“This piece offers an opening,” Christina Wheeler says of her debut release for Going In, Music for Meditating, Love-Making and Astral-Projecting, Part 1: The Invitation. As its weighty name suggests, this hour-long composition—the first in a three-part series—invites the listener to dissolve their perceived boundaries of separation, to engage by way of meditation, intimacy, or transcendent bodily experience in the act of transpersonal communion. The listening experience offers as a sonic gift, the space to delve inward, to move beyond the illusions of the ego into ever more fulfilling realms of connection and oneness.

Recorded in the winter of 2021, amidst ongoing lockdowns, Christina birthed the entire hour and forty second piece during a single, uninterrupted live session in her home studio, combining deliberate, elongated vocal articulations with an array of electro-acoustic and electronic instruments. As she describes it, the piece is all about “experiencing the unique imprint of the real-time human gesture” in relation to the sonic spaces she inhabits, from the acoustic to the analog to the digital. Like other releases in the Going In catalog, The Invitation was created specifically for the label’s 2021 streaming festival.

Despite the improvisational nature of Christina’s creative process, the album very much reflects a lifetime spent honing her sonic vision. Each movement contains a deep sense of intentionality—one that merges the artist with the listener in an intimate act of hypnotic suggestion. “Feel your breath rise and fall,” her voice echoes over lush undulating arpeggios. “Feel the air on your skin.” These motific invitations, sung in slow intonations, arise throughout the album, acting as shamanic guideposts, inviting the listener into deeper sensory states, where internal emotion and external stimuli merge and transform one another. At times, the words seem inarticulable, beguiling, panning under soft filtered delays across the stereo field, calling to the listener from the distance like a siren at sea.

To follow the words is to descend into the heart of this sonic journey—to surrender resistance and allow the enchantment to take hold. Halfway through, a cathartic chord rings out over a bed of flanged pink noise. A flourish of strings beckons the listener further into the dream. The atmosphere is at once tranquil, disconcerting, and surreal. Such is the process of dissolving our own illusions. Throughout the piece, Christina wields a sense of assuredness—as though she herself has journeyed through the mire and the darkness out into the light. By the time The Invitation reaches its conclusion, Christina declares, “We are one” as the arpeggio breaks and the digitally processed noise fades into silence.

In this work, Christina says she sought to facilitate a space for the listener to experience these states. It is her hope that the music encourages a loving, intimate environment for conscious surrender and connection with oneself, with others, and with the rest of the world and the larger universe.

“I would like to thank Jamie Hill and Kevin McHugh for all their hugely generous support in the mixing of this album; Keith Fullerton Whitman for his sensitive and elegant mastering engineering; ACE for his beautiful contribution with the album art and design; Sister Zo, for her deft and eloquent text; and Bryan Kasenic for his ongoing support, love, and friendship, for making this festival happen, and for releasing this recording.”