In Xanadu did Kubla Khan  A stately pleasure-dome decree

 



"Step right up, Folks, and get your tickets... the Psychedelic Circus has come to towne."

The Big Igloo Project idea was born when Remy Chevalier attended his first Laserium show at the Griffith Park Observatory Planetarium in Hollywood back in 1974. He could not believe how uncomfortable planetarium seats were, so he started dreaming of a traveling Laserium where one could lie down in a comfortable bean bag to stare off into the artificial space projected at the ceiling. OmniMax now offers such an experience today; 3D movies projected on a giant circular concave screen, giving the illusion of reality. The holodeck on Star Trek if you will. But we're not exactly talking about the same thing here...

In 1974 Remy befriended the laserists in residence at Griffith, and they had fun experimenting with synchronizing the wavelength of the color beam used to project patterns on the dome with the wavelength of songs being played. In this case Remy chose "Children Of The Grave" by Black Sabbath, which, let me tell you, back in those days, didn't come close to getting airplay on the same bill as the usual program of Led Zep and Pink Floyd. Things haven't changed much at Laser Images by the way since 1973, the company that owns and runs Laserium shows around the world. But back in the early seventies, when Ivan Dryer, Laser Images's boss, was not around, they got to try things on the audience today's laws, rules and regulations prevent all together.

Remy picked a pattern of a wheel within a wheel which he found in a first edition of a John Bennett book, a disciple of Gurdjieff. Back then the beam was aimed from the center of the room, with perfect alignment and symmetry, like a light fountain springing upward. Today, Laser Images has moved all beam projections off to the side of the dome, which destroys this effect. The song started, the wheel within a wheel started rotating, tuned perfectly to a bluish purple in key with the song Black Sabbath played, sound vibrations per seconds and Angstroms units in unison. 

Immediately, in the darkness, the sympathetic harmony between the light and sound frequencies grabbed the audience as if by magic. They had waited till the end of a regular show to spring this on a full house. Those who let themselves go, immediately went into a trance. We're not going to describe here all the other weird things that followed. Those who didn't go with the flow just thought the show went nuts and started leaving. Sabbath was an acquired taste 30 years ago. Those who stayed, and "got it", experienced something they'd never felt before, the music riding the light, through their eyes, deep into their psyche. All we can say is that evening, people in Hollywood who attended the show and understood, ran back down the Hollywood hills talking technological spiritual revolution.

It wasn't long before Laserium was shut down for mysterious maintenance reasons, the laser moved over to the side, and people fired. Remy was never an official Laserium employee, he had actually never met Ivan Dryer. Weeks later, when he walked in again one night, Ivan was there. The laserists pointed towards him as the one responsible for what happened. Ivan came up to Remy blue in the face, screaming that he should never do anything like that ever again without asking his permission first. Remy was too much of a free spirit to deal with the reality of the situation and never set foot inside the Griffith Park Planetarium again.

Years went by before Remy started learning enough about bioelectromagnetism to understand what he had asked the laserists to do. In 1991 he met up with Show Tech in Norwalk, the company responsible for building the permanent  Cirque Du Soleil tents in Vegas and Orlando, and a slew of other very complicated Broadway sets. Their VP Dan Hoffman liked the idea, so under his hospices Remy started marketing Big Igloo. Unfortunately Show Tech broke up into three separate companies. Dan's new company is Birch Street Design.

What you'll read in the next few pages is the testimonials, the technical information and early hints of the crack team of electronic musicians, brainware designers and set builders Remy has assembled to do the job. We will find financial backing to transform what has, over the years, become the sole classified domain of non-lethal weapons programs, turning it into a form of benign entertainment. We know the brain can be entrained into "other" levels of consciousness with "light & sound waves" just as it can with ingested or injected chemicals. Unfortunately tuned light and sound potentials have been kept from public view for national security reasons.

The 1986 Book MegaBrain stopped short of telling you the whole truth about the subject. Why? You'll have to ask author Michael Hutchison that question. Today with MIDI, computers, and instantly tunable lasers, we can play the electromagnetic spectrum like we do a musical keyboard. We're talking about virtual reality here, but on a much deeper psychosomatic level than the animation of over hyped gadgetry the public has been exposed to so far. 

Laser assisted sound can increase the power of music a thousand fold, much like a great movie score makes the images on the screen that much more powerful. But here, the colors, the wavelengths, the frequencies, all become part of the performance soup. Just as light waves and sound waves can piggy back on each other with microwave emitters, so can they in the visible spectrum. Imagine a surfer and a wave. The surfer is not the wave. He just uses the wave to get back to shore.

There's been a few light and sound shows that have attempted this with varying degrees of success.
Jean-Michel Jarre for example with his laser light organ. There was even a little theater in Sandy Hook, Connecticut which used to run shows called Lumia. It was closed by the time Remy finally got there. It was billed as a light and sound show tuned to chakras. But all this was, and still is much too arbitrary. What we're suggesting here is an exact science made possible by modern day neurophysics and psychophysiology. It draws on the work of Rife, Moray, Tesla, Ouspensky, Reich, Delgado, Vogel and many other pioneers of electricity in life who knew the mind could be modified by electric and electromagnetic signals, that emotions themselves are a feedback loop mechanism between hormones, glands and the bioelectromagnetic fields of the endocrine system.

Emotions are contagious. That's what "atmosphere" is in a bar, a theater, a church, an arena. Yes, it's subjective to "taste" and musical preferences, but that's what Gurdjieff called Subjective Art versus Objective Art. We're talking about Objective Art here, a kind of art which has the same effect, if it has any effect at all, on different people. In a sense, a great rock concert or a great revival meeting that leaves you elevated accomplishes such a feat. What Big Igloo proposes is to magnify that experience to a greater degree through the use of breakthrough brain entrainment technology. Acid without the chemical if you will, simply by dialing your mind to generate its own neurological stimulants through the wonders of light and sound. (continue...)

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