Niko Skorpio :: Khôra (Some Place Else)

A vortex of sorcerers’ certainties graphed according to agnostic geometry.

Khôra by Finnish sound artist and graphic designer Niko Skorpio is a book of secrets, a collection of hermetic theurgies, but also literally a book insofar as this deluxe, double-three inch CDR edition, available only until 20 December, comes in the form of a handmade booklet. (I wonder what happens to the remainder—an auto-da-fé?)

Musically, it is an introspective Koyaanisqatsi, though not lacking in holy extroverts. Opening with “Sunya,” fragments of incantation splash into all manner of whirling hurdy-gurdiness. “No_carrier/Kathmandu Copper Wire” is a song stitched onto earth-churning dub. A meuzzin’s call gets caught in the bar-code scanner on “Ash-Shahub.”  A sample of a monotone expertise analyzing the psychosis of a serial killer is juxtaposed with a happy string of dancing Tibetan prayer pennants, tightly followed by the industrial plod of “Pwdr Sêr,” Clint Eastwood invoking The Book of Revelations—”So I looked and behold, a pale horse.” On “Sentient Debris,” notes and chants bend like willow branches in a stiff breeze while the closing gematria of “Bodhi,” an odd count in French, is slung spaceward.

A vortex of sorcerers’ certainties graphed according to agnostic geometry.

Khôra is available on Some Place Else.