A 17-minute binaural headphone piece: a guided Soham meditation led by a guru who is also a parrot — voiced by Warren, pitch-shifted into absurdity. The audience laughs. The parrot is funny. And the parrot is also guiding them, truly, through one of the most foundational of all mantras. Soham: I am that — the sound the breath already makes, so on the inhale, ham on the exhale.
Beneath the parrot-guru, three sonic geographies braided in binaural audio: kākā parrots in flight over Wellington's Prince of Wales Park, a Catholic festival in Puebla, and recordings from the United States. The binaural production is the conceptual engine, not a finish: heard on headphones, the three places occupy three-dimensional positions around the listener's head at once, an audio augmented reality laid over wherever the listener actually sits — a heterotopia, a space that occupies a location without being locatable. The instruction is to listen in your favorite meditation spot, undistracted: the listener's own most private geography becomes the fourth space, and the work completes only through that geolocative participation. The story it tells lives across three real places, a fictional guru, and the listener's own room — transmedia in the strict sense, distributed across channels that only the listener's attention unifies.
The Zen tradition has always used humor and paradox to short-circuit the rational mind. The hilarious parrot is the koan. The laugh and the breath are the same breath. The parrot laughs you into stillness.
Headphones recommended · 17 minutes · find a quiet place to listen