555 makes music to dissolve into.

Chris Farstad came to our attention as part of Night Court, whose recent record Law & Order offered a bizarre psychedelic reimagining of the music from the TV police procedural. Born in Minneapolis and now living in Portland, Farstad’s latest release as 555 is a goosebump-raising take on New Age music inspired by everything from Eastern philosophy to utopian architecture to tarot.

Arcosanta is named after Arcosanti, an experimental town in Arizona conceived by architect Paolo Soleri. “Soleri’s project is kind of like the baby steps of a species trying to sandbox the next stage of its own evolution in terms of healing a severely damaged relationship with itself and with the network of ecosystems that make up its planet,” Farstad told FACT. “Arcosanta as a body of recordings uses Soleri’s concept as a metaphor for the tension of our current transitional moment, which is nested in so much hopelessness and fatalism with regard to our environmental and social trajectories. It’s New Age for dark times. Dark Age, or Now Age. Something like that.”

The album is also influenced by the teachings of Indian thinker U. G. Krishnamurti and Farstad’s growing obsession with Carnatic flute, or venu, a Southern Indian instrument made of bamboo. “I began to feel in the flush of obsession that Western art music was less interesting to me compared to the approach of Carnatic music. It stands as a pretty clichéd neo-Aquarian thing but I couldn’t help it; it was totally sincere. For me, Carnatic music is like a whole separate thing from what I knew of religious music. It has a rigorous and seriously dazzling technicality of its own, spiritual and emotional depth also, but at the same time still bangs—you can dance to it!”

He adds: “Carnatic bamboo flutes are cheap, I got one for $36. TR Mahalingam quickly became my favorite Carnatic musician. By developing on my own on the instrument I got into the idea of coupling the imaginative scope and technology of synthesizers and samplers with simple bamboo. Kat Epple and Deuter and Ariel Kalma all resonate here, it’s a kind of idiom at this point.”

Released on Oakland label Moon Glyph today, you can melt into Arcosanta and read the full interview with Farstad below. For a handy introduction to Carnatic music, check out Farstad’s illuminating Bio-Vita Mix underneath, the first in a series of cassette mix releases through his new label Bio-Vita Cassettes. You can also check out 555’s page on Patreon, a platform to support artists by becoming a patron, giving you access to their entire past and future catalogue.

Can you explain the title of the record?

The name “Arcosanta” is a reference to Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti project, an experimental community made to explore Soleri’s concept of arcology in urban design. In short, arcology (a portmanteau of architecture and ecology) is a vision of architecture and environmental management that is primarily concerned with bridging the gap between fantastical and practical urban engineering while being informed by an overall philosophy of responsible and respectful stewardship towards the Earth. It stands as one of the most powerful articulations of the whole Western “total transformation” vibe to date, alongside luminaries such as Buckminster Fuller, Donella Meadows, and Jacque Fresco. Arcosanta as a body of recordings uses Soleri’s concept as a metaphor for the tension of our current transitional moment, which is nested in so much hopelessness and fatalism with regard to our environmental and social trajectories. It’s New Age for dark times. Dark Age, or Now Age. Something like that.

More broadly, what else influenced Arcosanta? You mentioned the concept of ‘utopian realism’ in your first email, and the teachings of U. G. Krishnamurti.

During the time leading up to the making of the record I developed a pretty extensive obsession with Carnatic (that is, Southern Indian) music and started learning Carnatic flute. I began to feel in the flush of obsession that Western art music was less interesting to me compared to the approach of Carnatic music.

It stands as a pretty clichéd as a neo-Aquarian thing but I couldn’t help it; it was totally sincere. For me, Carnatic music is like a whole separate thing from what I knew of religious music. It has a rigorous and seriously dazzling technicality of its own, spiritual and emotional depth also, but at the same time still bangs—you can dance to it! The only Western equivalents that I can think of are the vocal acrobatics of gospel music and music by people like ‪Earl Scruggs And Lester Flatt. I’m really not an expert. I had not heard Carnatic music at all before I stumbled onto it in 2012 by “cruising the dial” of Internet radio, but at the time it felt like indictment of the music education I’d come up in. How was it that this was not part of my understanding of musicianship and music history? I felt truly dumb that all the Indian music I had heard had been strictly through the lens of Hindustani recordings by artists like Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, or the collaborations of John McLaughlin. I couldn’t understand it. I am part of a generation that grew up surfin’ the tiger of the Internet, and it kind of blew me away.

Carnatic bamboo flutes are cheap, I got one for $36. My favorite Carnatic musician became T. R. Mahalingam. By developing on my own on the instrument I got into the idea of coupling the imaginative scope and technology of synthesizers and samplers with simple bamboo. Kat Epple and Deuter and Ariel Kalma all resonate here, it’s a kind of idiom at this point.

U.G. Krishnamurti helped me to embrace emptiness as the hub around which life turns. Boiled down to one statement, his philosophy is roughly in line with the best of Buddhism: that hope and despair are both crutches to shield you from reality, that clinging to emotions as self-constituting and treating self as the stone upon which you grind your axe is inhibiting. It’s just a massive head trip. It literally is what allows people to be manipulated by ridiculous oligarchs at the head of flawed economic and political systems. Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death explores a concept of culture as an illusion created by humans to shield ourselves from our transient nature and never quite says it, but emptiness is the stone. In my opinion, treating it as such works better and frees up a lot of energy.

U.G. Krishnamurti’s attitude is that having a problem at all is completely an anthropocentric idea. From the perspective of the planet, he says, we are a nuisance and would not be missed, and humans as a whole have a lot to learn with regards to humility from that idea. What do cows and ants and volcanoes care about your refugee crisis, or your new BMW, or your personal “Enlightenment,” or the Criterion Collection? Survival and procreation are all we know, and our internal life of wants and fears is just an impossibly complex, beautiful (to us) version of what a cockroach does all day. Emergence. No more, no less. As brutally shitty as things some societal fronts are looking, the harsh reality is a pretty mind-blowing cosmic indifference to our plight. I feel that the music I made reflects this sense of detachment and acceptance.

You also mentioned tarot – how did you incorporate that? Have you experimented with tarot before? Did it have any compositional use?

Tarot had no compositional element inherently. The composer who used the I Ching I believe is John Cage. I’m a fan of Cage, in a lot of ways. Cage’s Branchesstands out to me, for some reason. His philosophical approach to music-making in terms of treating all sound as inherently interesting when considered with detachment resonates with me, but for me detachment from emotions doesn’t mean you don’t feel them. They’re just not happening to “you.”