Sense Gates: Sound, with Erik Davis and Sam Plattner – Berkeley, CA

The first in an occasional series of Sense Gates workshops on sensory awareness taught by Alembic co-founder Erik Davis, this gathering will focus on the contemplative and aesthetic practice of listening – to sounds, to music, to the environment, to the Void. Erik will discuss the topic of sacred sound in world mystical traditions, including the extraordinary teachings in the Surangama Sutra, and link these teachings to more contemporary and experimental approaches to “deep listening.” Then Erik and Sam will present various practices keyed to a variety of manipulated soundscapes, drones, and musical tracks drawn from the spiritual avant-garde.

In addition to inaugurating the Sense Gates workshops, this afternoon event will also provide some of the thoughts and approaches behind Alembic’s new 3RD EAR series of musical and sound events. 3RD EAR will explore ambient soundscapes, field recordings, experimental electronica, sacred noise, cosmic drones, sonic manipulations, and Old World improvisations.

Hearing is a thing that just happens, but listening is a practice: a way of exploring and meditating on sensation, mind, and the vibratory cosmos around us.

With the purchase of your Sense Gates: Sound ticket, you will get complimentary entry into Hidden Vistas, an urban soundscape experience with Sam Plattner at 7pm.

Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on alternative religion, media culture, the popular imagination, and the psychedelic underground. He is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. Davis’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He writes the online publication the Burning Shore (www.burningshore.com), and his next book is Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024).www.techgnosis.com