h+ Magazine

A moment of speculation, rooted in a study of universal trends: human history can be defined as development along any of numerous axes, but my preferred storyfor- our-species is of an advance in mind control technologies. For good and ill, the development of our consciousness flies in tandem with our expanding capacity to access and explore various states of mind at will. Our command of navigating the mind with sensory and electrochemical stimulation has matured to include everything from reviving early entheogenic experiments with drumming and chanting, to contemporary techniques of magnetic temporal lobe stimulation and virtual reality immersion. And with impending advances in biotech and nanotech that will profoundly deepen the intimate relationship between brain and machine (and erase those primitive distinctions), we can be sure that individual control of the mind will be one of the best markers we have for measuring our humanity (and our transhumanity).

With this in mind, I spend much of my time looking at contemporary art and music as touchstones, clues to our place as a self-transcending species. Every time I see intention meet technology in a deliberate manipulation of mindstates, I rejoice that we are on the right track. And nowhere is this confluence more apparent than in the careful structuring of electronic musicians like Akhentek, a self-described “crystalline array technician” from Elphinstone, British Columbia, whose psy-trance productions are “precision engineered sonic textures intentionally designed to induce higher frequency mindstates.”

Akhentek’s nuanced tracks, like the burbling glitch of “Spectrality” or the freefloating guitar and synthesizers on his “White Girls in Saris” remix, definitely induce a strange, buzzing feeling – and unlike many other buzz-inducing artists, I know that he’s doing it on purpose. Binaural beats coast inaudibly across each other underneath warm and deep mastering, giving this music the strange quality of feeling at once transparent and mysterious.

Deep within the art of this music coils the esoteric theory of neuroentrainment: the science of getting the brain to vibrate at specific frequencies. It seems to be an easy enough trick. Our brains expect to hear more or less the same thing in each ear, so they split the difference between tones that don’t quite line up, creating the auditory illusion of a single note. This activity requires special collaboration between the right and left hemispheres, which syncs brain activity at that agreed-upon mean. If the left ear hears 104 Hz and the right ear hears 108 Hz, the entire brain will pulse at 4 Hz, the corresponding state of mind. It may be one of the cheapest ways to engineer consciousness. No drugs, no surgery, no nanobots – in theory, all you need is a pair of headphones and a “crystalline array technician” to prepare the sounds for you.

These so-called binaural beats coast inaudibly across each other in Akhentek’s music underneath warm and deep mastering, giving his compositions an odd quality – it feels at once transparent and mysterious.

It’s little wonder that he has a background in biology and “Brazilian Genetics” (which I assume is a euphemism for ayahuasca initiation) – this guy’s eye and ear are definitely trained on human evolution and accelerating its numerous permutations. Cascades of twittering clicks and swells of buzzing oscillations sweep through my head as I listen, seemingly reformatting my consciousness on some deep unconscious level. I start feeling the effects of his “rare sensitivity to frequencies” as the physical environment around me begins to ripple with gauzy transparency.

It may be a long while before we have total agency over individual awareness, but until we do, I’m thrilled to know that we have innovators like Akhentek. Fighting the good fight, sculpting sound to elevate consciousness directly and for the greater good–secret agent techno-shamans like Akhentek are about the business of enlightening unwitting ravers and inspiring the next generation of state-engineers to plunge even deeper into our limitless potential to explore – and create – novel states of mind.

Michael Garfield is a live painter, songwriter, and essayist in Boulder, Colorado.