We recently connected with Avahara and have shared our conversation below.

Avahara, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Not many people survive a glioblastoma. About six years ago, shortly after my wife and I bought our first house, we heard the news that a friend of ours had been diagnosed and was going in for brain surgery in two weeks. We live on the west coast and this friend was living on the east coast, but we knew we wanted to do something to help her. We immediately recorded several guided meditations, to help her prepare and recover from the surgery. My wife, Cheri Clampett, has a wonderful voice for guided meditations, and will tend to lead them spontaneously in her Therapeutic Yoga workshops. By that point I had been playing live ambient music for her yoga workshops for several years, so I had been building custom synthesizer and effects sounds for that style. We recorded the vocals at a nearby studio and I composed the music and mixed everything in the space that would become my full-fledged home studio. We worked some late nights and got the tracks together and emailed them to her prior to her surgery. Not only did she listen to them before and after surgery, but her mom also listened to them in the waiting room during the surgery.

Avahara, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m primarily an ambient musician with a focus on healing and relaxation. I really got into the ambient style after meeting my wife, Cheri Clampett. As a yoga teacher specializing in the Restorative, Yin, and Therapeutic Yoga styles, she has always been really dialed into great musicians like Anugama, PC Davidoff, Deuter, Craig Kohland, Carlos Nakai, and Brian Eno. Those folks are all luminaries in the field and really inspiring.

I’ve been playing live music, mostly synthesizers and acoustic guitar, for my wife’s yoga workshops and teacher trainings for over a decade now. Those workshops are usually two and a half hours long and the participants will often be in poses supported by props for fifteen to twenty minutes. My wife sequences those workshops on the fly, following the inspiration. As a musician, that presents some interesting challenges because it means I’m improvising for two and a half hours, and my goal is to enhance the effects the participants are already experiencing through the yoga – to take them deeper into the experience, not pull them out of it. That means putting aside the musician’s ego and taking on a more shamanic approach – someone who accompanies the changing of consciousness.

Those workshops have been the genesis of what I do musically these days. Along the way I got really into building my own synthesizer sounds because I’ve had the chance to see what really works to relax people and move them into those deeper states – literally, watching their breathing patterns change in response to certain ways of playing particular notes and to different sound sets. I also do something similar with the effects I use when playing acoustic guitar.

There’s a tremendous amount of information and mental stimulation in our world today. Finding peace of mind and healing states can be a real challenge. I make music designed to help people find that.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

It’s a two-fold mission. The first aspect is internally focused. I deeply believe that as artists we are on a sacred quest to create art that is as authentic to our true self as we can get it, because that’s how the light from our souls can best reach out to the world. The journey we make as we strive for that authentic expression is in one sense, the point. Daniel Lanois refers to this as “soul mining”, and it’s a lifelong, every-changing experience for an artist. The second aspect is externally focused. It’s a desire to heal others, or at least bring some measure of comfort or restoration of the body, mind, and spirit of the listener.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Embracing and experiencing freedom. In the quest for authentic expression, artists have to unlearn, or decide to ignore, the boundaries and the rules, otherwise they will never fully blossom. The more an artist allows themselves to do that, the more that translates into other areas of expression, and if you run with that, it can add incredible richness to your entire life. For instance, in addition to composing and playing music (next album “The Altar and The Well” comes out in April), I also started writing fantasy fiction (first book “Dragons of Aeronoth” drops on March 16th under my given name, Victor Borda), and I now have six software patents to my name. The fountains of creativity for those may be different on the surface, but the water comes from the same well.

Contact Info:

• Website: avahara.com
• Instagram: avahara
• Facebook: avahara
• Youtube: avahara
• Other: For my fantasy fiction writing, find me on the socials as @victorbordawrites on IG, TikTok, and Facebook.

Image Credits
Carl Studna. Cheri Clampett. Yul Jorgensen.