Ah yup, there it is in the basic tutorial, "Intercomponent communication". It is strange that I don't remember noticing that when I skimmed it. I must've been too distracted counting parentheses and trying to wrap my head around clojure syntax.
I'm relieved to know it was there the whole time and I simply missed it, thank you.
that's strange, because Om's tutorials use core.async
https://github.com/swannodette/om/wiki/Basic-Tutorial
https://github.com/swannodette/om/wiki/Intermediate-Tutorial