Following their acclaimed 2023 collaborative album the formless track, UK producer Arman Ray and Zen Master Hyon Gak return with a new EP that further dissolves the border between meditative philosophy and electronic music. Form is Emptiness takes the ancient Buddhist teachingย that everything we perceive as solid is fluid, interconnected, and ultimately transient, and translates it into trance, future pop, with ambience and spoken-word musings. Itโs not a concept bolted awkwardly onto club music because he philosophy is the pulse of the sound.
The opening track โform is emptinessโ arrives with a lightly hooky Afro groove, with a grounded and hovering rhythm. Steady beats thump in slow motion while Hyon Gak delivers spoken word with the clarity of someone who has lived the words rather than studied them. His calm, assured, lucid voice anchors the track, as he refrains, โForm is emptiness / but that emptiness is form,โ making a koan, looping in your mind long after the sound fades. It feels less like a lyric and more like a key youโre being handed.
A little further in, โthe hookโ shifts the mood with relaxing, uplifting tones that sit over a warm drone. The track slowly adds sharper textures with glitchy pulses, percussive flickers and so onโ like a mind coming awake. In the bridge, horns bloom into the mix, giving the track an expansive, breathing quality. Itโs electronic music that feels alive rather than engineered.
Then thereโs โโฆhomesick,โ closing the EP with moving emotions. Gentle piano meets soft harmonies, faint whistles, and swelling strings while Hyon Gak speaks, โReturn to your original home, because that homeland you take with you wherever you go.โ If you are completely sober, you can spend so much of life searching for what was never missing.
Where the formless track pushed boundaries, Form is Emptiness settled into inviting boundaries.
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Review by: Naomi Joan