Introduction to the Interview by Natalie Mariko
Like many, I spend a lot of time lost in rot. I wonder how many days I have stared, almost numb, into the endless stream of other people’s memories, while scenes of train cars, café chairs, and beds blur together. It’s been at least a few weeks.
Mind control is real, and we’re more disconnected than ever. Lost in a digital world, we feel pressure to join in on social media. In this space, time has no clear shape.
Simone Weil saw attention and presence as a form of prayer. In the ‘attention economy,’ focus splits into isolated pockets, and presence suffers, interrupted by constant notifications and the noise of daily life. Every place has its own soundtrack: trap music blasts at the corner shop, thunder cracks, and vehicles fill the streets. Athens moves with sound. Cities can be seen as fields of interpretation, mapped by inattention and layered with loss. Moments lost to digital distraction reflect, in religious terms, the turning inward that limits outward possibility.
Copies of ‘realities’ give the illusion of presence and progress, forming chaotic mixes of personal moments. When art maintains a chaotic presence instead of dissolving into bland or moralising forms, it keeps traces of earlier times alive. This is most clear in performance. Performance strips away screen voyeurism, revealing its lack of real experience.
Simply put, you can’t experience a performance without attention, and random online content lacks emotional connection. Political content uses exaggerated emotions to drive repetition and turns suffering into products. In contrast, performance requires presence. If performance becomes only a screen spectacle, it loses emotional impact, and presence becomes meaningless.
Rosanna McLaughlin’s essay Against Morality describes the trend in the 2010s of replacing lack of artistic emotion with moral purity, which she calls ‘liberal realism.’ When art plays the moral judge in a closed world and forgets its power to affect reality, its transformative impact is reduced to slogans. Ironically, this makes such art easy to dismiss or even a tool for fascist ideas. To achieve meaningful change, alternative mythologies that are not easily consumed are needed. Even imperfect performance that resists moral rules reopens the possibility more than rigid commentary.
The title of MIRA新伝統’s new work, Mythoplaxy, combines mythology and praxis. It questions illusions and embraces performing mythology as a revolutionary act. The effectiveness of this gesture and the music is subjective. Still, it points in a direction I support. Political and technological changes separate individuals from the universal context. Federico Campagna explains that this creates ‘dividuals,’ categorized and separated from possibility. The body, when freed from strict definition and given to a living audience, takes on a collective shape of time.
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Natalie Mariko: Laura Tripaldi’s book, Parallel Minds, engages with Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action. Tripaldi writes that subjectivities exist in objects in the world, and consciousness is not a precondition for the existence of thought.
Rafael Leray: It deals with the idea of an object having a cognition or material memory.
NM: These objects are shaped by my objectivity toward them. It’s more than colliding in space; we and the objects co-define each other through our relationship. Your work as MIRA新伝統 seems similarly rooted in intra-active relationships with one another and with your chosen spaces. What are you both reading now?
RL: I hoard books. I’m finishing Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture and bought a book on cyberpunk for its cover. I recently read Philip K. Dick’s VALIS Trilogy, which was challenging for its lack of narrative shape. Reading’s been hard since moving to Athens. In Tokyo, I’d take a book to the sento for one or two hours, three or four times a week.
Honami Leray: Lately, before bed, I’ve been reading Ancient Magic in Greece and Rome, which I found at my favorite Athens bookstore. It also helps me study English, so I read it slowly, one chapter at a time. Here, magic isn’t supernatural but part of the everyday—a way to reconnect with the world. The book describes actual ritual sites, which feel like lingering residues.
The second book I’m into is Vermis I by Plastiboo. I found it by chance at a Paris indie bookstore and was genuinely happy to discover such a striking book. Presenting it as an official guide for a non-existent game stirs the imagination.
NM: Tripaldi explains that some technologies’ intelligence comes from rigidity. The ideal physical building material, symbolizing progress, becomes incrementally harder—from adobe to graphene. But she notes that weaving fabric is technologically more complex than making ultra-durable metal. Soft technologies, such as fabrics, are more adaptable to change.
Tech oligarchs equate optimization with technological perfection, valuing obedient machines, aligning with emerging fascism. The environment must adapt to the structure of technology. Campagna calls this Technic’s absolute language.
Your work mixes technology and ritual performance. When you relate to technology, how does ritual either oppose or reinforce the violent elements within the technological? Cyberpunk is a good example, as much of modern tech seems to be influenced by precisely this.

RL: Cyberpunk is extremely violent. It’s also dystopian. Almost all of these stories feature a totalitarian government that people are fighting against. But the precondition of that totalitarianism is technology itself.
I have a love-hate relationship with cyberpunk. I think it’s wonderful. It’s, in some ways, my childhood. But what I’ve been looking for recently are adaptable fictions. Octavia E. Butler, for instance. Bloodchild was something we both read when we arrived in Athens. Soft SF, as they call it. I found it much more interesting.
Using a computer for rituals may seem paradoxical, but you work with what you have. When I started making this music, I realized analog tools cost more. For those from middle-class backgrounds, computers are accessible, but the ritual doesn’t have to be tech-based.
The first Freemasons were doing their rituals with chalk. There wasn’t even an object. They painted the object with chalk on the ground—and that’s it. That’s the ritual. What needs to be understood is the meaning behind the symbols. Once you integrate this into yourself, then in any case – during war, during really hard times – you can recreate this ritual with other people using your imagination alone. The ritual superimposes pretty much anything, be it hard technology or non-technical layers.

NM: It’s adaptable. A soft technology.
RL: And unreadable by capital. Whatever material condition you are in, you can still manage to practice it.
And you can’t practice it if there is nobody else in the room. There is a lot of personal ritual, self-care advertising out there, but I don’t think that qualifies. There has to be a common sense of what is going on, and that common sense is creating a community. Then, through that circuit of common knowledge, you can circulate your values, exchange them and create an independent society from it.
HL: Technology is inseparable from contemporary life. That’s precisely why we deliberately bring it into parts of our performances. On stage, we don’t use technology as an extension of the self. We use it to evoke the struggle against the way it tries to shape us into its systems of measurement.
For me, those moments are a practice of bracketing the speed and efficiency of technology, in order to return, for a moment, to the body.
I picked up this book on ancient magic because I’m interested in why people choose particular objects, and how, in a pre-rational era, those objects came to exceed their practical or decorative roles and shape everyday spiritual life. I feel something similar in my choreography. A costume or prop is never just decoration; it powerfully alters my movement and presence. The symbolism in our shows isn’t so much there to explain a message as to recondition the body in space, redirect the flow of movement and posture, and create a different state of being.

NM: What was your first contact with ritual?
HL: My grandmother’s funeral.
During Japanese funerals, the family spends the final night in the same room as the deceased, watching through the night to ensure that the candles and incense never go out. No one speaks; they simply continue to share the space together. The air feels slightly cold, and time seems to move differently than usual. When sounds fade in the middle of the night, breathing becomes more noticeable, and the body quiets itself. Without words, you think of the deceased. Everyone’s attention gathers there. It felt like a particular ‘shape of time’ meant to allow the acceptance of loss.
NM: To what extent does the illusion of ritual enactment really exist in the world? And how does that change you? How do you hope it changes the audience?
HL: I hope it would be like after seeing an inspiring movie, staying with you aesthetically and emotionally. It changes you, digs deep inside you and then something else comes as a result.
RL: Which is something you experienced as a child as well, right? When you’re creating the world as you go through it, it influences your decisions before they solidify into a specific form.
Before thinking of our performances as a very serious concert, when we do them in a club, some audiences can be rude, but it’s really fun because a lot of people are ready to dive super deep into what’s behind the show, their own interpretations, and so on. That’s a real-life aspect of this illusion being more than just a moment in time on stage.

HL: But I feel it’s not really measurable; there isn’t a sense of completion to look forward to in illusion.
Just the fact that this moment existed for people during the performance is precious enough. Most likely, some people will encounter echoes of this moment, either on that same night or years later.
I don’t expect the audience to understand something specific or to change. I think it’s enough if the sense of having coexisted in that space remains, without turning into words. I try to incorporate actions that dissolve the boundary between the stage, the symbolism and the audience during the performance. Depending on the night’s vibes, it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. A recent performance we had in Manchester had this feeling of gentle merging. After the show, a kid approached me, visibly emotional and simply said, “I was moved.” This is when you know it worked.
RL: The moment in history we’re living through is really a recognition that fiction has been shaping our society in deeper ways than we thought. Cyberpunk offers us only one vision of an inescapable dystopian future, and tech billionaires love it. We need to build alternative choices carefully because they’re self-determining. There is an apparatus of control managed with fictions. And we cannot just say, “Ah, it’s affect. It doesn’t relate to dialectical materialism.” It affects people and their adherence to an ideology. Some fictions are destructive. Terminator, The Matrix, or cyberpunk Blade Runner aesthetics are surely good, but within that is a kind of dystopian pornography.
I recently discovered ‘arcology’, a synthesis of architecture and ecology as the philosophy of democratic society, an idea developed by Paolo Soleri. I’ve been trying to develop my architectural knowledge and looking at similar approaches, such as Pascal Häusermann’s modular habitats in the forest. It was interesting to see how space can completely change how a society functions.

NM: When it comes to music, performance and movement, to what extent is it important that people comprehend the force behind it all, the theoretical or even just the emotive background of what you guys are trying to do?
HL/RL: It’s not important to us.
RL: It’s much more important to convey emotions in the moment. The truth is, when you make music or when you decide which choreography or which ritual to perform, there is always the (distinct) moment of actually starting to do it. If you are aware of the process when it happens, there is always a little snap. You black out. You enter a black box where nothing is in control. I could get academic, but for most people, that’s not the point. It’s more spontaneous. That spontaneity betrays the concept you’ve been preparing in your head.
When I was working in my [Freemason] lodge on the use of ritual, I initially assumed that modern rationality and science had made rituals — and magical thinking and superstitions — disappear. I later realised that rituals aren’t primarily magical or superstitious customs, but are rather synergetic protocols within communities, helping them to become more than the sum of their parts. It might seem counterintuitive, but I think beliefs and superstitions are interchangeable components of rituals, not their foundation.
I have little in common with my neighbor, yet we share a minimal set of ritual practices: solstitial ceremonies, knowing the proper dance movements for matsuri and so on. What is truly eroding ritual is capitalism’s encoding and commodification of social life. Which is, to some degree, intentional, aiming to produce a society of individuals rather than communities. Even the mall, one of the saddest forms of communal sub-ritual, is being replaced by delivery apps and warehouses. People are becoming strangers to one another, leaving them vulnerable to oppression and increasing dependence on techno-capital.

HL: For me as well, intellectual understanding is not important. Understanding may come later, or it may not come at all. If someone wants to know more, they can explore it themselves and make it their own. Wherever you live, spontaneous movements and rhythms can emerge, gradually expanding into larger circles until they reach a ritualistic state. The narrative or belief system is often formed and expressed afterwards, sometimes with little or no connection to the initial impulse.
NM: Since you are operating on intuition, how has that intuition changed over the years? How is it especially different on Mythoplaxy?
RL: What other people do impacts me now—openly. I like to be close to people whose work I actually appreciate. And I’m completely okay with being influenced. But also, I’m less and less obsessed with seeing a single narrative. Especially after this album. I’m thinking more and more about architecture right now, about spaces and sound as spaces. If you compare this with our first EP, which was recorded in a tiny space. It’s isolated, almost claustrophobic. Mythoplaxy is a bit more free-roaming, which is pretty logical given our travel.

HL: Our early stuff was less ritualistic and more focused on having a catharsis on stage because it was relating to sexual abuse. It was scripted, but very lightly, a minimal script creating the space to release emotions. Now, I’m more focused on creating a space in itself through movement and undulation, rather than being the main character.
It’s less about displaying raw personal emotions and struggles to an audience, and more about projecting both the audience and ourselves into the future, imagining alternative times and places where things could be better for everyone—narrative territories where dreaming of a better future becomes possible again, even if these projections are not escapist and fully acknowledge that they would take shape in the ruins of a world order that has failed.
RL: The idea is to create a space, and if possible, to give the audience a sense that they are part of this space. And you’re part of the audience while you are creating the thing, which works differently depending on the space you’re in. So we’re more careful about where we accept to play and under which conditions.
NM: The way I would read that is going from individuation to indivisibility.
RL: That’s the way I feel. I think Nami is the same. Moving from being an individual to being a part of everything.
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Natalie Mariko is the author of HATE POEMS (no more poetry, AUS 2023), managing editor of the annual arts, sciences and fashion magazine CODE and a junior contributing writer for CLOT.