Purusha-Prakrti from SOAR by Manuel Rocha Iturbide

For two digital sound tracks 2005

Samkhya is one of the philosophical schools of India, known as one of the oldest and most orthodox systems of Hinduism. This philosophy sees the universe as part of two eternal qualities: purusha & prakrti. It is then a dualistic philosophy characterized by a way to see life that contemplates the universe as an evolution of different dualities (light-darkness, masculine-feminine, etc).
Spirit as an autonomous transcendent principle is accepted by all Hindi philosophies, with the exception of Buddhists and materialists. The purusha (spirit-self) is unexplainable; it is the one that sees, isolated, indifferent, simple inactive spectator, pure and eternal. Then, how can the spirit accept being accompanied by one’s psycho mental experience?
In the Samkhya School, purusha is always tied to prakrti (matter and psycho mental life), and this tie to the self and life is to be found out of time. The only certainty that we can have is that man has been in this condition since antiquity. Prakrti is so real and eternal as purusha, but compared to the spirit it’s totally dynamic and creative.
The self will be captive of the body while the purusha is mistaken by it.
The spirit can be liberated (moksha) when it realizes that it is different from psychic matter, and certain millenary practices like Yoga have been able to develop techniques in order to arrive at this liberation.
At the present, people in India that believe in Hinduism (most of them) accept the doctrine of Karma that stipulates that each individual obtains the results of his good or bad actions through an eternal cycle of life’s (Samsara). They believe that this cycle of suffering can be only detained through the spiritual practice of Yoga, or by attaining death in the sacred town of Varanasi.
This composition is about an imaginary trip that begins in the high mountains where the Ganga River begins and where the Yogis perform their spiritual practice, and it ends at Benares (Varanasi). The work is inspired in the dualistic conflict between spirit and matter that repeats till infinitum in the eternal wheel of Samsara, and in its possible way outs. The work was made starting from digital sounds recorded in two trips made to India (in 1998 and 2993) where I recorded different soundscapes along the Ganges river (in the cities of Haridwar, Ritshikesh and Varanasi), many of them that deal with daily rituals, where different kinds of bells and percussion instruments are played. In this way, sound instruments, animal life (specially insects and birds) and finally man with their diverse daily activities are the protagonists of this work that evolves and transforms as the sacred water stream of the Ganges.
The digital transformations of the soundscapes recorded take us to an abstract aesthetics in the beginning of the piece, having now and then real bell like sounds (the leitmotif element of the piece). Slowly, the transformations become less electronic and more transparent, nearer to their origin, to finally end the piece with a real sound scope recorded in Varanasi at 7PM at night from a boat in the water, when people come to the river to bath, wash their teeth and their clothes while the bells of all the temples sound in an important daily ritual.
Purusha-Prakrti was a commission of the Bourges festival in 2005; it was made at the Charydbe studio at IMEB in Bourges France. In this composition I combine digital means as convolution and different cross synthesis techniques with a couple sounds made with analog old noise generators and oscillators. Most of the sounds were transformed starting from the digital soundscapes I recorded in India. This piece was dedicated to my uncle Guillermo Rocha Diaz.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide is a composer, artist and writer. His creative work comes from different approaches to the sonic phenomena; from pure imagination, programmatic ideas, conceptual art, soundscape and experimentation with different sound objects. His interdisciplinary work has led him to use photography, sculpture, installation, and visual art as a complement of his sonic work.