Join us within this beloved 90 year old cultural institution to honor the autumnal equinox! 🍂
We’re celebrating the release of Jessica Hundley’s latest book Sacred Sites, the 5th in her all encompassing Library Of Esoterica series with TASCHEN. To mark the occasion Jessica has curated a library gallery of PRS founder Manly P. Hall’s personal travel photography and we’ll open the evening with a panel discussion to discuss the themes, dreams, and set the scene of her latest offering.
Liberate Elemental Forces will then soundtrack the auditorium in psychedelic ensemble, followed by an improvisatory collaboration between Lani Trock’s live collaged earthdance film and soft future’s blend of expressive electronics, percussion, and woodwinds. Before, during, and afterwards our friend DJ Silkworm will be spinning music in the courtyard.
We’ll also have hot tea, a courtyard sunset, and the promise of a gorgeous night among friends. See you in Los Feliz.
Liberate Elemental Forces is an Indian classical experimental band from Los Angeles. Instrumentation is varied but centered on the sitar, tabla and synthesizer while incorporating slide guitar, electric guitar, tanpura, flute and swarmandal to create a unique sound.
The music is based on the fundamental architecture of Indian classical ragas and rhythm cycles but also fuses the meditative aspects of spiritual jazz and krautrock.
The core of the group has trained in both LA and Kolkata with their music guru Pandit Shashanka Bakshi - a renowned tabla master who played with greats like Ravi Shankar and Nikhil Banerjee.
The members of LEF have traveled the world as musicians in various incarnations and were brought together by their mutual love of devotional music and the philosophy Sufi mystic Hazrat Khan.
Jessica Hundley is an author, filmmaker and journalist. She has written for the likes of Vogue, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times, and has authored books on artists including Dennis Hopper, David Lynch, and Gram Parsons. Hundley often explores the counterculture in her work, with a focus on metaphysics, psychedelia, and magic.
Sacred Sites is a visual pilgrimage through holy mountains, great pyramids, and golden shrines in celebration of the ways we transform the world around us through ritual, creativity, and worship. Essays, interviews and more than 400 images explore spaces ranging from ancient temples to modern works of spatial art.
Nature, art, beauty, these are the common elements found both within the places made sacred by our ancestors and in the multitude of environments where we strive to connect to source, and to ourselves. Tracing a hallowed route from rugged stone temples to transcendent works of modern architecture, the fifth volume in The Library of Esoterica celebrates the collective history of spaces made sacrosanct through human worship.
earthdance is a participatory, audiovisual installation, presented on this occasion with a live, improvised score by soft future. Viewers are invited to contribute through expressive movement and vocal harmonization. Alternatively, they may explore a quantum listening practice, as conceived of by Pauline Oliveros, reflecting on their relationship to the whole, contemplating their unique role & purpose as cohabitants of our sacred, living earth.
Inspired by evolutionary biologist Elizabet Sahtouris’ book by the same name, earthdance invites us to honor the beauty of this world, deepening our awareness of the planet as a living ecosystem on an evolutionary journey, and us as interdependent, loving stewards. Through group somatic practices, we embody & facilitate the shift; our evolution from humanity's competitive, self-oriented adolescence, into our maturation as a collaborative, ecologically-self-aware species, in conscious co-creation with the dance of life.