JOHNS: We've got a special guest here in the studio...! Right now Richard Sun from the Ambient Temple of Imagination has been running the music for about the past hour, so maybe you've been noticing a bit of a different flavor. Richard's been trying to bring his knowledge of the ambient electronic sphere.... Do you want to let people know what your work is about, give people an idea where you're coming from?

SUN: The work. Transmission of global mind into super-consciousness, transmitting the information relevant to taking our quantum leap in the evolution of the human race.

JOHNS: OK ... I think that'll work. How long have you been attempting to complete this trans-global mission here that you seem to be working towards?

SUN: The ATOI transmission started when I left Santa Cruz about four years ago for the scene up in the City. We've been doing the ambient experiment in the rave scene since '91 and pretty much now it's mostly studio work. We have three CD's out ... and it's a variety/collective of experimentalists throughout the Bay Area. I'm back here, back home, back in the Santa Cruz domain and open to collaboration with anyone who's interested in experimenting.

JOHNS: Looking for someone to possibly bring a new approach, maybe a little bit of new energy into ... ?

SUN: ... Continuing the evolution. I basically am maybe like a conductor or something like that.

JOHNS: Someone who can wave their arms emphatically.

SUN: Yeah. When we started up there was really no ambient scene and it was a lot of hard work to establish this dire necessity for the ambient experiment within the rave community, and it's pretty much now a fixture -- If you go to any really good events up there, they need to have their chill room.

JOHNS: I just recently was flipping through the pages of a Rolling Stone, actually, there was a little one-page blurb called "Chill Out" talking about people like Jason Bentley and the movement towards even cafe chill rooms and things like that. What's your take on that?

SUN: Well I actually just came from Los Angeles, spent a couple of months down there, and we did a really nice beautiful room at this Enit Festival. It was a packed house; it was really nice; all the big names were there, and we were doing our little psychoactive environment in this beautiful place called the Palace, on Vine, and it was just perfect, it was so perfect. And basically ... I grew up in the 60's in a pretty hard-core psychoactive environment in Chicago so I got dosed pretty heavily with the consciousness there as a kid.

JOHNS: You got side-stream psychedelics!

SUN: Yeah, so this is just continuing where we all left off, into the 21st century, we're bringing a virus into the music industry that's going to transform it completely into a scientific expression using science and technology to alter consciousness, evolving out of chemical dependencies into transmitting vibrations and sounds.

JOHNS: Maybe this is going to delve a little personally here, but what's your take in terms of how the underground culture -- and, to use the generic term, rave: the rave culture -- is very heavily intertwined with a drug culture in terms of controlled substance culture. How do you weave within that?, because I see you as coming from more of a spiritual angle.

SUN: Yeah, well I would say that everybody needs to explore on the chemical level of enlightenment and gain their own experience but there is a certain point where you reach a level of realization that you need to maintain or access these states of consciousness without the chemicals. But I would certainly say that, without the chemicals, all of the technologies and computers and everything that we're dealing with now probably wouldn't even have come into existence. So they serve a great purpose; unfortunately, in this culture, we are still dealing with these people that are extremely hard to communicate with, and I'm trying to communicate on subtle and direct levels ... But eventually, in the future, thing like LSD and DMT and all those psychoactive compounds will be totally probably worldwide used like vitamins and nutritional supplementation.

JOHNS: You'll be able to download them from a webpage somewhere.

SUN: That may be very well come about.

JOHNS: Yeah, scary as it is, you can lick your screen and get your vitamins for the day.

SUN: We're doing the closest thing to it, which is the alchemical laboratories of the ambient experimentalists, of which probably the Bay Area is the biggest nest of people who really are aware of this potential with technology.

JOHNS: It definitely seems that the City has embraced this ambient scene. Do you attribute that in any way to the psychedelic history of the City?

SUN: Absolutely. This is where the '60s experimentation was before the music industry began, before there was a formal product and producers and even record companies -- Everything was in its raw primal chaos state and that's why a lot of people look back to the '60s as the beginning point when this psychedelic thing began, but it actually has been going on since humanity existed. We've been doing this shamanistic dance through time and space for eons of time, and I would probably say that we could look in history, in the past, and see where we're going into the future, and many people that are probably listening to this program have experienced the galactic mind and ... We're moving there, we're definitely moving there despite the insanity and the war on drugs and all this stuff.

JOHNS: At least, maybe if they haven't experienced the galactic mind, they've watched a little Battlestar Galactica back in the 70's so they have a little bit of the cheesy sound effects and all that. Everybody's ready to explore the new frontiers of space and time! Do you have any parting words for your new ... are you calling Santa Cruz your home again now?

SUN: Yeah, Santa Cruz has always been home because I still keep the same old P.O. box and see people from time to time, but it's definitely the home base. Hmm ... parting words? ... there is no beginning and no end, it's a continuation! We'll see what comes down the road; maybe some live stuff in Santa Cruz.

JOHNS: Two quick questions: You talked about collaborating further with some new people ... Are you going to continue the Ambient Temple or are you going to try to create something completely different, maybe reinvent ... ?

SUN: Well, ATOI is an ongoing experiment, and specifically in the Temple we try to bring up a lot of the religious formulas and iconology of sound concerning a lot of the spiritual aspects, but on Volume 4, depending on who materializes for this collaboration, it'll probably be much more ... possibly I should use the word "intense". I can't really go into the detail, but a lot of people equate ambient with gentle meditation music, which it is, but it's also a generic category for sound experimentation. So, the harder-edged stuff is definitely on the horizon.

JOHNS: That's good to know. Definitely for a harder-edged society ... forget all that kinder-gentler stuff!, unfortunately.

SUN: We need that, too. We need it all, all the colors.

JOHNS: I don't know how you feel about this, but would you care to give out your P.O. box so that if there are some interested people who might want to speak to you about collaboration they can drop you a line?

SUN: Sure! [The contact info given is, of course, out of date. ATOI can currently be contacted by email, post, and phone, as given on the homepage.] But down here ... this is the place, actually, where it all started, at the Coconut Grove.

JOHNS: Oh no ... that close to the Surf Bowl!

SUN: Mr. Floppy!, that was the first rave that we all experienced: We went down there, that was in '91, and I knew right then and there from the moment I heard the sound that I had a job to do.

JOHNS: Yeah, that was the year that broke the back of the underground if there was one. I know I was in LA and it was an interesting year if nothing else.

SUN: Historically it really triggered; there was just enormous psychoactivity from that point on in the City. It took on a humongous proportion beyond anything I think I ever even witnessed in the '60s. I should say probably, on this last CD, we had 25000 people at New Years on the live CD, which was at the Cow Palace, and they actually had to turn away 7000 people in line because their insurance was only paid for that much, for 25000 people. So these events are getting quite out-there, like in England they estimate there's half a million people on the weekends raving. That's a massive amount of people.

JOHNS: It's quite amazing when you think you can only get 40% of the people to vote, but you can get thousands and thousands of young people to get out and dance all night, dehydrate themselves to the point of passing out. So there's definitely something to be said for this scene.

SUN: It's definitely a very powerful and, I believe, ultimately a movement of the future, of cultural evolution. I believe that it is changing a lot of perceptions and ways in society that we're not aware of, each time an event like that occurs. That's what the Sonic Acupuncture name is about: it's like planetary acupuncture with sound.

JOHNS: And just to give you a little plug, that is the actual name of the album; it's a double disc ...

[About 20 seconds of the dialogue are missing here, but when it picks up Richard is apparently discussing IAO Core's Feast of Fire ritual during the Eleusinia concert.]

SUN: ... injection into what we were doing. And that's a lot of what the ATOI thing is, to try to incorporate performance art and ritual theater and kind of focalizing the energy. It's very heavily involved in spoken-word and poetry.

JOHNS: Yeah, I've been noticing that thread; it's I think a very potent thread in terms of how you can bridge the music so easily with those spoken pieces and bring in the elements of dialog into the music.

SUN: I'd also like to give a mention to, in case nobody knows out there, Timothy Leary is dying of cancer and who knows how long he's got left to live. He's pretty close to it, and he's basically said that when he checks out he's going to dose, so just to let you know out there that he's ready to check out.

JOHNS: So if you've got a few tabs laying around, just mail and send them to Timothy and let him go out in style! How old is he anyway?

SUN: 74, I believe, 75? He definitely was an instrumental part of the whole trip, and his spirit definitely lives on.

JOHNS: Yeah, it's interesting: It seems like the trips are -- I mean, with the death of Jerry Garcia, and you speaking of Timothy Leary dying -- there definitely is a passing of the torch in terms of The Trip, because you've got this old trip dying and here comes this new underground scene picking up the torch and running with it.

SUN: Absolutely, yeah, Jerry was very aware of the rave scene and a lot of the Grateful Dead family are very connected with that. We definitely will miss him, but we feel him. I was actually down in LA, at the Moontribe gathering, which is a free outdoor thing every month in Los Angeles, the day that Jerry died. On that full moon there were about 2000 people out there in the desert and we were feeling him very strong. It's pretty amazing.

JOHNS: I know there was definitely something felt here in Santa Cruz; it was an interesting day. I actually, personally, didn't think I'd ever live to see the day but: surprise enough. But I'm sure everybody will pick up and move on. Do you want to say anything? ... OK! Running away from the microphone! Well, I definitely want to thank Richard for coming up here.

outward  inward