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The Ambient Temple of Imagination is an open collective dedicated to activating the world's imagination through experimentation. It is primarily promoted and conducted by Richard Sun and Seofon, but members exist worldwide, and anyone is welcome to join in and participate, collaborate, or do their own work under the ATOI banner. Our work is a continuation of the "ultimate conspiracy": to transmit information intended to prepare humanity for its role as global and galactic consciousness.
The transmission began in San Francisco, where Richard planted the seeds of the ambient experiment in the rave scene, outside of the stagnant rock & roll circuit. With introspective chill spaces, ritual performance art, and spoken-word poetry, ATOI focused on the public ceremonial exploration of magick and sound.
With its recent releases, ATOI intends to inject a virus into the music industry that will transform it, over the next 20 years, into something new--a scientific expression, using technology to alter consciousness, evolving out of a dependence on chemicals and business into an awareness of vibration and sound. The ATOI sound is that of enlightened awareness using new technology, a process of discovery and learning through experimentation.
WHAT IS MYSTERY SCHOOL?
The seeds of Mystery School were planted at the Imagination event, 10 September 1992 at Townsend in San Francisco. Promoted by ATOI founder Richard Sun, the event featured the city's first dedicated all-night horizontal chill-out space, as well as a live performance by Seofon's music project of the time. Contact between Sun and Seofon was intermittent for the next year, while Seofon shaped his first solo album, but upon its completion Richard proposed a collaboration, the fruit of which was the ninety-minute "Mantram" (two excerpts of which have been released). Sun and Seofon were immediately aware of their common interests and effective chemistry, and decided to form a branch of ATOI called Mystery School, which would focus on releasing records and CD's of material which continued the transmission of the mystery schools of ancient and modern times.
The first Mystery School release was a 12-inch e.p. on San Francisco's Visible Records label, entitled Volume One. Due to the enthusiasm behind the project, Visible sought support in releasing a Mystery School CD, finally connecting with ambient music pioneer Silent Records, who had long been interested in Richard's work. Sun and Seofon worked intently for the next few months to complete the material for a full-length Volume One, which Silent then pressed and released cooperatively with Visible as 1994's Mystery School album, and which subsequently peaked at #18 during five weeks on CMJ's RPM chart. Silent Records signed ATOI to its roster, going on to release Sonic Acupuncture, the sequel to Mystery School, double-packed with a classic live recording entitled Eleusinia. Following Silent's reorganization, ATOI left to pursue new opportunities, connecting with the up-and-coming Mindspore label to release 1997's acclaimed Planetary House Nation live concert album, which reached #29 on the NAV Top 50 national chart. With that album's widespread recognition, but with all of the earlier material now out of print, the group decided to issue an anthology of their recording history, which manifested in July of 1999 as the independent double-disc release Y2KAOS. With it ATOI hopes to foster connections and collaborations with artists and industry, most recently realized in the collaborative Zero Point project with ambient music luminaries Vidna Obmana and Steve Roach.
The songwriting process for Mystery School usually begins with an extensive dialog and/or meditation on the material that is to be brought forward in the transmission of that session, with attention to both experimentation and continuity of the album. The piece is thus created on the mental level first; then it is just a matter of bringing it into being. Richard Sun relies heavily upon the techniques of automatic drawing, channeling spontaneous inspiration with whatever tools are available. Although Mystery School is electronically based, Richard occasionally plays guitar and acoustic instruments for injections of raw energy.
Mystery School is of the awareness that new technology, even like electronic music instruments, affects the destiny of humanity, and that music is not about becoming a public figure but about discovering and learning--both for the artist and the listener. Evolution in the present time requires more than a rock and roll mentality, or a product mentality--We want to change and open that paradigm, and facilitate the progress to a galactic mind. We are clearly in intense times on this planet. ATOI and Mystery School focus explicitly on religion and prophecy because religion is used to program and control people, but we have power over this enough to change the "doomsday" prophecies, to demonstrate that we have choice in these things.