Ikipr is one of the founders of the label
and website Aleph9.com, where he’s released
a number of albums, both his solo work and
work by a number of others, all free to download.
Aleph9 is more than that though, it is also
a starting point and stepping stone into a
neo-platonic reconstruction of what magic is
capable of becoming, thanks to computers and
the internet.

Ikipr has helped flesh out the cutting edge
of technoshamanism with his experiments and
research into correspondence systems and his
application of this knowledge into the music
he’s crafted. In addition, he’s released a
vast amount of information vital to those
interested in the possibilities promised by
altered mental states triggered through sound
and light, as well as the library of esoteric
and transhuman thought he’s made available to
support these ideas and spread his anti-pop
memes.

In this half of the interview, we’ll be talking about
Ikipr’s unique blend of ambient noise and the ideas
that inform his compositions, and in the second half
of this interview we’ll be discussing ideas that are
impacting human evolution. The transcript begins
after the jump, but first
here’s a small audio portion of the interview:

 Ikipr Interview Intro: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

First off, what is Aleph9 and how did it come about?

It’s kind of like an egregore, if you will.
It’s the Aleph because it’s the zero, or
first emanation. And then 9, because in
single digits that’s the final number. So
it’s kind of an Alpha-Omega synthesis sort
of notion, and I guess that’s the meaning
behind it. But what I really wanted it to
be was kind of like a voice for things that
could only be expressed in music that weren’t
being heard so much so.

And it’s not been used to the extent that I
would like it to be. So I’d encourage anyone
that wanted to release anything on it to
contact me. It’s sort of like an open-source
tool for the community in a way. It’s just
got the channel of me doing the actual
footwork on the code. It’s mostly comprised,
currently i guess, of people who kind of have
an interest in the esoteric in one form or
another. And it may not have been the same
sort of theory that I’m working with, but you
know, it was still something that I really
wanted, to give people an outlet to go through…
Because it can be hard, you can produce
endless amounts of noise and never be heard in
the huge vast landscape of the intarwebs and
whatnot. You know, Aleph9 is completely
free, and I have the control to do that,
to put up as much as I want for free, and
I got to make that decision. Whereas a tool
like Myspace limits you to four or five tracks
at a time, that you can put up for download if
you want, and I guess that’s okay. But it’s
still not the level of control that you’d want.

In looking over Aleph9.com and listening to
the music you’ve released, I can’t help but ponder
how people have gotten to the point where they’re
working with digitized samples to deconstruct
meaning, and then rebuilding it all over again.
I don’t know that this is specifically a magical
process, but it does seem to inform the basis of
a lot of people’s magical systems nowadays.

Well it is kind of a magical act in and of itself.
It kind of reaches out into that non-linear time
interface there, and your digital recordings are
like quantum interfaces into what they’re recordings
of… it’s also kind of kinetic in a way, there’s a
momentum to that evolution. You know, we’re the
intelligence in that feedback system, analyzing the
inputs, using whatever tools, but we’re still the
only utterly free-willed sentience doing that
particular aspect of the process there.

I don’t know, I’ve been working more and more with this notion
that free will is a complete and total illusion. Anything
that could possibly happen is going to happen, and
that we’re just deciding which consciousness to experience as
all these different parallel universes move forward simultaneously
through time.

People tend to underestimate the value of the unmanifest,
because of course it is substantially equal in value.
It’s also kind of weird too, because at the same time
I kind of agree with that notion that this is the universal
perfect construct of reality that we’re viewing. I
can’t shake that feeling that there’s infinite
possibility, but the singularity that meshes from
all these waveforms of different timelines and such
that we experience with our linear perception is
the correct one, in a way. But that’s not to discount
things that we don’t see manifest because they’re
still there, just on subjective levels. It’s in Yesod,
not Malkuth, so you don’t see it.

It’s always appeared to me that Ray Kurzweil’s notion
of the singularity and consciousness storing, removable
media, and being able to swap consciousness with people
like “Hey dude, here’s the Ipod of my consciousness,
borrow it for a week” sort of lends itself to the fractal
realities existing cohesively. But I don’t know, it is
really hard to ponder.

Probably just “really crazy,” but I like that notion of
“hyper-kinetic.” What it is to me is that I’m of the
alignment of sensory overload as a means to Ketheric gnosis.
Like we’re saying earlier, pondering all of the infinite
realities existing simultaneously is a mind-fuck. And
that’s what looking up at the singular Ketheric-Tao is
like to me. It’s all these infinite things at once but
it has like a cohesive beauty to it. And it’s constantly
shifting and moving in endless amounts of ways at once.
That’s what I try to do, but it’s still like technology
is limiting, currently.

It’s gotten a lot better, yet it’s still not where
it could be. Even if I clustered all my computers together
I’m still not sure I could make what I see with a kind
of third-eye perception during a Kabbalistic scrying, or
something like that. But I do kind of try and
incorporate some sacred correspondences to sounds, so
I guess I would iterate that point to people somewhat.

Yes, I’ve noticed you’ve got a handbook/guide to Metaphysical
Music Theory on Aleph9 under the Theory link.

Yes, it’s handbook sized because all I felt that was
important was the actual correspondence tables themselves,
but I wrote up some rough stuff in-between to kind of
illustrate a flow, of this is this, and this is how you get
this particular note. It’s kind of like

Marcotone, programming color to notes. It’s kind
of like programmed synaesthesia. I’ve kind of like
worked with that relative to Western metaphysics.
Rather than C as red, I’d see C as Mars, or whatever
tarot card I’m corresponding to Mars, or whatever
other system I’m working within where that would be applicable, like
an Enochian letter corresponding to C.

Well this leads into my question about what an
Alphabet of Desire is, and then secondly could an Alphabet
of Desire be constructed of sound as acoustic sigils rather
than visually symbolic sigils, so that in essence you could
construct an entire magical space out of sound using
correspondence tables?

Yeah, you could do it other ways too, but it’s kind of like
I remember what Rex Church mentioned when he was talking to
Freeman and I. He gave the example of people say anything
goes in magic but there are mathematical formulas like Phi and
other key numbers that you can work with. Same thing with
sound, there’s specific frequencies – you know, even tuning
something. Planetary tuning would be A equals 432, as opposed
to A equals 440, which has become the standard of tuning. And
as far as making an Alphabet of Desires, like expressing intent
in sound, I think even pop music does it. It may not even be
the person singing it’s intent, but the writer who wrote
with intent or whatever, through lyrics they wrote. And with
a proper metaphysical formula in place, you can create a
magical environment to fire off that sigil through. And so
you can construct things with sound.

I believe it’s F equals Venus, so there’s your love note
right there, and you probably find that it pops up a lot in
your happier love songs. And you could make a spell in sound if
you wanted, you could use techniques of cut-ups of
pre-recorded audio to get some retro-active enchantment or
to even target like it’s a radionics system with a target.
It’s as free-form as any other art that you can express intent
through. Just like with visual artwork, it’s just picking it up
through a different sensory receptacle, the ears instead of the
eyes and visual cortex. It’s still going to fire off the sigil
even for you to just experience it. But you can make something
more macro-cosmically infective, kind of like hidden memes in
sound acting as magical waveform servitors, or something crazy
like that.

I wrote an article on technomancy on Phase II you might want to
read on all this, as I think it has a lot of ideas that you probably have
in a slightly different perspective as well. I called it
Liber
Tek, and you should check it out at some point.

In the next part of this interview Ikipr and I will be discussing
more about his music, but we’ll also be discussing the role of science-
fiction, the idea of the singularity, and the collaborative work
he’s done with Foolish People. Until then, check out Aleph9.com and
download away!