave then, I ask? Again, he asks me why I’m there, what I’m expecting. I reply, “I felt there might be a resonance between us.” My answer seems to satisfy him. I stay and we sing.

We were singing Raga Vrindavani Sarang, a raga said to be mystical and romantic, and intended to be sung in the afternoon. La Monte would sing, and then invite me to repeat the phrasing or pattern after him. If I got it wrong, he’d ask Jung Hee to demonstrate. Sometimes my anxious mind would interfere in the clarity of the process. Then I would be lost. Jung Hee would get me back on track with kind and patient encouragement. We sang like this for three sessions – six hours of non-stop singing with La Monte and Jung Hee, watched over by Marian who was always there, near us, while the Dream House purred above us continuously. By the third session I had learned something. Instead of thinking of whether I could repeat the phrase when I was called upon to do so, I began to imagine that with each utterance, La Monte was manifesting an instance of the ambient wavefield, and all I had to do was allow it to move towards me, like a puddle of liquid spreading between the three of us. And then, we would all be sharing it, drinking it, so as not so much to create sound, but rather to offer our voices to the process of manifesting the unmanifest, by making (humanly) audible the ripples of the undertone. I remember reading in a book on Hindustani Classical Music once that ‘the best singers are the ones who drink’.⁽¹³⁾ At the time I hadn’t understood what was meant by “drinking”.

After the third and final session, I ran around Lower Manhattan for a couple of hours looking for some flowers to offer Marian. I returned having found a bunch of red and white mottled roses. I arranged them in a vase to be placed on the small altar adjacent to her bed, dedicated to Pran Nath – another curvilinear synchrony we’d discovered during my visit, is that Pran Nath had spent many years living and singing inside a sacred cave located on the outskirts of Dehra Dun, the town where my grandmother lived in India.

That evening I was invited to stay for an Indian takeaway dinner. As the time came for me to leave, La Monte summoned me. “So this is goodbye?” It was. He reached out to me. He wanted to touch my head and instructed me to touch his foot: the customary way of greeting and thanking one’s guru. As I was about to move away, with extraordinary humility, he looked at me with sweetness and added, “I hope I lived up to your expectations.”

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It was after the second singing session that I played my crochet copper instrument, the Crochet Resistance Suit, for them. I, mindful of the situation and of their time, took it out of its bag and was going to simply show them what it looked like. But La Monte insisted that I demonstrate how it worked. And I did. In that small area between the beds and the boxes, I put it on, connected it to the speakers and composed music with my body, explaining the function of the sensors and what was being heard. Jung Hee was drawn to the technology’s beauty and delicate aesthetic. I knew La Monte was a fan of electricity, and with all its copper, the resistance suit’s noise is the music of latent electrical charge. He was intrigued and encouraging, and recommended I keep working on it and that he would gladly hear it again in the future.

He was perhaps even more curious about it when I explained that I had developed the suit over the course of my art PhD. When he realized that this research had been done within the framework of an academic project, he seemed pleased and somewhat vindicated, that finally educational institutions might be waking up to the kind of nonrational ways of knowing he’d been researching all his life. 

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A week after my return, a new immersive exhibition opened in London: Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive (Serpentine Galleries,16/02/2024 - 7 /04/ 2024). Anadol’s work aims to show the potential for creative applications of AI (artificial intelligence). The production is extremely slick and ‘high-tech’. The gallery is filled with colour saturated LED screens, and black-clothed security guards at the door managing the droves of excited people queuing for their turn to bathe in the experience. Another sound and light environment, though poles apart from the Dream House. The seamless, floor to ceiling visuals immediately pulled my (ocular) attention outwards – towards the ‘observed phenomenon’. But for me, more intriguing than the AI eye candy, were the reactions of other ‘viewers’, most of them slumped around the gallery. People had flopped onto bean bags and were staring wide-eyed at AI-generated elephants projected on the ceiling or trying to capture the best (selfie) moment with the hypnotic swirling patterns of AI-generated bubbles, or marvel at the endless metamorphoses of AI-imagined chimeras that they were filming with their smartphones. All the while emotive cinematic music, the genre you’d associate with a nature documentary, played on the surround-sound system. Here was Technology with a capital ‘T’, staged to disorient by “[altering] our perception of the natural world and our experience of time and space.”⁽¹⁴⁾ I too felt this environment lulling me, this time towards the depths of awe-induced inertia, into ‘self-forgetting’.

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I’ve continued to probe into the musical affordances of the Crochet Resistance Suit by working with artist composer, Pietro Bardini. Taking our inspiration from the drones and harmonics of the Dream House, we decided to code seven channels of shifting harmonic frequencies into the (Max) patch that receives the numerical data from the suit. The frequencies we implemented can ascend and descend across a vast tonal field, at times creating vertiginous acoustic shifts. Two independent capacitive sensors function as (uncontrollable) tambura drones, sonifying latent electrical clouds as they sweep through, affected by human bodies and all other conductive elements in the space.

On 25 March 2024 Pietro and I shared these new developments at the Sound Immersion Lab of Goldsmiths University, in an evening entitled How to Dream a Rasa Machine II: making music in the microtones that shimmer between us, presented by Iklectik Art Lab and the Centre for Sound, Technology and Culture.⁽¹⁵⁾ This time, I incorporated Hindustani singing techniques to vocalize the rhythmic and microtonal patterns within the noise and help guide the ‘partakers’ attention through the complexity of the wavefield.⁽¹⁶⁾ Pietro and I ‘played’ the crochet instrument over this layer of sound, by exchanging the controls of the interface between us: going back and forth between embodied composition and electronic composition.

One of the partakers was artist and curator, Sophie Hughes. She approached me afterwards. She was bewildered, struggling to find the language to describe what she had just experienced. I mentioned ‘self-remembering’, but without going into much detail. The next day I received an email from her:

“…it was a remembering but not in [an] easy woolly domestic way, [but] as in a remembering of the wild, terrifying and beautiful core of the universe, like a de-construction of everything that individuates - a calling to a home that is vast and unknowable.”

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Ouspensky speculated that “to remember oneself means the same thing as to be aware of oneself — ‘I am’.” ⁽¹⁷⁾

Self-remembering continues to be elaborated as a spiritual concept, and I haven’t found any conclusive definition, nor a formula for how to achieve it. What I have found is that such a principle exists in other traditions and arts (Buddhism, Daoism, Noh theatre, Butoh). From the accounts I’ve found in the record of the Study Society, and in writings by Ouspensky and Roles (and their later students), self-remembering is an active exercise of working the muscle of attention. Ultimately, I’d say that self-remembering is something to be practiced rather than theorized. What I discovered experientially (through Sufi turning, ‘loving’ and in the Dream House) is close to how Ouspensky perceives it – a two-way, non-dual perception. Self-remembering is an instant of self-knowing that transgresses the daily ‘readymade’ habit of individual identity.⁽¹⁸⁾ It arises through a (non)dual state that teeters at the diaphanous edge between inner and outer attention, both of which are held delicately in awareness, the way a spinning coin, the instant before it topples, appears to move in slow motion. In the vertigo of that instant, listen for the murmur of the undertone.

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Marian Zazeela passed away peacefully in her sleep in the night of 28 March 2024.

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With thanks to Jung Hee Choi and La Monte Young for their comments and input.