I show up about 15 minutes early to Concentric: Transcultural Resonance in Sound Practices, and the room’s already packed. There’s 50, maybe 60 people packed into the tiny CSPS Black Box Theatre when I arrive and slink towards the back into one of the chairs lining the walls. In front of me, arranged in a semicircle, attendees have laid out yoga mats or prop themselves up on bolsters. Some sit in a meditative position, some lie back with their hands clasped over their belly. A couple appear to be asleep throughout the entire evening.
It’s a lot of people in the little room, and every sniff or incidental cough feels as if it’s right next to my ear. It’s claustrophobic at first, but as I grow more acclimated, it starts to feel comforting — a reminder that we’re all occupying bodies in this space, that our minds still ride inside physical forms.
In the center of the semicircle, a light shines down on a tangle of black wires hooked into mixers. Sock-footed and relaxed, hunched over their synthesizers, Jason Snell and Cece Zhang, our hosts/performers for the evening, look like a solemn pair of spiders tending their black plastic web. Snell is wearing a Muse headband, which will read his brainwaves that change and flow with active concentration and deep focus, interpreting the waves into sound during the performance. It looks like a cyberpunk tiara, giving him a slightly regal air in the chiaroscuro lighting. Zhang and Snell trade glances as they adjust the settings, communicating in nods and soft whispers.
Snell is no stranger to CSPS; his first art show out of school, “Out of Bounds” was hosted here. Since then, he’s gone on to exhibit at the Met, teach at NYU — where Cece met him during a class on experimental music creation — and show his work in galleries internationally. He was also heavily involved in the ’90s rave scene in eastern Iowa, which has been a major influence on him since.
Zhang is a multidisciplinarian born in Beijing who’s lived in Cairo, Bangkok and now New York City, where she’s a student at NYU Gallatin building a major that touches on Jungian psychology, sociology, and culture. She’s also a music producer and experimental musician.
The performance is built on biofeedback — Snell’s heartbeat and brain waves are interpreted into sound by a custom program he’s coded, modulated by additional tracks and sounds. It’s a natural succession from his previous work, which went from algorithmic music, using random generators to create musical experiences, to music generated from motion detection, to sets controlled entirely by his mind.
“I had this vivid dream in December of 2017 about making music from DNA sequences,” he tells me in an interview the day before, the three of us sitting at the wide table in the lower gallery. He’s easygoing, relaxed with the calm poise of an experienced meditator. “It was the idea of, could I make music from something that’s inside of me, rather than something like movement or a computer algorithm? It was a combination of those things that, once I saw [the Muse headband] and I got [it] and I built my initial test, it was such a eureka moment to do something in my brain and then, without touching it, a note came out of my synthesizer. It felt like telekinesis or telepathy … very Professor X and Cerebro.”
After a bit of setup, the first performance begins. In sound, there’s a microcosm of the process of being — creation, suspension, then destruction. From silence, the great humming silence that isn’t true silence — he turns up the sound of the silent room he’s recorded and amplified, a bassy, throbbing hum — comes form.
Waves start to ripple across the silence — at first simple shushing sounds like lapping waves breaking on a beach, but as they grow they start to change and collide, to throb and take shape, and suddenly there’s a world of sound around me, fluting sounds and low bass that sucks at my ears. His heartbeat pulses in the middle of it, a steady sound like drumbeats echoing across distant mountains.
As the music continues, I feel it take hold of me in a way that reminds me of my occasional flirtations with psychedelics; my head feels separated from my body, drifting, a balloon anchored by my neck. I find myself swaying my head back and forth, slow, with a glossy smoothness. I have the sudden fancy that I could pop it off and upend it and I would fill the room with the bubbles inside of my brain. Images flit through my head, vague and ill-defined with a sense of truth, like memories of dreams.
I feel my heartbeat and it’s in perfect sync with the heartbeat pulsing in the room. I wonder if the hearts of everybody in the room are beating the same, quickening and slowing along with Snell’s.
The sound bath lasts for some 20 minutes, though it’s hard to track the time. Afterwards, Snell delivers a presentation of his research. He’s drawn on Vedic, Christian, Meskwaki, Transcendental Meditation, and rave/techno culture across Iowa. He shows us the tapestry-like spectroscope of traditional Buddhist nuns’ chanting, explores the way Meskwaki songs use repetition to induce states of trance, maps out brainwaves’ response to Pentecostal services. He’s forced to skip over the deep dives in the 199 pages of slides due to time constraints, but he covers his base thesis.
“What are the fundamental energetic building blocks which lead to these experiences?” Snell asks. “I don’t want to imitate the form, I want to tap into my own experiences of that creative field that’s underneath it … And then it goes through my own personal lens, which is rave and techno, and so we’re using synthesizers and drum machines and creating this experience that is similarly transformative for people.”
Zhang presents after him. She tackles the sociological perspective, building on Snell’s research with her own thoughts on the relationship between music and culture.
“I think music nowadays is a cultural phenomenon. It’s not just a physical or neuroscientific phenomenon,” she tells me. She gives the example of what she’s observed of white audiences experiencing Japanese folk musician Ichiko Aoba. It’s common, according to a Reddit thread on the subject, for attendees to experience fainting, dizziness or other altered states. Zhang thinks it’s just as much the cultural shift, the shift of states and perception to a different culture’s, that create trancelike or transcendent experiences as it is the music itself. To experience and immerse oneself into an unfamiliar culture can create a dissonance, an aversion, or lead one to exoticize or fetishize something they don’t understand.
She’s not telling people not to listen, she stresses, but to listen more — not just to the music of other cultures, but to the context of the cultures as well.
“The point isn’t to cancel contact [with other cultural expression], but to approach with humility and to let the music teach us, not just how to feel but how to live differently, more attentively, more responsibly, more relationally.“
After the talks, there’s another performance. Fog machines hiss out clouds that twist in columns of colored light. This one, we are warned, is less gentle, more deconstructive. It starts like the first — from a drone it builds outward and upward, taking on form and shape, but this one feels heavier, darker. Massive waves of droning bass wash over me, high, airy synth wipes away the world around me and I feel myself adrift in a misty emptiness. Zhang’s voice, reading passages from the Daodejing in Mandarin, blends into the instrumentals like someone talking at a great distance, so far away it’s impossible to make out the words.
I have a vivid — dream? Experience? during the second session. I see myself remade, a la Tetsuo the Iron Man, my bones replaced with metal. When the thought pops into my head the sound shifts into sharp screeches of feedback as if it’s heard my thoughts and started responding. As the heavy throbs of the music build I feel myself building into a glittering skyscraper in an abstracted city and the scraps of Zhang’s voice transform into the indistinct chatter of the residents within me. Then – a shift – the whole edifice that is me and outside of me is sheared by screeching waves of sound, bisected, the top of it reeling and falling to the ground. I feel it slam into me physically, as I am both a body in the black room and I am the building I have imagined, my metal structure collapsing, twisting apart. The bass grows to a vast crescendo as the building and I slump to the ground, the voices silenced, and I realize that I’m crying.
The music lulls and I hear Zhang meowing, unexpectedly, chirpy and bright. In the dream, a cat climbs out of a window of the skyscraper that is me, unscathed, and yelps into the silent city. For the rest of the show, that image stays with me as I gaze into the swirling mist.
After the shows, in the silence that feels so sudden and so overwhelming, we share our experiences. Some people describe images, some thoughts. One man shares a poem he’s spontaneously written. A woman asks if there was a release of incense in the middle of the performance — there was no scent element, and we conclude it was a psychosomatic response to the experience. Everyone feels slightly shocked, dazed, speaking with a reverently low tone. It feels strange to speak, our voices harsh.
What were they trying to evoke? asks an audience member after the show. Zhang thinks for a moment, then smiles. “Transhumanism,” she says, and when she does I’m reminded of a thought I had during the first performance.
When I closed my eyes, I felt as if the room around me had been transfigured into a cybernetic womb, that through the medium of electronics and speakers the room had become an organ of Snell’s body, his own heartbeat echoing through the room, his mind itself turned to sound in shushing waves, and all the occupants within nourished by it.
“How do other cultures bring people into that trance state?” Snell asks. “What was our experience in the womb? That’s something that’s going to be universal to every human being, regardless of what culture they’re born into after that, and what sort of instrumentation or experiences they have. Everyone has spent several months with, essentially, a subwoofer above their head, you know, with this heartbeat from the mom. Everyone heard that blood flow and everyone [hears] our mother’s voice resonating through our own body as she’s talking, or singing, or vocalizing.”
On my way home, I pick up my sleeping 2-year-old from my sister’s house. She’s heavy draped over my shoulder, and I can feel her heartbeat through her little chest, feel the rise and fall of each breath. I tuck her into bed and go smoke a cigarette on my back porch, watching the spirals of smoke curling in the porchlight.
Staring down the tawny full moon I hear echoes of the performance around me — the whap-whap-whap bassline of the St. Luke’s helicopter, the high twittering of the peepers in the creek. I know I won’t recreate the ineffable feeling of being there, of feeling the bodies around me as I drift along waves of music, but I feel more open, more aware. All around me, there’s echoes of it in the silence, waves building and rising and falling back into the endless sea.
