“By this campfire in the desert, I greet you as a fellow traveler. Music and story arose together in this offering, a first glimpse of my debut opera The Ghost. The two pieces – wordless, probing electronic interludes from Act I - were recorded at HQ studios, a recording space converted from a storage unit in a warehouse in Sydney's inner west, during the Covid lockdowns then completed in the Caribbean. In response to the pandemic, I chose them for their meditative quality. Humankind is a wave of the ocean; between and before our reifying, porous overlays, I hold to our richer, common ground, and thank you for listening.”

So Austin Oting Har welcomes listeners to this mindful EP. But there’s more to tell.

Har is a composer, writer, and academic with a background in music technology and ancient philosophy (think Daoist, Greek, and Zen). His work employs ancient languages, concepts, and instruments, digital sound design and creative coding, bridging the experimental electronic and contemporary classical music worlds. Born in Australia, he played violin in orchestras then studied composition, music technology, and philosophy, creating a variety of music before moving to Hollywood to work as a project coordinator and audio engineer. His journey has taken him from Sydney to Edinburgh, the Virgin Islands where he is currently a professor, and next Berkeley as a visiting scholar-composer, yet his musical concerns cover even wider territory.

In The World Between Worlds (the first of the opera extracts) the traditional characteristics of Japanese music converse with the language of European spectralism. Jōji Yuasa’s fusion of Zen and electronics; Gérard Grisey’s ecological approach to interval and timbre; and Daoist and Zen poetry and landscape painting depicting humankind as but “a wave of the ocean” served as key reference points.

In the dramatic context of the opera, the male tragic hero walks alone through a deserted town in the rain and comes to a tunnel. Accompanied by a chorus of ghosts, the soprano reveals a latent power to shape the landscape. Through this expansion and contraction of time comes recognition of the vast extensions of everything: the individual and the cosmos regain intimacy.

This union gives way to Ataraxia (the second piece, occurring sequentially toward the middle of Act I). Here Har worked without musical references but visual and philosophical ones in William Blake and Plato - especially Plato’s cosmology in the Timaeus. In the demiurge’s geometrically-designed, teleological creation of the world - a living, breathing, and dying thing like sound - wind and water are juxtaposed with the sounds of civilization in a flux of growth and decay. The soprano, all-receiving and invisible, embodies the receptacle through which all opposites and combinations of opposites arise, including the simultaneously terrifying and wondrous.

The World Between Worlds was originally commissioned for The Long Now by MaerzMusik and features Laura Wachsmann, Jackson Tuynman, and Jeremy Boulton. An early version of Ataraxia was performed by Har in 2018 under his former stage name, Omelas, at Dark Mofo held by the Museum of Old and New Art.