Gestures Of Perception, a new album and artbook from Khôra produced in collaboration with Marionette, will be released in digital, 2xLP, and limited edition perfect-bound book formats on April 19, 2024. This work sequences an array of research, concepts, and recordings conducted over many years into a mystical artist statement and work of poetic mythography, with music whose meditative textures and rhythmic thrusts explore a vast terrain, forging a singular sound among the shadings of various global cultural influences. Please stream the album in the embedded player and read some brief excisions from the text below. The album release will be celebrated with a show in Toronto on April 2 at the Tranzac Main Hall. Curated by Burn Down The Capital for The Music Gallery's Departure series, the show will feature performances from Egyptian vocalist Nadah El Shazly with harpist Sarah Pagé and Finno-Baltic duo Honeypaw. Click here for the details.

“The pronounced oscillatory rhythms of the human heart, brain, and lungs vectorize the interwoven electromagnetic, chemical, and mechanical complexes of biophysical realities. The body’s metabolic pathways and signal transduction enabled by the voltage gradients and action potentials of cells dynamically entrain us to variegated, fluctuating worlds of perception; electrical propagation, chemical reaction, resonance, interfacial vibration, temperature, and light are only a handful of the numerous descriptive modes which collectively model transient energy exchange in its variety of presentations from endogenous and exogenous stimuli. The mystic awakens to discover themselves experientially enmeshed in this subtle network of energetic trade routes and, cognizant of the simultaneous power and impoverishment of naming, collapses all modalities of the absorption and release of energy into a single complex chain of creation. In so doing, mystical thinking reveals its desire and capacity to overcome ensnarement in this linear chain to more fully participate in freedom, fruitfully bypassing the anatomical terminologies of science and grasping the pneumatic and pendular actions of the pulse and respiration as intrinsically bound up with mythical origins and destiny, intuiting the fractal structure of vitality stemming from the initial withdrawal of the infinite from its undifferentiated self-containment to instantiate a vibratory space for the evolutionary play and conscious realization of its finite attributes. Mystical thought-forms penetrate beyond mechanics and surfaces to reify the resonant meaning of formal characteristics, affirming the constitutive paradox of immanence and transcendence by demonstrating that the limited and the limitless are dual aspects of a unitary phenomena; the fiat lux of the universe and the electrochemical change of neuronal energy propagating along axon and dendrite channels in the brain are the same act, the creation of a world. This image of a recursive, self-similar reality is nicely posed in the Lurianic lineage of Kabbalism’s conception of tzimtzum, the primal contraction of a boundless light or unlimited God to open space for a cosmic emanation whose nature will share in the form of the vital and originary impulse. This archetypal countenance of reality under the aspects of withdrawal, veiling, or self-sacrifice, where absence enables presence, is expressed on the human plane in the characters of the mystic, shaman, or hermit artist, which is to say — any being who mirrors this act of withdrawal or has taken time to reflect and orient themselves internally in the service of effecting a desired order or external result is redramatizing a primordial act of creation.”

“Before they could approach the inner circle and master behind the mythological veil, neophytes of the ancient cult of Pythagoras were required to take a vow of extensive preparatory silence, a process named echemythia. This discipline and observance was doubtless enacted to fire and temper any deficiencies and excesses contained in the human personality, laying out a promontory of faith leading beyond the fragmentation of the individual to the heart of cosmic intuition. The restraint of speech is an operation aimed at the cultivation of virtue before the felt presence of the divine, a technique which imitates the silence and withdrawal of the gods who generate and sustain the world without taking part, and prevents the sullying of mystery with the inane dribbles and unguarded approaches of the human tongue. The primitive and mysterious relationship between words, power, and existence (known as heka, or magic in Ancient Egypt, i.e. the perceptual axis wherein we witness the outward manifestation of vibrations or figments of inward concentration) is what produces fear in those pursuing echemythic silence for this confrontation is akin to death in that there is a quality of ceasing to be which accompanies the inner extinguishment of language and, for the Pythagoreans, it was a necessary rite of passage or rebirth before one is humbled, purified, and prepared for communion with Janus-faced wisdom. Just as extended immersion in darkness stimulates the visionary capacity and trans-mundane questing of the sage, a technique called incubation practiced in the hollow of caves by the iatromantis (physician-seer or poet-shaman) of Ancient Greece, the fever dream of long silence induces a state wherein one communes and dialogues with the unseen. Corpuscles of rare wisdom fall ready-formed into the mouth to be cast as formulas of eternity appropriate to the sentiments and vernacular of the living historical moment, highly elusive energies from occulted realms projected in tapestries of vision are born in geometries of the tongue. We call this process of bypassing the culturally-conditioned personality to tap and surface the anonymous sources which engender it echemythic transduction. Its structure is what we understand to be tantric in that it inverts the sexually dimorphous pathway taken in the production of genetic multiplicity in order to more fully dwell in the intuition of the unitary seed which cannot be grasped by cerebral intelligence, functioning through comparison of difference alone as it does. Silent meditation enables echemythic transduction by comporting subtle but real energy which is usually expended in the ordering function of language and anticipatory projection of reality into a heightened awareness and purification of the pattern or image-forming principal itself, the perceiver. Within the confines of such an understanding, khôra, like mantra, is a name of nothingness, expunged of meaning, functioning as an empty sound that emphasizes the vibratory field of material oscillations and makes life paradoxically profound by stilling the mind and collapsing beings into Being, the singular agent of all mutations. As a linguistic vibration, khôra must perpetually fall towards meaning which is its gravitational centre, and so it is simultaneously taken as a signpost of fecundation in the transit through and beyond the time-locked relativity of forms. Khôra serves the abyss between distinct, logical elements and is a charmed incantation which enters the realm of linguistic meaning to serve as a deputy of the meditation of silence, the reality of void, a reminder in language of what the habit of language often numbs us to — hieroglyphic resonance with enfolded dimensions of self and world. There is more than tongues can tell and the secret way of initiations, encapsulated here in the paradoxical nature of khôra, the darkness immersion of the iatromantis, and the echemythia of the Pythagoreans, endeavours to preserve the emotional weight of this immensity by seeking detours away from the limiting tether of language, enabling conceptual and non-conceptual strategies capable of piercing into the unity of the kingdoms of the unborn and deathless. The fixation upon and total surrender to mystery opens a clearing for ascent through the veils of negative existence, delivering consciousness from passable illusion amid the concourse of simulacra to its self-recursive ground in rigpa.”