Robert Thurman's words were the first I ever read about Tibetan Buddhism, describing the inner explorers of its practices as "psychonauts" and its mental tools for liberation "spiritual technology." Few have done as much to advance the understanding and practice of Tibetan Buddhism in the West and I consider him one of my greatest heroes and teachers.

Robert Thurman, an American author, professor, translator & popularizer of Buddhism, takes a deep dive into immersion through a Buddhist portal, sharing with us, stories & ideas of returning to the essential origin of oneself. Being the father of famed actor Uma Thurman is totally inadequate to describe who he is and where he’s been.

Born in New York City to the stage actor Elizabeth Dean Farrar (1907–1973), a stage actress, & AP editor & UN translator Beverly Reid Thurman, Jr. got his BA from & also did his graduate studies in Sanskrit at Harvard. He eventually built a house in Woodstock, NY where he lived with his first wife & two children for some time.

He has seen much of the world, traveling around Turkey, Iran & India, & moving back to NJ in the US, he became a Buddhist monk, study with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama to become the first American-born Tibetan Buddhist in 1965. He was the cofounder & president of the Tibet House in New York, established to preserve Tibetan culture.

He is also the author of many books on Tibetan Buddhism including his popular translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Thurman & I exchanged numerous stories of immersive experiences & ideas. This was our first conversation in roughly 60 years.

We had met in summer 1960 in New York City through a mutual friend, Bruce Bennett, Thurman’s Harvard classmate. Bennett and I were studying organic chemistry in Columbia University summer school. I was studying Organic chemistry as a pre-med. Although, I never went to medical school, organic chemistry and fluid mechanics are seminal to my work as a composer and sound designer

Bruce, a fine saxophone player, took me with him to meet Thurman in Thurman’s parents’ apartment south of the Columbia campus on the Manhattan upper west side. Thurman was then part of the scene around Timothy Leary at Harvard and working with psychedelics.

I was 19 years old, Thurman and Bennett were 20. A few years later Thurman lost one eye in a horrid accident while changing a car tire. This caused him to change his life. He spent five years traveling in Turkey and Tibet, a journey which would prepare him for a life of scholarship and spiritual growth.

What follows is a 33 minute excerpt of our 75 minute talk, the discussion of immersivity. It begins with Thurman speaking about his friend the Dalai lama.

Topics discussed: Buddhism, immersivity, essential origin of the self, Tibetan Book of the Dead, NYC, Bruce Bennett, Timoty Leary-psychedelics, travel, scholarship, meditation, Dalai Lama, the Sami, reindeer, Helsinki, Himalayas, chanting, sound artist, death, clear light, transparent light, nothingness, void, emptiness, aliens, god, hell, freedom, Joseph Cornell, consciousness, life force, 4 points, of confidence, Alexa AI, musicians losing themselves, remembering one’s birth, dream chanting, dogs.

• Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

An internal conversation between the creator of iMMERSE!, Charlie Morrow & the producer of iMMERSE!, bart plantenga. They’ve been working on the iMMERSE book-podcast-exhibition project for some years now & it was time to take stock of what they’ve learned & experienced... The fact is the subject of immersion, losing yourself in a context, a space, an altered consciousness remains fascinating. The podcasts are the offspring of the original iMMERSE! book ideas that came to the surface in 2019 as they reconnected after years of little to no contact. They hit upon a collaboration that continues full steam as they discover the depthless depths of immersion...

samples used Sea • Delia Derbyshire A State of Vibration • Wreck This Mess Mikro Kosmos - Archea [Béla Bartók] • Charlie Morrow Mikro Kosmos - Amoeba [Béla Bartók] • Charlie Morrow Train to the Plane • Charlie Morrow Haiku Lingo • Shelley Hirsch & David Weinstein Silence Drawn 4’33” • Paloma Jet & Wreck This Mess HEADPHONICS 01 • Ryoji Ikeda Snake Oil Symphony • Daniel Steven Crafts beach day may 2018 • b/art Cymatic Frequency • Coldcut & Hans Jenny Wave Music III - 60 Clarinets & a Boat • Charlie Morrow 4'33" End Groove Conditional (Various) • b/art Zäuerli • Jodelquartett Säntis Beethoven Amalgam Piano Trio Opus 70 No. 2 & Grosse Fuga 1.1 • Charlie Morrow Trafficante Onosphere • b/art

subjects: immersion, Jerome Rothenberg, dentures, under water, undertow, drowning, marching band, bass drum, Dutch coast, dunes, nostalgia, memory, birds, writing, serotonin, cymatic frequencies, silence, chewing on a bone vs gossip vs science, cochlear implant, SPL – sound pressure level, ears always exposed, mental earplugs, death, drowning, yodeling, Robert Thurman, Tibetan Buddhist Death tales, fallling dreams, lucid dreams, NY Yankees, transistor radio, Mickey Mantle, power of sound, power of words, lifeguard, echo, echo location, soak in the bathtub, enveloped in warm water, Descartes, Plato’s Cratylus, vibration, sense of smell, sight dominance, venue audio aesthetics, Kachun Yu, Halcyon Period, climate change, unstable earth, the valley as recording device, sampling, plagiarism, Beethoven was a sampler, notating folk music, Colin Turnbull, the Ik Tribe, coccoon of specialness, jingoism, the People, immersed in your own uniqueness, Infinite Distraction Syndrome IDS ...

Lotta Wennäkoski is a Finnish composer based in Helsinki. She has won praise and has been described as a lyrical Modernist and post-Expressionist. She studied violin in Budapest in her youth. She also studied music theory & composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki as well as the Royal Conservatory of The Hague under Louis Andriessen.

Wennäkoski launched her career composing for radio plays and short films. Her breakthrough was her performance at the Musica Nova Helsinki festival in 1999. Her work consists of orchestral, chamber and vocal works, many of which are performed worldwide. Notable works include Sakara for orchestra (2003), the flute concerto Soie (2009), which was one of the recommended works at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 2012, Verdigris for chamber orchestra (2015), commissioned by The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, & the harp concerto Sigla (2022) for Sivan Magen & the Finnish RSO, which was awarded the Gramophone Award 2023 for the contemporary music category.

Wennäkoski was the artistic director of the Tampere Biennale festival in 2008 & 2010, composer-in-residence of the Tapiola Sinfonietta in 2010–2011 & designed the program of the Avanti! Summer Sounds festival in 2017.

Meanwhile, Heikki Nikula is no slouch either. He’s a Finnish musician from Seinäjoki, a small city in the southwest of Finland. He plays numerous wind instruments, percussion & harp but is most known for his work on bass clarinet. He is one of the only proponents of the bass clarinet as solo instrument & has a special fondness for free improvisation.

He graduated from the the Sibelius Academy & joined Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in 1991, for whom he continues to perform. He also works with the renowned Finnish chamber orchestra Avanti! & the Free Okapi ensemble. He has also performed on numerous Finnish film & series soundtracks inc. the Battle for Finland. He has recorded 2 CDs of solo music for the instrument – Hoepnadium & Piping Down the Valleys Wild. He has been a member of the Helsinki Filharmonia since 1991, & is one of the original members of the renowned Finnish chamber orchestra "Avanti!."

Sound collage backdrop: b/art & Wreck This Mess

CM Hausswolff: Immersion at the Junction of Electronics & Nature 32

"I was thinking about immersion & that word – when you become engulfed with something, when you sink into something & you feel that you are a part of something."

Carl Michael von Hausswolff [also known CM Hausswolff & personally known as Mickey] was born in Sweden in 1956. He’s unusual in that he readily admits he is a NONmusician musician, untrained in any instrument, but still able to make music with available electronic gadgets.

He is both a soundsmith & visual artist, working intuitively in the area of where sound meets light. He uses recording devices such as the video camera, tape deck, radar, sonar. He investigates electrical currents and frequencies & how these relate to architectural space. His electronic voice phenomenon [EVP] recordings, proposes conjuring up voices of the dead through radio signals much like Moriconi proposed.

His work has appeared at prestigious platforms & festivals such as Manifesta, documenta, the Venice Biennale, & many others.

His list of audio and visual work is long, esoteric and intriguing with provocative titles like "800 000 Seconds in Harar," "The Wonderful World of Male Intuition," & "There Are No Crows Flying Around the Hancock Building.” He is also a curator and, if that isn’t enough, he is King Michael l, one of several Kings of Elgaland-Vargaland.

This conceptual or conjectural nation, co-created with Swedish artist, Leif Ellgren is a state of mind, an art project – that covers a great deal of territory.

Although they first met in the late-70s, they came to know each other in the 1990s, when Charlie was based in Copenhagen for a time. They met in Gothenberg at Radium, an art gallery at the time. It would later evolve into a magazine, an independent record label establish in 1983, an organization that presented a film festival, a computer music festival, screenings, and exhibitions & also had their own recording & video editing studio, which paralleled the work Charlie was doing in New York with the New Wilderness Foundation established in the Ear Inn where they hade their own studio, cassette label & magazine.

Samples Playlist Boo Wa Wa Wa • Charlie Morrow Day • CM von Hausswolff Brigati Music • Charlie Morrow Song of the Youths • Stockhausen Flooded Lamphun Temple & Confused Hawks • CM von Hausswolff Hour of Changes • Charlie Morrow Water Drums • Baka Pygmies Koilinen • Pan Sonic Ramayana Melukat • CM von Hausswolff Amplified Piano • Charlie Morrow NY USA • Serge Gainsbourg

Selection of topics covered: immersion, ski slope ambience, flotation tanks, EVP, Vienna, rock ‘n’ roll, Radium label, academic training vs DIY, sine wave generators, Stin Hensen, Stockhausen, drone music, Guatarri & Deleuze, rhizomes, non-musician musicianship, nature as inspriation, MAGA, minimal music, joy of collaboration, Fripp-Eno, meeting in NY in late 70s, artfulness of life, Sweden, Lamonte Young, Steve Reich, Pansonic, oscillosopes, color field work, Lord Byron’s poetry, open to influx of information, acceptance, Sufism, Finland, Finnish Sisu or perseverance, Leif Ellegren, EVP, drones, facing fear, humility, computer music, American exceptionalism ...

mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess

In the early 1960s, Poet & multimedia artist Gerd Stern & friends Michael Callahan & Steve Durkee founded USCO (an acronym for Us Company or the Company of Us). It became a burgeoning cooperative group of artists, poets, filmmakers, engineers, & composers who worked out of an old church in Garnerville, New York, north of NYC.

It is here that they emerged as probably the first producers of multimedia happenings, of immersive & oozing light shows, ephemeral performances that became all the rage during the height of hippie-LSD times. Part hippie, part beatnik, part Black Mountain, part Eastern mysticism, part fluxus, part political leftist, & part new music, they adhered to collective & inclusive artistic practices & preferred to work under the USCO name rather than as individual artists.

USCO utilized unique new uses for lighting, colors, projections, film, audio, & live performances to create multimedia & environmental art that included installations with slide projections, closed-circuit television, oscilloscopes, strobe lights, amplifiers, early IBM computers, live performances. This culminate most famously in the Expanded Cinema Festival & Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Theater & the first multimedia disco called Murray the K’s World that incorporated immersive technology & ideas, allowing audiences – many of whom may have been tripping – to feel as if they were entering a new, immersive, sensory realm.

They’ve performed or exhibited at many great museums, universities & venues including the van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, Tate Liverpool, Pompidou Center, MIT, & RISDI. The USCO Church was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.

I first met Gerd in the 20th Century. Born in Germany in 1928, he emigrated with his parents to the US as a refugee in 1936. Gerd & started crossing paths in New York City in the 1960s. We discovered common ground at a Phill Niblock loft concert in the 1990s. He asked me to write music & sound design for his play, “Lost Cabaret” or “Katandogastrophic,” produced for the 2003 New York Fringe Festival. I asked Gerd to create poetry for a 3D sound work Sky High. It is included in this iMMERSE! podcast.

Playlist mix by Wreck This Mess

When Then • USCO SkyHigh • USCO [Gerd Stern Poem, Charlie Morrow Music] Hubbub • USCO Insurrection Oratorio 1 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet Theatre Insurrection Oratorio 2 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet Theatre & various auditory intrusions

mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess

“I define immersive as the first time I realized that there was a bigger universe than my daily life.”

David First is a many-sided composer-musician having played in Dead Cheese, a hippie guitar band in his youth, performed with Cecil Taylor in Carnegie Hall, produced many records of minimalist drone music some of which were released on Phill Niblockʼs XI label, he’s played in rowdy bar bands, led the no-wavish band the Notekillers, which had a significant influence on Sonic Youth and he has even conducted a Mummerʼs String Band in various Philly parades. The Village Voice once described him as "a bizarre cross between Hendrix and La Monte Young."

He’s performed at most of the avant garde’s hallowed halls including The Kitchen, Bang On A Can, Central Park Summerstage, The Knitting Factory, Tonic, the Deep Listening Institute, CBGBʼs as well as De Ijsbreker in Amsterdam and many festivals throughout Europe. Other projects include working with the sonification of the atmospheric phenomena known as the Schumann Resonances and human brainwaves and other esoteric projects such as The Western Enisphere, a drone and micro-pulse acoustic-electric ensemble.

Samples Playlist Wave Music III - 60 Clarinets & a Boat • Charlie Morrow Tape Letter to Michigan • David First Dead Cheese Twice Daily live @ Cheese Nation 1971 • David First Harmonic Dance • David First The Distant Softening Spirit Wave Pulse Tape Girder Interference Etude • Wreck, First & Morrow Live at AmbientChaos • David First Wave Music V - Conch Chorus and Bagpipe • Charlie Morrow Tell Tale • David First Etude 15 • David First Distant Signals • Charlie Morrow Pulse Piece • David First Blossom Dearie Snippet of her Air • Wreck Mix Spirit Voices • Charlie Morrow

Subjects touched upon: drones, bar bands, rock & roll bands, Lamonte Young, Dave’s Waves, Sunview Luncheonette Greenpoint, psychedelic revolution, poet Jerome Rothenberg, bending notes, Douglas Kahn, minimalist tendencies, free jazz, world music, Meteor Crater AZ, the heavens, the Kitchen, Phill Niblock, guitar, oscillators, signal generators, Muddy Waters, electronic music, Dennis Sandole, Hermann von Helmholtz, ancient voltaic cells, Harry Partch, Charles Ives, the minor third, blues, Gert Stern, new age, pseudo-science, Schumann resonances, improv, Discman, electrical engineer father, heterodyning, pursuit of magic, Canal Street ...

mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess

Robin Sip as a Dutch writer-producer-director and CEO of Mirage3DRobin is best known for productions like Mars 1001, Dinosaurs at Dusk, Origins of Life, Natural Selection & Dawn of the Space Age, which was the world’s first 3D fulldome film. Sip is also an award-winning pioneer of special venue 3D cinema & his Mirage3D is a leading fulldome-VR producer, having produced some 20 fulldome shows.

He began his professional life as a computer engineer, moved on to become a 3D modeler, & eventually, a writer-director. More recently, he has focused His is on the improvement of live action capture for domes, with the design of new camera rigs for films & fulldome-VR productions.

I met Robin over a decade ago in Denver, Colorado when his work was featured by Dan Neefus in the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Since then, we’ve collaborated on the creation of the Planetarium version of the feature documentary Moonwalk One on the anniversary of Apollo 11. It has my music & Sound by Robin.

Topics discussed: love of space flight, astronauts, Apollo 11 & 12, immersive practice & work flow, studied electro-computer engineering, Omniversum, tilted dome, digital projectors, space flight narratives, immersive educational films, fulldome cinema, planetariums, research, Darwin, soundtracks, dinosaur.

mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess

Phill Niblock migrated to New York after completing a BA in economics at Indiana University, determined to pursue his passions: photography and film, often documenting jazz and modern dance performances. [Playlist below]

But, despite having no formal musical training, he soon found himself inspired by the New York music scene and immersed himself in experimental music, specifically loud sound, microtonal work, minimalism, and drones, producing works of often epic length. Fifty years later we can see how influential he has been in these genres with his copious output of records, videos and films and having won numerous awards along the way.

He has served as director of the Experimental Intermedia foundation for avant-garde music since 1985 and curates the record label XI. Niblock’s films includes a series called The Movement of People Working, which features workers at work in mostly rural setting worldwide.

Niblock has often collaborated with musicians, which include David First, Lee Renaldo, Thurston Moore, Susan Stenger, Al Margolis, and David Soldier as well as with me.

He just turned 90. He and I first connected in the 1970s when he attended Rhys Chatham’s presentation of my Spirit Voices in the Kitchen of the Broadway Central Hotel. He invited me to perform at his loft in Chinatown where he had just begin what has become a historic series. He came to my home sound studio on West End Avenue and West 77th Street for a session. I engineered and removed all the pauses from his solo cello work, making it a drone work. Phill's sunsets shone in our 1987 International TV Solstice. His Glittering Stream graced our Winter Solstice Celebration 2020.

Topics discussed by Morrow and Niblock: immersion, Lenny Tristan, Empress Dowager Cixi, China, rule of thirds, photography, high fidelity, history of hifi, speakers, dark room techniques, New York City water, performances, listening to records as immersion, tenement life, Mingus, Ellington, Monk, alcoholism, loops, file storage, loud sound, tech and gear, sound editing, reel to reel, archives, old trains, wire recorders ...