Ambient Temple Of Imagination Article by Michael Moynihan/Photos by Larence Sutton
Originally printed in SECONDS #34 ©1995
You may not realize it, but you've heard AMBIENT TEMPLE OF IMAGINATION before. Whether or not you've purchased a CD by RICHARD SUN's project of that name, it is part of your consciousness. Listening to the "music" of ATOI is a bit like slipping into a parallel universe - the one inside your own head. Sure, there are other ways to access such a place (take a hit of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, or simpler still, just close your eyes and float into the vast, undulating electricity of your mind's eye), but this is a damn convenient one.
Born at the onset of the 1960s, having experienced the deranged mindfuck of that decade firsthand, Sun recalls his very extraordinary childhood almost as if it were yesterday. And Ambient Temple picks up where the original hallucinogenic musicians left off before they dead-ended into Flower Power nowheresville. Unlike most who adopt its mantle, Sun takes the possibilities of Psychedelia seriously, propelling ATOI into the future, not the retro paisley past. By doing so he's created two albums (Mystery School and the double CD set Sonic Acupuncture/Eluesinia, both on Silent Records) which transcend their "Ambient" classification and go far beyond the routine Techno/Primitive formulas of the genre.
A conversation with Richard Sun is psychedelic, too, as the reader will quickly discern in the following extraction from an almost two hour conversation. Tune out your mundane workaday world, turn off the faucet of media babyfood you've been ingesting, and drop into the Ambient Temple of Imagination...
SECONDS: Describe what kind of performances ATOI has been involved with.
SUN: It's all underground stuff that I do. It's not really commercial venues or anything. I've been doing rooms for the last four years, since the Rave scene started in San Francisco. What I did in those rooms was experimental collages of sounds. The first one I did - there was about ten thousand people - it was called "Toon Town." The scene was extremely Psychedelic, probably the most Psychedelic thing that ever happened in San Francisco since the Sixties.
SECONDS: Psychedelic in the sense that everyone was on drugs or that it was "mind-expanding"?
SUN: Probably eighty-five to ninety percent of the people there were tripping on psychedelics. When I was a kid, I grew up in Chicago and my father had this coffee house called The Witch's Haven which was a speakeasy for the Beats that hung out there and a lot of the Black Panthers and Chicago Seven and all these radicals that were hanging out with my dad. It's like the same thing, only much more technological now, and more mind-altering.
SECONDS: It's expanded from just being confined to a coffee house ...
SUN: It was Psychedelic back then too, but it was different in the sense that the Rock & Roll industry had not developed. It was still fresh and people like Hendrix and The Doors were just beginning to be formulated. It hadn't become a marketable product. It was still a wild experience. I grew up in that and my father was a Satanist - he actually went on to become an Atheist ... The Witch's Haven was in Old Town, which is like Haight-Ashbury. Actually, it doesn't even exist any more. When I grew up in this place, there was hundreds of thousands of people tripping their balls off in this area and it's been completely eradicated off the planet. It's weird - when I got into this scene in San Francisco, some people actually remembered Witch's Haven. It was really strange because these people are in their fifties and I was just this little kid running around this place. It was kind of like the hangout for a lot of bizarre characters that would come out of the woodwork at three in the morning.
SECONDS: How did you go about recording Mystery School, ATOI's first CD?
SUN: Basically, we did that in my friend's house and just channeled it. There's no rehearsal, that's just what comes out. The spontaneity is what I'm into. I'm really influenced a lot by Bill Nelson and Austin Osman Spare's automatic writing, and stuff like that is what I try to do with sound. Another thing that I work a lot with is processing. I work my processors like instruments. Most people just use reverb or echo effects as a little touch-up, but to me those are as much of an instrument as my keyboard. I'm very much into experimentation and that's what Ambient Music is - it's not really music, it's more of an experiment in sonic research. We consider ourselves librarians of sound. We're trying to inject a virus into the music industry and transform the entire music industry into something extremely mind-altering. In a way, you can say hallucinogenic drugs in the Sixties gave birth to processing technologies. The Echoplex and early delay units were the beginning of an evolution of technology that manipulates time and sound. In the future, I feel this technology is going to be used as drugs. It's what we're doing now. It's like having a laboratory where you can alter consciousness. You can alter the way people think because they're hearing sounds that they've never heard in the history of worlds; they're hearing stuff that their ears have never witnessed.
SECONDS: But hasn't music always affected consciousness?
SUN: Yeah. Absolutely. But now processing to me is like psychedelic instruments. As soon as you get into the world of processing, everything becomes psychedelicized.
SECONDS: Maybe you can define what you mean by Psychedelic Music because the average person is going to think it's in the genre of Sixties Acid Rock.
SUN: It's music that blows your mind to infinity; it comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. It has no beginning and no end. It's like sound that comes through that's non-classifiable. It's an enigma. It just exists and can't be labeled. ... if people really expanded on psychedelia and channeled their core self - like Nietzsche would say in "The Superman" ... if you were channeling the Superman right now, what would that sound like? This is something that keeps people obsessed with their art, is that there's a pressure from within that's driving them to channel this thing that will give people the inspiration to activate their own art.
SECONDS: You felt Rock & Roll becoming an industry is what destroyed its power to affect things. Wouldn't that happen with any form of music?
SUN: If they smell money to be made, these guys have their scientists and psychologists studying the trends - and believe me, they're all over the Rave scene trying to see if they can make money on it. If there's a particular point I'm trying to make it's that the industry is run by people who are not just in it for the money but they're in it to prevent certain things from coming out. I do believe there are some definite conspiratorial situations going on behind the scenes. They want to prevent the real shit from getting too popular. It's very hard to describe ...
SECONDS: Why would they want to prevent something genuine coming through if they'd profit from it?
SUN: Well, the thing is ... that's a good question. It's like ... if there's particular music that would be labeled anti-Semitic then they will work to suppress certain things if they get out of control. I don't think you or I or anybody, at the level of power that these people are at - and this isn't even the music industry, I'm talking about politics and the world banking system of the New World Order.
SECONDS: What's the tangible effect of this kind of conspiracy?
SUN: Instead of encouraging revolutionary thought it drains it out. I think that's true now. People in Rock & Roll want to dis the Rave scene as some kind of Disco trip - and let me say right here, right now: this is no Disco. This is some of the hardest shit I've ever experienced in my life and I've been in Rock Music since I was ten years old. I had a cover band, we did Kiss songs and Queen and Mott The Hoople and all this shit. The Rave scene is the future. People are tired of paying twenty bucks to watch somebody play and then go home. They want to stay all night until the sun comes up and that's what happens in this scene -it's all night and it's all ages. They're trying very hard to suppress this with the Criminal Justice Bill in England. The Rave scene in England is so huge. They estimate half a million people are raving on a weekend in England. That's a serious threat to the government. The government realizes this thing is so huge and the power in that music is so strong. It gets people trancing and dancing for ten to twelve hours on Psychedelics. That's the kind of excitement that was going on in the Sixties. The government tried as hard as they could to suppress that kind of radical thinking.
SECONDS: What I wonder is: what's particularly revolutionary about ten thousand people taking drugs and dancing for fifteen hours? In what way are they a threat to the government?
SUN: Not all these people are doing drugs. The whole thing doesn't revolve around drugs, but for sure there's a lot of people doing mind-altering substances. If not that, there's a lot of Pot being smoked.
SECONDS: The people I've known who do that - my impression of them is that they do absolutely nothing. I'm not just saying Pot specifically, but I think Pot is a drug that has a pacifying effect on people.
SUN: I would say, too, that if anyone thinks Pot is not addictive, they're full of shit. Maybe it's not physiologically addictive, but psychologically it's totally addictive. It gives you the illusion that everything's okay - and everything's not okay. Everything's really fucked up.
SECONDS: So why would it be good that there are unprecedented numbers of people smoking Pot?
SUN: I'm not saying that's good or bad; it just is a phenomenon I'm witnessing. To be honest with you, I outgrew that phase when I was a teenager. I did massive quantities of all these things ... I don't need drugs to get high. I'm not into the Hippie thing. If you can't make yourself high, if you need something to get high, then you're really fucked. Being fucked in this society is common. People are really fucked up, they need something to get high. They need their whiskey, their Pot, but then there's the flipside, which is Shamanism. Shamanic use of power plants to get visions is a whole other thing. In this culture, we're very weak on Shamanistic use of power plants. Down in the Amazon, if the warriors didn't have DMT, they would not survive; they would not be able to adapt to the forest. Native American people as well - their visionary Peyote. Same thing in Mexico, the San Pedro cactus and Psilocybin mushrooms. Native peoples throughout the world are into medicine plants for healing, enlightenment and spiritual purposes. You can look at their art and their strength and you can see that behind it there's an elder who knows how to initiate the younger people.
SECONDS: Is that knowledge equally applicable to everyone?
SUN: No.
SECONDS: It seems to me that magic is by its very nature elitist. Part of it is furthering your own agenda and really not caring what everyone else is doing.
SUN: Well, a big word that comes up in LaVey's doctrine is "pretentious." I do not want to sound like I know anything. I could talk for ten months about all the different levels of garbage I've gotten myself into. It all sums up as sounding pretentious, like I really know something. The bottom line is this: I know that I have a responsibility to myself. My intention is realized in the music that I'm doing. I'm intending to put something out that's going to make people think. People can dissect it or make it seem like I'm trying to be pretentious, but I know what I'm trying to do. I'm going uphill all the way here. Everybody wants to hear the straight Rock & Roll: 4/4 guitar, bass, and drums, with somebody screaming in your face. I've done that. It's no longer interesting to me. I want to do something different. I think I'm doing my true will. The word that comes to mind is virus. There's negative viruses and there's positive viruses. I think the Ambient thing is a positive virus. It's going to make people in the music industry think. I'm interested in reaching musicians. I would like to see them do stuff that blows my mind. I outgrew the music industry when I was twenty years old. I realized it's a game; it's about money. I wasn't in music when I was a kid to make money. It was the only thing I could to do to survive. I either had to create my own gang or get shot up in the other gangs. That's what it was for me. The only way to survive in Chicago - you have to have your family. That's what we did. We had this little gang ... we were in some serious shit in there. I remember once in Chinatown we were playing in this Chinese Cultural Center and there was a serious riot. We're still blaring away on stage and there's people with baseball bats. There I am, fourteen years old, we're playing Kiss songs, stoned out of our fucking minds
SECONDS: What sparked the riot?
SUN: The Italians came into the Chinese neighborhood. My best friend was Chinese, this guy from China, Peter Lau. These Italian guys came in to start a fight. This was my childhood, this is what I grew up doing these free concerts in churches and cultural centers throughout Chicago. It was a wild scene. I'm not a fuckin' wimp, but if you don't carry a gun and you're dealing with people who are carrying guns -
SECONDS: - you're an idiot.
SUN: You have a choice: do you want to die or do you want to live? See, my guitar was my gun. This is where it gets really political. Am I a pussy because I don't want to be stockpiling arms? I've got friends who do stockpile arms and they're ready for whatever the fuck comes down the tube. I want to do art, man. I want to make music.
SECONDS: But you obviously have no problem with carrying weapons.
SUN: I don't know, there's all kinds of problems I deal with. Chicago is a brutal place. Chicago is a mean, ugly, cold place. I've witnessed shit, gang warfare, and it's pointless. These people are not aware. My outlet was music. In the Nineties, I think people are realizing that getting signed to a major label and getting a big budget is the only way you can survive. It probably sounds to you that there's a lot of chaos in what I speak, because I am in a state of chaos and I have been since I was born. My mom was a prostitute. She worked in the red light district in Chicago on Rush Street. I remember when I was a kid and I'd go to these places that she'd work and they had full-blown orgies onstage. They don't have that anymore.
SECONDS: Pornography was far more extreme in the Seventies than it
is now.
SUN: Now it's all on video so people don't go out. It's in their house. What's happening now is people are getting more isolated. People are getting alienated to the point where they don't know how to relate to other people anymore ... I think half the people out there would commit suicide if it could be painless. If you set up a painless vacuum, they'd just walk right into it. This is where it gets very metaphysical. Who's really in control here? Is it the aliens? Is it the Masons? Is it George Bush and The Knights Templar? Is Reagan a 32nd degree Mason who killed Kennedy because he wasn't a Mason? Who's in control? Is George Petros a CIA agent? It's a real question.
SECONDS: Or, is anyone in control?
SUN: I'm not saying I have anything figured out. I don't claim to have all the answers, I think I have a couple, though. ... I think where humanity goes from here is a serious thing. My own personal philosophy is that China is the key to the revolution. People keep babbling that Communism is over, the Wall is down in Germany, but they don't even talk about China. The karma of the Tibetan magical systems - it was a tribal culture that, when that was destroyed in the beginning of the Sixties, all this knowledge of Tibet is now accessible to the Western mind, but before 1959 nobody knew jack shit about Tibet.
SECONDS: Haven't the Chinese done their best to wipe it out completely?
SUN: There's a couple of reasons. One, Tibet had a storage vault of treasure and gold artifacts, huge solid-gold Buddhas - we're literally talking about tons of gold. There's somewhere between two and three thousand temples that are two thousand years old and all those temples had storage vaults full of ancient artifacts. In Tibet, they didn't have a monetary system. Emeralds and jewels are more for adornment than money transactions. The whole Chinese invasion was created by the CIA in the first place. There's evidence too that Hitler had dispatched intelligence agents to Tibet and they had accumulated information and brought back various swamis and the Black Path school. A lot of these things sound like wild rumors, but the swastika's origin is from Tibet. Right now, there's some people saying Hitler's alive down in Argentina and other people claim the Russians have his skull and on and on it goes. There's some people that say Hitler was Jewish, there's some people who claim because his father sodomized him every day as a child he -
SECONDS: - had an axe to grind?
SUN: There's all these things. When something like that occurs in history, there's a power behind it. There's a force of will behind it. I think the problem with Americans is that our cultural identity is so confused - we're not a tribe. America is this mosh pit of all the races, religions, creeds and colors. In a place like Germany, there's a national identity. People speak the same language. I'm German myself and I am fascinated by genealogy - where people come from. You can look at somebody and immediately you can tell where their genetic lineage comes from. The blood carries the spirit all the way back to the beginning. You get to these root races, the beginning of the creation of humanity. That's a fascinating subject. When we start probing the origin of the human species, that's where you get into the gray area. Do you believe we came out of the muck of the ocean and that evolved into some amphibious land creature which then mutated over millions and millions of years and human beings evolved from apes ... there's a lot of scientists on the planet that validate Darwin's theory but at the same time they say, "We can't prove this."
SECONDS: By it's nature it's a theory, which means it hasn't been proven.
SUN: The theory that's just as applicable is that extraterrestrials came here and mated with Cro-Magnon cave dwellers and created a whole new species. That's as believable to me as that we evolved from monkeys. This is where it gets funny. Terrence McKenna is saying, "Let's say Darwin is correct. What happened is these monkeys ate mushrooms and they started going psychedelic and that's the mutation effect that occurred. Whenever somebody does a Psychedelic drug, they've mutated, they are no longer the same person. They are no longer chemically the same once they've had a psychedelic experience." I think that there's a lot of validity to that theory. If you look at The Beatles' music, Sgt. Pepper's and Yellow Submarine, and then you look at what music they were doing before they did Psychedelics, it's real clear that the mind explosion -
SECONDS: Yeah, but look at what Paul McCartney does now. Did he revert back to something even more insipid than the early Beatles?
SUN: Well, all of those guys are magicians. I just saw somewhere in the paper that Paul McCartney is worth six hundred and fifty million dollars.
SECONDS: So you mean magicians in the sense that they are -
SUN: Hypnotists. People like Paul are serious musicians. They have an ability to mesmerize with their music. They can create music that is true mind control.
SECONDS: Maybe in the sense that any music is. I would certainly say the best Beatles stuff has that effect, but I don't know about "Ebony And Ivory." I guess you could say that's mind programming of another sort.
SUN: I was in a bookstore and I read Mark David Chapman's autobiography and anybody that reads this magazine, if they want to get their mind blown, go get that book. This guy was a fundamentalist reborn Christian tripping his balls off on Acid wishing to God he could be as big as John Lennon. The church he belonged to paid for his tickets to New York - he told the guys in his church, "I'm going to kill John Lennon" and they said, "How can we help?" He said, "I need a gun and I need plane tickets to go to New York and I have to get a hotel room ... I'll probably need about three grand" and they gave it to him.
SECONDS: Your recordings contain numerous references to Aleister Crowley. Why do you feel his philosophy is important?
SUN: I'm really seriously into Crowley; I don't dismiss Crowley as some eccentric poet drug fiend homosexual. Crowley was one of the greatest geniuses of this century. There's a lot of people out there who just think he's a fool - which he was; he played the role of the fool many times. The thing is, when people start talking about Hitler, they start talking about the creation of the Nazi Party and how they got into the occult and how this whole thing was engineered. It didn't happen overnight; this thing was well planned for many years. Crowley did have a big part in all this. Anybody who studies the history and gets into the facts of what was going on in England at that time with the Golden Dawn ... people like Bram Stoker and Shelley and these people were the beginning of the horror movement with Dracula and Frankenstein. All these people were in the Golden Dawn back in the 1890s. We're in a similar situation right now in the 1990s. We're in a computerized version of the Golden Dawn where these Illuminati and these people who are serious agents for planetary evolution are all opening up this new era. Inevitably, that new era, which has been run by the old school - they're holding on until every last one of them is gone. The thing that Crowley did was putting the woman on the altar and declaring women equal with man. In her, all power is given. It's like the beginning of the first male acceptance of the female equality movement. Crowley was a Mason - you don't see female Masons - and he threw this whole monkey wrench into the Masonic Order by putting women into the organization. What I'm trying to get at here is that I think the whole New Age movement -beginning with Blavatsky, Theosophy, Gardnerian Wiccan teachings which trace the modern Pagan movement back ... if you're into the history of the occult going back all the way to ancient times, I consider LaVey one of the keyholders of the present. Evolution from England to America - the question is: now where does it go? His teachings are in many ways different from Crowley's because Crowley religiously told people to do drugs. This was a part of the teaching. If you look at Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and the Stones, all these people had Crowleyan influences in the Sixties. They had all read Crowley - Lennon studied Crowley intensely. In The Book Of Law it says, "Take wine and strange drugs and worship me under the stars," basically worshipping the goddess Nuit, the star goddess, the goddess of the universe and invoking all her power into your consciousness. Realize we are stars. We appear to be human beings, but that's one microscopic speck of what we are.
