A few years ago, I took a psychology of religion course at a nearby university. During a lecture on mysticism, the professor – probably looking for a welcome break from speaking of Jungian archetypes and Freudian subdivisions of the human psyche – asked us students if we’d be interested in learning how to achieve a mystic-esque experience for ourselves. All of us, atheists, religious persons and seekers alike, nodded affirmatively.
“It’s all very simple”, he said smiling, “and you can do it in your own homes. Just get yourself comfortably seated in a dark room, put a blindfold and a set of headphones connected to a radio on. Then adjust the radio dial to a suitable frequency somewhere between two radio stations, where all you hear is white noise. If you sit there long enough, with some of your senses somewhat deprived by the relative darkness and subtle noise, you will start to see and hear things that aren’t really there. A friend of mine tried this, and after a while, he saw his girlfriend who walked through the room, picked up a set of car keys lying in a bookshelf and then left saying she was off to somewhere. Later that day, when he told her about this, she looked at him in disbelief. It turned out that she hadn’t been in their apartment when he claimed she had, neither had she used their car.”
This, the professor claimed, is similar to what mystics experience after having danced, meditated, fasted, or what have you, for a prolonged period of time. According to him it’s simply a case of adjusting conditions to the point where the brain gets an opportunity to play tricks on you. And the biggest difference between mystics and the professor’s friend, is how they interpret those uncontrollable, yet easily manipulated, mind tricks. To someone religious, the image of a woman walking through a room could be interpreted as if a deity of choice had something important to say to them. To an atheist, it would just be a certain woman, in a certain place, at a certain time, doing something more or less mundane and irrelevant.
Though I’m yet to take up the professor’s challenge, I found his anecdote interesting, and I couldn’t help thinking about it when I first heard Hiroki Sasajima’s moment and silence. Just like white noise, darkness, and deprived senses might, Sasajima’s drone based pieces, with their layers of sounds seemingly frozen in time, work as a temporary refuge from the obstacles of the outside world for me. And, oddly enough, they both empty my mind, and evoke numerous thoughts, images, melodies, and emotions at the same time.
Take, for example, the second track on Moment and Silence: “In a crowd”. The track starts off with a combination of sounds that, to me, resembles chainsaws and the cracking noises of falling trees, fed through excessive amounts of spring reverb. I come to think of rainforests being horribly wiped out from the earth’s surface, I think of logs flowing gently downstream to eventually be used in the construction of pioneer railroads, and then, somewhere in the middle of the track, as the textures of sound change ever so slightly, I forget what I was thinking just a moment ago, and a new set of emotions and pictures enters my mind.
Processes like this succeed each other through the duration of Moment and Silence. And though I never quite know how Sasajima creates his soundscapes, I’m continuously filling the mental blanks with snippets of information – in the form of plausible sound sources – that I see fit, when I feel a need for it. This way, I get to hear traces of voices, train stations, foghorns, the clatter of heavy industries, and, indeed, majestic natural phenomenons in both harmony and conflict with the human creativity and possibly destructive inventiveness, in the richly textured sheets of sounds that Sasajima works with. These sounds range from the impersonal to the intimate, from the calming to the disrupting, from to comforting to the downright threatening – all with a common haunting quality to them.
Now, I don’t know if Sasajima is a mystic or not, nor where he puts himself on the scale where ends consist of religiosity and atheism, nor do I care. All I know is that, after having listened extensively to Sasajima’s subtle drones – either with headphones on, or through speakers connected to an amplifier with the volume control set to eleven –, I feel little need to take up my former professor’s challenge. Sasajima’s music is so much more appealing to me than white noise and darkened rooms. While listening, I often find myself to be lost, and I always seem to discover new things in the depths of Sasajima’s sound waves at every listening session. I’m content with this, and leave the experiences of mysticism to the actual mystics. Listening to Moment and Silence is gratifying enough to me, in its own right. Actually, I find it to be bordering addictive.
Peter Stenberg
