Mystery Theater

Memoir Recounts Youthful Quest for Meaning in D&D, Comics, Zeppelin

2012-01-28T13:03:00.000-08:00

Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, interviewed about Too Much to Dream over at Wired's GeekDad.

From the interview:

Gilsdorf: As a kid also growing up in the same era, I remember being haunted by Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of TV series, as well as devouring books about the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot. There are tons of examples of the weird and occult breaking through in the ’70s to the mainstream, aren’t there? Think of the X-Ray Vision glasses you could order from the back of a comic book, or plans to build your own hovercraft, or spy cameras, ventriloquist dummies, all kinds of tricks and magic. Remember Freakies breakfast cereal? All about a post-hippie commune of misfit toys who lived in a tree. What was that about?

Bebergal: Freakies cereal is an amazing example of the fringe making it into the mainstream. But it was so giddily counterculture, almost like a hippie practical joke, and yet it seemed to have this deep mythology, replete with individual characters with their own personalities, and even the great mythic trope, a world tree where all the Freakies gathered. I had to have it! I recall it was hard to find though, and that it actually tasted kind of horrible, but they came with a terrific prize, a magnet in the likeness of one of the characters.

--Read the interview--

Harry Smith - Heaven And Earth Magic (Excerpt)

2012-01-09T16:13:00.000-08:00

American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist, edited by Paola Igliori
I am dying to find a copy of this. the only book I know of that is a comprehensive look at the life and work of this remarkable character; a music archivist, filmmaker, magician.

Too Much to Dream Excerpts

2012-01-05T07:18:00.000-08:00

Read excerpts from Too Much to Dream:

Tablet Magazine

Poets and Writers

The Fix

The Revealer

You can also read an excerpt in the Fall 2011 issue of Tin House.

Getting There Too Quickly: Aldous Huxley and Mescaline

2012-01-05T07:13:00.000-08:00

Between his 1932 vision of a sterile dystopia in Brave New World and the 1962 novel Island about a spiritual utopia, the author Aldous Huxley experienced two things; the Hindu religious philosophy known as Vedanta and psychedelic drugs. In Brave New World, people are addicted to Soma, a hallucinogenic that artificially simulates a kind of dull transcendent state, and so makes religion irrelevant. In Island, the Palanese (residents of Pala where the book takes place) ritually use the drug moksha for spiritual and mystical insights. It wasn’t that by the time he was writing Island Huxley no longer believed that civilization was potentially doomed to a homogenized over-indulgent consumer culture, but rather that there was another possibility for human destiny. Soon after writing Brave New World Huxley saw this other opportunity but believed it would take work, a disciplined and rigorous adherence to a spiritual ideal. By the time he got around to writing Island he was convinced there was a faster, less strenuous way to find the higher purpose of human consciousness: mescaline.

--Read more--

Psychedelic Sobriety

2011-12-14T11:05:00.000-08:00

David Metcalfe, one of the most interesting people writing on esoteric and other related matters, interviewed me for Reality Sandwich:

How did writing this historically centered autobiography help you understand your experiences?

The single most important thing I realized was how mediated my experiences had been. Whether it was Silver Surfer comic books, Syd Barrett albums, or William Blake's poetry, cultural artifacts formed the language of my trips, my ideas, my hopes, and my fears. In understanding this, I came to believe that all experiences, not matter how pure we think they might be, are intimately shaped by symbols and mythologies and grammar.As I say in the book, there can be no pure experience. Even during the most profound context-smashing acid trip, our unconscious is drawing from a rich and abundant well. Maybe it's a Ray Bradbury story read in seventh grade or maybe it's a passage from the Vedas.

--Read more--

Interviews related to Too Much to Dream

2011-12-12T13:21:00.000-08:00

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Erik Davis on his show on Expanding Mind

Other interviews include:

Interview with R.U. Sirius at Acceler8tor.com

Interview with Ian Pickus on WAMC's Roundtable

Interview with Virginia Prescott on NHPR's Word of Mouth

Interview with John Schaefer on WNYC's Soundcheck

Back in the Pit

2011-12-02T06:57:00.000-08:00

Photo by Laura Black

The students had returned, so Harvard Square was particularly crowded. I was walking down the sidewalks with Sam, my 9-year-old son, and together we navigated gawking parents, wide-eyed freshman, and the panhandlers out in full force, who were eagerly hoping for less jaded and more sympathetic newcomers. Full-time Cambridge residents learned long ago to differentiate between the truly hard-luck cases and those spare-changers just looking to score for a drink or a drug. A little anxious about the new faces, I kept my hand tight around Sam’s. He doesn’t know it, but it feels a little like my home has been overrun by locusts in chinos and knee-length A-line skirts. We turned a corner and came upon what is affectionately known by locals as “the Pit,” populated, as usual, by young punks and other assorted teenage freaks with leather jackets, pierced noses and lips, and multicolored hair. I felt a wave of ease and nostalgia. Here is the Harvard Square I know and love.

Almost thirty years ago I first came into the city on my own, taking the bus and leaving my parents and their suburbs behind for the day. After buying my first clutch of punk 45s and a few stickers I headed back to the subway to catch a train to the bus terminal. That’s when I first spotted them: a group of young misfits with crew cuts and Mohawks, leather jackets, and combat boots. After a few consecutive weekends I worked up the nerve to sit with them, my hair newly spiked, my red Converse high tops gleaming. A tall, restless skinhead who called himself Flea put his hand out, asked me for a cigarette, and for the first time in my life I no longer felt like a misfit. I finally belonged.

Flea introduced me to the other Pit kids: Ruth, Sue, Tobie, Colin, Claudia, Sean, among others. We were all punks, our musical loyalty leaning sharply toward the loud, fast, and short songs of hardcore. Ours was a movement that kept its friends close and its enemies –headbangers, hippies, Mom and Dad – very far away. To find other kids that understood me marked the beginning of instant, unspoken friendships. In the Pit, I’d found a home away from home. I came here every weekend and at the age of fifteen learned about community, loyalty, the way of the street, and how to entertain yourself with a few joints, a six pack and a bottle of apple wine shared among eight kids, and maybe, just maybe, a small square of LSD. Despite our youth, we felt at once old beyond our years and immortal.

Three decades on, the kids in the Pit don’t look much like me and my friends did. Mohawks have given way to piercings; suspenders and flannel shirts have been replaced with tattoos. But the stoner affect and boisterous voices are the same. The patches on their leather jackets and thrift-store messenger bags still announce obscure and angry rock ‘n’ roll that probably drives their parents up the walls. Yet there was something I noticed that day that I’d never seen before in the Pit.

Sam started to climb up a slanted wall that ends in a window overlooking the subway, and I watch his fearless ascent. He wants to be noticed by the Pit kids who must seem to possess a staggering amount of cool. He might even come here after high school one day, his hair short and spiked, a leather bracelet around his skinny wrist. Some of the kids here are not much older than Sam. He watched as they lovingly jostle each other, make angry eyes at the incoming students. To Sam they are rare and dangerous animals, free to roam as they choose.

Looking at them, there with my own too quickly growing son, made me uneasy as I remember how fiercely my friends and I had lived. As young teens we felt desperate for something beyond the shallowness of pop culture, the hypocrisy of our churches and synagogues, and the emptiness of our public educations. We drank and got stoned with abandon, fumbled our way through sex with a dangerous naiveté. Our days were reckless. No matter how passionate and authentic we imagined ourselves to be, we were merely children.

Sam ran joyously and precariously down the bricks. The kids took no notice, but some other thing between them caused them to burst into laughter. My anxiousness faded into their merriment. Of those kids who were my companions decades ago, some have disappeared, others died, but most of us turned out okay. I eventually even found my way into the hallowed halls of that school across the street from the Pit. As a graduate student strolling to class through Harvard Square, I would take glances to see what the new recruits were doing, and if they still listened to the same bands, still smoked the same awful clove cigarettes.

I gripped my son’s hand even tighter as we walk past, feeling a strange tug to sit with the kids and talk, to tell them what to look out for, how to stay safe, but Sam is pulled me away. He has his own life to live, ahead of where we all are.

Magical Limitations: An Interview with Alka

2011-09-14T19:32:00.000-07:00

Inpsired by John Zorn's most recent volume of his Arcana series, Musicians on Music, Magic & Mysticism, I present the first in a series of interviews with musicians on the intersection of music, esotericism, and creativity.

Alka (Bryan Michael) is an electronic music composer who imbues his music with echoes of an analog past. It's ambient music you could almost dance to, the psychedelic dreams of a circuit bender. I corresponded with Alka by email about how magical symbols work in the context of his compositions.

What is it about esotericism and the occult that seem to attract
underground musicians?

I think on a very superficial level, musicians may be attracted to the often misunderstood imagery of the occult, and the mild fear or excitement they believe this association will create in the minds of their fans and listeners. For me, it is about inspiration. It is about looking beyond the known senses and alchemically transforming gathered perceptions from an archetypal realm into a physically audible creation.

What role do these kind of symbols and emblems have on shaping your music?

I suppose it's a form of musical notation in itself. Many symbols associated with the esoteric, tarot for example, have musical note correspondences which can be used by the composer deliberately or, oftentimes, subconsciously in music to project higher philosophies, or on a more base level, emotions. I believe that digital electronic music is even more conducive to transmitting the occult, as it can easily be reduced to a numerical base. Something I have been experimenting with in my own music is taking words or phrases of some importance, reducing them to their numerical equivalency via gematria, and then inputting these symbolically-representing digits into tonal parameters or step sequencers.

[Listen to the track "Nether," inspired by gematria]

Can making music be a kind of magical practice?

Absolutely. Even composers completely unaware of the deeper connections underlying all things, intentionally choose various musical keys and particular instruments to convey a set of feelings or moods across multiple listeners. They are ultimately projecting a rather abstract form of expression, effecting a change in the audience's physical body chemistry, psychological state and possibly, philosophical state.

There has always been a tension within occult circles on the distinction between magic and mysticism. How do you make sense of that distinction for yourself?

This seems to be a current issue within academic circles; does magic(k) imply religion, merely compliment it, or is it something independent altogether? I think this is largely left up to the minds of the individual practitioner and how they define their beliefs. Of course certain religious dogmas through defined preset doctrines, discourage personal will, or even interest in Hermetic philosophies in general, but I believe that magic can compliment faith or stand completely on its own as needed. It all depends on what particular form and level of practice you want to involve yourself in.

Do you think that music can actually alter consciousness, either the making of it or the listening to it, or does it merely reflect consciousness?

I believe that music can potentially aid in the altering of consciousness, but is dependent on a number of factors, such as the listener's mood, environment and will. More accurately, music, I think, reflects the subconciousness, which in turn, can then be used to effect the consciousness.

In a recent interview with Erik Davis, Alan Moore explained that he does not believe magic can change the laws of the physical universe (whew!) but can absolutely change consciousness.

Well, I suppose it depends on what path of physics you choose to define the physical universe. Quantum Mechanics, for example, suggests that thought can directly alter the physical realm. This is referred to as consciousness-correlated physical phenomena and is something that is repeatedly popping up in related scientific studies. The essay, "Change the Rules!" by Robert G. Jahn and Brenda J. Dunne of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, documents this nicely.

Which is more powerful, art or magic, in this regard?

I feel that the two can be one in the same. Magic when approached correctly is an art; and art, in general, has the potential for magic.

Given that electronics can do so much, do you impose any limitations on yourself? Are there lines you won't cross?

Electronic musicians have sound palettes ranging into the inaudible, and therefore some control must be exercised. That is not to say that my personal audio limitations do not shift from track to track, but I do have a loose guideline as to what music released under the alka moniker should feel like. Some electronic musicians prefer to work in a pre-defined style-palette, so that they can be easily identified with a proven subgenre. I find this practice extremely limiting and will always choose tones that reflect mood over popularity.

What about in this regard spiritually?

If you are referring to limitations on personal spiritual beliefs, I would say that it is inevitable for anyone who considers themselves spiritual, to exact some sort of, shall we say, "belief parameters". That is not to say that I would EVER impose personal parameters on others.

Are there any musicians/artists who you feel embody this notion of art as magic?

I would say W.B. Yeats, Jhonn Balance (of Coil), and William Blake, but of course there are countless others, some we are not yet aware of. Most importantly, art as magic is not limited to any one artistic medium, or even sub-genre within a medium. When art is infused with a magical property, the distinction lies not merely on the resulting work but in something that emanates a little differently from it.

Lego Secret Society Members

2011-08-23T21:49:00.000-07:00

None of these use customized piece so I was a little limited with bricks on hand:

Freemason (Master of the Lodge w/ gavel)

Mathers-esque Chief of Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (w/ dagger and cup)

Kabbalist and his golem (sefirotic tree, of a type, in background)

Rosicrucian (1600s, wholly imagined)

Reptillain Illuminati

Celluloid by Dave McKean

2011-08-04T07:47:00.000-07:00

Turning the page of Celluloid, Dave McKean's new graphic novel and seeing a full-page spread of an ejaculating penis is disconcerting, no matter how mature and sophisticated the medium has become. McKean is best known for his surreal and often macabre cover collages for the seventy-five issues of the beloved comic Sandman. His work has always been interested in the visual language of fantasy and dreams. Here, McKean is attempting to subvert hardened notions of both comics and pornography. It's a book that gets the blood racing just as it raises questions that just won't go away about the nature of art, porn, and the male gaze.

Read the rest at Bookslut

Soft Machine, "Moon In June" at the Bilzen Festival, August 22, 1969

2011-08-04T07:44:00.001-07:00

Thank you YouTube...

Pathologizing the Sexual Revolution

2011-06-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

The Sixties counterculture beleaguered most traditional religious communities. Not only was there an increase in behavior deemed inappropriate (drug use, promiscuous sex, and the generalized spread of anti-establishment ideas), there was what came to be seen as a distracting interest in non-Western, non-traditional spiritual philosophy and practices. Compounding this was the insistence by many young people that psychedelic drugs were a profound catalyst for helping them to break free of what they saw as dusty and dried out teachings spouted by clergy who had no understanding of the injustices of a country torn apart by war, racism, sexism, and homophobia.

It’s no surprise then that the recent report on the “causes and context” of sex abuse in the Catholic Church claims that one factor was the prevalence of counterculture values that peaked in the mid- to late-Sixties, characterized in the popular consciousness of hirsute young people taking drugs, having sex, and otherwise dropping out of society in pursuit of a naive belief in a cosmic utopia. This stereotype would ultimately reduce the Sixties counterculture, an extremely complex and diverse movement, to a kind of youthful pathology, or simply, deviance. As the report says: “The rise in abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by social factors in American society generally. This increase in abusive behavior is consistent with the rise in other types of ‘deviant’ behavior, such as drug use and crime, as well as changes in social behavior, such as an increase in premarital sexual behavior and divorce.”

Read more

Amy Ross’s Wunderkammer

2011-05-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

Somewhere there is a forest of birch trees without roots that walk on bird feet. Maternal wolf-women hide in wait for Little Red Riding Hood, to either eat her or to protect her. In another part of the forest other birch trees walk on hooves amongst mushrooms capped with bird heads. But this is not a magic forest. You will find no faeries here, no dryads or sylphs, no dragons flying overhead or wizards smoking hashish under a rainbow bridge. There is something oddly alchemical about these birch trees and mushrooms, as if they were constructed by a potent blend of forbidden knowledge and advanced genetic science. And the wolf-women that haunt them might know more about what’s going on than one might think.

Amy Ross, the artist of these strange and bizarre worlds admits that her own body is the model for the naked lower torso of these lupine/human cross breeds. These creatures are a departure, though, from the main body of her work: animals morphed with branches, mushrooms, berries, and blossoms, forming implausible hybrid creatures. Her collage, graphite and watercolor paper creations form a collection not unlike early botanicals, except in her natural history goat heads emerge from near-bursting berries and fruits, which are endowed with teats that feed other fruit-housed creatures nearby.

So where does Ross’s doppelganger exist in her earlier work, which is devoid of any human imagery? Well, despite the lack of obvious human elements, Ross’s hand exists in the very nature of her drawings and watercolors, which always suggest works-in-progress. There is a deliberate unfinished quality to them, like the best scientific research, that continually build on past successes (and errors) to further push the boundaries of those trials. But in Ross’s experiments, any result is worthwhile, sometimes the more grotesque the better. Ross exists as an immediate presence behind a drawing of piglets suckling on their fungal-pig mother. Hers is the scalpel performing these bizarre surgeries and implantations at the moment one is looking at the images.

While Ross’s work plays with the intersection between art and science, there is another component that is equally fundamental. The tradition of the 18th and 19th century naturalist and natural philosopher was the precursor to Ross—where science, art, and speculation all worked together to discover and catalog all the wonders, and oddities, of the natural world. The material expression of this came in the form of botanical and zoological illustrations, and was even part of the impetus behind the Wunderkammer, 17th century cabinet of curiosity. The Wunderkammer was an attempt to catalog and collect all the wonders of the known world. Works of art, shells and minerals, plant and animal specimens, and even objects that blurred into the mythic (e.g. unicorn horns) were housed in private rooms by wealthy naturalists and aristocrats. Modern science has replaced the curious with the rigor of scientific investigation, and the modern museum houses the rest of what was once only for the rich and their patrons.

Ross’s whole body of work exists as a modern Wunderkammer, a room that houses both the real and the fantastic. In one watercolor, a goat head emerges from the center of a flower. The flower itself could easily be mistaken for an image from a early botanical--the precision of its rendering gives it scientific value. The goat in the center is almost shocking, and while it seems content, one can’t but help feel sorry for the creature. How much of its own goatness had to be lost or removed for it to exist as a mere extension of the flower’s identity? In a Wunderkammer, the problem was the same. What happens to the identity of natural specimens, no matter how strange, when coupled or presented next to things that simply do not really exist? Ross’s work often moves from being simply a naturalist of the improbable to a mad scientist. This will mean that her hybrid creatures will not be naturally-occurring anomalies (such as a mushroom with a calf’s legs and feet) but rather human created monsters, which might potentially mutate and wreak havoc.

There is of course, one other primary influence. That of religion and its myths. Even as Ross moves further into the realms of science gone amok, the religious metaphors for her work can be startling. The golem, for example, haunts the very edges of almost everything Ross has done. In that story, a rabbi constructs a man out of clay, and by using the hidden names of God, imbues it with life. Both a representation of human beings, but also a grotesque mimicry of humanity, the golem eventually turns on his creator and the rabbi is forced to erase the divine name from the creature’s forehead, turning it back into a heap of clay. In some versions of the story, the golem had grown so large that when it crumbles, it crushes the rabbi under the weight of its rubble. While Ross’s creations are delicate lambs and birds fused with even more delicate plants and mushrooms, they are an attempt to create new life where it had not previously existed. Is this something that should be left to God alone? Ross’s work does not answer that ancient questions, but only reveals how human that impulse is. Isn’t this how we are most like our creator, her work insists, to want to form something out of the void, and then to see how malleable nature is?

Repost Friday: Interview with Steven R. Smith

2011-04-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

Steven R. Smith is one of the most prolific underground musicians working today. In addition to his numerous solo works including Hala Strana and more recently Ulaan Khol, he is a member of a number of influential collaborations such Thuja and Mirza. He is also a print maker and instrument builder, and from what I can tell from corresponding with him, a mensch. Important Records recently released his collaboration with clarinetist Gareth Davis, Westering and on the horizon is the forthcoming LP Cities. Smith was kind enough to answer some pestering questions.

Your music draws from a vast array of ideas and traditions. Do you also draw ideas and themes from non-musical influences such as art, literature, philosophy

Yes, these things definitely seem to seep in. Most often it’s books and films—recently both Cormac McCarthy’s the Road as well as the films of Hungarian director Bela Tarr have both sort of dickered their way into an LP of mine called Cities which will be released in the next week. It may not be apparent to listeners but I hear it in certain moods that I was trying to go for and certain phrases turn up in song titles and things like that. But Cormac McCarthy and Bela Tarr’s influence has cropped up in subtle ways in a lot of my previous records over the years. I guess they’re people I come back to often. I remember the films of Sergei Parajanov, particularly Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, were very influential on the Hala Strana records I did. Basically, I wanted to make Hala Strana sound like the way that movie looked and made me feel. I just loved that film, and still do. All of these examples are saying things in one medium that I wish or struggle to say in my own music.

Does making music have a ritual quality for you? Do you find that your music has effects on your own consciousness?

I think playing music definitely has an effect on my own consciousness, but this has also occurred from listening to other people’s music as well, seeing bands play and so on. I’d maybe even venture to say that if I’ve ever had a truly spiritual moment or a transcendent moment then it’s definitely been while playing music. Unfortunately, those seem to be far and few between though, but one keeps trying. Music is as valid a religion as any as far as I’m concerned. I guess any creative pursuit could be seen as a spiritual pursuit and, for me, music might even, at times, be the way I would engage in things the way I suppose others would use prayer or meditation. And hell, it’s also fun and it feels good. Now, that’s not to say that I think my music is special, far from it. I can’t stress that enough. It’s hard to talk about this without sounding self-important. I just mean the process of playing music (or any creative process) could have that potential to sort of lift you to another place, at least on a good day, and that’s not a bad thing to strive for. That goes for anyone, whether they’re gardening or cooking or painting, etc. That potential is there.

So the ritual part of it, I think it has a lot to do with preparation. A lot of what I do is improvised so it’s not so much about practicing what I’m going to play but rather getting in the right frame of mind and trying to understand what I want to say before I even start playing notes. Mostly just being in the moment, which really is a sort of prayer, right? Even just the process of plugging in your gear, tuning up, there’s a physical ritual of handling the guitar, a guitar I’ve held over and over for years and years, or instruments I’ve actually built myself, so there’s a connection with the tools as well and it’s comforting.

Lately, I’ve been struggling with time and not having enough of it. I work a full-time job and have a toddler at home so it’s hectic. And it’s getting harder to use my time wisely, it’s too diffuse and erratic, so lately I’m trying to write some music beforehand and then I’ll take a block of time off from work and just record the next record in a focused set amount of time. Not that everything will be written in stone but I’ll at least have some source material to start with, maybe a concept, some things to work with, maybe some goals to tackle. And what I’m finding is that there is ritual in that as well. It’s very calming, just moving notes around on a piano or an acoustic guitar, slowly putting things in place but not actually recording or even really playing, just free associating during this sort of vague writing process that I’m going through.

The music you make and the people you collaborate with are often lumped together into that now very broad category of psychedelic music. Does this word mean anything to you? Do you think it is an important signifier?

The word psychedelic doesn’t mean a whole lot to me at this point but I’ve used it myself to describe what I do. So there you go. It’s a loaded term, for sure, but I don’t find it to be too embarrassing so I guess it’s better than others. It’s just the cartoonish image that comes up when the average man on the street thinks of something as “psychedelic”--“Incense and Peppermints” and the lava lamp and a camera lens zooming in and out to the beat really quickly—that’s sort of a bummer. And that’s not what I think of when I think of psychedelia. My first thought would be something like the MC5 rocking the Democratic Convention with the riot squad and the helicopters overhead, so my image of what’s psychedelic is not really very accurate. I think Ornette Coleman is psychedelic! I’d say when talking to friends though, music friends, the word psychedelic usually refers to good qualities, things we like, bands that we respect and so that’s usually a compliment so it’s still an important signifier, at least to “those in the know.” Ha ha. I guess to others it might not. Part of the music I make is psychedelic, no doubt, so the term’s fine with me, but I hope there’s a little more to it than that. Frankly, it’s better than “freak folk” or some of the other terms people have used that this stuff sometimes gets lumped into.

What kind of music were you listening to growing up? Did you always tend towards underground music?

Once I was old enough to know better, I guess I just started to lean toward more underground stuff. Honestly, the music’s just better, plain and simple, at least for what I value and am looking for. I was fortunate that I grew up in Fullerton, California where there was a really thriving punk scene in the early 80s, and although I was way too young to be directly part of that scene, we grew up in the shadow of it and I do think that had an effect. And it just felt like it was something you could do and do it on your own terms. You would see these people in bands you respected walking down the street, hell some of the younger ones were still seniors in my high school when I was a freshman and they had records out — very cool. That’s what I wanted to do. I never had dreams of playing a stadium to the adoring masses. Recently, I was talking with someone I work with and she had seen U2 play on their last go around at whatever arena it was and she mentioned how it was a real emotional experience for her. The show itself really affected her, and this just shows how people get different things out of music. I personally can’t understand how being in an arena at the back row watching some performer on a video screen could be much of a moving experience but it worked for her. I want to see a band in their practice space.

In middle school and high school it was some punk rock and a lot of post punk: you know the staples: Joy Division, Smiths, Cure, Bauhaus, whatever, but we also were rabid about the Dischord records stuff—Rites of Spring, Soul Side, Dag Nasty, Embrace, were all favorites in high school. Glenn Donaldson and I went to high school together and he was real hip to that stuff, he tipped me off to a lot of good music and we went to a lot of shows back then. I was big on the Minneapolis stuff too, the Replacements and all that. Later we found the Fall and the Birthday Party. That was the era, man.

Do you see noise as an musical instrument, a mood, or a system?

I guess we have to sort of define what noise is because one man’s noise is another man’s butter or something like that. I think what you’re getting at is sort of noise as opposed to noisy: “Metal Machine Music” or maybe how people tend to define Merzbow, or even say Keiji Haino’s hurdy gurdy discs—a sort of general electric cacophony. And that stuff’s great. I’m not so sure I use much of it as a general component of my own music though…although I suppose it’s in some of the Ulaan Khol stuff and sprinkled here and there in the others, but I generally don’t think of my music in that way. I really just see it as just another sound, the same as an A minor chord. Even when it’s something totally un-musical it still has to relate to the tonal center of the song, it still relates to it either in sympathy or in dissonance, depending on what you want. So it’s not really anything but another color on the palate that I might use. I like fuzz pedals and I like distortion and enjoy how different instruments and sounds get mixed up in that swamp. It’s just another sound and, like the A minor chord, these things give way to a sort of mood.

I just see sound and notes and chords, all of it, as degrees of dissonance and consonance. It’s a gray area really, and I’ll use a recording of a car engine sent through a fuzz pedal if that’s what works or I’ll play the prettiest chord I can muster on a piano if that’s what I need. But I don’t see noise as any more or less than that. I’m just referring to my own way of approaching it, of course. I’m sure there are artists that might view noise as a whole system to work within. I mentioned Merzbow, he’s like the archetypal noise artist, maybe he sees his own music in this way. I’m probably mis-attributing this to him, but I thought I read something where he said as a kid the only parts of rock songs he liked were the big endings, the big crescendos at the end where all the instruments tend to let go and collide together. The noisy parts, which I admit are often the best part. He just wanted to take that one moment and stretch it out. That’s a beautiful thought.

Do you think of yourself more as a composer than a song writer?

Oh, definitely just a song writer, or even more lowly, just a rock musician. Ouch, the lowest of the low. But really, “composer” just seems to imply that I know what I’m doing. It’s a bit pretentious as well. Even though we can bandy all these different influences and artists about, just because I like Morton Feldman and Arvo Part, and people like Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, and traditional folk music from Eastern Europe, and all of these different things that have been very influential and have definitely changed the way I make music, I still see whatever I do within the frame of rock music. It’s how I first became attracted to music and it’s always the context from which I view what I do.

How did you get involved with the Jewelled Antler Collective?

I moved away from San Francisco about 1999 or 2000 and the Jewelled Antler stuff didn’t really get moving until a little after that so my take on it all is sort of from a distance. Obviously, I am in Thuja and so on, but when I think of Jewelled Antler I think of Glenn and Loren and their label and all the great music they released—an awful lot of stuff in a short period of time, very prolific time for them. To me, it was my friends’ cool label. I wanted to be a part of it. They put out my solo record “Kohl” and the Hala Strana record “Fielding”, two of my best records really and we did awesome packaging with it. Really good times, I was so proud of those releases, and still am. I guess Jewelled Antler grew into sort of a whole community, and they were forming all these different bands and a whole aesthetic came from that. It formed an umbrella to put all these groups together. But to me, it was always just a way to do stuff with my friends. I can’t even keep track of all the groups they formed. And then of course it sort of blossomed and collaborations were done between other musicians from all over the place. It was a good moment in time and luckily, a lot of it was put on tape and released.

It's amazing that rock has become a palette for an incredible diversity of sound. What do you think it is about the genre that makes it so open to so much experimentation?

Interesting question. I don’t really know, but I’ll hazard a guess and say it might have something to do with the fact that rock music is the first genre, or at least one of the first genres, where electricity and volume were crucial to its definition. I mean, you have jazz and blues and folk and all that came up from and out of an acoustic situation and tradition and then maybe it went a little electric much later in the genre’s life. But rock, possibly by its own definition, or one of its definitions, is electric -- and rude, and loud. It’s electric, it’s based on electricity. And an electric guitar doesn’t, or at times, doesn’t sound like an acoustic guitar at all, it’s something else entirely. And once it’s electric, it can be tweaked and changed and morphed into different things really easily. It can accommodate outside influence really well. Of course, we now have electronic music and hip hop and so forth that are almost wholly electric based, but those genres also have a huge diversity of sound and have swallowed up other influences too, maybe rivaling rock music. I think a large part is electricity. There’s only so much you can do with an acoustic instrument to alter its sound, but an electric guitar -- shit, it’s all over the place.

Are there particular outdoor places that are important inspirations for you?

I certainly enjoy the deserts down here in Southern California and love the redwood forests of Northern California, in fact I’m trying to get up to Big Sur soon. But I’ve always sort of been more of a city person. I don’t know how much any of that has to do with the music I make. I mean, it must, these places stir something in you and so I guess it finds its way in. But I’ve never recorded music out in the woods, or in a cave or wherever. Some of the Jewelled Antler groups have done that, I think the Blithe Sons and some others, but I wasn’t in those groups. Thuja has done some performances and recordings outdoors but it has usually been in Rob’s backyard greenhouse, at least when I was around. And Thuja also recorded just as often in Rob’s garage and his old warehouse space. I’ve done field recordings for the Hala Strana stuff, but my field recordings, and this will tell you something, were done by walking around the city recording train stations, church bells, footsteps on a brick path, street corners, crowds, cars, etc… not out recording in an open field or by the shore. I’m not belittling that method, not at all, it just isn’t for me. I’m more comfortable recording my own music in studios or in houses, my own house usually. I’d like to take some mics and a tape machine out to somewhere more acoustically interesting, but by this I mean something more like a church or a house with large rooms and wood floors instead of my dusty cement bunker I call a studio.

Who are you listening to now that you think more people should know about?

Oh man, it’s a bit of a dry spell, so I don’t have any really great secrets. I just bought both the new Blues Control lp and “Box of Birch” by A Broken Consort and I’ve been enjoying both of those. I really loved the Blackout Beach record “Skin of Evil” that came out earlier this year. I don’t know why that didn’t get more attention, I thought that was a really great piece of work. I bought the Obits record which I liked, saw them play recently too. I just saw that Scott Walker documentary (30 Century Man) and I thought that was pretty cool. Boy, it seems like he struggles a lot to get that music out of him. I find that to be some really inspiring stuff. I picked up some La Dusseldorf reissues recently. Nice to hear those. I’ve also been re-assessing Jethro Tull [!] so take this for what you will.

Can you tell me a little bit about future projects, either music or art?

There’s some stuff in the pipeline waiting to be released: there’s a solo LP called Cities that will actually be out in a couple of weeks and I’m excited about that. There’s a second LP that I did with Gareth Davis that should be coming out later in the year. The last part of the Ceremony series for Ulaan Khol has been done for some time, we’re just getting the art and packaging together so hopefully that will be out toward the end of the year as well. It’s been a busy year. And I have a couple ideas floating around for what I want to do next, so we’ll see.

Why spend the dark night with you (Moondog)

2011-03-17T08:49:00.001-07:00

Why spend the dark night with you?
What a fearful price to pay!
Other nights would be
Lonely dark ages for me.

Visons of Frank

2011-03-13T06:58:00.001-07:00

See more of Woodring's work here.

NYPL Digital Gallery

2011-02-10T10:41:00.000-08:00

The New York Public Library Digital Gallery is a wunderkammer of images, including everything from rare manuscripts to cigarette cards, all of which can be downloaded. Prints can also be purchased at a pretty fair price.

Here are some keywords that produced some intriguing results:

mushrooms
octopus
space
sea monster
supernatural beings
planets

If you come up with anything neat, please leave a comment.

Radio Belbury

2011-02-07T10:16:00.000-08:00

Jim Jupp of Ghost Box has posted the newest installment of Radio Belbury. I interviewed Jupp in 2009 and he described his love of "the weirdness of the juxtaposition of ancient and modern, or the cosmic and the parochial," as found in the work of Arthur Machen and the Quatermass movies.

The radio show also which includes a nod to Trish Keenan of Broadcast who passed away last month. Their latest album, Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, was garnering all sorts of critical praise.

Mountainhood: The Boat-Maker's Daughter

2010-12-14T07:44:00.000-08:00

Psychedelic music is usually associated with some notion of altered consciousness, fueled by drugs or at the very least, inspired by a sensibility that understands how pliable consciousness can be (particularly when chemically enhanced). But there are other kinds non-ordinary states of consciousness; dreaming, hypnosis, forms of contemplation, ecstatic prayer. Sometimes those states are a result of something less intentional as when you are apprehended for a moment by the unexpected sighting of a hawk, by Venus in the morning, or those rare but startling connections with another person. When we recall these moments to others, it is difficult to capture fully how were altered, how something in our consciousness actually shifted. Thank God then for music like Mountainhood that understands the necessity for art to transmit those strangely ineffable moments. More importantly, it's no good to keep it to yourself. Mountainhood's songs embrace a mood of fellowship, even as they struggle with how personal and particular those moments can be.

Mountainhood belongs to that new movement in psych-folk, much like their label mates Sore Eros, that begs for a new name for music that traditionally has been called psychedelic. It's not that there is something radical going on here, as Mountainhood plays very well with all that came before, but referencing a genre shouldn't lock you into being labeled as part of that genre. Their originality has to do with risk, not with what is added, but what is stripped away to get to the essence of the form they are working with. Mountainhood's songs live in an eternal moment as in an autumn morning after an evening rain. The air is cool and moist, the sky is not yet clear, and may not be all day. But there is a sense of potential, and of some lingering sadness.

--Listen to "Apacotees"

--Buy The Boat-Maker's Daughter

Ghost Box Idents

2010-12-07T16:47:00.000-08:00

And here is an interview with Jim Jupp of Ghost Box

Julius Knipl and the longing for nostalgia

2010-11-09T17:25:00.000-08:00

I usually board the train in Porter Square and you have to go down pretty deep to get to the inbound track. First there is a short escalator from the street where in the morning a man hands out a free daily. On the level below him is where the turnstiles and token booth are and down here another fellow sells the Globe and the Herald, as well as the NY Times for those of us that secretly wish we were in Manhattan. After you go through the turnstiles there are three steep escalators that go down over 100 feet. Once on the platform, the wide arch of the ceiling can be dizzying.

I’ve sat on the wooden bench in this subway terminal in every condition, the whole of my experience seemingly reflected on in this space. The subway station is a liminal space and this is what makes it sacred. All you can do is wait. And it's in the waiting that everything appears, everything you are and long to be takes shape. And then the from the distance you hear the train and as you are pulled out of whatever reverie you were in a return to the feeling of hope or dread or wherever the train is about take you, takes hold and you shuffle off your thinking and board the car. It is then I am often filled with an explicable nostalgia.

One of the most realized contemporary encounters with nostalgia, similar to some freakish longing for Weegee’s Coney Island, is found in the work of Ben Katchor, an artist most known for his comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.

In this strip, a happy, but vaguely melancholic Knipl roams the streets of a city that exists just on the outside of the real. Where it does exist is in the nostalgic, an only slightly fantastic world where men find hidden rooms above their drop ceilings, salt and pepper shakers mysteriously disappear from diners, and where, as Katchor narrates from one panel to the next, “there exists no more perfect tool for lifting a succession of discarded papers from the soft earth/ than this simple wooden stick with its long protruding nail.” Knipl’s city is haunted by itself. Already rich with its own invisible history, it keeps creating this history over and over again if only to sustain this eternal nostalgia for itself. Through Julius Knipl, Katchor reveals that the present is often merely a shadow of the past, and that what is forgotten is more authentic.

In one strip the first panel show a street-level subway train curving into view. The next shows Knipl having just left the station and the panels read, from one to the next: “In the same way a doctor associates certain physical signs with the end of a human life/ Mr. Knipl knows what to expect at the last stop on any subway line.” Then through a wonderful convention in which Julius Knipl speaks not in thought balloons but regular speech balloons even when he is alone, the real estate photographer describes the businesses he encounters: “A Trophy manufacturer, a movie theater converted into a business school, the offices of a wedding orchestra, a dietetic candy store, a bus driver’s uniform and supply store.” One can imagine a minyan taking place in the back of one of these stores, a few tired salesmen gathering for some companionship under the eave of their Judaism. But even here, on the outskirts of the city there exists an even lonelier sentiment: “However, these last manifestations of private enterprise can linger on for a quarter of a century.” And Knipl continues, “An illegal franchise of a defunct fast-food chain/ a plastic slipcover showroom.” The last panel shows Knipl resting inside the store, a sun-broken shadow cutting across the floor through the front door. It’s as if in the end, what these things offered was simply a place to rest, a place to sit down away from the center of things where the noise and the movement made it impossible to have some communion.

The Medieval Bestiary

2010-11-01T12:46:00.000-07:00

The Medieval Bestiary is an absolutely marvelous Web site dedicated to Medieval art of catolaguing beasts, both real and imagined. The site has searcahble index, a digital collection of texts, and a vast encyclopdia of animals such as the Caladrius ("...an all-white bird that lives in the king's house"), the he-goat ("A beast so hot that its blood dissolves diamond") and the onocentaur ("The upper part is rational; the lower part is exceedingly wild.")

Free Classic Weird Fiction

2010-10-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

The Web is a treasure of books and other media in the public domain, and sites like archive.org and gutenberg.org offer texts in a number of different formats. For purveyors of weird and early horror fiction, there are a number of full texts available. Below is a small sampling of some of my favorites.

Arthur Machen
The Great God Pan-- A classic tale of ancient powers infiltrating modernity
The White People-- A strange unsettling story of a young girl describing arcane and secret rites

Algernon Blackwood
The Willows--Two people go into the woods...

H.P. Lovecraft
The Call of Cthulhu--"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

Clark Ashton Smith
The Immortals of Mercury-- One of Smith's science fiction tales, but as weird as anything he has done, where "There were long, tediously winding tunnels that went down into Cimmerian depth, or climbed at acolivitous angles."

Sore Eros

2010-09-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

Recently I have been interested in the lesser highlighted aspects of what we typically refer to as the psychedelic experience; loneliness, regret, longing, emptiness. Like most things related to psychedelia, I find the expression in music to resonate the most. Not too long ago I wrote about Big Blood and their ability to capture the sense of uncertainty and yearning when an altered state (whatever the kind) has worn off. Perfectly timed with this reflection is my late discovery of another group that has been examining the tender and vulnerable aspects of psychedelia; Sore Eros.

Much recent psych-folk is communal, a sense of a shared experience inside the sacred grove. Sore Eros tends towards something a little more isolated, where even if there are other people grooving with the same spirits, we easily get locked inside our own psyche. What makes Sore Eros so remarkable is their ability to take this very personal space and craft it into something that feels familiar. This isn't solipsism by any means. It's about the ability to recognize that no matter how particular our own experience is, there is something that we all can recognize. Maybe it's sadness, maybe it's hope. I had no idea, in the moment, what the heck it was you were going through, but on the other side we can rest in the knowledge that no matter how personal, we were never really alone.

Sore Eros began as a bedroom-recording project by Robert Robinson, but is now a full outfit including Robert (guitar and vocals), Adam Langellotti (bass and keyboards), Jeff Morkeski (guitar), Matt Jugenheimer (drums) and Matt Brown (samples/snyths) with most of the songs written by Robinson and Langellotti.

They have a new album due out on Shdwply Records next month, and are currently working on an EP called Just Fuzz which will be out early 2011 on Blackburn Recordings.

--Listen to "Tounge Tied"--

Robinson was kind enough to answer a few questions about his music and underground music in general.

What are you listening to now, both current and past musicians/bands?
Adam [Langellotti] just bought this Alan Lomax record full of field recordings he made in the south during the late 50's. Its called "I'll Be Glad When the Sun Goes Down." We've been listening to that non-stop. It's so raw and soulful. We've also been listening to this German Folk singer named Sibylle Baier that was reissued a few years ago. We also been listening to a lot of classics like Magical Mystery Tour, Marvin Gay and the Velvet Underground. We played with Julian Lynch a few months ago, who gave me his new record, which I like that a lot.

Your music is often vaguely claustrophobic, but resonates in a universal way.
We try not to think too much about the music in the process of creating it. We usually do the initial tracks of a song in one or two takes, creating a very natural/intimate base to the song, which we will later craft and build melodies to... I do believe the inspiration comes from a greater power, greater then us and perhaps greater then the listener.

Psychedelic music has undergone an remarkable transformation from the sixties, which at its peak became something almost saccharin. What is it about the notion of psychedelic music that inspired so many musicians to want to re-invent it?
To me psychedelic music is always interesting because I feel its a movement in music that not only keeps trying to do new things, but also has elements to it that actually make me want to listen to it -- like melodies and hooks. I've never really been into hardcore music or "noise" music. Seeing an occasional live performance of something that drones forever can be moving, but for the most part I lose attention fairly quick. I like hooks, and I always try to create hooks in the music we are doing, no matter how weird or abstract a song may be come. Another thing about the evolution of psych music is the whole drug relation. I feel over time, it's not so much associated with taking drugs like it it used to be I think people can enjoy psyched out stuff totally sober.

Why do you think that, like you, more and more underground music is opting for melody over noise?
Underground music is always evolving. I think top 40 music is just so horrible these days. I don't even know if I can name a hit that came out with in the last few years. So maybe even underground musicians miss hearing good old fashioned melodies so they end up putting it into their music with out really realizing.

Why do you think esoteric and occult images and ideas have been so much a part of current underground music?
I think there is a part of everyone that loves something mysterious. Unfortunately mainstream music doesn't really explore(or should I say exploit that) much these days. When you start to tread in territories that aren't simple, safe or cut and dry then a certain risk gets involved. That's a risk that maybe only underground musicians are willing to take. What do they have to lose? If people get offended or if people don't like it, they can just restart a new band with a different name. But it seems most underground bands don't even care if people like it not, that's what makes underground music so interesting.

On a more personal level, I've always been a huge fan of mythology. I feel like it's been such an important part of life for thousands of years and will probably continue to be as long as humans continue to use their imaginations. I've been to Europe a few times and walking through ruins in Italy, churches in France or Castles in England, there is a chill that runs through my body. Maybe its the spirits passing through me, I don't know, but it's something embedded in me and I know it comes through in my music. Adam and I just moved into this old Mansion right outside of Northampton, MA. We built a recording studio in the attic and we are starting to record a new record. So far, this setting has been exactly what we've always wanted.

Nostalgia is another thing that plays into your music. What are you nostalgic for?
I'm always nostalgic for moments in life when things are simple, pure and when you are happy, which are mostly moments of childhood, or even trying to dig deep into your earliest memories. I was raised Catholic and I have really early memories of seeing this giant bearded guy hanging from a cross and bleeding above all these people in robes singing beautiful sounding songs. It gave me feelings of both fear and curiosity. I like those feelings and I certainly think those feelings play a role in my music.But the nostalgia can also run recent, like moments of when you are so much in love that you make stupid decisions that almost ruin your life.

There is a deep melancholy to your music, but it is woven with hope. Where does this hope come from for you?
Sometimes no matter how hard we try to write something up beat, a dark cloud seems to come over the writing/recording process. We are always conscious of this and try to counter with a pretty keyboard part or a baseline that totally has an opposite feel. I'm certainly not interested in making sad music. I would much rather make music that makes people happy and leaves you with a sense of hope. This hope comes from your heart.

The Moore Collection of Underground Comix

2010-09-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

Wonderful, albeit small, sampling of covers of underground comix from the The Moore Collection of Underground Comix, as well as a searchable database of the entire collection with publishing information. The collection is housed at the California Polytechnic State University library.

Big Blood: Dead Songs

2010-09-02T09:01:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting aspects of psychedelic music in general is it's potential to both induce and narrate, in a sense, altered states of consciousness. This sensibility ranges from the druggy to the transcendental, the communal to the personal, the urban to the rural, the synthetic to the organic, the ecstatic to the reflective, much like the experience itself.

One thing that is often lacking from the whole range of psychedelic music, and in particular psych-folk, is a reflection on the psychedelic experience when the altered state has worn off, when the phenomenal world intrudes, when heartache and loneliness and feelings of uncertainty pervade. This authentic, often overlooked aspect for meaning beyond the mundane is something that pervades the new album Dead Songs by the due of Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin, known here as Big Blood.

The cracked and fragile qualities of psychedelia has its musical precursors to be sure; Syd Barrett, Skip Spence, and more recently Blithe Sons and some of the other Jewelled Antler Collective recordings walked the shaky ground between melancholy and ecstasy. But Big Blood has captured something deeper, something that contains a real authentic longing, with shadows of joy, and the way making music can act as a container for feelings that can overwhelm. And then, before you know it, it's the music itself that makes you remember how to hope.

What is also wonderful is that while Big Blood work in somewhat a psych-folk accent, they don't forget their rock roots. There is great vocal work, particularly by Kinsella. She can go from raucous to folk-gospel with ease. This is one of those records that makes it impossible to think you are missing anything out in the mainstream of music.

--Listen to the track New Eyes
--Buy Dead Songs here

Cages by Dave McKean

2010-08-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

When Dave McKean’s comic Cages was originally released from 1990 to 1996 (and collected in hardcover in 1998), there was very little discussion of comics as literature. A genre that is now regularly featured in The New York Times Sunday Book Review would rarely, if ever, make an appearance. When comics books became serious, they were only taken serious to a point. Readers of Art Spiegleman's Maus were either people who already read comic books, or people who didn’t but didn’t read any other comics afterward. But it was good evidence that the under the right conditions, the comic book could be seen as serious literature.

Today, even some superhero comics can merit being called serious as well, though it often takes a feature film to generate interest in a new generation of comic readers that have long been exposed to books like Blankets, Epileptic, and Fun Home. In its day Cages was sadly overlooked by McKean fans and all but the most serious comic reader. Only now, after the cognoscenti has decided comics can be taken seriously, is it getting a much deserved, and affordable, paperback release from Dark Horse Comics in September.

Cages was originally released somewhat irregularly as a ten issue magazine-sized comic book entirely written and drawn by McKean. McKean is well known for his cover paintings of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, which was a mix of mythology, horror and even cultural criticism that had a huge following up until its seventy-fifth and final issue. McKean’s covers are remarkable mixed media paintings, utilizing photographs, shadowboxes, and a myriad of other mediums. One of the first noticeable elements of Cages is that other than the original covers and a few pages here and there, the work is almost entirely done in pen and ink. It is, like most other comic book, done in panels with word balloons for the dialogue. And it is, for lack of any better term, literature.

The story is simple enough. A struggling artist named Leo Sabarsky moves into a rooming house in a shadowy part of London so he can paint without distraction. But the house is not simple at all, and contains an odd assortment of other characters, each with their own history, neurosis and mystery. The landlady, for example, is at one moment stubborn and argumentative and then suddenly almost overly intimate in her gestures and language. Other characters include a cat that walks the alley way behind the house (and serves as a particularly removed third person narrator insofar as we get to see everything he sees); an old woman abandoned by her husband who still waits for him while her parrot mocks her; a cynical writer who has an dark tense relationship with his wife; and a jazz musician who speaks in riddles.

Leo himself is struggling to paint and behind everything he sees and everyone he meets there is the strange shadow of malevolence. Leo watches everything almost without judgment except to judge himself against it. In one chapter, he meets the writer and upon learning that he has read many of the reclusive man’s books, offers him a sketch. The writer hangs it in empty space on the wall where there appears to have been another picture at one time. The next day Leo comes back and the writer is less inviting and keeps Leo in the doorway. Looking over the writer’s shoulder Leo notices the sketch has been taken off the wall. We see what Leo sees, and it is through the actual literal point of view that we are given access to his emotions as well.

The narrative is carefully constructed by McKean by intense, yet simple, pen and ink drawings that at times suddenly break away from the traditional comic book form. Simple panels become multi-layered with photographs and other times the panels themselves are opened up so much that whole pages turn into sweeping black ink strokes. The dialogue is rich and at times baffling, but the facial expressions of every character are perfectly matched to their words.

The story is at times frustrating and enigmatic, and if it is guilty of anything it's a bit of self-consciousness, but the narrative as a whole is a meditation on art and perception, and so this works to its advantage. It’s only real flaw is that of all comics: it reads very quickly.

Cages is an example, coming late when it was one of the first, of the wonder of comics, the sheer joy of reading by panels, and how the medium can be used for real characterization, plot, and narrative in a way that only a series of little pictures can. It is difficult to not take it seriously.

Before T-Rex there was:

2010-08-25T16:28:00.001-07:00

What's the Web Without God?

2010-08-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

We all wish we could block out some things we see on the internet. No matter how carefully you try to tailor a search query, you’ll often find yourself with stinging eyes at the various dreadful things that populate the electronic collective consciousness. And often those examples of violence, sexual degradation, bigotry, and racism come from the religious among us. Who doesn’t sometimes wish they could filter it out?

Enter GodBlock, a supposedly soon-to-be-available web filter that will, according to the website, “block religious content”: scripture, names of religious figures, and something it calls “religious propaganda,” an ill-defined but somewhat useful catchphrase when making light of religious ideas and trying to show how religion has been used to propagate all manner of human ugliness. GodBlock’s tagline is “Protect your children.”

Read more

Ensemble Economique: Standing Still, Facing Forward

2010-08-11T13:07:00.000-07:00

I have always been a bit skeptical of the movie soundtrack as a listening experience independent of the film for which it is ascribed, but I am fascinated with the idea of a soundtrack for a film that doesn't exist. Brian Eno, of course, brought this idea into popular music, but hauntology, (and the folks at Ghost Box), has taken this to a slightly different place; a nostalgia for films that seem like they might have existed, but never have.

Brian Pyle's Ensemble Economique new album Standing Still, Facing Forward is a soundtrack to a surrealist horror film, an orchestral backdrop played against a expressionist silent movie, a memory of a something shown late on a Saturday night when you were a child; none of which ever existed, but you are certain you saw them. There is something immediate to this music, and while there are natural sounds (birds, storms), nothing is given away. Images of jungles become crypts become deserts become basements become dark corners become other worlds entirely.

From a technical point of view, it would probably be a thrill to watch Pyle work, to see what goes into the crafting of these pieces, what he sketches beforehand, and what his own imaginary films look like. Admittedly, this is a pretty dark record. There is not a lot of space to catch a hopeful breath. But the sheer creative impulse behind it makes so many things seem possible.

Amen Dunes: Murder Dull Mind

2010-07-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

Amen Dunes (Damon McMahon), has sculpted a near-perfect album of outsider psych that is both hermetic and open, private and welcoming. The underground certainly has it's share of outsider saints and it's often the persona more than the music that resonates. Sometimes the music and the person come together perfectly, as in the case of Skip Spence's Oar. Amen Dunes draws on the private hauntings of the mind, but instead of making his psych-cosis (if I might coin such an awkward phrase) something to watch from afar, McMahon doesn't want to live in the isolation that was required to craft the record. It's like watching someone return from the underworld with some stories to tell, of the trouble of gods and men. Influences here range from Barrett, particularly in the guitar work on "Diane" to a wonderful channeling of Roy Harper on "Murder Dull Mind." A little bit of noise reminds you we are not completely free and clear of psychic disturbances, but for the most part, it's a quiet, extremely lysergic meditation that expands both the mind and the heart.

Listen to "Murder Dull Mind"

--Buy it here--

Some out-of-print books I covet

2010-07-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

These are some of the books I wish I could own, often available used through places like Abe, Alibris, and Amazon, but are just too darn expensive.

American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist, edited by Paola Igliori
The book I know of that is a comprehensive look at the life and work of this remarkable character; a music archivist, filmmaker, magician. Much of his work can be seen online, and in particular YouTube has a substantial number of his films.

I have seen this book for about $50.00-120.00.

Automata. A Historical and Technological Study, by Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz (Translated by Alec Reid)
One of the most comprehensive looks at the history of automata and the relationship to watchmaking. A beautiful massively illustrated volume. A book I have wanted for years.

Volumes in good condition are around $195.00- 300.00

A Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants, Richard Evans Schultes
I will always have a special place in my heart for the Golden Guide series, and I was amazed to discover this out-of-print little gem. I mean look at it! Just look at it!

Price is anywhere from $175.00-500.00 or more.

KrautRockSampler, by Julian Cope
Cope's love letter to KrautRock, filled with terrific anecdotes and deep investigations of the music. Includes album cover images and a top fifty list.

About $40.00-100.00 for a decent copy.

The Modern Antiquarian: A Pre-Millennial Odyssey Through Megalithic Britain, By Julian Cope
Not coincidentally, another one by Cope, this his travel and spiritual guide through the standing stones and other ancient artifact of Britain. Includes maps, photographs, poetry, and reflections. So impressive, the BBC crafted a documentary of the same name hosted by Cope.

Can only be had for $180 and up.

Ravi Shankar at Monterey International Pop Music Festival, 1967

2010-07-18T18:37:00.000-07:00

Sure, I know, everyone has seen it, everyone cites it, but it truly is one of the most masterful and breathtaking live performances of all time, made all the more amazing by the great photography and editing of the film Monterey Pop.

David Whyte-- Tilichio Lake

2010-07-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

In this high place
it is as simple as this,
leave everything you know behind...

--Listen--

Repost Friday-- Some Questions for Sir Richard Bishop

2010-07-08T23:18:00.000-07:00

Sir Richard Bishop is truly one of the most exceptional guitarists working today. He is best known for his work with the brilliant and inscrutable Sun City Girls, but his recent solo career is no less impressive. His most recent record, The Freak of Araby [Drag City] is a wonder of technical virtuosity and authentic respect for his influences.

Bishop is currently in Southeast Asia (read his blog here) and was kind enough to answer some questions regarding his thoughts on the influence of occultism on underground music, his own thought on esotericism, and the difference between the inner and the outer.

Underground music and esotericism have been a pair for a long time, but there seems to be a much more candid expression this last year or two. Recent examples include the summer Equinox Festival and the Musicka Mystica Maxima Festival put on by the O.T.O. Do you have thoughts as to why this might be?

I was pleasantly surprised when I first heard about these two festivals. I don't recall any festivals like this happening before. I'm not sure what Raymond Salvatore Harmon or the O.T.O. were expecting from these, and I honestly don't know if either was successful but I hope they (and others) will continue in this direction. As to why it is all happening now, it's hard to say. It's possible that more and more people are getting fed up with all the bullshit that is going on in the world today. I mean, there really isn't a lot to grasp onto these days. Maybe by getting involved with the esoteric side of things, musically and otherwise, people, especially younger people, can find something to identify with or at least broaden their personal horizons. And on the other side, perhaps it benefits some of these occult groups by bringing more into the fold to increase their own ranks. After all, the economy is pretty fucked up and maybe the O.T.O. needs more people to pay that $666 a year (or is it more now?) in order stay afloat. Who knows? It really doesn't matter how one interprets it all but I do think it's a good thing. It seems like a natural affinity.

Do you think psychedelia and occultism are inexorably linked, as seems to be the case with many of the so-called psych/folk musicians?

I think some aspects of psychedelia are linked but certainly not all of it. I feel that the majority of psychedelic music from the 60s still holds onto that kinship with drugs and peace and love and all of that crap but it sort of stops there. For a lot of folk musicians, the same thing applies though I suppose you could add the idea of protest. Among the modern psych/folk movement there probably are several bands/artists that do have some personal connection with esoterica or the occult, it's just not always obvious, at least not to me. Some bands, regardless of time period, may be automatically linked to the occult because of particular songs, album titles, artwork or because of some dark, creepy music but they may not have any magical or mystical aspirations at all. There's certainly nothing wrong with that but sometimes groups get umped into these categories by default. Sometimes it's good for a band's mystique. The connection seems most common with Death Metal or Black Metal bands than anything else but how much of a true interest there is in anything esoteric is not clear. It usually takes a colorful or mysterious personality within a group or a specific proven reputation of a band in order to establish that occult connection to where it's there and everybody knows it (Jimmy Page, Brian Jones/Late 60s Stones, etc).

Is your own interest in esoterica a driving influence behind your music, or do you see music as a kind of esoteric practice in its own right?

Anything can be an esoteric practice in it's own right. My interests in the occult and music developed separately but they do overlap every now and then when they need to. But in my solo music it's not always a conscious thing. It just happens. With Sun City Girls it may have been a bit more prevalent because we did often incorporate elements of improvisational ritual and trance into some live shows from time to time. It wasn't necessarily based on any particular system except our own but it often led to some interesting energy exchanges between the three of us and among the audience. But nowadays, though my mind is often thinking in esoteric directions, I don't automatically connect it with the music but like I said, it does relate in its own way sometimes but I usually recognize it after the fact.

There has always been a tension within esoteric circles on the distinction between magic and mysticism, between external effects and internal transformation. How do you make sense of that distinction for yourself?

I see both as part of the same package but I am mostly interested in internal transformation than anything else. And I think that is necessary before any external effects can even happen. But I never really was one who sought out external effects or things like that. I mean, what are external effects anyways? Causing a spirit or an energy to assume visible form? Does one need to actually see it to know that it is present? Moving something across the room without touching it? That's just being lazy. Does one want to make a woman fall madly in love with them? Is that an external effect? Why don't they say hello and go from there. That's all kid stuff. Earn it! Want to be rich? Get a fucking job or start digging for gold or silver. But I think that may be the attraction for a lot of fledgling magicians. I personally don't see the importance of it. But I do agree that there is some tension out there, or at least some disagreement as to what is more desirable or "real." I think that will always be the case.

Nowadays, the word "Magic" (add a K for those who can't spell) is usually associated with the Western Magical Tradition - Ceremonial or Ritual Magic. That was and is the entry point for a lot of people, myself included. Golden Dawn, Crowley and O.T.O. seem to attract a lot of potential initiates. It's a totally valid way to begin but I think a lot of people leave it at that and don't choose to explore other areas, many of which may cross into the realm of internal mysticism. But it's all one and the same for me.

Certain disciplines within Hinduism or Buddhism for example, or even Animism and Shamanism may appear to be entirely mystical and not have anything to do with ceremonial magic but that's not always the case. There are still plenty of ritual elements involved. There are implements and objects in use that may not be visible to you or me. Building an external magic circle can be contrasted with the internal process of "fencing the quarters of the sky," barbarous names can be replaced by vibrational mantras, etc. There are still particular rules or formulas that are followed that have been handed down over the years - it's just not always distinguishable on the surface. Do these practitioners require any external or visible results? It's hard to say, though of course there are always so-called spiritual "teachers" (East and West) who will resort to external trickery or whatever it takes as long as they have an audience that is willing to be duped or are ready to part
with their money. There is a sucker/seeker born every minute!

Do you think art/music is as powerful a form of ritual than traditional religious forms?

I think it can be just as ritualistic but how powerful or effective it is might not be a very positive thing. But it's a matter of opinion. I guess it depends on how its done and who's doing it. I don't have a whole lot of experience in traditional religious forms of ritual but let's take the three "Baby Religions" (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), Whatever rituals they are using they certainly do have a strong control over their flocks don't they? If an artist or a band uses the right formula, anything can happen. Look at the stupid pop music of today, look at the millions of dollars it generates, look at the millions of fans who worship this crap. That's powerful maybe because a lot of people are just still pretty low on the evolutionary scale. So, who knows? It's anybody's guess.

I once read you saying something to the effect that you are skeptical about folks who "talk" about esoteric things. Can you elucidate/ clarify that?

I'm not against talking about it, in fact, I enjoy having intelligent conversations about anything esoteric or arcane with people who are capable of doing so. I learn a lot that way. It's when people start bragging about their magical skills and telling others just how much they have accomplished in their studies, or on the path, and how great they are and things like that. That's when I get skeptical. They want others to respect them, to fear them. That doesn't do anything for me. I can usually tell within a few minutes if someone is full of shit or not. But I don't care if someone has achieved this level or that level, or what series of numbers come after his (or her) fraternal name or anything like that. Why would I want to know about that. Let's talk shop. Sometimes its quite entertaining though. Do you know how many people I've met over the years who think and claim that they are the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley? It's ridiculous. Besides, why would anybody want that?

The Renaissance idea of the magus was much more that of the scholar than the way we today imagine magicians and wizards in the popular culture. Do you see yourself as more bookish than practitioner?

I do not consider myself a magician or a wizard or anything like that. I seek wisdom and knowledge. That's it. I claim no special powers at all and I never intend to. My interests in the occult have been spurned by direct experience and I've maintained those interests with a fair amount of study and research. I have always been a book person and I think that most "magicians" or occultists out there are as well. You don't just wake up one day and make it rain. But I'm not a scholar by any means. I study and read the things that interest me and I know that no school, no matter how prestigious, would ever offer the opportunity. Everybody should be responsible for themselves and seek out that which attracts them without relying on anybody else. So yes, perhaps I am more bookish than anything else and I will say that reading books will only take you so far. But that doesn't mean I don't "practice" or "work" on certain things - though I probably don't do it as often as I should.

Would you mind talking about what you are listening to these days that has you excited about new music?

Unfortunately, I am not all that excited about new music these days. It might be because I don't expose myself to most of it and the so called "new" music I have heard from whatever genres that creep in, really hasn't done much for me. I'm waiting to be blown away by something incredible that's new but it just hasn't found me yet. So I still listen to older stuff from all reaches of the globe but I am still partial to North African and Asian traditional music and a smattering of psychedelic weirdness from various places such as Turkey, SE Asia, etc., but it's usually 1970s and earlier.

Anything you want to tell those kids who are off in their undisclosed locales in the woods taking drugs, drawing magic circles in the dirt, and making music?

It depends on what drugs they're taking! But first off, I hope their location is as undisclosed as they think, but nowadays that may not be the case. Regardless, they should stay out in the boonies - it's the way of the future. Today's cities are tomorrow's prisons. And if their music is any good, let's hear it! If not, bury it somewhere or destroy it by any means necessary. As for the magic circles, they should leave the dirt alone and create a permanent protective field around themselves. You CAN take it with you.

Cover art from Epic Illustrated

2010-06-30T13:50:00.000-07:00

One of the Web's greatest resources, The Grand Comic Database, has cover scans of Epic Illustrated's full 34 issue run. Artists include Frank Frazetta, Barry Windsor-Smith, John Bolton, and Arthur Suydam. The end of Epic heralded the closing of magazine-sized American horror/science-fiction comics, a missed genre for sure.

And while you scan through the covers, enjoy the krautrock/psychedelic goodness of the new release by Gnod/White Hills, a perfect soundtrack to images of swords, rocket girls, and otherworldly beasts (courtesy of Raven Sings the Blues.)

Emblems at Archive.org

2010-06-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

There is a great collection of old texts on emblems over at archive.org. A current highlight is the Devises et Emblemes Anciennes & Modernes, Tirees de plus Celoebres Auteurs (1699), which I cannot read a lick of, but has lovely emblems all throughout.

During the Renaissance, the emblem was used to illustrate moral and spiritual truths, often within the context of hermeticism and alchemy. By meditating on the images, a kind of narrative consciousness unfolded. Emblems are particularly important, because they served to emphasize the allegorical nature of these "sciences."

The loss of the emblem in spiritual teachings has in some ways removed the ability to let the symbolic nature of these ideas act on the unconsciousness. We are often presented with ideas as being phenomenal or literal, rather than existing in the nouminous, where the only way to really access them is through these deeper and subconscious kinds of understanding.

Woods: At Echo Lake

2010-06-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

Last year I described Woods first (and wholly remarkable album) as a kind of rural esoterica, music for a woodland secret society. Their new endeavor, At Echo Lake, brings them out of the grove and into the sun. While not devoid of bemushshroomed elements, At Echo Lake is a pop record that reaches beyond the known towards something just slightly off-kilter and is all the more lovely for it. There is some traditional psychedelic noodling, but it's earnest and playful.

What is most impressive here is the optimism. It's a testament to how the underground is capable of eschewing the predictable and easy reflection on dark and apocalyptic images in favor of something hopeful while also maintaining an authentic melancholy. We live in a time when we need our artists to do something more than just mirror the state of things. There are dark elements here, but they don't wallow in it. There is no sudden crushing drone for underground cred. Woods always seemed in awe of something, and on their first record it was some ineffable vague thing haunting them around the campfire. On At Echo Lake they are in awe of life, on the preciousness of other people, on how bountiful joy can well up unexpectedly.

Buy it here---

Kitchen Sink Press

2010-05-25T06:24:00.000-07:00

While Kitchen Sink Press as a publisher is no longer, the founder Denis Kitchen still maintains a fantastic online store and a small publishing house producing art books and prints. I interviewed Denis for my forthcoming book and he is a gracious and warm fellow, full of amazing anecdotes and an undying love for comics. I expect to have some excerpts posted soon.

A Setting Sun: Flower Garden Of Doom

2010-04-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

I was skeptical when I saw the title of A Setting Sun's new album, expecting it to be an overly conscious nod to doom and drone metal. Instead, Flower Garden of Doom is an ambient experiment that is filled with emotion and quiet drama. There is darkness here, it's true, but it's not morose or sludgy. The airiness of the guitar situated within the electronics, particularly on the track "Raspberry," give it a particularly human stamp. One is not lonely here, but there is certainly a sense of the unknown, and the dread that comes with that. Imagine H.P. Lovecraft writing about childhood and lost memories, lost loves and growing old, instead of ancient gods and arcane cults. And when you least expect it, there is hope and a bit of light cutting across the shadows.

What gives Flower Garden of Doom its strange warmth is that it doesn't rely solely on electronics. Field recordings and guitar make even the more melancholy elements pulse with color. There really isn't any doom here, just an honest reflection on the a particular state of mind, a state that feels relevant and universal, even as it reflects something deeply personal.

And MP3 of the track "Raspberry" is available here as a zip file.

Soft Machine: Facelift

2010-03-09T09:36:00.000-08:00

It's nine minutes long, but worth every one. Soft Machine live performing Facelift from their album "Third."

loscil: Endless Falls

2010-03-02T16:04:00.000-08:00

As you wind your way into the last track on the new loscil album, Endless Falls [Kranky], there is the startling moment when you hear the unexpected voice of Dan Bejar, better known as Destroyer. His voice, even when doing spoken word, is unmistakable, and inexplicably perfect for an ambient electronics record. Bjear's voice is normally one of drama, a synthesis of glam and torch song. On the track "The Making of Grief Point," surrounded by the melancholy of loscil's music, Bejar's voice has the quality of a radio broadcaster from an imaginary world. It is the perfect wrap-up to a haunting record that itself is the music of invented landscapes.

Scott Morgan, the man behind loscil, charts geographies of the unconscious, specifically those aspects of us that continue to feel connected to, or nostalgic for, times and places that don't really exist. It's kind of a magician's feat, to make music that realizes something for us that is wholly new, but is also strangely familiar. There is some Kosmiche here, some Eno. Morgan is working in a tradition, and he is sure and inspired.

Endless Falls eschews noise in favor of of electronic constructions that sound almost natural, and there are sublime moments when you hear what appears to be bells or rain. Even the titles have the quality of a list of odd natural phenomena; "Fern and Robin," "Showers of Ink," "Shallow Water Blackout." Even the synth blips and blurps come from something organic, at least thematically. Everything here just works, and while there are moments when I wanted a few more surprises (such as Dan Bejar), there is every reason to recommend this walk in the electronic dreamtime.

Stoned Out of Their Ivory Tower

2010-03-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

[My review of Dan Lattin's The Harvard Psychedelic Club]

In 1964, a year after he was fired from Harvard University, Timothy Leary, together with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, published The Psychedelic Experience, a how-to-manual for taking LSD. Key to a positive undertaking is what Leary calls “set and setting.” Make sure you are in a safe and comfortable place with someone you trust who can guide you along the trip: “The role of the psychedelic guide is perhaps the most exciting and inspiring role in society. He is literally a liberator, one who provides illumination, one who frees men from their life-long internal bondage.” Like indigenous peoples who use mushrooms, peyote, or other psychotropic plants within the context of a community, Leary was trying to reproduce a kind of tribal context for drug use in the modern age.

Continue Reading

People Who Do Noise

2010-02-26T11:32:00.000-08:00

Pitchfork is offering online, in chapters, the full length film People Who Do Noise, a documentary about the underground music/noise scene in Portland, Oregon. The film includes some great performances as well as interviews with folks like Yellow Swans and Redglaer. My own likes tend towards more melodic stuff, with noise as texture, rather than noise as the raison d'etre, but I cannot deny the creativity and energy of these musicians. And their influence on experimental music is undeniable.

Casper Electronics

2010-02-23T13:07:00.000-08:00

Through a series of links I chanced upon Casper Electronics and Peter Edwards, a circuit bender and electronic musician/artist who has both an enviable amount of talent and equipment. The site offers an incredible array of his hacked toys and gizmos, tutorials, and then there's this:

Edwards offers this as a kit for $200.00, or you can buy just the circuit board, or even a pre-built unit.

Here is my own feeble attempt at a little noise box:

I am eager to get back to it once it warms up and I can go out to the workshop in the freezing cold laundry room...

Phenomena and Occurrences

2010-02-17T19:28:00.000-08:00

From the hauntologists at Ghost Box Records.

Read an interview with Jim Jupp, the label's co-founder, here.

The Yellow Book

2010-01-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

I am excited to find that archive.org has the complete set of The Yellow Journal, the magazine of Aesthetic and Decadent art and literature published between 1894 to 1897. It's importance is mostly due to Aubrey Beardsley--the Art Nouveau illustrator known for his erotic themes--being the art editor.

Because of his association with Oscar Wilde, Beardsley only worked on the first five issues. Wilde's arrest in 1895 for "gross indecency" was not something many of the other contributors wanted to be connected to, and so the publisher felt forced to fire Beardsley. A nice summary can be found here.

Almost an annoucement

2010-01-11T09:54:00.000-08:00

I have yet to make the official announcement that the book I am working on has been picked up by a publisher until I actually sign something (just a little superstitious), but I can tell you about some of the people I have interviewed that will be appearing in some form or another in its pages:

Rick Doblin, president and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

Wavy Gravy

Ken Babbs, former Merry Prankster

Jim Woodring, creator of Frank

Arik Roper, psychedelic illustrator and poster artist

Michael Moorcock

and many others...

Over the course of the next few months I will post quotes and notable anecdotes from these folks.

Here's a gem from Michael Moorcock as taste of things to come: "...Generally, however, I decided that recreational drugs were best just being used for personal enjoyment and that little insight into the workings of the world, at least as I understood them, could be acquired through their use. Far too much, in my view, was assumed to be some form of objective truth. I think we got a little illumination but a lot more sheer delight."

Windy Day

2009-10-30T05:27:00.001-07:00

It's that time of year again for the annual posting of one of the great animated shorts:

Questions for Jim Jupp (Ghost Box Recordings)

2009-10-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

The British record label Ghost Box is something akin to a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities that contains things both fictive and real. But their proximity to each other makes it near impossible to sort out what is of the phenomenal world and what is inexplicable. Ghost Box (started by Jim Jupp and Julian House) is home to a number of remarkable musical groups, including Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, Advisory Circle, and Roj. Jim Jupp was kind enough to answer some questions about his work.

Your music plays with ideas of technological decay and natural technologies; the past haunting the future, the future finding its way back to infiltrate the past. What is about that tension that is so compelling as an artist?

You've hit on something there that I think we feel is an essential part of the labels aesthetic. Amongst the ideas that interested us when we started the label were EVP and the spiritualistic leanings of Jon Logie Baird and also Thomas Edison. There's something magical and plausible about that area where technology and spiritualism overlap.

Similarly we love the weirdness of the juxtaposition of ancient and modern, or the cosmic and the parochial. This is a common motif of British science fiction. In a John Wyndham novel, or a Nigel Kneale screenplay you will often find an archetypal English village where suddenly weird cosmic events break in, or a new technology will open up access to forbidden and ancient knowledge. Don't know if its known at all in the states but Nigel Kneale the creator of Quartermass wrote a one off "ghost story" drama for British TV in the 70s called The Stone Tape. In it a group of scientists trying to make a breakthrough in a new recording medium to replace tape realised that stone themselves store up a psychic imprint of events and sometimes replay them as ghosts. Its just the kind of thing that's a real touch stone for Ghost Box.

I imagine growing up, were you an avid reader. What were the books that shaped you and maybe even continue to find their way into your music?

I've know Julian [House] since we were kids in school together and in our late teens we both got obsessive about HP Lovecraft and this opened up the floodgates to a whole world of weird, cosmic fiction by the likes of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. As well as that particular strain of British science fiction I mentioned before, the work of John Cowper Powys has been an influence. More heavyweight and literary than the supernatural fiction that feeds into the Ghost Box world - he explored the mysticism and romance inherent in the landscape and nature of the British Isles.

Although having said all that we don't pretend to be steeped in literature and television and film are perhaps more important influences. Old Hammer Horror films, MR James dramatisations (in the UK there used to be a ghost story , usually MR James, broadcast more or less very year on Christmas Eve during the seventies), supernatural children's TV dramas from the 60s and 70s (maybe not known outside the UK at all ??) like The Owl Service, Sky or Children of the Stones.

What is interesting about these authors is that while some of them (Lovecraft and Machen in particular) are sometimes believed to have actually mapped out certain supernatural locales, I would argue their real legacy mapping aspects of the human psyche.

One of the appealing aspects of Lovecraft is the way he achieves a sense of plausibility and continuity in his fictional worlds with hints at mythology, books and fabricated history. I believe its called hyperstition - the notion that a fictional reality becomes more believable if ideas , names, references and images are shared across a number of different works, even by different artists. It's partly what we've done in Ghost Box, there's little hints to a local dialect and history to Belbury spread across each of our releases - only small incidental things but they seem to give the fiction more solidity.

Machen also created his own mythologies and mixed them with genuine history and myth to make his world more tangible. Also there's a more personal connection for Julian and I, because much of his fiction is set in the exact part of South Wales where we grew up. So there's that psychogeographical idea that both the fiction and the real locales are enhanced if your familiar with both.

Would you say your music is more "psychological" than spiritual or occult?

Actually I'd say it was more an occult process - if accidentally. As I understand it magic is about trying to realise imagined worlds through creative effort and will. I'm talking about a more poetic idea of the occult - There's no nudity and incense though, we're far too up tight and cynical for all that business.

The music on your label seems intent on shifting or even altering the consciousness of the listener. Is the listener's "state" something you consider?

I think this is always in the mind of anyone composing instrumental electronic music. Julian in particular sees his Focus Group work as am extension of his visual collage work, and I know that he shares the view of the surrealists that collage is a way of access the alternate worlds of the unconscious. Roj's work for us I think is more directly psychedelic and I think his album is a beautiful, immerse and disorientating experience. My own work as Belbury Poly and perhaps Jon Brook's work as the The Advisory Circle I think plays with the idea of false memory and that sense of hard to place familiarity.

When I was a kid in the US, there was always something exotic and strange about British horror that made its way here, particularly the Quatermass stuff. Americans culture is fairly young, whereas the horrors that lurk in the English countryside can be ancient. Do you find British listeners are more attuned to this deeper sense of the macabre?

I'm not so sure. Again I think of how Machen and Lovecraft both found something weird and ancient in their respective landscapes. When we started we never thought our stuff would appeal to much of an audience outside of the UK. But I think we now have more listeners in the states than anywhere else.

History is very much in your face as it were in this country. Anyone can dig a hole in the back garden and find medieval coins and Roman pot shards. Bizarrely, one of the longest running weekend family TV shows here is called "Time Team," a kind of weekly archaeological dig against the clock. British people love all this stuff but the flipside is that tourism here is based on a fanciful romanticised version of the past and sometimes it seems the whole country could become a kind of giant heritage theme park with little gift shops repackaging history as Henry VIII tea towels and nasty Celtic knot-work jewelry. This is partly what we explored with the CD booklet for the Owl's Map album.

I suppose our references do seem otherworldly and foreign to non British listeners. I think part of the appeal may be the stereotype of British eccentric boffins locked away in garden sheds tinkering away with strange experiments. Like Dr Who. or the now laughable British space projects in the Quatermass films. You suspect those astronauts wore tweeds under the silver suits and thought nothing of smoking pipes in their space capsules.

I just listened to Roj's new album [The Transactional Dharma of Roj] and one thing I was struck by was how all this cultural detritus can be made into something so original. How much of that is a result of the studio work and how much the artist's vision?

In Roj's case its his vision plus the result of the way he works and the tools he uses. Roj lectures in electronic music and understands and uses all of the techniques of the last 40 yrs of the genre in his work. There's lots of tape processing, tape loop splicing, analogue synthesis, experimental acoustic recording techniques and digital editing and post production too. Its a well worn cliche about lots of things but I really think his work is timeless - its very hard to anchor his sound to a particular point in time.

We live in an incredible time to be awash in so much cultural history, particularly music, which often sounds like a catalog of what happened before rather than an attempt to pave new ground. How do you ensure what you do isn't just hagiography?

The questions we are all most commonly asked are, is what we do nostalgia? How do we avoid it being nostalgia? How is it different from nostalgia? Well there is clearly a big dollop of nostalgia in what we do, we're steeped in music of 30 to 40 years ago and we love its sounds, textures and technologies. But what I think we're trying to do in Ghost Box is convey a sense of nostalgia for an imagined past. Either that or we're imagining the sounds and imagery of a parallel world where time is not so important and all these things are current all at once.

I would guess you are collector of "things." Any particular obsession these days?

Well apart from the old library, psych, folk and electronic albums and DVDs of British horror movies, and forgotten weird, supernatural TV shows, its Penguin and Pelican paperbacks, particularly from late sixties to mid seventies period.

Do you see Ghost Box branching out in any interesting ways?

For years now we've been discussing the possibilities of putting a book together along the lines of The Folklore and Mathematics booklet we did a couple of years ago. So I'm hoping that becomes a reality before long. Julian recently did a Ghost Box gallery event in Stirling in Scotland with installations, prints and video, I think we'd like to explore more of that kind of a stuff in the future. Loads of things really its just a problem of finding the time to get the things off the ground.

What are you listening to these days that is not your label?

Well the last few records I've acquired that are still on my listening pile: Seventh Wave Psi-Fi, Broadcast and The Focus Group With Cults of The Radio Age, Jonny Trunk's Scrap Book, Anandar Shankar Anandar Shankar, Greenslade Bedside Manners are Extra.

Preferences: Tubes or Solid State? Vinyl or CD?

I'm no Luddite but I've always love the warmth and tactile nature of analogue technology. So both at the same time is good for me. As for Vinyl or CD, I guess if both are becoming obsolete I'd rather cling on to the vinyl.

Thanks so much. Let me know if you are ever in the US and coming to Boston.

Will do. I'm told Boston is a great city and I've often thought about a trip to see some of HP Lovecraft's New England if it still exists,

White Rainbow: New Clouds

2009-10-04T13:53:00.001-07:00

The fog over the harbor in Provincetown made it impossible to see anything beyond the crowd of fishing boats knocking up against the dock. Behind us, the Pilgrims Monument rose up and disappeared into the mist, ghostly, like it was both here and not here. Inside my heart was a dream I couldn't access because of all the other noise. I tried again when we were on the ferry just as the Harbor Islands began to emerge from the horizon. I went to the bow and let the wind push it all out of me. I wanted the fog and the mist and the sea to lift me. Gulls and cormorants bobbed along the currents until we got too close, and at the last moment, the precise moment, they took flight. I wondered why they wait so long, why I wait so long to allow these perfect moments to untie the knot that keeps me tethered.

Part of the trick, maybe, is finding that tension between being pulled and being grounded. Like the best kind of mystical experience, where you can't tell if you are moving towards the godhead, or the godhead is descending to meet you. In either case, it all happens in the halfway point, somewhere between the immanent and the transcendent.

Adam Forkner, performing as White Rainbow has hit on this beautifully with his release New Clouds [Kranky]. Lots of folks are using the essential grammar of rock and roll to sort out ideas about the ineffable (Om for example), but they often tend towards the metal end of the rock spectrum. Forkner is working from a different model, a little more Krautrock, a little bit of prog. While certain elements of those genres became the template for New Age Music, Forkner is able to find spiritual reflection without so much as a hint of saccharine. The production has a lovely fuzziness, not too produced, but lovingly put together. I imagine on vinyl this is the just the thing to get you through until 3am when sleep will pull you towards the rest of that half-remembered dream about cormorants and fog.

There were many paths in the forking road White Rainbow is going down on New Clouds. Forkner chose the middle path, somewhere between the world of loops, pedals and guitars, and something sublime where we are given the means to simply let go.

-- Tuesdays Rollers and Strollers [Excerpt]

Across 2 cities’ borders, a mystery of dislocation

2009-09-21T18:19:00.000-07:00

My review of China Miéville’s new novel, "The City and the City," can be found here.

I recently interviewed Miéville in the Harvard Square haunt Casablanca, and had intended to post it as an audio interview. Here's what went wrong. I was using a hand held Sony digital recorder that was placed on the table between us. Said table acted a parabolic microphone and picked up every tiny sound in the restaurant except our voices. So I am having to transcribe the conversation. Hopefully it will be posted soon.

Stars of the Lid performing Arvo Pärt

2009-09-16T10:59:00.001-07:00

Sort of speaks for itself.

Tim Cohen: The Two Sides of Tim Cohen

2009-09-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

I have been habitually hard on myself lately, and it has to do with a struggle with my own skepticism. I have come to regard this part of myself as essential to avoiding what Umberto Eco has called "turning metaphysics into mechanics." But in doing so, I am becoming a detective with all the clues but nothing to investigate. Sometimes I forget that the answer has been, and has always been for me, in music and literature. When art aches towards transcendence, (and if George Steiner is right, all art does,) it is the ache that absorbs all the doubts, the loneliness, the emptiness. Somewhere along the way I forgot how much spiritual power exists in the longing, in the question. In the novel Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee, the titular character has a wonderful sustained argument with herself about the stories of gods and mortals couplings. Why, she asks, would a god want to bed a human? What about being human is attractive to them, would stoke divine desire. (desire that often has to be hidden in another form, such as a swan or a bull lest the mortal be destroyed by the pure form of the deity). The answer, she alludes to, is that there is something so unique and wonderful about the human desire for transcendence. It is our longing for them that makes them desire us.

Tim Cohen's album The Two Sides of Tim Cohen is a perfect antidote to my crippling skepticism. There is an unabashed calling out to the heavens, not for perfect answers, but because that is how we claim our own humanity. We reach out and we become more connected to the divine, not because something reaches back (although sometimes it does) but because that we are, like the gods, desirous of each other.

The title of the album hearkens back to the seventies, and while there is a bit of that decade winding its way around the songs, the album is not derivative. These are simple songs made complex by harmony and rhythm, and they carve themselves right into you. There is some texturing, a tiny bit of noise, but these are mostly stripped bare of anything extraneous. Everything sounds like it was recorded outside, in the hollows of a cave or under the bow of trees. Sounds echo from the hills, as Cohen walks along some sacred grove; grooving, dreaming, looking up, looking around, but never forgetting to look straight ahead.

--Take Aim Goliath

Bedtime Stumblings

2009-08-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

Every night, my wife Amy and I take turns lying with our six-year-old son Sam before he falls asleep. It’s his favorite time to ask questions, those particular ones I dread trying to answer.

“Dad, is God real?”Oh boy, here we go.

“Some people think so…” C’mon, don’t be a jerk. Tell him what you think. “I think so.”

“Then why can’t I see God? Is God a person?”

“Well, it’s more like a spirit.”

“So God’s a ghost? God died and now God’s a ghost?”

“Well, no, I don’t mean a spirit like that.” Then what do you mean? You’re losing him.

“Then what?”

“It’s like the force in Star Wars.” Idiot!

“But people can’t move things with their mind like Jedi.”

“Well, it’s more like God keeps things together.”

Pause. A long, long pause. I don’t know where to go from here. And then:

“Oh I get it,” Sam says. “The world is in pieces, and God has to hold them all in place or it will all fall apart.”

“Yeah.” I say. “God just keeps it all in place.”

Read more

Some Questions for Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance

2009-07-21T16:21:00.001-07:00

The forthcoming Six Organs Of Admittance album Luminous Night (Drag City) is a wonderful mix of Eastern and Western influences, and incorporates both electric and acoustic sounds to good effect. There is even a flute, an instrument I am a sucker for, particularly when used alongside the feedback of an electric guitar. But to much of this Mr. Chasny was a bit bemused: "See, I guess I just don't understand how people listen to music. I thought this last record was sort of a more acoustic Cure's Disintegration or Joy Division or something." But we did have an enjoyable back and forth over email, although with each note, I wanted nothing more than to be sitting with him in person, listening to music, and discussing esoteric ideas and esoteric music.

The mix of flute and electric guitar is a disconcerting but ultimately satisfying and evocative pairing. Why do you think the flute often gets a bad rap?

If the words "Sitting on a park bench" mean anything to you than I think you know the answer to that question. But flute can be pretty killer. I would point people towards Brainticket, Comus or Samurai movie scores. Not to mention a few scenes in El Topo.

On this current album you are actually able to achieve much more complex and deeper feelings than in your noisier incarnations. Why do you think more and more underground musicians are moving away from noise towards much more complex melody and sonic landscapes?

It feels to me that more and more bands are making noise. The No Fun Festival seems to be more popular than ever. It seems like nearly every city has a noise festival now. I guess I haven't been noticing the some things as you. And I know for a fact that some people hate this record much more than noisier ones I have done, so it's all in the eye (or ear as it may be) of the beholder I guess. But thanks for saying that.

Noise was a great shot of energy to music, just as punk was. But forms that are pure and have no cross pollination are likely to become stagnant after a while. I mean, KK Null's Ultima Materia LP is one hell of a blast of pure noise and I love it, but since that music is about motion and energy it is bound to loose it's power eventually and I haven't really heard a record like that recently, not even from KK Null. When that energy pollinates with, oh, say rock, then you get things like Caspar Brotzmann's Masakker or something, and that has a bit more lasting power. It's basically musical Eugenics! ha (please, no letters from the National Front). But terms like "noise" and "psychedelic" and "experimental" are highly relative.

For instance, when I was obsessed with Harry Smith years ago I got into taping my neighbors, who were very obnoxious college kids and had horrible parties that used to keep me up at night. So to make it better and since I couldn't sleep, I used to record the people who were having conversations outside (I like to imagine what it looked like from the other side with the bathroom window slowly opening and an SM 57 mic slowly being placed on the window sill). Anyway, as one truly observant party goer that I recorded one night said, "Dude. What about Radiohead? I mean, I used to like their old stuff, but now? I don't know man. Now, they're fuckin' weeeiiird." Indeed.

It seems early psychedelic music and culture was deeply influenced by Eastern philosophy and music, everyone from Incredible String Band to the Beatles. Contemporary psychedelic folk music, particularly those that are trying to infuse some kind of spiritual or religious imagery seem much more tied to Western pagan and occult ideas. I am thinking of alot of Jewelled Antler folks.

I don't think of the veneration of nature as particularly pagan. There's a great tradition of American Transcendentalist that really have nothing to do with pagan rituals and are much closer to the Deists, who were of course Christian. One need only look at the similarity between Glenn Donaldson's beard and Henry David Thoreau's beard to realize that the Jewelled Antler guys are sailing much closer the shores of Walden Pond than any pre-christian ideas. I do see what you mean about pagan imagery in other so called psych bands. I don't know. Metal definitely made that much more interesting. Let's hope it's because of that.

What are you reading these days?

During the Summer time I always re-read Bachelard's work on Earth or Air or Water. I think if everyone woke up and read a little Bachelard every morning this world would run a lot smoother and people would be in a much better mood. It's the reading equivalent of taking a valium and a vicodin and a Vodka Tonic all at once.

Bachelerd wrote alot about architecture and living inside spaces. Do you see writing music as a kind of architecture, creating spaces that the listener can dwell inside?

Yeah, Bachelard's Poetics of Space dealt specifically with those themes. Oddly, that is one book I don't go back to in the summertime, though it is great. I guess that music can build or illuminate a certain psychological architecture for sure, though I don't think in the same manner that Bachelard talks about architecture and space. Bachelard talks about a real and physical space that initiates but also participates in that reverie, not a psychological space built by a reverie that was created by music. It's almost the opposite. Not taking into account his views of science and epistemology, Bachelard was most concerned with Reverie and the Active Imagination. I think THAT corresponds more with music.

Who is making music right now that not many people know about that you think should be heard?

Mick Flower for one. His work with Chris Corsano is THE ecstatic music of the 21st century so far. Joshua Burkett in Western Massachusetts is continually making some of the most beautiful outsider music around. There's a great band called Son Of Earth that has a new record out just this month and they are one of my favorites, though I haven't heard the new one yet. One of my favorite folk type records that came out this year is a band called Head of Wantastiquet and is the project of one Paul Labrecque. It's really gorgeous 4am trance type folk with great electric guitar feedback passages. As far as killer solo electric guitar, I just saw Bill Nace play and it was totally mind boggling and inspiring. Dredd Foole just dropped an incredible LP on Apostasy Records called Songs to Despond Ya that is amazing Tim Buckley meets Kan Mikami type music.

What are you listening pre-1975 if anything?

This week? Ali Akbar Khan's 80 minute raga, Sun Ra's Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy, AMM music 1966, and probably some others. Those are the ones I see in a stack by the stereo...

What has it been like working with other musicians who I imagine have very definite visions of what they want, like David Tibet [of Current 93]?

Working with David is crazy. First he makes you watch all these Reese Witherspoon movies, because he loves her. Actually, he makes some references to her on his new record. Then there is like a 3 hour discussion about Crowley, then some Christian Gnostic talk. Then some flash cards involving the Coptic Language. By the time all that is done, it's usually about 2 in the morning, which is when all his records are recorded. So yeah, it's kind of weird.

Do any spiritual or religious ideas find their way into your music?

Maybe. Maybe not. But I'm certainly not going to advertise it or talk about it. The people who are self proclaimed mystics and spiritualists are either trying to sell something or start a cult.

Do you think spirituality should only be a personal thing?

That word is covers pretty broad ground so it is hard to answer that question. It sort of means different things to different people. What I see is a general trend to try to appear mystical or spiritual when it comes to certain music and that is mostly a ruse or an image and that has has always bothered me. In terms of people outside of bands and people living their lives, I think people should do what is best for them. A church or mosque or temple is a shared spiritual experience. Even a Sufi needs a master to teach him, so that is also a shared thing. I guess that is hard to answer because what do you mean by "personal thing" and "spirituality?" Of course all spirituality is personal. It's between the person and their beliefs. Should they talk about it? That probably depends on why they would want to do that. And do you mean spirituality such as the general feeling of there is something else out there but can't really put your finger on it? Or are you being more specific and talking about the actual Spirit, which was abolished by the 4th Council of Constantinople in 869 as part of the tripartite anthropology of the spirit/soul/body which set up the duality of body and soul, which some believe led the way to Cartesian dualism? That is a pretty specific Spirit that has been banished to make room for the idea of the Soul, which needs to be saved of course! Point being, the word "Spirit" has, or used to have, meaning. It still does for some gnostics and Sufis and such, when you get into various neo-platonic ideas of correspondences and things like that.

How does making music correspond do your own ideas about what spirit means?

To be honest, I don't feel my music has much to do with my own personal concept of what Spirit means at all. Making music is a very social thing for me. I make a sound which is to be heard by other people on a social level. Though, one might say that where there is communication, there is communion. But when I am making music I don't think about that.

Do you think music can capture some kind of transcendence, some kind of meaning beyond the material?

Ask Hazrat Inayat Khan and Sun Ra about that one. I mean, the universe is made of music. Atoms are atoms because of their movement, their vibrations. So called solid matter is mostly empty space and it is the vibrations that makes it something. And music is vibrations. That is what they would tell you. Is it possible to tie that together with personal music and vibrations? Sun Ra would answer that it depends on the frequency that you are dialed into. I think everything has another meaning if one wishes to engage it.

(above photo by by Elisa Ambrogio)

Misc. Saturday: Nikola Tesla and 555

2009-07-11T15:34:00.001-07:00

Boing Boing has a wonderful collection of links related to Nikola Tesla in celebration of his birthday.

I have finally completed a little 555 noisemaker project. I used an old tea container for the case and the rest mostly from other parts on hand. I had hoped for some older knobs, but these will do for now. I am having trouble getting the LED to light, but otherwise it is working nicely. Below are some pictures and a video.

James Blackshaw: The Glass Bead Game

2009-06-15T10:36:00.000-07:00

It is kind of a startling thing to realize that underground music has become a most mercurial creature. Certain signatures use to be apparent across the board, so at least you knew you were listening to something that was created within an unspoken, yet agreed upon hermetic language. But the nature of that language is changing in a such remarkable way with the infusion of choral-like-voices, traditional American finger-picking styles, acoustic drones-- such a those produced with sitar, tambura, and voice, and in many cases, the absence of noise.

Many of these elements have been found in underground music for decades, but there is a peculiar kind of earnestness that recent musicians have brought to their compositions and it has made an enormous impact. There is also an emphasis on the Medieval quality of the acoustic instrument, which has given underground music both an anachronistic quality, but also a forward-looking vision, in the way that steampunk is also about both a romantically realized past and a love of technology.

Some of this music is akin to the early kraut-psych of folks like Popol Vuh insofar as their are vestiges of those early days of when prog was forking out, one branch growing into what would one day be the bombast of arena prog-rock, and the other dropping its seed into what would one day grow into New Age music. The problem with both of these genres is that they relied so heavily on production and dexterity that those more unpredictable and grounded aspects of kraut and early prog were lost.

James Blackshaw's new album The Glass Bead Game is something of a wonder. While all these things can be discerned from his music, it really is wholly original. I could also cite John Fahey, Steve Reich, and other modern composers as being part of his musical trajectory, but there is something much more inventive going on here than just a fusion of influences. What is important is that Blackshaw is showing how music can become not only a vehicle for re-imagining these influences, but also how it can transcend itself and become about something else entirely.

It's not just that underground music has recently been trading in noise and crushing drone for harmony and melody, but that there is something decidedly, dare I say it, spiritual going on. In the case of Blackshaw, it's also remarkable is how mature that vision of. I keep going back to this in almost every other blog post, but it's the difference between the hopeless black morass of certain underground metal and something akin to hope. Maybe art has a responsibility to be more than just a reflection of the world. Maybe art has a responsibility to remind us again how much beauty there still is, or if none can be found, then to bring it to us.

James Blackshaw-- Cross

Wolfe's exemplary literary fiction

2009-06-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

There seems to be no better time to declare that the term "science fiction" used to describe a certain kind of literature is no longer viable than with the release of "The Best of Gene Wolfe." Gene Wolfe has long been recognized as one of the finest living science fiction writers, none of his many novels or short stories really can accurately be labeled that. Wolfe himself has suggested the term Science Fantasy for his work, but there is still something oddly contrived about trying to fit an author of such magnitude into any genre box.

Wolfe is probably best known for his work "The Book of the New Sun," a four-part epic that is one of the most exhilarating and challenging things I have ever read. Wolfe loves the unreliable narrator, and most of his fiction relies on the very fact that we can never really trust what we are told, as all experience is filtered through things like pride, desire, and the fickleness of memory. His novels are dense and filled with arcane language, heavy with double meanings.

Wolfe's short fiction, however, is an entirely different animal from his novels... Read More

Ulaan Khol: I and II

2009-05-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

Much of contemporary music is an encyclopedia of sorts, a text comprising definitions on myriad entries with a consistent voice, at least stylistically if not sometimes ideologically. Encyclopedias tend to take their sources and distill them into easily digestible bits, often with just enough garnish (maps, photographs, charts) to give it the shadow of flavor. Experimental music, however, is a very different kind of encyclopedia. Sometimes its interpretation of the entry is even more like hagiography than an objective presentation, but it has the freedom to bend the definition beyond all recognition until you find yourself having to quickly flip back pages to make sure you remember where you started. This is what makes the listening often so exhilarating.

Ulaan Khol is like A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr, the mysterious text in Borges' story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which purports to describe a world that can't exist, except that since there is a encyclopedia about it, it must exist. This tension is what drives the vaguely unsettling, but wonderfully strange, theme of the story. It is also the tension that pulses below the surface of two very beautiful and challenging first releases in a planned trilogy by Steven R. Smith.

To annotate a world, you have to first create one, but some would say you can't create in a vacuum. You need raw material, maybe even a precedent of some sort. Smith is certainly working in a tradition, but there is nothing derivative. Like Tlön, some things are familiar, but they are placed in a context that makes them appear like phantoms. Smith's Ulaan Khol is haunted by something, by some possible creation that moves in and out of the periphery. This is not creation ex nihilo. It's more like the construction of a dream, where what is recognizable is made new and a little bent, a little frayed around the edges. Like static. Or feedback.

Smith has some serious pedigree, having associations with a number of underground outfits including Thuja and Hala Strana. Ulaan Khol is of a heavier sort than his previous incarnations, layers and washes of guitar and percussion. It's not burdened by noise, but rather uses noise as a palette. Because it's underground music of a particular variety there is a tendency to want to attach some esoteric meaning. I wouldn't call it magic, because there is no sense Smith is trying to conjure something, and it's not quite mysticism because there is something too active and participatory. And yet it can't be ritual because there is something a little lonely here. I would prefer to simply call it art.

Ulaan Khol II: Untitled 3

A Field Guide to the Birds of Cambridge and Surroundings

2009-05-21T07:10:00.000-07:00

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
-Emily Dickinson

Birds are beautiful and graceful creatures. Not only do birds satisfy our aesthetic sense through their handsome plumage and their sweet voice, but they are marvelously adapted to their respective fields of activity.
-Red Book of Birds of America: Illustrated in Color, 1951.

From the corner of Oxford and Beacon Streets to the edge of Harvard Yard, this highly populated and congested area is home to a fair number of birds. Most are quite common, such as the pigeon, starling, crow and blue jay. But with patience and a keen eye, it's easy to spot some surprises, such as grackles, terns, and red-tailed hawks. I have, for the purposes of this guide, extended the area to include the Anderson Bridge that crosses the Charles River, as well as some portions north of the city so as to give a more complete picture of the birds of the area.

Before you venture to go bird watching, please take note of the following suggestions. When you think you have spotted an interesting bird, take a deep breath. Then, when you are centered and relaxed, follow it carefully with your eye and try and take note of its color, shape, and size. Listen for its song and begin to attach the sound to the bird so that later when you hear the bird again, its image will come right into your mind. Other times, when you see a bird in the distance, you will immediately hear its voice in your head. In this way, the bird will always be with you and you can bring it into your consciousness whenever the need strikes you, even when you are alone and there are no birds around. But if there is anything you can count on in this world it’s the birds. Wrap your heart in twine and clip it to the feet of birds. They will never let it go. Read more
(originally appeared in American Journal of Print)

Strange and Wonderful Discoveries at Project Gutenberg

2009-05-18T18:32:00.000-07:00

The Project Gutenberg online library is a Wunderkammer of books in the public domain available in a number of different formats, some of which include images.

Some recent interesting discoveries:
The Planet Mars and Its Inhabitants, a psychic revelation, in which the author describes the various cities, canals, and moral principles of our red neighbor and explains that "Printed books are used, but mostly for the very young, as information is usually transmitted impressionally."

Electric ity for Boys, in which we are given many hands-on experiments because, "A boy does not develop into a philosopher or a scientist through being told he must learn the principles of this teaching, or the fundamentals of that school of reasoning. He will unconsciously imbibe the spirit and the willingness if we but place before him the tools by which he may build even the simple machinery that displays the various electrical manifestations."

Of Natural and Supernatural Things : Also of the first Tincture, Root, and Spirit of Metals and Minerals, how the same are Conceived, Generated, Brought forth, Changed, and Augmented, in which we are taught that "the Magnet and true Iron perform almost a like benefit in Corporal Distempers, having almost one kind of Nature in and with them, as it is with it in the Celestial, spiritual, and Elementary Intellect, between the Body, Soul, and the Chaos, out of which the Soul and Spirit went, the Body at last was found out of the Composition."

Half-hours with the Telescope: Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a Means of Amusement and Instruction, in which we are warned that "The feeling experienced by those who look through a telescope for the first time,—especially if it is directed upon a planet or nebula—is commonly one of disappointment."

Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners: A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood, Advice To Maiden, Wife, And Mother, Love, Courtship, And Marriage, explains that "Dissipated single men, professional libertines, and married men who are immoderate, often pay the penalty of their violations of the laws of nature, by losing their vital power."

United Bible Studies: The Jonah

2009-05-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

Our myths live in the past, but when we tell stories about the end of things we treat them as literal. What we need is a myth of the future that can act on the same unconscious triggers that myths of the past are able to do. The best modern myths rely on both the language of earlier stories and the a vision of our own human situation. We are not the ancients, and yet the symbols that activate those parts of our religious and spiritual imaginings have not changed that much. In fact, the only thing that has really changed is how we have sucked all the mythic power from them by making them literal, what Umberto Eco calls "Turning metaphysics in mechanics." Talking about chakras or 2012 as literal is no different from a reading of Genesis that says the world really was created in seven days.

So thank God for music, where we can continually play out all the contradictory and strange and wonderful meanings that our myths provide. But even here there is the danger of musical ideas taking on literal weight. Or worse, in an attempt to capture something of the mythology of the ancients, there is the potential for seeming a parody of oneself.

But not with United Bible Studies remarkable new album The Jonah, who use to their advantage every musical style that has recently been capable of devolving into silliness (psych- and outsider-folk, doom, prog) and uses them tools to carve a new myth onto the stones of our psyches.

A line in the title track,"We sleep in the skeletons of large animals," is one of the most perfectly crafted verses in apocalyptic-leaning underground music I have heard. Not only does it invoke the whale of the title's Biblical namesake, but it recalls the human experience of all our stories. The world doesn't come to an end without witnesses, and no matter who we think we are, we will always need to rest. The song continues: "We rise with our back to the sun/ we live in the shadows of waterfalls..."

Myth implies cycles, and eternity. Literalism is the death of myth but there is no better place to remain inside those cycles than in nature. United Bible Studies builds mythology out of the real, and in doing so makes that human part of us that is born from the woods and the rivers and sky into something eternal as well. There is no death when at every immeasurable moment something is transforming, something is being released, being born, emerging.

--United Bible Studies: A for Andromeda

Valerio Cosi / Enzo Franchini: Conference of the Aquarians

2009-05-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

My mother knew something about jazz, but I didn't want to know what it was until I was much older. I can't quite remember the moment that I decided that not only was my lack of knowledge an impediment to really understanding anything essential about music, but it was also an impediment to knowing something essential about my mother.

My mother grew up in Brockton, Mass. and whenever she was able, she escaped to Boston to go to nightclubs like Wally's and the Jazz Workshop. She always stayed after hours when, she once told me, all the really great music was played. All the people had gone, and it was just the musicians and some good friends. I have signed photos dedicated to my mother from Stan Getz and Billy Eckstine, proof that she was really there.

Educating myself, with my mother's help, was a long excercise in listening to everything until I could start to understand it. But it was the language of improv that I found most difficult. Negotiating a standard made sense, and there was a sense that no matter how out-there you went, there were still some boudaries to keep it all in check. You could veer away for a long time, but eventually you were pulled back toward that recognizable core. Even though I had spent years lisetning to experimental music, I was still not much of a risk taker. The standard was a way to keep it grounded. I could do with a little free jazz, such as Love Supreme, but that was because Coltrane was still reminsiscing bop. Eventually I found my way to avant garde klezmer, particularly the music of David Krakauer, who is certianly one of the best living reed players.

The new wave of klezmer experiments with free jazz, but it uses traditional Eastern-European music as its standard, and so no matter how noisy or improvised, there is this kind of spiritual tether that anchors it that peculiar mix of melancholy and joy that only klezmer can evoke.

Recent explorations of experimental have led me into some avant-garde jazz territories, but I have still been a little skittish. Recently I was sent a package in the mail from Italy and sat down to listen to the CD with the most intriguing title, Conference of the Aquarians. And then my third-eye turned on.

Valerio Cosi is a young saxaphone player of considerable talent, but his real genius is in his ability to use noise and electronics as stitching. His compositions seem deeply influenced by a vast array of Eastern sounds, not only klezmer, but raga as well. The mix works and they serve as that standard core. I felt for the first time that I understood what free form music could be, and why it's important. I was always skeptical that it couldn't offer any real emotional resonance, that it only pretended to some kind of transcendence. But Cosi has converted me. There is something graciously human about this record, and while there are moments of extreme noise, they eventually give way to certain kinds of temperate and even lovely expressions of mind and heart.

--Valerio Cosi/Enzo Franchini: Part One

Woods: Songs of Shame

2009-04-29T12:06:00.000-07:00

There is something vaguely disconcerting of feeling like you are stumbling upon a ritual that you were not invited to. But once you find yourself there, the participants don’t so much as ignore you, but just go on about their strange and haunting business. Maybe there is a nod of recognition that someone else has entered the grove, but you are welcomed simply by not being asked to leave.

You seem to be able to discern, that something is being exorcised, but it’s all happening with a quiet and subdued kind of dignity. There is no flailing about, no objects are being tossed around, nothing is sacrificed. But there is intention, and despite the ramshackle method, there is dignity.

Alongside the exorcism, there is invocation of something that lives among the group. Nothing so lofty as a god, but maybe the minor spirits that inhabit the crevices of stones.

And then there is celebration, among friends and brethren and the ritual becomes festival.

(By the way, Songs of Shame is the new album by Woods, and it’s all that is good about what can often go wrong when psychedelia meets folk out in the forest.)

--Woods: to clean

--And you can buy it here

Kill and Eat: Green Bushes

2009-04-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, loneliness is a feeling that can be strangely comforting. There is often a sense of possibility, when out of the corner of the isolation there is that tiny flicker of some vast landscape, as when seeing peripherally out of the window of a train. Your little seat and pull down tray are all you have, but rushing by is the whole other world of experience. Sometimes you fold a little more into yourself, because with that potential for experience comes the dread of choice, the fear of your own agency, and maybe even the trouble it has gotten you into before. But even the conscious decision to not act contains that glorious vision of what could still be had, if only the train would stop.

And so it is with Kill and Eat's new release Green Bushes, a little steam train of strange and just-on-the-cusp-of-glorious set pieces. At first listen, I was immediately reminded of The Microphones, but instead of veering into noisy invocations of rock, Kill and Eat bumps up against jazz. Caleb Vogel's vocals avoid being cloying while maintaining a kind of preciousness that makes the whole thing feel a little unstable. I imagine live, there is something even more special going on, as what is improvisational probably looks a lot like that scenery that keep changing and beckoning from the hazy glass of the little window.

--Kill and Eat: Green Buishes

--and buy it here or download for free

Christopher Tignor: Core Memory Unwound

2009-04-24T05:49:00.000-07:00

Christopher Tignor, a member of the experimental collective Slow Six, has opted for something more personal on his solo release Core Memory Unwound. His particular Pärt-like compositional themes are still here, but there is an internal transformation that he is making accessible. Like any good alchemical process it also contains the ability to create an emblem.

Tignor's piano and violin (peppered with some electronics) compositions are beautifully evocative and challenging. While they allow for a certain level of passive listening, they still demand attention and contemplation. Imagine your heart is a piece of vellum, and Tignor is the emblemist; an alembic here, a crucible there, a bird, a sword, and somehow, through a process of transmutation, there is the beginning of something, something being formed out of the fire; an egg, or a crown of fire. And all the while you are transfixed, memories are hatched, tiny jewels that have been crystallized by the pressures of time, somehow push themselves to the surface.

The miracle here is that what is personal to Tignor can be made so personal to the listener; the microcosm is really a macrocosm, which itself is only another particular moment in time and space. Core Memory Unwound is an astonishing experience, and one I hope Tignor is proud of.

--Christophe r Tignor: Cathedral (pt. 2)

--And buy it here

Francesco Giannico: Folkanization

2009-04-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

Boing Boing recently featured the seamstress Althea Crome that knits miniature clothing (her work was used in the perfectly marvelous film Coraline), and it started me thinking again about how miniatures offer such a vast emotional palette. A recent and fairly popular photography technique called tilt-shift has been cropping up all over the intertubes. Tilt-shift photographs take real world environments and create the illusion of scale-models. Some fine examples are here and here and even a video version here:

[actually looks better with the sound off]

There is some pretty great ambient music that can draw your attention towards the smaller, more detailed areas of consciousness, but it wasn't until I heard Folkanization by Francesco Giannico that I began to imagine that there could be a musical version of tilt-shift. Giannico layers miniature sounds into vast landscapes, but your attention never wanders from those micro-details that imbue it all with so much life. His colors are more muted than those that are found in tilt-shift, but his vision of life in small scale has even more quiet emotional resonance than those photos made to look like a town from a Z-gauge train setup.

So what it about miniaturization that moves us so? Part of it, I think, has to do with the way we project a kind of magician's skill on the artist. As Crome describes in the feature about her, there is as much a fascination with the final product as there is with the tools that are used: tiny needles, paintbrushes made from a single horsehair, tweezers that can pinch together microscopic threads. Miniaturists seem akin to alchemists, whether working with paint or carvings,they are creating something that is not only made precious by their size, but magical by the their very possibility. There is also a mythic quality, as we unconsciously recall the little worlds that make up our childhoods, that as children we create, but that we are also told about, like Peter Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Lilliputians.

Giannico weaves on a tiny loom, but the resulting soundscapes stretch on into infinity. The mix of electronics and acoustics are not haphazard, but feel as deliberate as a tiny brush against a tiny canvas.

--Francesco Giannico: Kami Akan Biasa

--And you can buy it here

Strange Maine and Inspector 22

2009-04-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

I went with my family to Portland, Maine for the first time this past weekend. When we arrived, we walked along Congress Street and a little beyond, and were pleasantly surprised to see so many art galleries, little bookstores, and some terrific record shops, the best of which was a tiny dimly lit shop called Strange Maine. It was one of those serendipitous moments, where you suddenly stumble upon a concrete manifestation of all the things you had been thinking about lately. So here in this little store were a great stack of used comics, a random but admirable collection of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, weird underground magazines, lots of great vinyl, and lo and behold, a great collection of underground CDs in handmade packaging. The proprietor was a tall sleepy sort of fellow who graciously suggested some music, and I happily left the store with 1999 issue of the much-missed Ptolemaic Terrascope (including great interviews with Can and Stars of the Lid), a little plastic skull for my son, and the CD Inri by Todd Wesley Emert, otherwise known as Inspector 22,who hails from North Carolina.

Along the coast of Maine at a place called Two Lights there is a shoreline made up of huge sheets of metamorphic rock. There is an almost dream-like intensity to these formations, and they seem to stretch on forever around each bend of the coast. My son and I climbed down to the very edge where the waves crashed around us. Along the way, we stopped to inspect small tide pools teeming with brightly colored snails and other little crustaceans. My son was giddy on this huge expanse of stone to climb and explore.

Later, we went to eat and while waiting in line started chatting with another couple. Somehow the conversation moved to writing and then to religion, and the woman, Megan Don, told me about her work writing on the lives of medieval women mystics. Within the space of a few minutes we had communed on the idea of suffering, of coming out to the other side where there is not necessarily perfect light, but rather a diffuse kind of radiance that seems to reflect off other worlds, other realities.

Inspector 22 uses lots of religious imagery, and one gets the sense he might have a peculiar kind of knowledge about the mystery of these other worlds, but the music is delightfully raw and earthy in a way that keeps it humble. There's a little piano that actually gives the edges a little more dementia, and a barely tuned ukelele that could scare the children. It's folk music marred by pop. It's alone, but not lonely; far away, but not secreted away; sad, but not desolate; cracked, but not crazy; feverish, but not delirious; a little baked, but not druggy; visionary, but not outsider.

Through something a little like electronic theurgy, I was able to find a a web presence for what appears to the label that released Inri, dontrustheruin. Other than that, there is very little else I can tell about you about this strange but alluring CD except that there is something mighty weird going on up in Maine and I am grateful for having stmbled upon it, or led there by some other force, as the case may be.

--Inspector 22: Evening Seaside

The Brown Book: Thirty Nothing

2009-04-09T06:23:00.000-07:00

Soon after writing about Grails, I was sent a CD by The Brown Book, a particularly heavy combination of melody and drone that avoids metal trappings. Given their speed and the moments of drum-stick raising nods, it's hard to imagine how they keep it all under control. There is a unique use of reference material, from Robert Fripp to Battles. But what I admire about The Brown Book is the ability to use rock chords to generate walls of noise without everything blurring at the edges like so many My Bloody Valentine clones.

I realize I have said this a number of times, but to hear experimental music that is delightfully heavy without wallowing in the ubiquitous morass of volcanic sludge is a joyful experience. The Brown Book is characterized by chance moments of elegance and remarkable musicianship. You can hear the comradery, which for the listener is like getting to be a fly on the wall of some secret fraternity where the brothers ritually make fantastic noise in order to evoke their own unique kind of transcendence. When you crack open the alchemist's stone and the light of the gods rushes out, it's a mighty good idea to have some guitars on hand to channel all that energy.

As I was listening to Thirty Nothing, my doorbell rang and snapped me back to my normal consciousness. At the door was a quiet young man tenderly holding a bible. He was achingly shy, and tentatively held out a little pamphlet announcing an Easter event. I explained that we were actually celebrating Passover, and he respectfully pulled back the pamphlet. It made me realize again there are all these different narratives we each possess about some aspect of the world. This week is about that peculiar narrative of a group of slaves (slaves who also possess a very specific knowledge of building and artifice that even their masters didn't have) who find their way to freedom. These builders eventually make it to their promised land where they again will construct another great wonder of the world, a temple like the ones they were forced to build was also intended to be a house for their god. (And even after the temple is built, King Solomon exclaims, "How can anything contain you?")

Music also is a construction of certain elements, using a craft, that attempts to contain some idea or feeling. And with something like The Brown Book, you can hear the way the intent is straining at the seams, like these guys know that at some point it's all artifice, but artifice (and story, and myth, and ritual) is all we have. So they go at it anyway, and it sounds like it might overtake them, but again, like any strong community, they withstand it together, even as they build it up, and afterward there is something to point to, to say, "We did the best we could to give that ineffable thing a form," but we could only do it together.

--The Brown Book: Deer Heads

--And you can buy it here

Charlotte & Magon: Love Happening

2009-04-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

This weekend my seven-year-old son walked in on me and my wife just as we were about to, well, you know, and I mean just as we were about to. She gave out a little yelp in surprise and my boy looked around, his eyes half-shut, and he said "Why are you naked?" and I said, "Well I was putting my pajamas on." "But you already had them on earlier," he said. So I said, "Well I changed them because I was hot." Then he said, "Why is mom naked?" I said, "Well she was also changing," and he said, "But she had her pajamas on before." I said, "She also wanted to change." I started walking him back to his room when he asked "So why was your door closed?" so I said, "We had loud music on."

And we actually did have music on. We were listening to a strange and seductive album by Charlotte & Magon, Love Happening, whose title is reminiscent of 60s style European bedroom pop. But below the surface of this nostalgia that they are so adept at is something slightly cracked and off-kilter. There is a sense that things are going to fall apart at any moment, but this is what makes it compelling. The entire evening was scored by their music, even the interruption of our son, who only highlighted the kind of chance and unpredictability that weaves its way of the music. We were blanketed by it, all of us, our little family on our raft bobbing along the currents of love. When I tucked my son back in, I knew my wife was waiting, but I wanted to linger with him for a moment, because he is the lovely unpredictabilty that underscores our life.

--Charlotte & Magon: Rivage

Balmorhea: All Is Wild, All Is Silent

2009-03-31T13:12:00.000-07:00

I'm always amazed when I come across underground music that is full of cheer and grace. It's not that it's all dark, but we live in a time when so much of the sound from the margins is glum to the point of parody, or else awash on so much noise as to create only a kind of hypnotic nervousness in the listener. Those moments of hope or optimism become even more powerful when only with the most intense concentration on the music can they be heard. But what happens when it's the moments of melancholic reflection that are the exceptions in a field of joy and wonder?

Balmorhea, a six-piece instrumental outfit from Austin, Texas who share a label with Here We Go Magic and Dirty Projectors among others, embrace a kind of two steps forward, one step back view of the world. (I am reminded of the idea that we should "not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it.") It's about making plans even though you have no idea how it will turn out, planting despite the forecast, loving with no guarantee of love being returned. It's about realism that is fed by dreams, and light that can only be seen when it makes shadows.

In almost all the great myths, there is a story of descent, of walking into the underworld before the real transformation can begin. But this idea has become corrupted by the idea of a hell without end, of eternal damnation. In the stories before, the hero always returns, sometimes a little bit worse for the wear, but never without knowledge, and never without the stuff one needs to keep going. Orpheus descends into Hades playing music.

It's hard to pretend to some kind of muscial criticism when something like Balmorhea touches me so deeply. Even during those moments when I'm waiting for something more, I'm rewarded with a whole catalogue of musical touchstones. Even the plucking on the neck of a fiddle changes everything. They mean it. Every strum, every slide of the bow, every ghostlike voice in the background. There is nothing contrived here, although it must take quite a bit of arranging and intent to do what they are doing. I would love to see them live, to see how they take to improvising. There is a sense that individually each musician lets go in their way, but only long enough to stretch out the possible.

This is a group of people I imagine one would be blessed to call their friends.

--Balmorhea: Coahuila
--Balmorhea: Harm and Boon

Reclaiming the Irrational from the Religious

2009-03-29T18:53:00.000-07:00

The rational, and quite reasonable, skepticism regarding religious belief is also in its way discouraging. As we try to imagine a human culture that is devoid of religion, we are also envisioning a human culture that is devoid of something essential to the preservation of the very culture we hope to prolong. That essential something is the irrational.

As a skeptic and rationalist myself, I am often embarrassed to have to admit that I spend considerable time cultivating those irrational aspects of myself, aspects that might look on the outside very much like religion... [read more]

Grails: Doomsdayer's Holiday

2009-03-23T09:59:00.001-07:00

There is lots of heavy right now in underground music with varying labels attached to all the different kinds of heaviness--- sludge, doom, stoner, etc--- but these are starting to feel a little inhibiting. Many of the musicians playing within whatever mode these words try and conjure are themselves stepping beyond them. I've always had a place in my musical consciousness that can only turn on with heaviness. As a child, I would steal into my older brother's room and listen to Alice Cooper, David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, and even the heavier prog stuff of that era. Later this preoccupation would find years of release with hardcore punk. But the one kind of music that never opened up this particular third eye was heavy metal. Maybe it was because in the 80s it all seemed so polished. There was heaviness, but there wasn't any noise. There was feedback, but even this felt contrived and somehow neutered. And even those metal bands that could match the speed and ferocity of hardcore were too articulate to sound authentic.

Lately I have been missing the heaviness. It's not just about rock, it's about something else, about the kind of heaviness that can open up that particular portal for me, the aspect of awareness that requires volcanic shifts, the cracking of seismic plates, the creaking of icebergs. But while there is certainly some very good heavy heavy music nowadays their main point of reference is still the growling, crushing metal that never lit my pilot. I certainly can groove to Mastadon, I appreciate Earth and SunnO))) in the best philosophical terms, and I love me some Growing and Boris (although Boris's live show in RI last year was kind of bummer), but I have been patiently hunting for some heaviness that could get me really excited again.

So begins my love affair with Grails.

The first song I heard by the them was "Reincarnation Blues" from their new album Doomsdayer's Holiday, (but I was pleased to see they already have a decent catalog of recordings). "Reincarnation Blues" opens with a call to prayer of sorts, a lone horn in the distance setting up the terms of the incantation, and then wham! Never mind the middle chamber, these guys take you right into the holy of holies.

And while the guitar driven intensity of Doomsdayer's Holiday is rooted in classic rock, it's references are more Meddle than Paranoid. The difference between prog heaviness and metal heaviness is that the former absorbs more from classical music and folk, whereas metal has traditionally been buyoed by blues. I realize much metal depends on classical music, but there is little room for the improvised as it tends toward precision and direct assault. (And don't even get me started on my dislike for thrash-metal) Underground metal has certainly expanded the range, and even a band like Growing--whose album All the Way is one of my favorites from last year--keep a foot in the metal genre while sounding wholly unique.

Ok so I'm blabbering on here. Let me get to the point. Grails is defining underground music right now, and I imagine them having the same impact as Sun City Girls and even SunnO))). There is real power here, but it's not all bravado or machismo. I liken it to how it must have felt hearing Cream for the first time in the 60s, a storm of sound that had at its core something oddly familiar, but not deriviative. I know Grails are being billed as kind of avant-metal, but I just hear something else here, something that just upends all the silliness and theatrical graveness of so much metal and does it without irony, but also without taking themselves too seriously.

I went back and listened to the previous album, Take Refuge in Clean Living, where I can really hear them fulfilling the promise of Sun City Girls. SCG were almost too hermetic for their own good, and it often feels like you need the Emerald Tablet to really listen to them. (I am digging the solo Sir Richard Bishop material, however.) But Grails weave and thread a dynamic array of instruments and sounds that seems to teach you the language as you listen. The incorporation of Eastern melodies and raga is just the perfect complement to their sound.

But never mind all this all this musical blah blah blah. Grails nail it for me. I just can't get enough of this stuff.

--Grails: Reincarnation Blues

--Grails: Take Refuge in Clean Living (only a sample from the label site, but enough to know you have to get this album

Eluvium

2009-03-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

One of the ongoing themes of this blog has been the distinction between passive and active listening. This of course is central to the idea of ambient music. It was for Eno, as he describes in the liner notes for his first true ambient album Discreet Music, an almost mis-attention to some classical music that he heard softly through only one channel while he was laid up in bed.

I would imagine a lot of ambient music is meant to be heard on the periphery of our listening, where it can introduce various kinds of unconsciouss ideas. Nevertheless, I think the challenge is to try and create ambient music that requires a mode of passive attention, or active letting-go. I am reminded of a thaumatrope, a Victorian optical toy in which a image is drawn on each side of a disk. Strings are attached to each side which are then pulled, spinning the disk and creating a miniature animation.

Matthew Cooper, who goes by Eluvium, is a composer of ambient music whose pieces require this kind of particapatory meditation, otherwise there are important moments that could easily be missed. There is a decidly Eno influence here (he even has a compostition titled "Thoughts for Jjohann Pachelbel" a nod to the second side of Eno's Discreet Music titled "Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel") but Eluvium avoids the overall pop sensibility of Eno with his own emphasis on classical music.

Eluvium uses repetition to great effect, with slight changes that seem to be generated in the actual playing, almost accidents or artifacts, rather than intent. But this only goes to capture that quailty of ambient music that is also true for the composer as well as the listener. While one imagines the musician also experiencing meditative or trance like states when performing, the making of the music is not happening on auto-pilot. There is deliberation and agency, while at the same time there is an acceptance of whatever comes.

What is also special about Eluvium is the emphasis on light rather than darkness. Even his use of minor keys are kept alight by expansive secondary themes that lift the whole compostion into authentic humanistic ideas. Some might call it elegance or even a little naive. I call it love.

--Eluvium: Miniature #3

--Eluvium: Thoughts for Johann Pachelbel

Plenum: Here We Go Magic

2009-03-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long absence between posts. I have been working steadily on a book proposal and have finally turned in all the material. Hopefully I'll have some news soon.

In the meantime back to the music.

My friend Jason Patch and I share broad musical tastes and he has been grooving lately on his satellite radio and discovering some little known jewels. Recently he told me about Here We Go Magic, and I had to give them a listen.

It's hard to write succinctly about psychedelia these days. The term is used in so many ways, aspects of everything from certain doom/stoner metal to underground folk to house trance music. So maybe it's best to talk about a sensibility rather than a genre of music. And by sensibility I mean a kind of musical consciousness that attempts to raise, heighten, or otherwise alter the state of the listener. But there is no single end-point. There is some psychedelic music that evokes dread, some that evokes wonder and, and even some that can urge you towards movement, even if its only tapping your foot or clapping along.

I have found the best involves a little of all of these; a little hope, a little fear, and a little bit of desire to sit around the ancient fires and sway and groove along. Why all these things? I think it's because the more powerful experiences of altered consciousness, however you come by them, are ones that straddle the threshold between joy and melancholy. So when music is the path by which we can come to open ourselves up to other states of mind and being, I don't want to be taken solely down a path of blackened doom, because it's just not true that there is nothing beautiful in this world (this isn't to say some of the the blackest drone metal don't exhibit moments of beauty, but these are often artifacts of the nature of drone). And I am skeptical of music that offers only the lightness of pop devoid of noise and uncertainty.

I saw all this by way of introduction to the music of Here We Go Magic, which draws from the great well of psychedelic music by incorporating folk (by way of Simon and Garfunkel, the mountains, and the woods), noise, drone, a little Harry Nilsson and even some old-fashioned acid-damaged pop. But what they do with it is so original and earnest, so without contrivance or above-it-all irony, that it's like hearing some of these musical ideas for the first time.

There is a kind of cozy claustrophobia here, nestling in the darkness where instead of feeling afraid, you feel strangely safe. Sometimes the easiest way to fall asleep is to remember dreams.

--Here we Go Magic: Only Pieces
--Here We Go Magic: Ghost List

Plenum: James Blackshaw-- Cloud of Unknowing

2009-03-06T06:00:00.001-08:00

[This is a re-post. I was trying to fix some embarrassing typos (thanks Jim L.) and I inadvertently lost the entire post.]

Recently I was in the local vitamin store that happened to playing some new-age music. I wondered how it came to be that the sound for contemporary spirituality is devoid of feeling and complexity? What I heard in that store has more in common with Muzak than with the Krautrock and experimental music that originally inspired it.

TodayI was reading this site, which I find to be a good corrective to what I spend a lot my time thinking about. But skepticism equals atheism these days, and I was struck by something the site's author said, which I have been noticing a lot lately in this kind of discussion. There is a tendency on the part of many atheists to see belief in a higher power as a desire for easy answers to hard questions, or that to believe is to find "solace." I am sure this is true for many, and listening to the music in the vitamin store, I would say this might be true for new age believers even more. There is a kind of emphasis on serenity and peacefulness, but I find these things a very small part of what it means to believe in God or to have some semblance of a religious or spiritual life.

And so the music becomes not a reflection of the lived spiritual life, which is often frought with doubt, struggle, suffering, and yes, moments of insight, stillness, serendipity, and meaning. The music I heard seemed to offer some kind of perfect spiritual vision, not much different than the the kind of heaven promised by certain Christian groups. (It leads me to believe that even non-traditional Western religious practice that incorporates Eastern mysticm and even some occult practices is guilty of its own kind of literalism and evangelising.)

Is there music that can touch upon a spiritual vision that can take into account those moments of peace and reflectiveness without being saccharine and disingenuous? Well, there is James Blackshaw.

Blackshaw is an unnervingly young guitarist with ties to the folk underground. But rather than resting upon Fahey and American acoustic music, he seems more influenced by medieval strings. His album Cloud of Unknowing on Tompkins Square Records works over some of the ideas that can be heard in the sacred minimalism of Arvo Pärt (see earlier post) but layers it with a kind of Steve Reich-level of complexity that takes that shadow of longing and turns it into light. This is the kind of serenity I long for, a serentiy that is active, moveable, and noble.

--James Blackshaw: Returning to the Ghost

Plenum: Ilk-- Language of the Court

2009-02-25T08:32:00.001-08:00

I have been walking down some interesting musical paths these last few years, mostly following the breadcrumbs of Soft Machine and Robert Wyatt, across the street to Can and Faust, and all the way, up ahead, on the horizon, I can see the red blaze of an ascending prog-rock sun. My 80s' punk rock instincts kick in and without thinking I shade my eyes. But like any good cultural mystic, I decide to gaze straight into the star and see how long I can take it.

There are a few acts I could never take quite seriously, like Genesis and (I'm sorry to some of my dear friends) Rush*. But there has always been a soft spot in my heart for some of the precursors to the mainstream prog acts. King Crimson, ELO, the Moody Blues, and even some of the more satyr-ific moments of Jethro Tull have remained a secret joy for me. And then just last month two things happened almost simultaneously. I heard Roy Harper's StormCock for the first time, and then I chanced upon Ilk.

Ilk is one of the many incarnations of the experimental musician Andew Paine and underground artist Richard Youngs, (whose recordings with Jagjaguar are astonishingly powerful). I didn't know that he was involved with other outfits, but thanks to a small review in The Wire, I discovered the CD-R recording by Ilk, Language of the Court. And now I am happy also to have made the acqaintance of Paine, who by all accounts is not only an incredible musician, but a gentlemen as well.

Ilk is progressive rock when stripped of its pretense and its bombast, uncovering the human element that infuses the best of the genre. It's not without artfulness, but where much of the late 70s prog musicians favored technique and fiction, Ilk goes back to the folk roots. But rather than taking a romp through the woodlands, Ilk hooks them up to a Tesla coil. It's like the difference between a Grimm's fairy tale and a Disney version of the same. The former isn't afraid of the mud and the fecundity, the violence and the dread; the human. The latter adds sugary sweet songs and de-sexualized caricatures of what had been rich archetypes.

While Roy Harper offers an unplugged acoustic vision of this denuded form of prog, Ilk starts at the top with all the electricity and the echoes, but has removed those things that get in way of real emotion. If Harper and Ilk met in the middle, you would have best of the early King Crimson recordings. By themselves, they each remind us what is so compelling about rock and roll that aims for the stratosphere, and once in a while for the stars.

If Ilk are cosmic, it's only because they sometimes sound like a microphone aimed at the center of a nebula, full of radio noise and wonder. Language of the Court is a mesmerizing experience. There is a bit of jangly guitar strum on the first track that leaves me breathless and the song "Again Recurring" is one of those late night tracks to play over and over.

I'm not sure how many copies of this are available, but if you want to be reminded of how even the fuzziest rock can inspire spiritual introspection, try to get a hold of this.

-Ilk: Salutation of the Elders

*Truth be told, Farewell to Kings had a huge impact on me (science fiction and mysticism!) but I was turned off by Rush's later stuff and I think I retroactively stopped liking even that album. I think it deserves it going back and giving it another listen.

Plenum: The Blithe Sons-- The Great Orthochromatic Wheel

2009-02-18T17:30:00.000-08:00

I normally wouldn't highlight a recording that is difficult to find, or limited, but I just love this stuff so much, I had to at least post a few words. The Blithe Sons is made up of two highly regarded psychedelic/folk musicians--Loren Chasse and Glenn Donaldson. Chasse is best know for his work in the band Thuja, and Donaldson has garnered some decent attention with Skygreen Leopards. Together they are the driving force behind the Jewelled Antler Collective, a loose conglomeration of musicians, recording mainly on hard to find small run CDRs. (A wonderful boxed set of some of the better JAC offerings is out now, although the price point is a bit steep for 4cds.)

But this Blithe Sons recording demonstrates the most human elements of the underground folk movement, and it offers the least contrived and most authentic strains of psychedelic tropes. Psychedelic folk is often guilty of too much Woden-on-the-brain, or in an attempt to subvert the expectations, their is often too much reliance on noise and drone. Sometimes this is done to beautiful effect, but psychedelic music is easily reduced to a kind of tonal solopsism. But when psych-folk is successful it reaches out beyond its own inner world and tells a story. It might still be extremely subjective, but if it is honest, then the details don't matter, only the feeling needs to catch you off guard and remind you of something, even if the actual event or feeling eludes you.

--Try to Find a Memory in a Dark Room (excerpt)

Plenum: Mountains-- Choral

2009-02-10T16:09:00.000-08:00

Every now and again drone is used as the means to end, rather than the end in itself. This is an important distinction particularly during a time when drone is the guiding principal in so much experimental music. I am reminded of a band like Growing, who despite having shared philosophical roots and a shared audience with doom and stoner metal, their use of drone relies on what it makes possible rather than what it takes away.

And now there is Mountains, with their new album Choral coming out this month from Thrill Jockey. I am going to take a chance here and say that I think it will be difficult to think about drone in the same way once this record gets its proper reception.

On Choral, there is a lesson that when reduced to it's almost primal elements, pop music is still only made up the fundamentals. And when you begin to take them apart, as I think Tape also does to great effect in their recent album, you are forced to have to listen in a new way. Most people don't want to. It requires work. It means having to be willing to wait, sometimes for a long time, for any kind of illumination. What Mountains offer a sure path by demanding that at intervals, you slow down and listen carefully to what may or may not be coming next. But this is what makes something like Mountains' new album so exciting. It doesn't condesend with a kind of drone or noise that refuses to teach.

In the titular song "Choral," for example there is a subtle, yet exteremly detailed enviroment of sound, but if you don't wait for it, or if you dismiss the flourishes as merely artifacts of the drone, then this isn't the album for you.

I have been struck lately about how many new releases are taking this kind of risk to build upon drone, but often the results are mere noodling about with sqeaks and squaks with the ubiquitious homebuilt oscillator, than any kind of crafted layering. Mountains takes you along the drone and points out all the beauty along the way.

Some of the songs use beautiful guitar picking and strumming to set the stage and then return to the central musical themes of the album. This, too, feels like an important risk, because sometimes we need to be reminded of melody, that this is an essential element as well. But then the guitar will slowly get washed away by fuzz and Mountains drift off again into the timelessness of the drone in a way that again, forces concentration.

We often think of meditation as a passive state, but it actually is a strange mix of concentration and letting go. We have to push ourselves towards the emptiness, and then not get attached once we are there. It's something special when music offers us the same opportunity.

-Choral

Plenum: Tape--Luminarium

2009-02-09T14:04:00.001-08:00

I recenlty posted on Tape, where I referred to their music as "that long range telescopic, pin-hole view of the depths of being, colored by small points of longing, and something that sounds like love." I have finally been able to give the whole album a listen. My wife and I played it late one night in bed, lights off, in repose.

Most of the pieces are guided by a simple acoustic guitar. The other sounds and instruments don't so much build on it as function as emanations of a sort. They only exist because of the primary structure. They draw their meaning from the guitar, and then provide new layers of insight. But they never get mistaken for the actual thing itself. There are a few tracks that offer surprises of the sort that you feel as though you just stumbled upon the answer to some secret. But then it fades away. There is a feeling of loneliness at times, but it is pinned down by immense hope.

Tape has a nostalgia for pop, but instead of crafting a pop song, they draw from pop just enough nutrients to keep it all aloft. The third track "Fingers," feels like a deconstruction of a pop song that is at times quite disconcerting. But overall, the buzz of the electronics actually crack open the songs and reveal the yolk, where the real proteins are found.

Simply put, one of the best albums so far this year, and close to perfect in terms of craftsmanship, heart, and the thing that makes this kind of music so important: the possibility that sound can actually shape consciousness.

(Thanks again to Raven Sings the Blues for turning me on to this.)

Tape-- Moth Wings
Tape-- Beams

Introducing Plenum- A music blog

2009-02-04T12:36:00.000-08:00

This is the first of a regular posting on experimental, ambient, and psychedelic music, particularly as these genres of music relate to ideas about consciousness and mysticism. But it's mainly a place to discover and explore some of the lesser known musicians that are crafting sublime and powerful sounds.

This first installment is a listen to some beautiful, yet extremely challenging music from the album Kristallivirta by Aan Meets Eyes Like Saucers. This group is made up of a number of musician including Jeffrey Knoch, a keyboard player whose solo outfit is Eyes Like Saucers, and Jani Hirvonen and Jari Koho who play together as Aan. I believe this music serves as an important entry into this blog.

There is a tendency in many contemporary ambient/noise/drone bands to create landscapes of decay and loops of circuit bending that suggest entropy. It's easy to follow a path of hopelessness into the the woods. But hopelessness isn't the same as melancholy or pathos, which despite the darkness, still recognizes that shadows require light.

Aan Meets Eyes Like Saucers goes in the opposite direction of many of their peers; here the chaos expands into form. It sounds like the echo of creation, formlessness becoming form, darkness becoming light. What sounds like decay is really the moment before unification, as matter finds it ways into some kind of cohesiveness.

We often think of expanding consciousness as a moment whereby self becomes formless, but this has reduced much of the discussion around ideas of consciousness as a dichotomy between the material world of form and the nouminal or spiritual as formless. But what if we imagine that the Godhead is really the realization of all things, not the dissolution of matter, but the perfect union of all things. Creation is God's own beginning.

Aan Meets Eyes Like Saucers offers an possibility that the this kind of music does not always have to point to the dissolution of things, but rather to the beginnings of sound, where what is initially perceived as the staticky echo of nothingness is really the move towards the plenum, the fullness of creation.

--Aan Meets Eyes Like Saucers--

Mystics Under the Microscope

2009-01-13T18:15:00.000-08:00

Until 2006, John Hayes, a psychologist and self-described Zen-Catholic, had never taken a hallucinogenic drug. In the 1960s, Hayes was a Franciscan friar watching with curiosity while the counter-culture used psychedelics with impunity. Through his own meditation and religious practice, Hayes believes he has had sensations that he would label mystical. But these mystical states—which he described to me as “moments of unitive experience” —were significant enough that when he heard about a surprising research project at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine he was more than intrigued. Doctors at JHU were investigating the effects of psilocybin—the active ingredient in the more common variety of hallucinogenic mushroom—and looking for volunteers.

After some considerable thought, he signed up. For three sessions Hayes is certain he received a placebo. Then, in the fourth session, something happened that had never happened before in all his years of prayer and meditation.

“It was like ‘All right, what’s the big deal?’ Then ba-boom!” he says. “There was a sense of moving in some sort of astral space with stars whizzing by me. It was like getting the big picture.” -Read More-

Unity

2009-01-10T17:52:00.000-08:00

I have been working hard to maintain some kind of balance. I have been calling myself a rationalist and a mystic, a skeptic and a believer. I have held fast to the idea that the religious imagination is irrational, but that one can have a spiritual attention that does not need to be governed by any rational faculty to still be a valuable part of our lives.

I have argued, often vehemently, that things like Intelligent Design do more to damage the religious life than the scientific one. The need by some to square spiritual beliefs with scientific truths is faulty and damages our ability to integrate mythological stories, rituals, and religious experiences We turn mythology into history and it stops being eternal. We live for our immortality rather than be as immortal in the mortal realms of our experience. By this I mean, fail to see all life as holy, as part of an eternal unity, focusing rather on the hope of eternity.

But then I read David Bohm, and I understand how rational and spiritual modes of thought can be intergrated. It doesn't have to do with proofs or making those truths of the natural world we understand through science have religious meaning, and it certainly doesn't have to do with taking our religious stories and showing how they are literally true in the same way. It has to do with recognition of unity, of a greater universal principal through which our lives are activated and all things arise. Here is David Bohm:

With Agassiz, Darwin, and God in a Collection's Inner Sanctum

2008-11-29T19:18:00.000-08:00

We often think about museums as public institutions, their collections made available for our consumption. When I visit an art museum, for example, I know there are some things in the collection that are not on display, but I don't imagine there is anything they would never display publicly. But the history of museums belies this notion. The first natural history museums, known as Wunderkammer, were originally private collections of the extremely wealthy and sometimes eccentric collectors. These rooms contained animal specimens, shells and coral, and minerals and gems, and they often held fantastic objects as well, such as unicorn horns, most likely the twisting horns of the narwhal. Only those who were part of the upper classes were allowed to see, and maintain, these "cabinet of curiosities." It wasn't until the Louvre in Paris that a museum opened its collection to the public, in 1793, due, in large part, to the French Revolution. And, much unlike the museums of today, the purpose of early natural history was to reveal the glory of God in the diverse forms of nature.

Read more

Harry Smith and the Consciousness of Magic

2008-11-11T18:43:00.001-08:00

I was happily surprised to recently learn all kinds of amazing things about Harry Smith, the man whose personal record collection was to become the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music. First of all, Smith regarded himself as a magician and was deeply interested in the secret magical societies as well as spiritualism and alchemy. He was also one of the early experimental animators and his work is a remarkable fusion of music, image, and magical symbolism. The animation itself serves as a form of alchemy, and I can be used for certain kinds of meditations on consciousness. Here is a prime example:

I want to use Smith and this film as a springboard for thinking about metaphor, magic, and consciousness. I am working on an article right now that has as its central theme the question of whether or not there is a mystical consciousness that independent of cultural ideas, religious tradition or personal expectations. Jung, for example, saw these kinds of alchemical symbols has playing an important function in the development of archetypes or rather, serve as vessels for archetypal imagining. But the symbols themselves are the product of very specific cultural and religious ideas, having their own history and even Western bias. Is it possible to parse how symbols can be both cultural/historical and perennial?

Psychedelics, Science, and WTF

2008-09-28T09:35:00.000-07:00

Alternet recently reported on Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics conference that took place in NY last week. I imagine it was an interesting and illuminating event, but of course, and no surprise, we get this nugget:

"In the conference's closing session, [Daniel] Pinchbeck suggested that the current renaissance in psychedelic culture came about because Saturn was at right angles to Pluto. And when one audience member asked who doubted the "official 9/11 story," more than half the crowd raised their hands. Forte then began spouting a mix of 9/11 conspiracy theory and erroneous Holocaust history -- and confessed that Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered the effects of LSD in 1943, had told him shortly before his death that he thought the Jews had been behind the attacks."

The Trans-Spirit message board posted the article and set off a little discussion. I had asked how the rest of the audience responded to
these kind of claims? I asked: Is their a kind of polite acceptance that no
matter how outrageous the claims (eg. Saturn at right angles and
Jewish conspiracy theories) everyone at these things has to be nice to
each other? Don't the serious scientists and researchers protest?

The article, and others like it, always tend to equalize everything,
but put some of these people in the same room as a creationist or an
ID proponent and they would not stand for it. But literal belief in
the phases of the planets affecting human destiny are left standing...

I like Pinchbeck and I am interested in the work he does, and of course Robert Forte is an important figure ~~and his Council on Spiritual Practices does interesting work~~, but I wonder how their particular claims and ideas really undermine the scientific underpinning of the new psychedelic research. The problem for me is that I believe very strongly that these substances, under the right circumstances, can be efficacious for certain kind of spiritual revelations, but when these things get transmitted outside the experience, the danger of literalism is too great. How can we find a way to talk about spiritual realities without falling in to the trap that all religion's and spiritual practices face, which is the dissolution of mythic language and elevate the concrete. This is the fundamental problem of things like Intelligent Design and creationism, and no matter how you slice it, saying that certain things happen because the planets align in a certain way uses the same categorical language. I would love to hear what Pinchbeck thinks about this. But right now I am going to email Forte and give him a little what for.

Music to listen to when reflecting on consciousness

2008-09-12T12:03:00.000-07:00

Robert Wyatt-- Last Straw

Stars of the Lid-- Tippy's Demise

Can-- Mushroom

Gong-- Magick Mother Invocation

Gong-- Master Builder

Steven Reich-- Section 6

Red Krayloa-- L.G.F.

Avro Part-- Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten

Stars of the Lid-- Hiberner Toujours

I recommend reading some David Bohm, Ouspensky, and Alan Watts to get things moving. And then perform self-hypnosis in which you imagine you are descending into the abyss by way of an old elevator. You control the speed of your descent by a brass lever. Once you arrive at the depth you feel most comfortable, take some time to look around at the shadows and the symbols, the sigils and the signs. Take nothing for granted. But don't become to impressed by anything. Then begin to remove the subject from your internal grammar. Highlight the verbs. Rather than "I see the mountain rising up out of the volcanic ash," think, "A mountain rising up is being perceived," or "perception of a mountain rising up is happening." After a time of this, come out of the hypnotic state and then listen to these songs.

At the Mountains of Madness with tiny paint brushes

2008-09-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

My beautiful collection of Ral Partha miniatures has long since disappeared with so many other things from my adolescent days, but lately I have been interested in painting miniatures again. I read in Make recently that Cory Doctorow had started up again after a long lapse and was inspired by both his admission and his attempt. But I have disappointed to see that Warhammer seems to dominate the market. Not that their product line isn't cool, but they all kind of look the same after a while. The pre-painted plastic miniature line from Wizards of the Coast are kind of a debacle and take all the real fun out of the hobby. And they have no weight, not like the terrific lead figures from the later 70s and 80s. So I have doing some searching for something a little off the beaten path and what did I discover but a wonderful line of miniatures for Cthulhu/Lovecraft games. Adventurers, vehicles, and of course, gods! And they are dread-tastic!

Beginning to listen all over again

2008-07-29T18:24:00.000-07:00

The time has come to begin my musical education all over again. I go through stages where I spend a lot of time researching and listening to particular periods, composers, bands, etc. It seems I have missed some very important watershed moments and people. You can only go down so many forking paths, and I just happen to missed some of this all together.

It started, where I think it does for many people who end up here, with Soft Machine and Robert Wyatt. Soft Machine's 1 and 2 have become a sort of cradle for me, where I have just begun my first associations with the world around me. Then it was Gong, and this was like starting to differentiate colors, and then Can and Faust, and this was like taking my first unsteady steps. And now here I am, a toddler, having just discovered Steve Reich and what is before me now feels like really having to grow up a bit.

Strangely, I realize that part of this growing is going to involve paring down, unlearning what I thought I knew about what music could really do. I have always said that I need a little noise with my pop and a little pop with my noise, but now I am interested in the ways in which pop can be disseminated into bits sometimes beyond recognition. Like this for example. Or like this.

So where do I go from here? The drone? The crackle box? The toy piano?

I'll be sure to let you know what I find, and post some mp3s and suggestions along the way.

If you are an experimental/ avant garde musician and you would like me to write about your work, please drop me a note (peter.bebergal at gmail.com).

And by the way, to better accommodate this curriculum, I am going to be building a tube amp and some other audio gear to bring it all back to the most basic category sound.

Inherit the Windbags

2008-05-27T14:00:00.000-07:00

I was hoping to get back to my discussion of my life long of comics, but I wanted to post about some interesting conversation going on regarding a recent essay I wrote for Nextbook, Inherit the Windbags, in which I argue that things like Creation Science and Intelligent Design not only damage science, but the religious imagination as well.

One blogger, PZ Myers, really took me to task in a post he titles A pleasant, smiling apologist is still lying to you in which he writes: "Bebergal is waving his hands frantically, trying to justify irrationality as a power for human happiness rather than an impediment. There is no true power there. It is definitely the case that the human mind is not a piece of clockwork logic, and there are certainly irrational interpretations of the world that mesh well with our flawed preconceptions, and it can even make us feel good to give in to comforting myths. But this is not good for us."

Another blogger, Chris Schoen, does an elegant job of defending my unspoken position: He writes: "It's not a complete surprise that Myers can only conceive of religion, spirituality, or mysticism as a comforting, ego-stroking enterprise, because that tends to be all that rises above the background noise of our popular culture: AM Radio sermons, megachurches, and televangelists are almost impossible to avoid, and most of them tend to exploit (consciously or not) the same feelings of anxiety and insecurity that are so effectively targeted by television commercials...

But that's why we have books. That's why Eagleton and Orr and others are exhorting Dawkins et al to read them. Not just (or even) theology, but any the challenging disciplines of assembly: philosophy, literary theory, philology, cultural studies. Even a cursory command of these fields might help Myers think twice before writing something that imagination is 'a cognitive randomizer,' or--my favorite from this piece,--'science has taught us ... that our imagination is pathetic.' This is a confusion of categories along the lines of 'I can't be overdrawn, I still have checks!'"

I am excited about this conversation taking place over my essay and I am pleased it has incited some passionate responses. I consider myself a believer and a skeptic, a rationalist and a mystic and for both atheists and religious alike, I am the worst kind of animal, sowing misinformation and as Meyers would say, blatantly lying. But I know that historically I am not alone. Some of the great naturalists, theologians, and scientists have wrestled with the dual nature of what it means to be human, and for many of them, religious language functions well to describe the ineffable, however flawed it might be.

But you know what? All of this pales before the fact that we just landed a frickin' robot on MARS! Is there anything cooler than that?

A Life of Comics, Part 1

2008-01-14T18:05:00.000-08:00

I was walking home the other day with a bag full of comics. I had just dropped over 25 bucks at the comic book store (Million Year Picnic here in Cambridge). I spend about this much every week. In my bag I had BPRD, Nova, Simon Dark, Mighty Avengers, mostly superhero titles, a few horror titles, and one or two indies. I realized suddenly that I am going to be 41 in a few weeks, and that I have been reading and collecting comics for about 35 years. For the last 15 or so, I have been buying my comics in the same store. And let me tell you something. I still love them with all my soul and all my heart. And more specifically, while there is a special place in my life for Clowes, Tomine, Ware, and Kochalka, it's superhero comics that I adore.

Over the years, I have had bouts where comics fell a bit to the wayside. Computers (Atari 800), punk rock (Boston Hardcore), girls, sex, drugs, getting clean, jazz, the study of religion, writing, marriage, a child; each of these things, in their way, distracted me for a time, but no matter where I have been or what I have been doing, broke, flush, student, unemployed, or book contract in hand, I always found a way to read and buy comics.

I acquired my first collection from the ages of 6 to 12. It was the seventies, and I had some wonderful things; X-Men 94, tons of Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes, all those great giant size Batman and Superman Family comics. Thor with the "Pop Art" stamp on the upper left corner, Fantastic Four with the Impossible Man, High Evolutionary, and Galactus. So many wonderful comics. My family moved from Florida to Massachusetts in 1980, and when the moving truck unloaded on that fateful January day, my box of comics was not part of the delivery.

For a few years in the mid 80s I bought almost every superhero title that came out. My favorites at the time were The Avengers, Ann Niocenti's Daredevil, Cloak and Dagger, and Walt Simonson's Thor (simply one of the best runs by a single creator). I also collected back issues of Creepy and Eerie, the weird tripped out comic called Nemesis the Warlock, Grim Jack, reprints of Zap, Sandman, and of course Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns. One day I found myself desperately needing money. I sold the whole collection for $300.00. (Don, can I please buy them all back?)

It was really the work of James Robinson that brought me back to superhero comics. His Starman stands out as one of the great ongoing series. But I still had a love hate with superheroes. There was some that was good, but a lot of it was still terrible. But I could never really let go.

Now here I am, as I said almost 41, and buying tons of superhero comics. But it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I was able to understand what it was all about. I had gotten home with my comics and was excited to read the new Giant Size Avengers. I was a little disappointed with the book. I was about to go on to the next comic in the stack when I noticed that they had reprinted an old issue of the Avengers. And lo and behold, it was my favorite single comic of all time: Avengers #58, titled "Even an Android Can Cry." The story follows the Vision, who after helping the Avengers defeat his creator, Ultron, wishes to become a member of the team. Iron Man and Thor duke it out with him to see if he has the stuff to be an Avenger. The issue also includes the Vision's origin, one of the most marvelously convoluted origins in comics. Henry Pym, the golden age Human Torch, and Wonder Man all somehow figure into the creation of this android that can become ethereal, diamond hard, fire a laster from a diamond embedded in his head, and put his arm through someone's chest and then change his density so that the victim is wracked from the inside.

Ultimately the Vision is accepted into the Avengers. The last page of the comic is a single panel. The Vision is holding his head in his hand and a long tear flows from his eye. Off panel, Captain America is saying: "...even an android can cry." WHAM! When I was nine or ten this captured my imagination like no other moment. Even Tolkien didn't produce this kind of emotional effect for me. There was a mythology here that contained this wholly unique character, something like a god, also a construct, but he was vulnerable. This ability to capture the deeper quality of myth and imbues it with humanity is something that keep me, at 41, still reading superhero comics.

Part 2 coming soon.

Not Nearly Geek Enough

2007-12-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

As I stood with the other congregants, I felt an old tension wash over me. I was so glad to be here, so proud that there was something traditional that would soothe my yearning. But as things got started, I noticed a kind of orthodoxy that has always turned me off. I have been just as turned off by the appropriation of tradition by outsiders, but at least they have sense of distance, and maybe even a little irony. But here I was with my people, and I couldn’t have felt more alone. They were just a little too hardcore for me, or maybe I was a wimp who had once abandoned them, here now with now my tail between my legs. As a Jew who grew up mostly secular, my return to Judaism over the past twenty years has been always walking a precarious line between looking for tradition and keeping a critical open mind. But I wasn’t at synagogue. I was taking archery lessons from Peter the Red, a Queen’s Archery Champion in the Eastern Kingdom of The Society for Creative Anachronisms.

There were a number of other folks there, who like me were a fairly un-athletic bunch. Their life long interests have usually kept them out of the sun and certainly not the people one imagines being proficient with a deadly weapon. Peter’s yeoman, an orthodox Jew by the name of Yaacov ben HaRav Eliezer was quick to point out to me where I had not found my correct anchor (a tooth that you press down with your index finger as you pull the bowstring,) and while he spoke his tztitzes blew in the wind.

But while Peter and Yaacov were gracious patient hosts, for most of the morning I had the strange feeling of not belonging. It’s a feeling I have long grown accustomed to. From the days in middle school when walking down the halls was like a walk across hot coals, to today if I am standing around a party when everyone is watching and talking about the football game on TV. More importantly it's how I've felt in many religious contexts, a believer whose not quite observant enough, or with my wife's family on Christmas, the tree looming over me like the inquisition. At archery practice with folks whom I know I share more than a passing interest in things like fantasy and role-playing, there was no friendly banter, no winking knowledge that what were doing was both awesome and awfully goofy. The nicer I tried to be, the more marginalized I felt. They could tell I just wasn’t one of them.

I hadn’t sewn my own quiver.

Recently I attended a science fiction convention in Boston, and looking at the list of events I was already feeling out of my depth. At what part of my geek life had I missed the transformation of dice wielding friendly misanthropes into polyamourous, leather clad martial arts experts? More importantly when did I stop being cool amongst the uncool?

I asked the science fiction author Jay Lake his thoughts on fan culture and he suggested my experiences are not that common: “One of the interesting characteristics of both the writer and fan communities within SF is a very strong social value placed on inclusion. When you see exclusionary cliquishness, it either arises from competition – the Star Wars people arguing with the Star Trek people, for example – or insecurity.”

But like any community with strong internal bonds, how easy is it for a newcomer to feel a part of? For two years or so I wrote a science fiction/fantasy book review column for the Boston Globe. I was pretty proud of it. Since sf/fantasy got so little coverage in the mainstream press, I only reviewed books I thought I could recommend, even as I was critical of them. After reviewing two books that I was quite fond of but suggested that too much science fiction is not character driven, I was lambasted on the now defunct, but extremely popular blog of the book review site Emerald City, which suggested that I was just one of those reviewers that hates science fiction. I felt like I had been kicked out of a club because someone in the locker room saw my circumcised penis.

A certain defensiveness, coupled with a kind of group aspergers, has forced many fans into a cliquishnesses that far exceeds anything I saw with cheerleaders growing up. In fact, while most cliques can have a mean streak built in, what I am seeing amongst geeks is a kind of righteousness due to their culture having been appropriated by mass culture: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, World of Warcraft, and even the popularity of Battlestar Galactica and the science fiction pretensions of Lost. I feel the same righteousness, a sort of chosenness that I am also part of the tribe, even though I don’t always worship at the temple. With most groups there is a shared orthodoxy that keeps the members bound together. It’s not enough to attend services. To really belong you have to agree the earth was created six thousand years ago or that exclusion of Tom Bombadil from the Lord of the Rings film was a grave sin.

Paul Di Filippo, a beloved and prolific science fiction author has had years of experience with fans and conventions. I confessed to him my feelings of inadequacy and he counseled me: “Anyone can plunge into the midst of any SF convention wholeheartedly and warmly embrace the most oddball geeks, nerds, dorks, pointdexters or otakus. You just have to cultivate your inner fan, and see past the superficial tics and mannerisms to the intelligent, entertaining people beneath.”

Like my religious life, my geek life has me torn in two directions. I long for tradition, to be with those that understand the sacred texts, can argue about the finer points, and embrace ritual and custom. But I also need a little distance, a little critical reflection, and maybe a little humor that sometimes, from the outside, this stuff can look a little goofy, and many folks are skeptical, if not downright atheists (one of my best friends is still oddly irritated that I like fantasy and comics books). But I will still attend. I will carry my tattered Dungeons Master Guide into the holy places with pride and hope that I can be accepted, even as go home to my gorgeous (and not Jewish) wife who will insist I put down my polyhedral dice before I roll around with her.

*Cross-posted at Jewcy

Mysticism and music

2007-12-11T13:04:00.000-08:00

For the last few years I have been thinking about the relationship between psychedelic music and mysticism. I've written about it here and here, but even when I was researching the material for these essays I felt the musicians were mostly guarded when talking about religion and their music. I also found a lot of hedging when I talked about their music in the context of a genre, or of a tradition. I really do think of psychedelic music as a kind of kabbalastic teaching, passed from generation to generation, the music and the records as the texts. But many of the musicians I spoke with saw their own music as existing in a sort of cultural and spiritual vacuum. Now, for the most part, no music is unformed by what came before, but psychedelic music, in all its various forms, has always borrowed from the past, and I believe this is a good thing.

But what was more frustrating was the insistence that whatever spirituality could be gleaned from their music was also something that existed outside any religious framework. And this is ultimately the problem I have with current discussions about psychedelic experiences, especially those had on DMT and mushrooms. Terence McKenna often suggested that those worlds encountered on psilocybin are not accountable by any traditional religious language, that there exists reality that is completely outside any previously understood mystical ideas or symbols. But he is not talking about some ineffable quality. He often describes these worlds very beautifully. But there was this sense that the psychedelic experience is not part of any other mystical sensibility or experience.

What troubles me most about this is the inference that other paths to mystical awareness are left in the dust in the face of the mushroom experience. And while I admit the mushroom experience is quick and dramatic, other forms of altered consciousness can be just as valid. But what seems to be troubling about this to some contemporary pscyhonauts is that these other forms are deeply entrenched in their particular religious frameworks, whereas for them, the psychedelic experience is beyond any religious language.

But I am getting off the point. What I want to begin is a discussion of whether or no t psychedelic music can induce altered consciousness, as if itself was the drug. And more importantly, how has the spiritual landscape of psychedelic music changed? The 60s was much more influenced by Eastern mysticism, but today's psych is often characterized by very American, woodsy, almost pagan musical ideas. How does this impact the spiritual nature of the music?

Welcome

2007-11-30T12:32:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Mystery Theater, a review of psychedelic music and culture, comic books, religion, and cultural oddities. Things will start up in December, but for now here a list of what I am listening to, reading, and thinking about.

Small Faces- Ogden's Nut Gone Flake
Soft Machine- I and II
Umberto Eco- The Name of the Rose
Abraham Joshua Heschel- The Sabbath
BPRD
Mysticism and psilocybin
Dr. John Halpern
The Faith Between Us
Huston Smith

I'll have more to say about all these things soon.

Interview with Steven R. Smith

2000-08-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

Your music draws from a vast array of ideas and traditions. Do you also draw ideas and themes from non-musical influences such as art, literature, philosophy

Yes, these things definitely seem to seep in. Most often it’s books and films—recently both Cormac McCarthy’s the Road as well as the films of Hungarian director Bela Tarr have both sort of dickered their way into an LP of mine called Cities which will be released in the next week. It may not be apparent to listeners but I hear it in certain moods that I was trying to go for and certain phrases turn up in song titles and things like that. But Cormac McCarthy and Bela Tarr’s influence has cropped up in subtle ways in a lot of my previous records over the years. I guess they’re people I come back to often. I remember the films of Sergei Parajanov, particularly Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, were very influential on the Hala Strana records I did. Basically, I wanted to make Hala Strana sound like the way that movie looked and made me feel. I just loved that film, and still do. All of these examples are saying things in one medium that I wish or struggle to say in my own music.

Does making music have a ritual quality for you? Do you find that your music has effects on your own consciousness?

I think playing music definitely has an effect on my own consciousness, but this has also occurred from listening to other people’s music as well, seeing bands play and so on. I’d maybe even venture to say that if I’ve ever had a truly spiritual moment or a transcendent moment then it’s definitely been while playing music. Unfortunately, those seem to be far and few between though, but one keeps trying. Music is as valid a religion as any as far as I’m concerned. I guess any creative pursuit could be seen as a spiritual pursuit and, for me, music might even, at times, be the way I would engage in things the way I suppose others would use prayer or meditation. And hell, it’s also fun and it feels good. Now, that’s not to say that I think my music is special, far from it. I can’t stress that enough. It’s hard to talk about this without sounding self-important. I just mean the process of playing music (or any creative process) could have that potential to sort of lift you to another place, at least on a good day, and that’s not a bad thing to strive for. That goes for anyone, whether they’re gardening or cooking or painting, etc. That potential is there.

So the ritual part of it, I think it has a lot to do with preparation. A lot of what I do is improvised so it’s not so much about practicing what I’m going to play but rather getting in the right frame of mind and trying to understand what I want to say before I even start playing notes. Mostly just being in the moment, which really is a sort of prayer, right? Even just the process of plugging in your gear, tuning up, there’s a physical ritual of handling the guitar, a guitar I’ve held over and over for years and years, or instruments I’ve actually built myself, so there’s a connection with the tools as well and it’s comforting.

Lately, I’ve been struggling with time and not having enough of it. I work a full-time job and have a toddler at home so it’s hectic. And it’s getting harder to use my time wisely, it’s too diffuse and erratic, so lately I’m trying to write some music beforehand and then I’ll take a block of time off from work and just record the next record in a focused set amount of time. Not that everything will be written in stone but I’ll at least have some source material to start with, maybe a concept, some things to work with, maybe some goals to tackle. And what I’m finding is that there is ritual in that as well. It’s very calming, just moving notes around on a piano or an acoustic guitar, slowly putting things in place but not actually recording or even really playing, just free associating during this sort of vague writing process that I’m going through.

The music you make and the people you collaborate with are often lumped together into that now very broad category of psychedelic music. Does this word mean anything to you? Do you think it is an important signifier?

The word psychedelic doesn’t mean a whole lot to me at this point but I’ve used it myself to describe what I do. So there you go. It’s a loaded term, for sure, but I don’t find it to be too embarrassing so I guess it’s better than others. It’s just the cartoonish image that comes up when the average man on the street thinks of something as “psychedelic”--“Incense and Peppermints” and the lava lamp and a camera lens zooming in and out to the beat really quickly—that’s sort of a bummer. And that’s not what I think of when I think of psychedelia. My first thought would be something like the MC5 rocking the Democratic Convention with the riot squad and the helicopters overhead, so my image of what’s psychedelic is not really very accurate. I think Ornette Coleman is psychedelic! I’d say when talking to friends though, music friends, the word psychedelic usually refers to good qualities, things we like, bands that we respect and so that’s usually a compliment so it’s still an important signifier, at least to “those in the know.” Ha ha. I guess to others it might not. Part of the music I make is psychedelic, no doubt, so the term’s fine with me, but I hope there’s a little more to it than that. Frankly, it’s better than “freak folk” or some of the other terms people have used that this stuff sometimes gets lumped into.

What kind of music were you listening to growing up? Did you always tend towards underground music?

Once I was old enough to know better, I guess I just started to lean toward more underground stuff. Honestly, the music’s just better, plain and simple, at least for what I value and am looking for. I was fortunate that I grew up in Fullerton, California where there was a really thriving punk scene in the early 80s, and although I was way too young to be directly part of that scene, we grew up in the shadow of it and I do think that had an effect. And it just felt like it was something you could do and do it on your own terms. You would see these people in bands you respected walking down the street, hell some of the younger ones were still seniors in my high school when I was a freshman and they had records out — very cool. That’s what I wanted to do. I never had dreams of playing a stadium to the adoring masses. Recently, I was talking with someone I work with and she had seen U2 play on their last go around at whatever arena it was and she mentioned how it was a real emotional experience for her. The show itself really affected her, and this just shows how people get different things out of music. I personally can’t understand how being in an arena at the back row watching some performer on a video screen could be much of a moving experience but it worked for her. I want to see a band in their practice space.

In middle school and high school it was some punk rock and a lot of post punk: you know the staples: Joy Division, Smiths, Cure, Bauhaus, whatever, but we also were rabid about the Dischord records stuff—Rites of Spring, Soul Side, Dag Nasty, Embrace, were all favorites in high school. Glenn Donaldson and I went to high school together and he was real hip to that stuff, he tipped me off to a lot of good music and we went to a lot of shows back then. I was big on the Minneapolis stuff too, the Replacements and all that. Later we found the Fall and the Birthday Party. That was the era, man.

Do you see noise as an musical instrument, a mood, or a system?

I guess we have to sort of define what noise is because one man’s noise is another man’s butter or something like that. I think what you’re getting at is sort of noise as opposed to noisy: “Metal Machine Music” or maybe how people tend to define Merzbow, or even say Keiji Haino’s hurdy gurdy discs—a sort of general electric cacophony. And that stuff’s great. I’m not so sure I use much of it as a general component of my own music though…although I suppose it’s in some of the Ulaan Khol stuff and sprinkled here and there in the others, but I generally don’t think of my music in that way. I really just see it as just another sound, the same as an A minor chord. Even when it’s something totally un-musical it still has to relate to the tonal center of the song, it still relates to it either in sympathy or in dissonance, depending on what you want. So it’s not really anything but another color on the palate that I might use. I like fuzz pedals and I like distortion and enjoy how different instruments and sounds get mixed up in that swamp. It’s just another sound and, like the A minor chord, these things give way to a sort of mood.

I just see sound and notes and chords, all of it, as degrees of dissonance and consonance. It’s a gray area really, and I’ll use a recording of a car engine sent through a fuzz pedal if that’s what works or I’ll play the prettiest chord I can muster on a piano if that’s what I need. But I don’t see noise as any more or less than that. I’m just referring to my own way of approaching it, of course. I’m sure there are artists that might view noise as a whole system to work within. I mentioned Merzbow, he’s like the archetypal noise artist, maybe he sees his own music in this way. I’m probably mis-attributing this to him, but I thought I read something where he said as a kid the only parts of rock songs he liked were the big endings, the big crescendos at the end where all the instruments tend to let go and collide together. The noisy parts, which I admit are often the best part. He just wanted to take that one moment and stretch it out. That’s a beautiful thought.

Do you think of yourself more as a composer than a song writer?

Oh, definitely just a song writer, or even more lowly, just a rock musician. Ouch, the lowest of the low. But really, “composer” just seems to imply that I know what I’m doing. It’s a bit pretentious as well. Even though we can bandy all these different influences and artists about, just because I like Morton Feldman and Arvo Part, and people like Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, and traditional folk music from Eastern Europe, and all of these different things that have been very influential and have definitely changed the way I make music, I still see whatever I do within the frame of rock music. It’s how I first became attracted to music and it’s always the context from which I view what I do.

How did you get involved with the Jewelled Antler Collective?

I moved away from San Francisco about 1999 or 2000 and the Jewelled Antler stuff didn’t really get moving until a little after that so my take on it all is sort of from a distance. Obviously, I am in Thuja and so on, but when I think of Jewelled Antler I think of Glenn and Loren and their label and all the great music they released—an awful lot of stuff in a short period of time, very prolific time for them. To me, it was my friends’ cool label. I wanted to be a part of it. They put out my solo record “Kohl” and the Hala Strana record “Fielding”, two of my best records really and we did awesome packaging with it. Really good times, I was so proud of those releases, and still am. I guess Jewelled Antler grew into sort of a whole community, and they were forming all these different bands and a whole aesthetic came from that. It formed an umbrella to put all these groups together. But to me, it was always just a way to do stuff with my friends. I can’t even keep track of all the groups they formed. And then of course it sort of blossomed and collaborations were done between other musicians from all over the place. It was a good moment in time and luckily, a lot of it was put on tape and released.

It's amazing that rock has become a palette for an incredible diversity of sound. What do you think it is about the genre that makes it so open to so much experimentation?

Interesting question. I don’t really know, but I’ll hazard a guess and say it might have something to do with the fact that rock music is the first genre, or at least one of the first genres, where electricity and volume were crucial to its definition. I mean, you have jazz and blues and folk and all that came up from and out of an acoustic situation and tradition and then maybe it went a little electric much later in the genre’s life. But rock, possibly by its own definition, or one of its definitions, is electric -- and rude, and loud. It’s electric, it’s based on electricity. And an electric guitar doesn’t, or at times, doesn’t sound like an acoustic guitar at all, it’s something else entirely. And once it’s electric, it can be tweaked and changed and morphed into different things really easily. It can accommodate outside influence really well. Of course, we now have electronic music and hip hop and so forth that are almost wholly electric based, but those genres also have a huge diversity of sound and have swallowed up other influences too, maybe rivaling rock music. I think a large part is electricity. There’s only so much you can do with an acoustic instrument to alter its sound, but an electric guitar -- shit, it’s all over the place.

Are there particular outdoor places that are important inspirations for you?

I certainly enjoy the deserts down here in Southern California and love the redwood forests of Northern California, in fact I’m trying to get up to Big Sur soon. But I’ve always sort of been more of a city person. I don’t know how much any of that has to do with the music I make. I mean, it must, these places stir something in you and so I guess it finds its way in. But I’ve never recorded music out in the woods, or in a cave or wherever. Some of the Jewelled Antler groups have done that, I think the Blithe Sons and some others, but I wasn’t in those groups. Thuja has done some performances and recordings outdoors but it has usually been in Rob’s backyard greenhouse, at least when I was around. And Thuja also recorded just as often in Rob’s garage and his old warehouse space. I’ve done field recordings for the Hala Strana stuff, but my field recordings, and this will tell you something, were done by walking around the city recording train stations, church bells, footsteps on a brick path, street corners, crowds, cars, etc… not out recording in an open field or by the shore. I’m not belittling that method, not at all, it just isn’t for me. I’m more comfortable recording my own music in studios or in houses, my own house usually. I’d like to take some mics and a tape machine out to somewhere more acoustically interesting, but by this I mean something more like a church or a house with large rooms and wood floors instead of my dusty cement bunker I call a studio.

Who are you listening to now that you think more people should know about?

Oh man, it’s a bit of a dry spell, so I don’t have any really great secrets. I just bought both the new Blues Control lp and “Box of Birch” by A Broken Consort and I’ve been enjoying both of those. I really loved the Blackout Beach record “Skin of Evil” that came out earlier this year. I don’t know why that didn’t get more attention, I thought that was a really great piece of work. I bought the Obits record which I liked, saw them play recently too. I just saw that Scott Walker documentary (30 Century Man) and I thought that was pretty cool. Boy, it seems like he struggles a lot to get that music out of him. I find that to be some really inspiring stuff. I picked up some La Dusseldorf reissues recently. Nice to hear those. I’ve also been re-assessing Jethro Tull [!] so take this for what you will.

Can you tell me a little bit about future projects, either music or art?

There’s some stuff in the pipeline waiting to be released: there’s a solo LP called Cities that will actually be out in a couple of weeks and I’m excited about that. There’s a second LP that I did with Gareth Davis that should be coming out later in the year. The last part of the Ceremony series for Ulaan Khol has been done for some time, we’re just getting the art and packaging together so hopefully that will be out toward the end of the year as well. It’s been a busy year. And I have a couple ideas floating around for what I want to do next, so we’ll see.