Meet Sanuk, my techno-wizard friend (repost)

"Music is a purposeless play, an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living." ~ John Cage (in a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music)

Deejay Sanuk (Daniel Schwörer) has been playing with sound since 1993

Born and raised in Zurich, Switzerland; now residing on Koh Samui, Thailand, where he DJs at parties and produces music on the side, using state-of-the-art hardware and software.

That's a one-line description of Daniel Schwörer, my techno-wizard friend who kindly agreed to digitally enhance and remaster my 1986 solo album, 2nd Coming. On Facebook he is known as Deejay Sanuk. In Thai, sanuk is a multi-purpose expression meaning pleasure, joy, delight, euphoria, contentment, bliss...

How I found Sanuk is a story unto itself. And why he would offer to me his expert services as an audio sculptor and sound cosmetician is another mystery I would prefer to remain unsolved.

Especially when the sort of music Sanuk manufactures in his tropical paradise lab is mainly for beach parties under the full moon - while the music I generated back in the 1980s can be described as mostly anarchic, expressionist, idiosyncratic journeys through inner space - not exactly danceable unless you happen to be a post-modern choreographer who has evolved beyond the Cagey silences and random industrial sound effects favored by Merce Cunningham.

Anyway, it all started with a visit to the SPCA a few years ago. Two of my cats urgently required spaying and I was pleased to meet a vivacious animal-loving young lady named Farida who was a volunteer or part-time staff.

I discovered that Farida was also a blogger. Apart from that she enjoyed beach parties in Thailand and that's how it came to pass that the first time Farida visited Magick River, she had this Swiss DJ on a visa run in tow.

When Daniel (who hadn't morphed into Sanuk at that time) heard I was also a musician he was curious to check out some of my early output. Played him a few tracks of recently digitized material and he found it intriguing. He asked if he could have a copy of the CD so he could fool around with the sound.

Months passed. One day I found a package waiting for me at the post office. It was a CD from Daniel Schwörer, posted from KL by Farida, who had been carrying it for weeks in her backpack.

I put on the CD and sat for a whole hour mesmerized.

What Deejay Sanuk had done was literally massage the music back to life. The material had originally been recorded on 2-inch, 16-track acetate, mixed down to 2-track stereo masters on ¼-inch magnetic tape, and dubbed directly to compact cassette (so that it could be played at home).

Another Daniel - a Tang - had laboriously digitized hours of material and saved it all on DVDs as wav files. However, without equalization and processing, the sound was dull and flat. Converting analog to digital isn't a straightforward task. The vitality of analog waveforms tends to get lost when translated into raw binary code.

Without altering the music in any way, Deejay Sanuk had succeeded in restoring the brilliance and clarity of individual instruments while consolidating the dynamic balance between the highs and the lows. In other words, whatever he did and however he managed it, my audio wizard friend from Switzerland had injected new life into music recorded in 1986, making it sound as fresh as when I first created it.


Sanuk's cultural imprinting as a Swiss native stands him in good stead as a techno-wizard. He is meticulous to a fault and ended up working obsessively on my Lazarus Project, tweaking hours of digitized music files.

Finally, many weeks of sweat later, he delivered two versions of the 2nd Coming master - one upfront, the other laidback - plus a completely unretouched version, tape hiss and all, as a reference to how the original mix sounded. I listened to both versions carefully, decided on the one to release, and wrote Sanuk a thank-you note via Facebook, incorporating some feedback. This is part of his response:

i have done the best i could not to deliver you something that sounds nice but shows its shortcomings when played at high volume, even though most people will not listen to it too loud i guess. i have used very drastic equalization which you will not hear in the final mix, i added bass frequencies in the low end which i then would cut back again. then after having cut low frequencies back i compressed the piano line as the leading element of dynamic in the mix. some other instruments had very extreme peaks in the problematic frequency range (e.g 1 khz, 3-4 khz ) so after any frequency manipulation and compression i had increased noise occurrence which i had to get rid of again without taking out the brilliance. so imagine that as an iterative process trying to achieve an acceptable result. i did the final step with a special emulation of the famous SSL (Solid State Mixing Consoles) equalizer and buss compressor.....

all in all i used quite a lot of different tools and dunno how many steps of rendering different versions from which i worked further where needed. that's only possible since we have powerful computers and can stay in the digital domain where there is no loss of data. another trick is to first transform the original file into a floating 32 bit data file since the good plugs all work in the 32 bit or 64 bit domain, then in the end you dither the whole thing back down to 16 bit 44.1 cd quality.... However, thank you very much that my work finds appreciation, it's the most difficult thing i have ever done and was a real challenge since it really is a remarkable recording with all possible sound elements and dynamics in it.

All the best and thank you again for the opportunity to work on something like that. best regards from cloudy Samui

I am none the wiser as to how Sanuk does it, since I know zip about the technical aspects of sound mixing. He did explain to me that he has special software that allows him to analyze the sound spectrum layer by layer and sculpt soundwaves with far greater precision than was possible in the analog era.

Of course, I feel a deep sense of gratitude to have met this wonderful wizard who happens to be a perfect blend of artist, scientist, aesthete, philosopher - and cultural philantrophist too, for I can't imagine getting this sort of magical results even if I could afford to fork out thousands. If you're interested in sampling some of Deejay Sanuk's head-banging dance tracks, go here. He has also produced soundtrack music for various European filmmakers.

Sanuk's amazing achievement is that he succeeded in restoring vitality, depth and presence to my 1986 recordings. I'm particularly pleased with the way he tweaked the piano so it sounds as if you're listening to a live performance. In short, I feel totally assured that the 2010 edition of 2nd Coming can hold its own anywhere in the world as a recording, in purely technical terms.

However, whether or not listeners will be receptive to the utterly unclassifiable music is something I cannot and dare not predict. Be warned: this album was recorded in the mid-1980s before music videos contributed to shortening people's attention spans.

But if you're curious enough, or kind enough, to order a copy:

2nd Coming is now downloadable online! 

[First posted 2 September 2010. Reposted 17 September 2018]

Advent of The Bunyip ~ musings about my son (repost)

Grandfather Dai had only three sons, but he had had countless daughters. Countless… because many of them had been drowned at birth in huge jars of urine kept as manure for the fields. In those days a Patriarch’s word was law. The Patriarch was the Progenitor – and the Progenitor held the lives of his progeny in his hands. Taking a daughter’s life was not regarded as murder. It was simply a means of ensuring fewer mouths to feed. ~ Dai Moong Yang (In Those Days, 1995)

Ahau's 13th day on earth

IN EARLY 1993 I spent a few weeks editing and retyping a collection of stories written by my maternal Aunt M.Y. (also known as Grace Lee) - but the significance of the lines quoted above didn’t fully register till 30 December 2012, during a long conversation I had with two healer-counselor friends, Heiko and Selina Niedermeyer, who have studied a wide range of emotional and psychospiritual healing modalities over a span of almost 20 years. They had recently completed a workshop with Bert Hellinger, founder of Systemic Family Constellation, which postulates that no soul enters into physical embodiment in isolation – it invariably enters through a complex soul cluster called the Family Constellation and therefore any healing process must always include an overview of the individual’s family dynamics.

Early blowpipe practice

In the course of our conversation, Selina mentioned that Bert Hellinger had discovered a nexus between murder in the suppressed family narrative (literally skeletons in the closet) and mental/emotional dysfunctionality. Apparently it is not uncommon for the souls of the murdered to be reborn within the murderer’s bloodline – but with characteristic disabilities like Down syndrome, autism or schizophrenia. The moment I heard this I had goosebumps. My sweet cousin in Singapore (the late Dr Dixie Tan) had two dysfunctional sons and two fairly normal daughters. My own brother Mike had been diagnosed with schizophrenia decades ago; and my only son Ahau, labeled autistic by some, was unlikely to ever interact “normally” with others because he was born with an unusual vocal cord that makes it difficult for him to simulate human speech.

Ahau at age 6 (pic by Emanar)

Our great-grandfather Dai, through sheer ignorance compounded with arrogance, had been instrumental to the murder of many newborn female babies. Perhaps the same number that had returned as dysfunctional males to haunt the bloodline like a family curse.

During a two-hour session I had with Heiko and Selina in the first week of January 2013, I conjured the spirit of my great-grandfather Dai. He had the haughty air of a typical Mandarin, scion of a rich land-owning clan, and it took him a while to even acknowledge that drowning newborn female infants was nothing less than murder.

His only defence was that he wasn’t the only one who practiced infanticide; it was fairly common in old China (and even in fairly recent times, many couples aborted female fetuses because the government’s one-child policy didn’t allow them another shot at conceiving a male heir). Finally, that impassive, inscrutable mask shattered and a few teardrops began to flow down his cheeks. He looked, for a moment, humbled.

A 10-year-old Bunyip

“Please ask forgiveness from the souls of those you thwarted from taking earthly incarnation, and then forgive yourself,” I told my great-grandfather’s spirit. When he slowly faded from view, I knew the family curse was finally broken. My only begotten son Ahau Ben would be the last in the bloodline to bear the karmic consequences of his forbears’ abysmal ignorance and self-serving cultural myopia.

After some initial hesitation I decided to share this story to illustrate how “the sins of the fathers” do get passed along the chromosomal track. I use the word “sin” in its original sense: in Middle English the word sinne was a term commonly used in archery to mean “missing the mark.” As a metaphor, missing the mark indicates poor aim, barking up the wrong tree, misreading the map of life, or possessing an entirely erroneous and distorted view of reality.

Humans who have yet to attain enlightenment tend to commit stupid, destructive acts as a result of a benighted perspective, usually inherited through parents and imbibed from their tribal and cultural milieu. A society that places a greater value on male offspring is likely to adhere unquestioningly to patriarchal attitudes that glorify skills in combat and the ability to “bring home the bacon.”

Amphibious Ahau by Dorota Nierzwicka

What happens, of course, is that such males end up in decision-making positions, bringing along their blinkered perspectives and prejudices. As military chiefs they will be constantly itching for the glory or martyrdom of warfare; and as corporate heads their ruthless ambition will blind them and harden their hearts to the wholesale desecration of the sacred landscape for illusory short-term profits and bigger bonuses.

However, life does not occur on a single plane. Almost every event or situation can be interpreted on many levels. Likewise the Advent of The Bunyip (a nickname I bestowed on Ahau Ben when he was a toddler, partly because of his amphibious nature (he loved playing in the bathtub and later the river); but mostly because he did seem to me a somewhat chimerical entity, a creature right out of fairy tales and long-forgotten legends.

Ahau was named after the Mayan starglyph for the Sun or Solar Christ. His second name Ben is inspired by the Mayan starglyph for Skywalker or Celestial Messenger. It so happens that the last King of Mu was reportedly named Ahau too. Not one to settle for the mundane, I delighted in creating a mythic context in which to locate Ahau’s entry into my life. I have written about this at length before, so I will say no more about the mystery of Ahau’s being (click on this link if you wish to read about it).

THERE IS ANOTHER possible explanation for the way Ahau turned out. He arrived at 2 in the morning of the 21st March, 1996, by Caesarean section at the Hospital Kuala Lumpur. I didn’t know till a bit later that the nurses had given him a hepatitis jab without first asking my permission. When they asked me to consent to a second follow-up jab, I expressed deep consternation that they would administer a vaccine to my child without first consulting me. Of course, I refused to grant permission for another jab, having learnt of the unholy alliance between the pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession that has made vaccinations enforceable by law.

Twenty years after Ahau’s birth a heated debate rages between pro- and anti-vaxxers with the main contention being that evidence linking vaccinations with autism has been systematically suppressed by vested interests – because once a vaccine is approved and becomes a routine medical procedure, vaccine manufacturers stand to rake in billions every year. Intuitively, I tend to be anti-vaccination because I generally feel a great deal more trustful of nature and the body’s immune system than of medical or any other species of science – especially since the bulk of it is fueled by corporate funding and private grants.

The possibility that it was a hepatitis jab that triggered my son’s autism has certainly crossed my mind many times. But as I can think of no way I can obtain irrefutable proof of this, it seems pointless to hold on to this suspicion.

Ahau is the way he is and those of us who know him well adore him exactly the way he is – even though it still strikes me as absurd that he should take advantage of everyone around him, recruiting us into his service, instead of taking more responsibility for himself. No doubt this can be attributed to the fact that his ancestors on my mother’s side were landed gentry (my aunt boasted that it took men on horseback 11 days to collect the rent) - all the males being archetypal spoilt brats - or perhaps Ahau’s sense of entitlement is due to his residual memory of having been an absolute monarch in a lost civilization called Mu.

22 September 2017

[First posted 25 September 2017, 20 March 2019, 21 March 2021, 22 March 2024, 22 March 2024 

& 17 November 2025]

Photographic Serendipity ~ Perfect Timing! (reprise)

[courtesy of Olivia de Haulleville. First posted 3 september 2012]

CONDITION CRITICAL BUT NOT SIRIUS ~ Cosmic Fact and Fiction by ANTARES

I can't believe this cosmic joke
I tried to break the news, 
It broke... (from ‘Mary Malone of Moscow' by Dr Strangely Strange)


If I didn't find it all so hideously funny, I'd die of exasperation and grief. What am I talking about? That four letter word, LIFE? Correct.

I'll tell you another joke. A funny thing happened to me on the way to Eternity. I got caught up in Time.

Entangled in History. Of course, in retrospect, I could honestly declare I did it deliberately, in full consciousness, of my own volition. Well, it sounded like an amusing digression at the time. The whole universe was abuzz with gossip about this bright bluegreen watery world called Gaia, Tellus, or Earth: third planet from Sol, a small star orbiting Sirius in the remote reaches of Galaxy 13, locally called the Milky Way. The food and sex were unutterably addictive - that's what all the guidebooks said.

Having been on assignment here for nearly 260,000 spins around the Sun, or 10 Galactic Years, I can confirm that. Now, 10 Galactic Years doesn't sound that long. But bear in mind it took only 5 Cosmic Days to get Earth's ecosystem tooled up and ready to receive the Zoo Program. And only in the last 11 minutes of the 6th Cosmic Day was the part simian creature called Homo saps released from the undersea labs and distributed over the land masses. Don't ask me how many Earth Years one Cosmic Day represents, I'm running low on zeroes.

Before I carry on (as I'm wont to do), let me explain a few important developments that have made this true life account possible. My dear friend Drunvalo Melchizedek recently arrived from the 13th Dimension with some really Mind Blowing Info (if you have access to the internet, key in "Drunvalo Melchizedek" for a summary of the exciting news from Headquarters). He revealed that our planet was digitized and frequency enhanced back in 1972, and that the experiment worked beyond everyone's wildest expectations. And so, in 1987, it was possible to announce the Harmonic Convergence, and the beginning of a new era of glasnost and perestroika (da, da, Gorby is part of the mission, even if he won't publicly admit it). After which it was no holds barred on previously classified information. You mean you didn't know there was an embargo on any intelligence that might cause the inhabitants of Earth to question the status quo?

Indeed there was, but the lid has been lifted at last. Who laid on this embargo, you might ask?

Your wicked stepfather did. Hold it a second, you say. You don't have a wicked stepfather, your mum and dad are alive and well and still happily married and living in Setapak. Listen, we're speaking metaphorically here. I personally know a few stepfathers who happen to be real sweeties. So let's not get too literal. That doesn't help when we're discussing really BIG issues.

Your real father, if the truth be known, was an Angel. More than that: he was an Archangel, one of the Elohim (that's Hebrew for "Sons of God"). These days we'd call him a Sirian (not Assyrian, mind you, but remember there are interesting clues to be found therein). A real wizard with gene splicing, your Father contributed his DNA to a long and tedious experiment involving a particularly receptive female specimen of modified primate, with whom he felt a passionate bond beyond the bounds of scientific duty. This superseded earlier humanoid breeding experiments conducted by the ruling council of Elohim, collectively called Yahweh. The results of these earlier attempts didn't survive very long because they lacked a sense of humor, which only comes from compassion.

Anyway, it gets rather technical, and I shall leave the sordid details to other storytellers. Suffice to say, it was a tricky and unauthorized experiment in hybridization that led to your Father's vilification for simply granting humanity the precious gift of Fire – Intellect, and its dangerous by products, Language, Reason, Self Awareness, Poetry, Humor, Free Will. Your mythologies have recorded this momentous event as the Promethean Revolt, the Eating of the Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, the Expulsion from the Garden, and the Departure of the Gods. If you were brought up on christian dogma, you may recall that the blame was put entirely on the Serpent and the overly adventurous feminine spirit of Eve, the Temptress, Mother of Evolution.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ring, we have Darwin's Evolutionists. Having split open the atom and found virtually nothing inside apart from some Strange and Fascinating Qualities, a few Quirks and Quarks, but no bearded patriarch icon, no uncanny likeness of Ayatollah Khomeini, John Paul II, or Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh aka Osho or even Sun Myung Moon... they had to assume that all previous theories were based entirely on superstition - and therefore classifiable as Mystical Hogwash fit only for the backyard bonfire. Our unknown Father was renamed Hap Hazard, or Pure Chance, or Mr Random Factor.

It was very convenient to have a dad named Random Factor: his mad brother Max managed to make a killing in the cosmetics industry - making up for (or covering up) the fact that humanity was just an illegitimate Child of Fortune after all, a regular Ugly Duckling.

So what became of our real Father? What kind of Daddy was he? Nobody knows for sure, because he has yet to complete his memoirs and get them published. However, speculation is rife that the Elohim are by and large a quiet, contemplative breed - quite unaccustomed to the gooey melodrama of a hydrocarbon protein existence. It's possible that our Father might have regarded the experience of being immersed in a flesh and blood scenario as somewhat odious, and would thus have been inclined to remain aloof from it all, content to take a peek into the nursery from time to time. And if the situation warranted, he might occasionally expend some energy rearranging the furniture, so as to prevent the infant humanity from banging its head on sharp objects (like flaming tektites).

In any case the child didn’t seem too badly off in the day-to-day care of the hired help, those hardy hide-bound hench-humanoids from the planet Nibiru. Which, alas, led to the first instance of child molestation – but we won’t venture into this psychic quagmire just yet. A remarkably racy race, us humans.

You see, the idea of sexual reproduction was perfectly fine for zoomorphs – but for a highly intelligent and geometrically precise species to be so intimately involved in the messy viviparous process was altogether a different kettle of fish.

Eons ago, the Elohim weren’t at all an individualized race. They were a group intelligence emanating from the pineal gland of the Great One like rays of pure focused will. They knew no gender and lived only in Light – and therefore were unfamiliar with tactile sensations, sensuality, sexuality – and all their attendant pains and pleasures. Their encounter and entanglement with Earth’s carnal karma was for the most part a bewildering but immensely educational process, which is still unfolding just beyond the threshold of our perception. Little wonder, then, that over the eons, watching our microbic human cosmodrama unfold has become a favorite pastime of the Elohim, who have indeed grown pretty protective of their dense-bodied runt, the human being, formerly called the Adama (“clay-formed entity”).

Where does the wicked stepfather come in? Ah... this is how official history begins. With a systematic fudging of the books, a laborious tampering with the records, conducted by grim-souled clerics working under the orders of a new CEO – some whizkid flown in from Rigel Kent, Orion, who seemed to have an instinctive grasp of primate politics.

Some say there was protracted debate in the High Council of the Intergalactic Confederation as to the wisdom of allowing such an unpredictable turn of events to manifest. Others aver that the whole episode was unforeseen and unpreventable: an invasion from Deep Space, no less. Ships suddenly appearing over the horizon of Business-as-Usual, flying the Jolly Roger. Will we ever get a full account? Whoever organized the cover-up did a damn good job. Crystal data banks deactivated, cellular memory files erased, deleted, or grossly distorted. Collective amnesia. Total News Blackout in the War Zone. Direct all enquiries to the Information Retrieval Department. Fill in forms XYZ/123/Q/ABC. In triplicate, please.

This is the Martian Inquisition. Identification papers will be issued to all new arrivals. Gene encodement procedures to be strictly observed. Put it down in black and white. Now, let’s ignore the Grey areas. Reticulate and gridify all internodes. Seal the portals. Sign and deliver on command. By Order.

With the altering of our DNA circuitry, it was relatively easy for the new “owners” of Planet Earth to claim exclusive sovereignty and exercise parochial jurisdiction over the proliferating tribes of humans.

And so the Dark Lords – to employ an archaic term – declared themselves our legal Guardians and Trustees to our Further Evolution. They set up monolithic Institutions, established Priesthoods, introduced the Guild System, spurred the invention of Barbed Wire. Crime was identified and duly Punished. Judgement was passed and Decrees proclaimed. Statutes and statuary lined the public walkways.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t entirely a “bad’” thing, this sinister twist in the plot. It gave us the dynamic flux of Duality.  We became obsessed with concepts of Good and Evil, entered into the not-so-merry-go-round of vicious and virtuous circles. And, of course, it was invariably THEM that were Evil. WE were always the Goody-Two-Shoes.

Perhaps it’s time to stop calling our stepfather “wicked.” The fact that he has never learned to trust his children is his problem.

Perhaps the horror of history was our collective crucifixion on the cross of Materialism. The dense and claustrophobic spacetime continuum in which our immediate past has been lived is now at the point of revealing itself as a mandala of kaleidoscopic meaning and metamorphic beauty.

Our stepfather wasn’t really all that wicked. He was merely terrified of losing control.

Now, you may be wondering, where is the humor in all this?

Sit back for a moment and contemplate your perspective of reality. What are you doing “for a living”? Are you succeeding at your chic “lifestyle”? How often do you feel confused, helpless, caught in a permanent double-bind? Are you perpetually looking back over your shoulders, fearful that any moment you may be struck down by disaster, disease and/or death? Is that why you succumbed and bought “life insurance” last year? Is the Inland Revenue Department or your bank manager sending you messages in red ink? Are you worried about your performance at work, at play, and in bed? Have the trees in your garden been felled for a new access road?

Surely, surely these are matters of grave consequence. Why waste precious time time tuning into weird stations when you can keep that dial set at 99.3 FM? Time (reverb FX) Highway (reverb FX) Radio (digital delay)!

Hey, the laugh is on you. Everything is perfectly okay. Stay tuned, folks. We’ll be right back after this commercial break, with an exclusive interview, transmitted live from Andromeda, with....

The Man Who Sired Humanity! (Cool funky theme music.)


© Antares, 1996-2004-2020-2022-2023-2024

[Originally published in Journal One, May 1996. First posted 11 March 2020, reposted 4 November 2020, 15 May 2022, 14 May 2023 & 14 September 2024]