A Couple Of Hippies Who Think They Can Get Plants To Play Music

Founded in 1975, Damanhur—an ancient Egyptian name that means “City of Light”— is a self-sufficient and eco-friendly commune located amid the rolling hills and the exclusive rehab clinics in the valley of Val Chiusella, outside Turin, Italy. The 1,000 people who live in Damanhur follow the principles and visions of their leader, Oberto Aiuradi, who, due to the Damanhurian tradition of renaming every member with the first name of an animal and the family name of a plant, goes by the name of Falcon. The Damanhur people do whatever this guy says. For example: When he was inspired by the vision of a falling star, the community went ahead and carved an 11-story temple inside the mountain where they live. It took them 16 years. They did it by hand.

One of Falcon’s major tenets is that every living thing, including plants and animals, exists in a harmonic plane that is connected to ours, and that they all possess an intelligence and sensibility akin to that of humans. That’s why Damanhurian scientists built machines that allegedly allow them to communicate with plants through the miracle of variating electronic frequencies, aka music.

When I arrived at the office of the Federation, I was greeted by Owl and Spider, who are both involved in the plant-music project. They talked about time travel and alien vegetable civilizations in the same tone that a bored science teacher might talk about gravity. A little while later I was taken to a room where Spider attached some electrodes to a cyclamen he fished out of a bag. Seconds later, a slow, discombobulated series of harmonic scales started to seep out of a speaker connected to the plant. The sounds of the plant’s music carried us through our conversation.

Vice: So, do plants live in another dimension?

Spider:

OK. And how do you manage to communicate with plants?

Yeah, but the plants can’t hear the sounds. They can’t decide what they sound like.

scared

Would you say some people are better than others in their ability to connect to the plants?

They have their own language?

Can they do other things, beside artistic expression?

Um…

What genre do the plants prefer?