Heliopathy by Jeff Gburek available for pre-order via Post-Orientalism label (Teheran/Berlin), Album Notes, Further musings----on the process of foraging in the ether or the plasmosphere and beyond while grounded into the earth ---

 

    

     https://postorientalism.bandcamp.com/album/heliopathy

 

 Album Notes

Heliopathy — the feeling of — or for — helios, our local star: a yellow dwarf, although it's funny to call this ball of super fire — so huge — a dwarf, & this is where relativity comes in, I suppose. Heliopathy is not to be confused with heliotherapy but there is no reason not to find within these sounds some form of vibration that can tune or calm the spirit or nerves.

All the sounds you hear in this project derive from radio waves that were recorded October 7 to 18, 2024 during a period of increased Coronal Mass Ejections, during what astrophysicists are now calling an early solar maximum peak, a time when the sun pours out the most radiation in its 11-year cycle.

These sonoscapes are generated using Audiomulch and Max-MSP and rely on a set of field recordings of VLF (very low frequency) radios, shortwave HF receivers, ground wires (ELF) and various antennae and sine wave generators in harmonic phase with Schumann resonance.

Characteristic of my approach to VLF recording is that I carry the device in my hands and walk barefoot on the earth as I record, which results in a different dynamic than isolating the device. I consider that I am part of the field and my "body electric" is a vessel/conduit for transmitting these signals onto digital memory banks.

Some of what you hear are called sferics and the internet can provide you with bales of information on what they are, but basically they are particles bouncing off of one another in the ionosphere as it "breathes" and the geomagnetic impulse flow through the earth's polar axis affected by photon and proton overloads during a CME (coronal mass ejection).

I was guided towards my title by a friend who had been reading Henry Corbin's essay "Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi."

He found that the heliotropic flower in Ibn Arabi's telling, finds a heliopathy and reciprocity in its turning. In that the flower finds its sustenance in the sun, the sun too has an experience of its being through the flower. This being mystical Sufi thought entails the action of mediating messengers in a kind of circular gnosis. In my work as listener and composer I am mediating my experience of the flower of the Gaian entity (Earth) as it unfolds in the many petals of the geomagnetic plasmosphere via the auditory prostheses that allow my mind to surf other dimensions.

Jeff Gburek
December, 2024
Poznan, Poland 

releases February 14, 2025

 

 Further musings 

----on the process of foraging in the ether or the plasmosphere and beyond

while grounded into the earth ---

 

When I go out and work with the devices it's like I can encounter or create a more commprehensive nature connection beyond confines of skin and society -- like field recording but with an extended field that sort of becomes molecular and the subatomic, subliminal, evasive, seductive but already laid -- guided by gravitational waves, pulsars -- wide swaths of universal beathing

I go very easily into ego collapse and it's very strange to do the work in an environement where I must be suddenly be socially engaged and going back into rational language paradigms -- Because it's hard to explain the audiosphere, because, well, it's frighetning on a existential plane: we sense a time frame for phenomenon which carries on without the anthropocene context. And people don't like to hear that the life they've invested so much money in is actually already over. It's unsettling, perhaps.

While in the ego collapse of listening there is a contrary feeling: that nothing dies but is transformed, continues, goes onward into scattered vibrational tempi and, in a sense always, vascilles between being and not being. Life is somewhere in that indeterminate chemical shift between connection (binding) and disconnection (being unbound). In Arabic -- in what I've gathered from reading Ibn Arabi these months: it's the difference bewteen taznih and tasbih, which is the difference between rational cum logical assesment and the apparition or imagination. Full sense only occurs when they are both experienced. In the Sufism of Ibn Arabi -- they are both illusions but the imaginative illusion (tasbih) is the more complete because it involves creative engagement and faith through being present through one's self as witness. And creative action based upon synthesis. The role of art thus becomes more emphatic since these ongoing syntheses of the ways of experience take on a form, one after another. Each form represents the fullness and emptiness. The left and the right. Yin and yang. One can experience this without art but only artlessly. In art, it leaves one back at the beginning. It's an improvisation.

I got another radio device today-- and as usual, it's totally not doing what I expected it to do. But it's interesting to learn what it can do...to both evolve one's knowledge of the builder's intentions and to also create new applications without a template