“How does one put the spiritual significance of music on paper? Music transcends all languages and barriers and is the most beautiful communicative skill one can have. Music makes us all experience different emotions or the Navarasa as we call it. Different types of music, whether it is vocal or instrumental, Eastern or Western, Classical or Pop or folk from any part of the world can all be spiritual if it has the power to stir the soul of a person and transcend time for the moment.”
Those are the words of Ravi Shankar – and while truer words have never been spoken, we feel compelled to point out that Mr. Shankar, to the best of our knowledge, never engaged in the type of ritual abuse of fuzz-boxes that has long been our primarily mode of time transcendence.
Not that he needs to. There seem to be plenty of bands willing to travel time, at a cruising speed somewhere near interstellar overdrive.
Case in point: Spanish Moss, a group of astral travelers hailing from the visionary state who appropriately and undoubtedly went green during the recording of their debut release, “KELP.” Then again, the color of the day may not be green, or even algae-brown, but perhaps orange – that being the hue of the picture sleeve that protects this massively satisfying record, and the hue of the amplifiers that drove directly into the over-driven, deafening, divinely-demonic rock and/or roll music contained therein.
All the pieces come together in the Spanish Moss fuzz puzzle, even the ones that we didn’t expect – as complete as their amplifier assault is (and make no mistake – it is), the band finds ways to be memorable within their dedication to blowing minds. As the comet-tail of the seven-minute incantation “Witch Rings” insists, over and over, “always remember.” We surely will, as Spanish Moss have dropped one trip that’s unforgettable.
We’ve no chance of forgetting Electric Flower, fellow time travelers in the freaky, fuzzy universe – not since our introduction to the band’s monstrous, memorable and more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts sound on their debut EP, and certainly not since we received word from friends in California who, upon seeing the two-piece tear a hole in the fabric of time and space live, reported that drummer Josh Garza is involved in an abusive relationship with a bass drum large enough to house the UC Berkeley freshman class. It’s details like that one fails to forget.
Yet we’re guilty of failing to realize just how blown away we would be by the follow-up, the reasonably Zep-esquely titled, “EP II.” It’s an appropriate reference, not merely for the way that guitarist Imaad Wasif uses his six-strings and (we’re assuming) seventy-seven fingers to conjure sounds so creepy and crafty that the great magus himself would give a ceremonial ring of a white bell-bottom out of respect, or for the Bonham-by-way-of-the-astral-belt bashing that Garza offers in compliment.
Rather, it’s the group’s stated dedication to the occult deception of recording that delivers us to the zoso-zone when listening to “EP II” – a calculated balance between the invisible vibrations of sound and the earth-bound blossoms that surround. Taken together, it’s a sound that astounds – Electric Flower power. And the brilliant Scott Walker cover doesn’t hurt things a bit, either.
Clear across the country, in the land where a King once balanced upon the earth, that same phenomena of two becoming one – and the one becoming an awesome sound – that Electric Flower represent is represented by our old friends, Ttotals. Long-time readers of the Apes (both of them) may recall the chat we had with the band last year after receiving custody of their “Drum Is Our Parent” release.
The recent pleasure of seeing the band perform live confirmed our total Ttotal admiration. And just as much, it’s the band’s recently released 10″ EP – “Silver On Black” – that has been in constant revolution at the Revolt of the Apes headquarters. This is the outer blues.
They don’t make bands like Black Science anymore, that’s for sure.
Which is more than a cheap way of describing the odd, somehow familiar-future-fueled space rock made by these Pacific Northwest mutants. Quite literally, Black Science is no more.
Somewhere between out introduction to the band, via “Cosmodemonic & Beyond,” a bizarrely singular moon-and-mind-rocking LP, and their latest – and seemingly last – blast, “An Echo Through the Eyes of Forever,” Black Science decided to put their beakers down and let the vacuum-tubes of their alien amplifiers cool down.
Some might think of this as a shame. Some might wish more weird-beard, 100%-geeked out lunar orbits from Black Science, and we have sympathy for this view. Space-lord knows, we’ve found ourselves wishing the echo of “An Echo” would continue to echo – it’s a steel-shined spin through the outer, gurgling reaches of rock and roll mythology, with a gravitational pull located equidistant between the yet-to-be-defined dark matter and the Earth-bound inner-sky-gazing of, say, being guided by voices.
Then we thought of the album’s final, detonating launch code, “Our Sentence Is Up.” Was it our old friend, planned obsolescence, all along?
The information-overload that defines Black Science’s recorded output will continue to inform – those attracted to the unpacking and decoding of the DNA running through the great music that has so enhanced our lives through all these years will find much to love about Black Science. Perhaps most intriguing, Black Science unpacks and decodes it all for you (as evidenced by the length of our chat below) – and the end result is only the deepened mystery of the cosmic, of the music of the spheres, of the boobly-woobly synths and sick, loud guitars.
Keep your satellite of love tuned in to future transmissions from Black Science’s John Gillanders, who was kind enough to respond – beautifully, at great length – to our ridiculous questions below. Enjoy.
What does the term “occult” mean to you? What does the concept of magic mean to you? How do these definitions manifest themselves in your life? How have your own definitions of these words evolved over time? Despite the ways in which you might gauge your own understanding and interaction, what still remains misunderstood, confounding or frustrating to you with regard to magick?
Well, you could define occult in a lot of different ways, and people do. The term occult stems from the word occluded, so in a pinch it can be summed up as the study of things that are hidden, and when you think about it, for any human, that’s the majority of the universe. People are thinking around you all the time and you can’t pick up on any of these thoughts, but you’d be hard pressed to get anyone to argue that it’s not happening. Astronomers tell us that something like 98% of the universe is invisible to us and is comprised of what they refer to as dark matter and dark energy. I find the methodology on that fairly sketchy, but it’s fascinating none the less.
At the heart of it though, I’d say a prototypical magickal practice would involve two basic components. One, making contact with extra-dimensional forms of intelligence, which I’ve found I can do through things like sex magick and astral projection. A lot of occultists just completely gloss over that because they don’t want to sound like they’re nuts, but that’s the most important aspect. Crowley was channeling entire books. Using sigil magick techniques largely credited to Austin Osman Spare, I can put myself in light sex and weed trance and have what classic occultists would refer to as a “conversation with my holy guardian.” It’s right there in the literature and it was happening for quite a while before my rational mind would accept it. So yeah, in a way that’s how my practice has evolved over the years. I’ve gone from being in complete disbelief to being more and more comfortable with the constant high strangeness. I listen more now. Whatever the fuck I’m communicating with, beings from the Sirius star system, grey aliens or what have you, they know things about the world I exist in that I decidedly don’t. They’ve demonstrated this to me over and over and over and over again. They’ve told me they exist “outside of time,” and that they’re me somehow. Certainly a level of precognition going on. I have a lot of psychic dreams.
Just saying things like that makes you sound like you’re on the complete lunatic fringe to most of humanity, but it’s something I taught myself how to do by reading books and was recommended to me by other people, so you know, I’m not sure how that can honestly be considered crazy by any conventional definition. There was a period when I first started doing this where these, what I call hypnagogic light entities, were installing updates in my brain when I woke up in the middle of the night. Information moving faster than I could even come close to processing. This went on regularly in the hypnagogic state (between dreams and sleep) for roughly six months. Then one night these entities were proud of themselves, as if they’d constructed something, a link. Telepathic communications software. I didn’t honestly get it, but soon thereafter I started chatting with them. It took me another several years to truly believe that it was happening.
The other primary component that would go into a basic magickal practice would be casting spells, for lack of better terminology – projecting sigils as one might call it. This involves trying to change the universe in accordance with your will. Basically it’s the concept that you can influence outer reality with inner gestures. Again, completely crazy things to think about from a Western perspective, but if you’re looking at it from the point that we’re all tied together inwardly and that matter is comprised of consciousness, it makes perfect sense. I’ve done a lot of this, and in all honesty, it’s very difficult to judge the results in any kind of scientific manner. Maybe in another ten years. I can say that your life becomes an increasing amount of impossible synchronicities and that you begin to expect them. You start to realize that this whole thing’s basically a sort of dream. Again, incredibly hard to accept for someone with a more materialist upbringing. I mean, I’m a guy from Ohio who grew up listening to rock music, drinking beer, and playing basketball. That’d be the other thing – I didn’t choose magick, it chose me. Long story that involves spirits awakening me from a sort of hypnotic trance and telling me to pursue magick. Sounds odd, but again, nothing uncommon at all. I’m not the first to report this type of summoning and I won’t be the last.
Those two components however would be considered your low magick. Your high magick would be the pursuit of whatever it is you’re passionate about in the world, or maybe just figuring out what that is in the first place. The low magick should be fueling the high magick.
As for things that are frustrating, I’d go with the church slandering the occult to the point that everyone thinks it’s Satan worship. There’s a reason the term witch hunt exists. I look at a lot of metal bands and think … you have noooooooooooo idea what you’re talking about, at all. Summoning your “holy guardian angel.” Not super dark or evil, but rather Jesus-y in all actuality. Sorry, metal dudes.
Where do you think your interest in and attraction to what we might broadly term as “the esoteric” stems from? Have you always felt more or less “out-of-step” with the world around you? Can you recall your earliest memory of having the thought that there is something more to our surroundings, power in the unseen?
Psychedelic drugs. That’s where it started. I have an abnormally strong reaction to things like LSD and mushrooms. I see what I jokingly refer to as “transdimensional demon lords” everywhere. My entire micro-verse is bombarded with what I can best describe as rapidly mutating transcendent art. I turn into living, breathing art which moves and changes faster than I can possibly process, and there always seems to be an interaction or communication going on. Like I’m staring into the face of a higher intelligence and it’s imparting information into me on a subconscious and sometimes direct level. The best way I could communicate what this is like visually to someone is by showing them this painting by Luke Brown called “Baphomet.”
I see shit like that. Everywhere. I’ve also had the typical “thousand eyed god within” visions that you see in the works of people like Alex Grey, before I ever saw those paintings. I did mushrooms once when I was 18 and didn’t have the ability to perceive the world in the same way ever again. There’s just no accounting for that kind of thing. If you saw it for two minutes you’d be contemplating radical ontology as well. Very abnormal reaction, but then, you read about people doing DMT, which I’ve never actually gotten ahold of, and it’s like, well, a lot of people see similar anomalies on that. In a way smoking pot for me is like taking acid. When I do that and meditate, or ganj-i-tate as I like to call it, I see incredibly intense visuals and hear music that I can typically control to a certain degree, in my head.
So yeah, psychedelic drugs randomly lead me into astral projection, as my mom had experimented with it in her youth and still had the tapes and books. I could talk about that for hours as it’s so fucking bizarre and flies completely under the radar. In a nutshell, you intentionally put yourself in a sleep paralysis state and attempt to separate your consciousness from your body.
Ten years later, I had this hypnotic awakening experience where I became a “sorcerer” or “magickian” or “mystic” or “shaman” or whatever you want to call it. Something in me snapped and I realized I had these abilities but was afraid of them and ultimately pretty much wanted them to go away so I could lead a normal life. This is where most of my misery was stemming from at that point. It’s what people in the shamanic world would refer to as “submission to a higher order of knowing.” It was instantaneous and seemingly tied to another astral encounter in my youth where I was pulled from my body into what I can best refer to as a psychic sky temple by myriad versions of me.
What can you tell us about your own personal musical evolution? What was the first music to truly capture your attention in your adolescence? How have your feelings about that music changed over the years? What were some of your earliest musical obsessions? How do you think your own sense of musical appreciation has progressed over the years?
I grew up in the 90’s in suburban Youngstown, Ohio, pre-internet, but my mom lived in Seattle so I spent my summers here. There was a bit of an awareness of the underground because of that, but not much. I was fortunate to grow up during a time where artier shit was being pushed by the mainstream more, so that helped. As I moved to cities like Columbus, Ohio, and later Seattle, in young adulthood I realized how vast the musical sphere truly is. I listen to so much music these days it’s preposterous because I write music reviews and have people sending me shit, and I’m completely addicted to buying music online. I actually spend a lot of money on downloading music despite the fact that people give me music for free, and I browse the library and grab random stuff I’ve maybe kind of heard about there as well. I have to constantly listen to new stuff. It’s a compulsion.
The first psychedelic music I got into was like Monster Magnet, Sonic Youth, Kyuss, old Verve albums, Meat Beat Manifesto, and The Future Sound of London. The first time I ever ate acid (I’d done mushrooms) my friend kept playing Dopes to Infinity on repeat. I mention that because despite listening to so much shit over the years I think you can fairly easily hear all of those influences in Black Science. In a way I think what I was trying to do was take everything that I think sounds cool when I’m high and cram it into one band. Stoner metal, shoegaze, noise rock, and weird electronic stuff.
Truthfully, we were always just trying to be a 2012 version of Pink Floyd. Definitely the band everyone in that project could agree on more than anything else. Take a simple song, insert jam here, repeat. What we didn’t realize is that the more we jammed the more structured it got which isn’t what we were planning but what we just found ourselves doing intuitively.
Oh, and I used to yell in an incredibly angry neo-spiritual rant metal band called The Nemesis Theory before I started Black Science. Completely different vibe as I didn’t write any of the music in the project. Worth a listen though and you can grab those albums for free at www.dmioccult.bandcamp.com. It’s funny, the occupy movement came around and I was suddenly like, maybe we were onto something with that.
At what point did your interest in the occult and your interest in music intersect? How would you describe your initial attempts are bringing the two realms together? Do you feel that music holds a special place in the hearts of those seeking magical power? What is it about music that makes you feel powerful? What is it about magic that makes you feel powerful?
Well, oddly, before I started actually directly dabbling in magick, I did in fact attempt a rudimentary experiment which was partially inspired by an article I read about William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. I made an album comprised entirely from samples of local metal bands and I honestly had no idea what the intent was. They were bands The Nemesis Theory had played with or liked. I guess I was trying to harness the psionic energy in the local metal scene or something. Odd idea, and one of the most brutal records I’ve ever made, as it’s you know, remixes of metal bands. Anywho, I called it Sorcery and the first night I played the final mix, during the first song, the volume on my stereo jumped to full, scaring the living shit out of me. I went over and turned it down but like five minutes later it happened again. If you think I was startled the first time, this time I was perfectly terrified. It was so sudden and loud, and also, you know, shouldn’t have been happening.
It was during this period that I started to conceptualize what I was doing as a musician more precisely. I’d been making sampler driven psychedelic music for years. I started when I was roughly 19. It’s a project I eventually called Thanaton (after the Paul Laffoley painting), but I almost never play shows doing that stuff although I’m thinking about maybe doing some in the near future. It’s music I make primarily just to fuck with my own head. Eventually I realized that what I’m doing is a summoning ritual of sorts. It’s an offering to the aforementioned transdimensional demon lords – I’m trying to draw them into my world. Works when you’re high, too, but mainly for when you’re tripping.
I actually did an experiment with this. I gave myself a low dose of psilocybin intentionally so I could kind of gauge whether or not it was the drugs or the music that was spurring the visions. Sure enough, I wasn’t getting any visionary stuff but when I put the music on, for the album’s duration I had my prototypical psychic invasion thing happen. A swirling pit of infinity even opened up on my floor on cue. Then when the album was done, the visions stopped and I went right back to normal low dose perma-grin territory.
So yeah, that’s the intention to what I do. It’s a type of auditory spiritual technology designed to put the user into contact with whatever the fuck otherworldly forces I’m in contact with. It works on me and that’s the point. Does it work on others? I have no idea – give it a whirl. Me suggesting this potentiality might be the most important part of the whole equation. Research into psychedelic drugs has been fairly impossible to get done although it’s starting to happen again. Obviously things like hyper-maximalism, delay pedals, drone, reverb, echo, etc., sound cool when you’re high or tripping, but you can’t get research done to prove something like that at this point. It’s an obvious fact. Why do you think psych bands have been doing it for so long now? What I’m trying to do is create a tear into another reality via your subjective perception of time. Psychedelics might be referred to as a time decelerator to a certain extent. I’m creating a wormhole distortion by which “they” can get in.
As far as magick making me feel powerful, well, as much as I have psychic abilities that most other people don’t at this point in human history, I’m still honestly trying to figure out what to do with them. It’s an ongoing process. Moreover, it really makes me feel like I know absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. Very humbling. Becoming acceptant and comfortable with the idea that you don’t know dick and you never truly will as a human is the key. Ego destruction. You’ve got to embrace the mystery. It’s all pretty hilarious if you look at it right.
How would you summarize the approach of Black Science over the years? Of which things that you accomplished as a band are you most proud? In which areas do you feel the band still had fertile soil to till? What was the most surprisingly gratifying experience you had with Black Science?
Well, what’s funny is that when the band first started out, I kind of thought it’d be more about my songwriting, which you can hear on our first lo-fi album. We weren’t even honestly a band at that point, just some guys recording and we needed another member at least. We realized pretty quickly that the band should probably be far more about my guitar playing rather than my songs.
I think we could have done more, but it had run its course. My brother Adam (guitar player/vocalist) is moving to Edmonton with his girlfriend and the drummer is having a kid. Kind of both at the same time. At some point, I’d say I’ll probably have a new band that sounds kind of like Black Science and plays some of that material. I might call it Black Science – haven’t honestly decided.
As for a surprisingly gratifying experience, I wanted to play a show in Portland last summer and I asked my friend Vivian from Redefine to help me book something. It ended up being one of the coolest shows I’ve ever played, or have ever been to for that matter. It had performance art dancers, psych bands and a general occult theme, based on her knowledge of my interest in mysticism. Midday Veil, Swahili, Billions and Billions, and Golden Retriever played, so, you know, radtastic. So yeah, Emily (from Midday Veil) and Vivian are going to be doing two of those a year now apparently, and the fact that I unintentionally inspired that kind of blows my mind.
What are your thoughts on the final Black Science album, “An Echo Through the Eyes of Forever”? What did you hope to accomplish with this album, and how does the final, released piece of art differ (either positively or negatively) from your original intention? What can you tell us about the song “Anywhere”? What do you mean to communicate with the words, “Same vision/Same faces/Same programs/Same motivations”?
I think it turned out phenomenal, but more than anything, I just feel a sense of progress. That’s the fourth full-on studio album I’ve made. I’ve made tons of lower-fi electronic stuff, but that’s fairly easy to record. So, the second Nemesis Theory record was better than the first in my mind, and the first Black Science studio album (Cosmodemonic & Beyond) was better than that by a long shot, and then Echo is better than that, so there’s definitely a sense of progress there in my mind, which is important. Same deal with the art. I’ve been getting better on the visual end as well. I did all three Black Science layouts and again, definitely a sense of progress.
The song “Anywhere” is actually the only song in that band that was initially written by another member, my brother Adam. He demoed the chord progression, concept and everything. Of course, I completely re-wrote the lyrics and added a bunch of shit to the arrangement, but it was his baby. It’s actually about the corporate takeover of America and how a lot of times, if you go anywhere outside the city, the towns look fucking identical due to exact same chain stores, strip malls and what not.
That was Adam’s idea, but of course I added a mind control aspect to the whole thing and joke that it’s about the Illuminati – the desire for hollow materialistic pursuits and militarism implanted into the minds of America through their televisions. It’s pretty tongue in cheek as well. I had a hard time singing the line: “I can’t take all the psychic mind rape” with a straight face.
Despite the eye-rolling that may occur, what can you tell us about your interest in comic books? Which comic book had had the most enduring influence on your life, what is that influence and why do you believe it has made a lasting impact on your life? What do you think is the most harmful preconceived notion that non-initiates carry regarding comic books?
Well, that’s particularly pertinent because the most well know occultists of our time, and in my mind the two most interesting spiritual philosophers, are Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, who are both comic book writers by trade, not spiritual philosophers. Definitely something odd about that, but also not surprising, because in the comic universe things like alternate dimensions and psychic powers are a part of the whole cosmology. So, I imagine growing up geeking out on that stuff probably hypnotizes you slightly to be more acceptant of the possibilities.
An interview in Arthur magazine with Grant Morrison is what got my interest peaked and starting to read about the occult in the first place. Kind of embarrassing in retrospect but at the time I had no idea who he was. Two years later I was a practicing occultist after the whole hypnotic awakening thing. Even more strange, it was right around that period where I realized that the library stocks tons of graphic novels, so I got waaaay into that again for a while, catching up on a bunch of stuff I’d missed. I’d turned my back on comics as a young adult mainly because they’re expensive, but for free at the library, why not?
As far as biggest influences, that’d definitely be The Invisibles by the aforementioned Mr. Morrison. That work was intended as what he referred to as a hyper-sigil designed to influence and raise the consciousness of the reader and it’s fictional but largely based on his experiences with the occult. Kind of what I was talking about earlier with the music, similar concept, art as spiritual technology. I have a freakishly good memory, so I rarely re-read things, but I’ve read that twice and will probably read again, because there’s so much going on. So many layers.
As a matter of fact, Black Science is named after a storyline in that, so we were trying to directly capitalize on the energy of the sigil that Grant ignited (well, truthfully, Adam just liked that name better than the others I’d written down but we ran with it). I’d say about a month after I decided I’d name the final track on the album “Our Sentence is Up” – which is the final declaration in The Invisibles – we learned my brother was moving and the drummer, Gael, was having a kid. So is the nature of magick.
Even more eerie is that it plays on the whole 2012 thing, which I’ll talk about here because I was told to mention it while in a trance state last night, which is hilarious because I don’t honestly understand what I’m talking about here much at all. Basically, what my cosmic over-soul wants me to think is that we’re about to enter a new era in human history, which will be the third world – Aeon of Horus, the conquering child, as Crowley called it, but that’s just one way of framing things. So, if you’re familiar with all the ancient architecture anomalies, it seems apparent that there was another civilization which predated ours, based on feminine energy and shamanism. And now there’s this Aeon based on materialism and misogyny, which is now nearing its end. 2012 specifically has never been mentioned, so I have no idea how long this process will take, but we’re destined to evolve into a hybrid of the two. I’ve been told flat out that consumerism is going to fail completely, which we’re already seeing.
With that being said, I think the biggest misconception a lot of people have involving comics would be that because a lot are about super heroes, they’re not serious art and just for kids. What they’re missing is that since a lot of the super hero titles pay, they attract some incredibly talented writers. Oh, Christ, and have long been a bastion for psychedelic concepts, not to mention on the forefront of censorship battles back in the day.
Despite the eye-rolling that may occur, what can you tell us about your interest in psychedelic substances – substances like “drugs”? Which psychedelic substance had had the most enduring influence on your life, what is that influence and why do you believe it has made a lasting impact on your life? What do you think is the most harmful preconceived notion that non-initiates carry regarding psychedelic substances?
I certainly touched on that earlier, but I think it’s of incredible import. My favorite psychedelic drug is weed. What, say, Robert Anton Wilson was trying to tell us in books like Cosmic Trigger and Sex, Drugs and Magick is that at the heart of all these occult conspiracies, what almost never comes up and is kind of the elephant in the room is the idea that through weed-induced sex magick you can communicate with forms of intelligence hitherto unknown. I’m honestly just continuing his work, which he in fact abandoned because he couldn’t deal with it. So yeah, I think if marijuana is legalized, which seems imminent, there’s a lot greater transformative potentiality there than anyone I’ve ever talked to is recognizing. It possesses incredible potential in helping to re-program your brain, which we’ve barely explored at this point.
People largely gloss over the fact that Timothy Leary was obsessed with Crowley and even explored this very avenue of channeling via his Starseed transmissions. Most people of this era are so wedded to the potentiality and infallibility of science, they fully ignore the fact that’s it’s just as corrupt as the government, business, or anything else in our culture. Take psychiatry. It’s fairly obvious that psychedelic drugs have the most potential of anything to actually help people, but that research has been basically impossible. And so we get mind-control, numbing drugs like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors which are total bullshit for people who aren’t severely depressed. Basically, take pills rather than addressing your psychological issues. Run away from your problems rather than confronting them. Heinous.
I have a degree in psychology and I realized pretty quickly that you can’t study this stuff inside mainstream academic institutions. It’s fucking impossible, which is why I went rogue. Ask anyone that’s tried to study even, say, psi-phenomenon in general. If you get results, no one will even look at them or care, and they will slander the fuck out of you for having the gall to even bother based on philosophical underpinnings alone. The problem is the powers that be have no idea how to make money off of it. It challenges everything. Look at the studies into remote viewing. As far as I can tell, they’ve proven the reality of psychic phenomenon, but seemingly no one cares at all. The idea that I’d ever get a study funded based on sigil magick is a complete joke. No fucking way. If I wanted to study, say, the efficacy of prayer and pursued that, checks would be falling into my lap. Einstein said, “imagination is more important that knowledge,” and more than anything, psychedelic drugs have the ability to expand our imaginations and save us from the materialist dead-end we’ve created. I like a lot of the materialist dead-end stuff, though. We’ve made some great records.
Jeffrey J. Kripal writes the following:
“Usually, the human imagination is a producer of fantasies, a dreamer, a daydreamer. But sometimes, sometimes, it is infused or ‘empowered’ by weird metaphysical energies. In these moments of influx, the human imagination is no longer a projector but a kind of ‘translator’ or ‘mediator’ of Mind, which communicates, which probably can only communicate, to the social ego through symbol and myth. Here the fantasy is also the fact. The trick is the truth.”
Your thoughts?
If someone were to listen to me talk about the occult and say, “That’s crazy!,” I’d say: yes. If they said, “Isn’t that just your imagination?,” I’d say: exactly. We’ve never solved the mysteries presented to us by things like schizophrenia, and I’d be the first to admit that I’m kind of touching on that with what I do. I think as a mystic I’m kind of like a half sane\half schizo hybrid.
Shamanism and westernized materialism are almost like completely opposite philosophies. One tells you inner experiences are the only things that have real meaning, the other perspective tells you that they are completely meaningless. Developing a balance between the two is the next step for us a species. Dreams, visions, and such are just as much a part of my life as anything that’s happened in ordinary waking reality. I remember them just as well, and they are just as much an influence on my behavior. A westerner would read this and think: this guy is totally batshit, and a shaman would look at it and think: this guy is incredibly naïve. A materialist tells you psychedelic visions are drugs influencing chemical reactions in your brain making you hallucinate, a shaman tells you you’re talking to gods. From a more shamanic perspective: thought does not arise from matter, matter is comprised from thought. That’s why magick works. It’s all a dream and you can tweak the parameters if you’re clever enough.
What’s next for John Gillanders?
I have a new project I’m working on called Chapel Supremesus with Dean Swanson who’s in a great band called Hidden Number and who recorded the two Black Science records. It’s incredibly anti-structural stuff and I think we’re going to intentionally skewer the dark occult mythos that’s so trendy these days. Also, I’m going to start working on more video, which is new for me. I’ve been doing graphic design for a while so it seems like a natural progression. Also, I might be starting another band with the drummer from The Nemesis Theory. It’s a ways off.
Other than that, I have a book about my experiences with the occult, The Galactic Dialogue, which should be out in fall. It’s my second and the first one I’m actually quite proud of, mainly because it’s straight up non-fiction which is something I was running from. If you think this interview was intriguing, you’ll freaking love it. It’s a non-fiction book which is weirder than any piece of fiction you’ll ever read and all entirely true. Well, as much as memory can be considered true. Also, when that comes out I want to do some spoken word, which is something I’ve wanted to do forever but have never been able to find the proper venue for. Where do you give occult lectures exactly outside of the podcast world? I have no idea but I’m determined to figure it out. Stay tuned true believers.
The world being what it is, we tend to spend little time discussing the measurable, geographic divides that separate us, focusing rather less on the quantifiable differences, and more on the qualitative similarities we share in our love of music. Whatever our desire for an expanded weltanschauung, we remain with the belief in our ape-mind that we’re all one, dude.
Still, the very fact that a band from South Africa can capture out attention so fully, so quickly, in the way that The Very Wickedhas, continues to fascinate us.
Not that it matters, in the abstract – we share a universal love of the kind of rock and roll that contains a slow-burn urgency, an easy, misfit’s swagger and the power to welcome us directly on to their slithering, sharp sonic wavelength from the first note, no matter where it originates from (as it surely originates from the same place, all of us being one and all). This, not coincidently, is the kind of rock and roll given by The Very Wicked among us.
Given is the appropriate word here, as The Very Wicked have made their first three songs available for download, gratis. It’s a kind gesture – or is it wickedness in disguise? Because we are now trapped in the state of anxious anticipation for what The Very Wicked come up with next – and there’s little price we wouldn’t pay to great that day sooner rather than later. “Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness …”
In our most sober moments, we would have considered ourselves lucky to name two records originating from The Republic of South Africa. We’re happy to say that our introduction to The Very Wicked coincides with that tally now being doubled. We’re equally happy to have several members of the band answer our ridiculous questions below. Enjoy.
What does the notion of “wickedness” mean to you? Do you believe that evil exists as a permanent force in our world? Do you see the world as a generally wicked place, a generally good place or something nuanced in between? What activity or belief do you feel is inappropriately thought of as wicked in your life? Would you say that “No Rest for the Wicked” was the last listenable Ozzy album?
Andre: I think people should acknowledge the wickedness/evil/darkness in the world and try to learn from it. Don’t let it overcome you, but try and benefit from it. A good friend of mine always says, ‘There is light in the darkness and there is darkness in the light.’ People who try to ignore the darkness and blindly live in the light their whole lives are pretty hard to be around, if you ask me.
It also makes me think of magic. Black magic, but magic nonetheless. I like to think that magic could/may have been a factor in peoples’ lives at some point.
I stopped listening after Sabbath. Is it worth it? I can’t imagine, to be honest …
Lucas: I heard “Changes” once long ago, and I remember thinking it was a pretty great ballad. Not sure what album that was from though. “The Osbournes” kinda made it hard for me to take Ozzy seriously. It’s sad how reality TV does that. I avoid it like the plague now.
Calvin: I think that living in SA also shapes our perception of ‘wicked’. I know evil is everywhere, but I think we are exposed to more than our fair share down here.
What band, artist or album has had the most enduring influence on you personally? How has the inspiration you’ve received from this evolved over time? Do you purposely set out to challenge yourself to take in new and possibly foreign sounds, or are you more likely to simply let music fall into yourself however and wherever it may?
Andre: We all come from different musical backgrounds, but it’s all pretty firmly rooted in artists like The Stones, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen …
I will say this: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club came to South Africa last year and that really had a heavy impact on all of us. It made it pretty clear that music was what we had to do. With this band still being very new, we are just seeing where the music takes us at this point. Everyone is still growing in their musical personalities.
We’d definitely love to explore some more ‘experimental’ sounds. I love bands like Psychic Ills, Indian Jewelry, etc. I’d love to venture in that direction … wherever that is. Haha!
Lucas: Growing up, there was a lot of Nirvana, Leonard Cohen, Radiohead, The White Stripes … I am open to letting music “fall in” however it may, but only the really worthwhile ones stick. There is a lot of bad music out there. And a lot of good. I like to think we have good taste.
Calvin: I have seen a lot of live bands, local and international when I was in the UK, but when I saw BRMC down here that really changed everything for me. It gave me a new sense of hope for music. The inspiration was always there but I wasn’t sure what to do with it – when I saw that band live, it all just made sense.
How do you think your surroundings – both the physical surroundings and perhaps the psychic surroundings, as well – in SA have impacted the musical outlook and development of The Very Wicked? What is the most beneficial thing about your location, in terms of its impact on your music? What is the most difficult?
Andre: I think the same answer goes for both questions: The SA “alternative” music scene is very young and support is less than desirable, albeit growing.
Lucas: Being part of a small, growing music scene is tough, but gratifying. It gives you room to stand on your own. The music we’re into is quite a small niche here, which strengthens our own personal attachment to it.
Andre: There are definitely some great acts around at the moment though. It’s an exciting time.
What can you tell us about the origin of The Very Wicked? Had the members had experience playing in other projects with each other in the past, and if so, how has this experience been different so far? What has been most unexpectedly pleasing about your time in The Very Wicked?
Andre: Myself and Lucas have been playing together since we were in high school, and were in The Pretty Blue Guns for about 4 years. PBG did pretty well on the local scene, actually. We had some number 1’s on local radio and video stations.
Calvin and Dirk have also played in bands in the past and Dom studies film, so she’s pretty comfortable with performance. The Very Wicked basically formed when the other half of PBG had to spend more time furthering their studies. So the two of us (Andre and Lucas) decided we should start afresh and put together a new venture. This was around the middle of last year.
We spent a couple of months scouting people and finally found the right ones. We have been jamming together with the full band since around February this year.
Lucas: The most unexpectedly pleasing thing for me is how smoothly everything has worked so far. I have also really enjoyed watching the video material that our friend Barry de Villiers has been putting together for us, through Roundabout Films, his production company. He did four “teaser” clips for us before we released the tracks, as well as the Winter Baby video. He only finished film school last year, so it’s been great to see how he develops his own style, much like we have been doing.
Andre and I learned most of what we know about recording, touring, playing shows, shooting videos and all that stuff through the work that we put in with The Pretty Blue Guns over a decent bunch of years, and I reckon that made things easier for us to put this band together. I had a few session gigs over the past few years too, but cut down on that to focus on what is really important to me. The only other project that I am personally attached to now is an artrock (for lack of a better word) collective called Lua Union.
Andre: I think the most exciting thing has been challenging ourselves musically, because there are no set expectations or rules to follow. We make sure everyone loves playing each song before we consider all the other bullshit – is it too long, will people like/get it, wtf are we doing?? Fuck that.
You know that we fell head-over-heels in love with your three-song EP immediately upon hearing it – not only are you very wicked, but very awesome and (perhaps as a rarity) very catchy as well. What does the EP represent to you as a beginning for the band? How would you like to see the EP followed up? Was there a certain feeling or atmosphere you were hoping to capture on the EP?
Andre: Thanks man, we’re really glad you like it. We actually don’t see it as an EP, really. More just three tracks that sum up where the band was at that time. It’s very difficult to capture a mood in just three tracks, but we had no money to record more.
Lucas: I think the EP is just a short taster of what’s to come. Or is it? I don’t know really. I’m very excited to see what happens next.
Andre: There are quite a few territories explored on those three tracks. We wanted to create something that people would have difficulty putting in a “box”. They love doing that around here. I think those tracks set us up to keep doing whatever we want with our sound. The band is constantly evolving, so we’ll have to see what comes next. You’ll be the first to get the demos…
Calvin: I think the hardest part so far was having to choose which three tracks to record, out of a whole bunch. I think we got the dynamic right though. We would like to follow it up with some sort of full length in the near future and take people on the full journey that is The Very Wicked.
What can you tell us about the song, “Winter Baby (The Valley)”? Do you think of the song as one that addresses a metaphorical mother and father (“Mother, father, why won’t you help me? I’ve got no hope, no place to go”) or actual, biological parents? What does the line “Load your gun and come undone, take a breath, sink your teeth in it” express to you?
Andre: It’s about leaving the safety, security, warmth of the home you grew up in and realizing that the grass isn’t always greener. I’ve seen a couple of friends sink pretty low and basically became outcasts to their friends and family. That kinda cold rejection leads to a pretty hard persona. “Load your gun and come undone, take a breath sink your teeth in it” – basically means if you shut yourself off to emotion, good or bad, you feel untouchable. Nothing can hurt you.
What has been your most unusual inspiration for a song? Does The Very Wicked tend to write through collaboration as a group, or is it more likely that individual members will bring pieces to the table? What have you discovered within yourself that was perhaps hidden from your own sight before you became a member of the band?
Andre: At the moment, it’s usually myself or Lucas that bring an idea to the band and we work on it in the studio, exploring different ways of playing it. But I see a lot more of us all writing together in the near future.
I don’t know about the others really, but for me it’s been playing guitar a lot more. In my previous band it was pretty straight forward stuff, while here I have space to explore various sounds, tunings, guitars etc.
I also realized that I have a great love for space. I love to be able to breathe. And I think that comes across in the music.
Lucas: I think inspiration is an unusual thing, by definition. It is an abstract process, and it always seems to happen at strange times. I don’t think I have ever been able to force myself to come up with anything at will. Usually when I get an idea for a song, most of the music is already formed before I get a chance to really think about it, if that makes any sense. In terms of discovery, I have rediscovered my love of noise. I used to get my fix by banging drums as loudly as a could (in Pretty Blue Guns), so when I played guitar it would usually be acoustic, with a totally different feel. It has been great for me to start channeling that louder, more expressive side with an electric guitar.
What music have you been listening to lately? If push comes to shove, is the album “Time to Suck” by Suck the greatest album ever to come out of South Africa, or simply the great album period?
Andre: I love Psychic Ills’ whole discography. That’s been on pretty heavy rotation lately. Also a lot of the later Tom Waits albums. From Bone Machine onwards.
Lucas: I’m really enjoying The Antlers and Thee Oh Sees at the moment. As for “Time to Suck” … well, I have never heard of it before … There are some South African records that don’t suck though – this I know.
Calvin: The Growlers #nowplaying
G.K. Chesterton once said the following:
“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
Your thoughts?
Andre: I’ve seen some pretty wicked children, man…
What’s next for The Very Wicked?
Andre: We’re playing our first live show in September, so at the moment we’re getting all our ducks in a row for a little national tour down here. We’re filming a video for “Head In Heavens” soon, too. We also just want to collaborate with other like-minded thinkers/friends down here. We have our own little Psychedelic Community down here and it’s growing. We’d like to push that and bring it to people around the country.
The fact that the latest release from Last Remaining Pinnacle is entitled “Visitors” will probably never stop putting a smile on our face.
It’s not that the massive, monstrous cascade of crushing, psychotic, steel-toed stab-gaze that makes up the sonic break-up of “Visitors” – and defines the sound of Last Remaining Pinnacle, writ large – contains any particularly sunny elements. Quite the contrary – this is what they call the dark stuff (albeit the dark stuff you can kind of dance to, kinda sorta) and Last Remaining Pinnacle have a confident control within the shadowy elements.
Instead, the title “Visitors” has us reflecting on the path of the core of Last Remaining Pinnacle, one Dave Allison. Dave has been making noise for about as long as he possibly could – from the start of LRP in 1995, from his time spent scorching the earth in the 90’s hardcore heavies Façade Burned Black, from the records he puts out on his own independent label, Custom Made Music (which, in addition to Last Remaining Pinnacle’s sounds, has unleashed to the world great records from Screen Vinyl Image, Pete International Airport, Ringo Deathstarr, The Sky Drops and plenty more).
So when it comes to deep, personal, proactive involvement in the music that has enhanced our lives over all these years – he’s no visitor. He’s a presence.
As is “Visitors” as an album – certainly a presence in our headphones since the time of its release, and for some time to come. We feel incredibly fortunate to know Dave Allison and even more fortunate to share his answers to our ridiculous questions below. Enjoy.
What was the first band that made a dramatic impact on you in a very personal way? What was it about that band that captured your attention so directly? What place does that music have in your life today? What is the most recent band that you can think of as having a similar deep impact on you?
Well, I’d say the first music that made an impact on me was when my Dad and I watched “Easy Rider” when I was about five. After we watched the movie, he played the soundtrack on his reel-to-reel tape machine and “Born To Be Wild” struck a chord in me right off the bat. I also enjoyed the Hendrix and Byrds tracks from that record as well. Soon after that I was at my Uncle David’s house and he had this double compilation LP of 50’s rock n roll and I got turned on to Little Richard and Fats Domino and Chuck Berry from that. But as far as the first band that captured my attention directly … well, that would have to have been Kiss. I have an Aunt Adrienne that’s ten years older than me so when I was six in 1979, she was sixteen. One day she was playing her piano and I was sitting there listening and watching and I started looking through her sheet music and noticed the cover of the “Beth” sheet music which featured the “Destroyer” album art and I was blown away. I had never even heard their music but I immediately went and told the entire family that Kiss where my favorite band. A few months later another Aunt named Peggy told my mom that she was out shopping and was planning on buying Aunt Adrienne the new Kiss record (which was actually “Dynasty”) and wanted to know if it was o.k. if she bought a copy for me, too. Mom gave the seal of approval and soon enough I was blasting Kiss’s cover of the Stones “2,000 Man” with Ace on lead vocals. That Christmas my Dad went out and bought me the entire Kiss back catalog and once I heard “Destroyer” and “Love Gun,” I was hooked. I got my own Kiss Army membership, all the records and even a Kiss Cake for my birthday. My sister Kathryne ate the Gene Simmons tongue part of the cake, which was made of strawberry jelly, and she proceeded to puke everywhere.
Is the name “Last Remaining Pinnacle” representative of something specific to you? Pinnacle, as a word, can be used in multiple ways – from an architectural sense to a bit of military code – how do you think of it in regard to the music you create with Last Remaining Pinnacle?
Well, back in 1995 when I started making the first LRP recordings, I wanted to choose a name that represented the sounds I was making and the visuals I was getting in my head while I was making and playing back those first tapes. I thought of world wide destruction. I though of isolation and what it would be like to be the only person left after an apocalypse. I imagined if there were one last building standing after everything else had been destroyed. I also looked at the project as something I would have as a life-long means to create the feelings and thoughts I experienced and Last Remaining Pinnacle was the name that fit all these ideas perfectly.
What were your experiences playing in bands or projects prior to Last Remaining Pinnacle? What was most satisfying about those experiences? What was most troublesome? How do you think those experiences informed what you seek to do with your music today?
Well, when I was in high school, I started learning how to play bass primarily and I learned a little guitar. I had a few “neighborhood” bands that played around the area doing parties and multiple club gigs here and there. We looked up to other Norfolk alternative bands at the time like Antic Hay and Buttsteak, and metal bands like At War and O.T.T. Once we got a little older I figured out that the guys I was playing with were never going to go past playing local shows and all I really wanted to do was tour and make records but they looked at playing music as more of a casual thing to do once in a while, so I started looking for new people to play with, which resulted in a couple of short lived punk bands who appeared on some compilations in the early-mid 90’s. In 1996, Facade Burned Black formed. I was the bass player in that band, which lasted till 2005. We released a bunch of singles/EP’s, an LP and did several tours. I was also in a band called Revenge Therapy that toured the Southeast multiple times. I think that the most satisfying thing about playing in Facade Burned Black was the amount of aggression that I could unleash in that band. The live shows where always very cathartic. It was as straight forward and “brutal” as you could get. Revenge Therapy was also a lot of fun. That band was more of a traditional-style hardcore punk band and the shows where always full of energy and crowd participation. I think the troublesome part of being in a band made up of four or five guys is that there are so many different things going on that effect the band. Relationships, work, finances, musical direction, etc., etc., all cater into how the band functions and when you have all that going on it can get crazy. I really enjoy the fact that LRP is a two man band. Just makes it way easier to operate and easier to focus.
Since the time when we named Last Remaining Pinnacle a “Band of the Week” back in February of 2011, you’ve had at least one line-up change – which is fairly significant when there are only two people in the band. How did it come to have Dave Dembitsky as your co-conspirator in Last Remaining Pinnacle? What perspective does Dave bring to the band that you feel is unique to him and his creativity?
Well, Dave Dembitsky joined Last Remaining Pinnacle in June of 2011. We have been best friends for years and I think we always knew that we would play together and collaborate on writing and recording songs at some point and when he joined LRP I felt like, “O.K., now the pieces to this puzzle are complete.” He brings a very distinct method of guitar playing that I feel is very complementary to mine. Our styles really play off each other well. There’s definitely a menacing feel to the way he plays guitar that is rare to find these days. He also comes up with some of the most distinctly original riffs I’ve ever heard and he works incredibly hard in the studio, constantly evolving as an engineer. In the words of the great Reynaldo Rey, “He’s the greatest musician I’ve ever worked with.”
Your new album, “Visitors,” is really monolithic, and monstrously heavy, as we would expect – yet it still racks up a beautiful hooks-per-minute ratio. Do you have a similar sense about what you created with “Visitors”? Was there anything in particular that you wanted to accomplish with this album? Were there any albums that you thought of as totems for the sound and feel that you wanted to achieve?
Well, I think the songs on “Visitors” really flow together in a very cohesive way and it all came very naturally. Dave and I didn’t sit down and say, “We need to write this kind of record,” or, “We need this kind of song to go after this song for the record to work” – it all just came out of us which is how I’ve always worked. I think when you approach music as a calculated or “forced” type of thing then that’s when you start to go wrong. As far as what we wanted to accomplish with the album, I think we wanted to make a record that was as straight forward and honest as possible. All of the things I’m singing about are things that have affected my life in a major way. I needed to get those thoughts and feelings out and making the record really served as a serious form of therapy for myself and I think Dave as well. As for other records, Cream’s “Disraeli Gears” was certainly an album that influenced “Visitors” in a major way. We we’re both listening to it a lot when we where recording and not to even put ourselves in the same league of musicianship as Cream but I think some of the tracks have a similar vibe. There’s such an organic feel to that record and that’s the feeling we wanted to get across while making ours.
We couldn’t help but notice that the album was mastered by our old friend, Jarrett Pritchard, legendary death metal guitar guru and sound magician extraordinaire. What were Jarrett’s impressions of what you created on “Visitors”? What did Jarrett bring to the album’s sound, in your mind?
Jarrett and I go all the way back to fifth grade. He’s the first person I ever played music with. At the age of ten we performed Motley Crue’s “Shout At The Devil” and “Looks That Kill” in front of nun’s at the Catholic elementary school we attended together. I don’t think there are many people who can lay claim to something like that as their first public performance. I think Jarrett was able to enhance some of the sounds we wanted created with the record. So many bands are looking for their albums to be pushed so far into the red to make things “loud” that they loose the dynamics of the songs and overall presence of the record. Jarrett really helped cement those ideas and make the feel of them even better.
Aside from working diligently on the music of Last Remaining Pinnacle, you’ve also got your hands full with one of our favorite record labels, Custom Made Music. What is the most fulfilling thing about running a label? What is the most frustrating? In your view, what record label represents the “pinnacle” of what you would like to accomplish with Custom Made Music?
I think the most fulfilling thing about running the label is discovering music I really enjoy and then getting it out to people that also enjoy it. That’s why I started the label. I have always been in love with the networking world of music and sharing music with others. The frustrating side of things are the obstacles that you run into during the day to day grind of running a business but I always push to overcome those things and move forward. As far as the “pinnacle” of labels in my world, I’d have to say I have always been inspired by the Factory Records mindset of things. I have never wanted to “own” a band’s music. The way I look at it is, first off, the band own the music because it is their music. I enjoy this music and like to help get the music out to others that may also enjoy it. That seemed to be Factory’s way of looking at things and they have always been my favorite label.
What music have you been listening to lately? If push comes to shove, what is your favorite Velvet Underground album of all time and why? Please show your work.
I have been listening to a lot of blues recently. Mose Allison, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Johnny Winter … I’ve also been rediscovering older bands that I love like Turkish Delight who where based in the Boston area in the mid 90’s and also Hose. Got. Cable. from your town of Richmond, who might be my favorite Virginia band ever. As far as newer music goes I’ve become a big fan of New Speedway out of Philly in recent months plus other bands like Ttotals from Nashville, and Modern Man from South Carolina. As far as my favorite Velvet’s record, I go with “The Velvet Underground and Nico” due to the fact that it contains the tracks “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “Venus And Furs,” which are two very influential tracks to me. I love the guitar sounds and the minimal drums and percussion and the trance-like feelings that those two songs bring with them.
The Muslim poet Rumi – who (and a lot of people don’t know this) was also an original member of Joy Division – wrote the following:
“This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor … welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice – meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”
Your thoughts?
For one, I find that a truly beautiful statement. All kinds of people or “Visitors” come through life everyday and we must take the great things with the bad things about what our life and people bring. Take the bad things that come in life, harness them and turn it into something positive.
What’s next for Last Remaining Pinnacle?
We are playing as many shows as possible right now. Pushing “Visitors” and getting the record out to as many people as we can. We are working on new songs in between shows as well. There will be some videos for some songs off “Visitors” debuting in the coming weeks. The long term plan is to be on the road more and more. The more we play the better we get and that’s what we like to do. At some point we will book a two month US tour where we hit every single state all in one run. I think our live show will evolve to include more things over the next few months as well. And as always we look forward to new recordings and releases which are also in the works.
Regardless of whether or not Kripal is Spider-Man – friendly, neighborhood-based, or otherwise – we have great confidence that he is, in fact, the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he is also the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies.
We have even greater confidence that Kripal – as represented by the books mentioned above – is among the most thoughtful, creative, and utterly energizing writers we’ve ever had the great fortune of encountering.
Close readers of this psychedelic-simian site (both of them) will recognize that we have been both reverently referencing and remorselessly ripping-off many of the themes (or “mythemes”) introduced by Kripal’s work for many months, since our first reading of “Mutants and Mystics” (seen most directly in this introduction to the Texas sci-fi maniacs of Mind Spiders, which also references the origin of Kripal’s complex Spider-Man complex).
Yet trying to summarize the breadth and depth of what we read in Kripal’s work strikes us as a fool’s errand – not because we’re certain to exclude massive, important points, but also because it’s been summarized well through the words of others, including the book’s publisher, the University of Chicago Press:
“In Mutants and Mystics, Kripal offers a brilliantly insightful account of how comic book heroes have helped their creators and fans alike explore and express a wealth of paranormal experiences ignored by mainstream science. Delving deeply into the work of major figures in the field—from Jack Kirby’s cosmic superhero sagas and Philip K. Dick’s futuristic head-trips to Alan Moore’s sex magic and Whitley Strieber’s communion with visitors—Kripal shows how creators turned to science fiction to convey the reality of the inexplicable and the paranormal they experienced in their lives. Expanded consciousness found its language in the metaphors of sci-fi—incredible powers, unprecedented mutations, time-loops and vast intergalactic intelligences—and the deeper influences of mythology and religion that these in turn drew from; the wildly creative work that followed caught the imaginations of millions. Moving deftly from Cold War science and Fredric Wertham’s anticomics crusade to gnostic revelation and alien abduction, Kripal spins out a hidden history of American culture, rich with mythical themes and shot through with an awareness that there are other realities far beyond our everyday understanding.”
Agreed. But what else? How does Kripal’s work achieve such great resonance – how does writing move from super-cool to a superpower?
Certainly, there is something to be said for Kripal’s position in higher education, his dedication to the subject matter of his profession and his curious and inquisitive nature.
Yet we see these as Batman powers and – let us not forget – Kripal believes he may be Spider-Man. Which makes sense, as Kripal has without question been bitten by the bug.
The “bug” in this case is – to quote here from Kripal’s “Esalen” – is …
“… a model of writing, reading and understanding that is deeply hermeneutical – a model that recognizes a truly profound engagement with a text can alter both the received meaning of the text and one’s own meaning and being (this, by the way, is also physiologically true in regards to the ‘subtle body’ of the brain’s neural pathways – reading is an embodied practice that literally changes some of the body’s most subtle processes). That is, we need to recognize that the act of reading, far from being a mechanical, disembodied exercise of vocabulary and grammar, is in fact an immeasurably complex psychophysical event in which two horizons of meaning and being (the reader and the read) are ‘fused’ and transfigured in a mysterious process that we do not, and perhaps cannot ever, truly understand … In effect, a kind of initiatory transmission sometimes occurs between the subject and object of study to the point where terms like ‘subject’ and ‘object’ or ‘reader’ and ‘read’ cease to have much meaning. And this, of course, is a classically mystical structure – a twoness becoming one, or, perhaps better, a not-two. Reading has become an altered state of consciousness.”
You may already have access to your own superpowers – read more to find out how. We feel tremendously fortunate to have access to the superpowers of Jeffrey J. Kripal, and for his willingness to respond to our ridiculous questions below. Enjoy.
Can you recall the first comic book that truly captured your imagination in a way apart from what we might term as the “common” adolescent enjoyment? What was it about that book that struck a chord within you at that time? How have your feelings about that particular book evolved over time? Are there any examples of comics that failed to capture your imagination during your youth, but now stand among the most compelling or intriguing to your mind?
What an interesting set of questions. I suppose it was not a single comic, but the genre itself, which somehow took the lid off my imagination. For example, I still remember, vividly, reading those weird occult sports comics with stories about things like the devil playing baseball and the occult dimensions of bowling a perfect game. I suppose these “hit” me because I was growing up in an athletic culture playing baseball, football, and basketball all year round. Sports was our practice. I also distinctly remember all the drawn and exaggerated bodies of the comics—the lithe, muscled, breasted bodies. And Spider-Man’s eyes. Between the bright colors and the erotic suffusion and my own hormone-buzzed body, well, it was just, just, . . . just what? How could have a twelve-year-old boy have articulated all of that? Sort of like those weird Saturday morning cartoons (think H.R. Pufnstuf) after eating six bowls of Cap’n Crunch—that was awesome. Except for that talking flute—that was just creepy. As for comics that failed to capture me, that would be the early X-Men. The X-Men mythology is, by far, my favorite now, mostly because it reads like a mythical version of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which has become a kind spiritual home for me and was born, partly at least, out of a very similar evolutionary mysticism and vision of human potential. The X-Men mythology also lies at the genesis of Mutants and Mystics.
On the topic of religious study, when did you first realize that the study of religion and spirituality would be central to your life? What do you think is the single biggest misconception about religious studies held by the public at large (if your feel there is even a conception at all)? Is there a single book, film sci-fi novel or even comic book that you can identify as being essential to fueling your academic interest in religion?
I became intensely, annoyingly pious in adolescence around the budding of sexuality (when the mutations appear) and my attempt to repress all of this. But I was not really turned on to the study of religion until college, when I learned the craft from some amazing Benedictine monks who approached reading as a spiritual discipline and study as a sacred vocation or calling.
The single biggest misconception about the study of religion is that scholars of religion are here to make people more religious. We are not. We are here to question everyone’s most fundamental assumptions about religion, about reality, and about human nature itself. The study of religion is neither belief nor non-belief, but endless questing and questioning. Because there is no study of religion in the high schools, first-year college students, and everyone else, generally confuse us with religious leaders or institutions. Wrong. Very wrong.
Which is not to say that scholars of religion are not sometimes, maybe even often, religious in their own nontraditional ways. I am a religious freak, but I doubt that most traditionally religious people would recognize me as “faithful” in any sense whatsoever.
My early interest in religion was fueled by a smoldering and repressed sexuality, not by popular culture. Although one could say that the lives of the saints bore a certain resemblance to the superheroes of my comics, and that that played some role in my own desire to be a saint. There is a later influence here, though. I have long had this uncanny sense that my early scholarship on the Hindu goddess Kali was somehow fueled by my earlier fascination with Spider-Man (their eyes are virtually identical, and they both resemble human spiders, if in different ways). Or was my adolescent fascination with Spider-Man fueled by an earlier (as in previous life) devotion to Kali? I can’t tell.
For lack of a better term, the “mission statement” of “Mutants and Mystics” can be found in the opening chapter, entitled “Origins” – “… showing how these modern mythologies can be fruitfully read as cultural transformations of real-life paranormal experiences, and how there is no way to disentangle the very public pop-cultural products from the very private paranormal experiences.” What drove you to fully explore this assertion within the pages of “Mutants and Mystics”? In your view, does the conventional wisdom of our modern society seek to disentangle or perhaps only seek to ignore these connections?
I study extreme religious experiences for a living (think out-of-body, near-death, and paranormal events), so people, mostly readers and students, are always sharing with me the most extraordinary stories—impossible stories, really, but also real stories. I know that nature, and especially human nature, is not what we are told it is. It is way weirder than that. So I was struck, really struck, how these pop-mythologies of “superpowers” did a way better job of expressing and exploring the weird stories I was hearing than the standard cultural dogmas around materialism and scientism. I knew, of course, that the comic books and sci-fi novels were fantasies, fictions, but they were also fantasies and fictions that were speaking real truths, that reflected the actual “feel” and shape of the paranormal experiences I was reading and hearing about regularly. How did this happen? How is it that the deepest truths are spoken in myths? How is it that elite religious and scientific figures can’t handle the full scope of the human being, but comic books and science fiction can? That was my question.
Speaking of that ol’ canard called “modern society,” after reading about the mytheme defined as “Orientation” in “Mystics and Mutants,” we were curious with regard to your thoughts on how advances in communication will alter this concept. Will sacred power and wisdom still be located “far away” in the age of Google Street View and beyond? Will the power of perceived wisdom located “in the East” remain potent as the East looks more and more like the West, with Starbucks and our endless televised diversions?
No, of course not. Globalization is connecting us all, and flattening us all. I am ambivalent about globalization—so much to hope for there, and so much to mourn and be critical of. I also worry a lot about the effects of technology on us—cognitively and spiritually, especially. I can observe as a teacher that it has pretty much destroyed the classroom space—total Armageddon. There I am with two hundred young people, most all of whom are watching YouTube or buying shoes or God only knows what. It’s really quite awful, and incredibly stupid.
My sense is that technology is “flattening” us. It keeps us on the surface, “surfing,” as we so accurately say. It prevents us from going deep. It also encourages us to confuse information with knowledge and wisdom. Information can be just “bits,” but knowledge and wisdom are something entirely different, and I do not think that they can be achieved by a computer or a machine, much less an Internet search. That claim is simply another symptom of our reigning materialism.
I should say that I am just as addicted as the next person. And I’ve noticed: as soon as I start doing e-mail in the morning, my creative writing ends, right there, right then. That genre does something to me cognitively. It changes me. It pulls me up from the depths.
We noted with great admiration the note in “Mutants and Mystics” that indicates nearly all of the comic images presented within are from your own collection. To what do you attribute your foresight in holding on to the comics of your youth – or do we presume too much, and did you actually re-acquire many of these gems years later? Do you wish to comment on the rumor (the rumor we are attempting to start right now) that says you will soon ship much of your collection to my home address, for proper care and keeping?
That is a false rumor. Let’s get that out of the way. Though I hardly blame you for trying to start it. Yes, everything in the book is from my own collection, much of which I collected while writing the book. What happened was that I discovered in mid-life that I could now afford these “key issues,” as long as they were of mid-grade quality. That thrilled me. Most of the more valuable pieces I purchased, as I put it to myself, “so that I could write this book.” That is to say, I rationalized their purchase. It was either that or a Harley.
You write about the counterculture resonances being “everywhere” when considering the work of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko in particular. Can you elaborate a bit more on your thoughts regarding how these artists influenced “the psychedelic aesthetics of the counterculture,” particularly (if you dare) in the realm of the pioneering psychedelic rock music of the mid-to-late 60s? Perhaps more broadly, in what ways do you see those same psychedelic aesthetics (or inaesthetics, as the case may be) have influenced our sense of spirituality or religion a whole over the past 50 years?
I think psychedelic culture was massively influential, far more influential than we will ever consciously know. Chris Knowles of the Secret Sun community has taught me to look at Kirby’s mid-1960’s transformation as “psychedelic” in some sense. We don’t know whether he ever ingested any, but it seems pretty obvious that his art took a most remarkable visionary turn about then. Ditko’s Dr. Strange is also there as well. Here is the question, though. Did the young people “see” what they saw because of Dr. Strange and the Silver Surfer, or were Ditko and Kirby responding in their art to the album covers and psychedelic poster art? My own answer is: Yes.
We were also fascinated to learn about John E. Mack in your chapter on the mytheme of authorization – particular the quote wherein Mack states, “you can’t deal with something such as the alien abduction phenomenon that is so shattering to our literalist, materialist world-view, and then try to understand it from a literalist, materialist worldview.” How does this “hopelessly incomplete” worldview impact your work as a religious scholar? Within the realm of academia as a whole?
Materialism is the reigning worldview of the academy in all its disciplines, from physics to history. Even in a discipline like the study of religion, the assumption is that a person can never escape or transcend his or her historical moment. We are all locked down tight to history, which is to say, matter. My own position is that this is almost always the case, except when it is not. There are moments of real transcendence. There are altered states of history that shape history, and we will never really understand something like the history of religions unless we can take these seriously. We cannot also, by the way, really understand the history of science fiction and comics, which are filled with similar impossible moments of transcendence, psychical perception, and cosmic Mind, as I tried to document in Mutants and Mystics.
Almost wholly unrelated to your latest book or your academic pedigree, may we ask what music you enjoy listening to, if any? Can you think of a piece of music that has moved you in a profound – even spiritual – way? What was it about that music that (forgive me) struck a chord within you?
I am a musical idiot. There were two classes in college that I got C’s on. One was musicology. The other was Christian ethics. I’ll just leave it at that.
I love listening to music, though, mostly what most people would call soft rock. I tend to gravitate toward the era of my youth, that is, the late 1960s and 70s, when the music was still counter-cultural and not so corporate (though I think contemporary artists like Pink, Melissa Etheridge, and Lady Gaga are occasionally incisive). I’m a fan of Queen, for example, and certain Michael Jackson and Madonna eras. I also like the later Beatles. I just listened to a collection of all of the Beatles’ number one hits. It is amazing to listen to them in a row and see how the lyrics develop from the utterly simplistic to the complex, poignant, and paradoxical. I mean, we start out with things like “I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah” and “I wanna hold your hand” and end up with cross-dressing, day-trippers, John and Yoko being described as “two gurus in drag,” modern mystics and occult magicians on an album cover, and deep reflections on the seeming meaningless and loneliness of life, with a sermon no one hears and a funeral no one attends.
In his excellent book “The Harvard Psychedelic Club,” author Don Lattin writes the following:
“Psychedelics inspired many of us to take a more positive, expansive view of our potential as human beings. Psychologists transcended Freud. Sociologists and political scientists moved beyond Marx. Cynics, skeptics and hard-core materialists suddenly found themselves interested in the spiritual quest. People of faith began to see beyond the doctrine and dogmas of their own religious traditions to envision a more inclusive understanding of the contemplative core that runs through all of the world religions.”
Your thoughts?
I know Don. I consider him a friend and colleague. Don is spot on here. His new book, by the way, is on a similar theme with respect to the shared and mixed “distilled spirits” of alcoholism and spirituality. It is a beautifully honest book.
What’s next for Jeffrey J. Kripal?
Well, dinner and a nice bourbon. But you’re probably thinking of books. I am contracted to write a history of sex and religion in America over the next few years. You ready?
Which means we just covered all the bases: sex, drugs, and rock’n roll. Geez, we even got comics in there. You’re good.
It feels like damning with faint praise to reveal how utterly unprepared we were for our reaction to “Drink the Sun,” the full-length debut from Brooklyn’s masters of time and space, Eidetic Seeing.
It’s not that we didn’t expect the album to be heavy – we did, and it is. It’s not that we didn’t expect the album to be far-out – we did, and it is. It’s not that we didn’t expect the album to reveal something heretofore unknown to us as it concerns our relationship with the cosmos of consciousness and the deformed deities of distortion pedals – we did, and man alive, does it ever.
What we didn’t expect is to feel all of this so deeply. There exists nothing faint about our praise – Eidetic Seeing’s “Drink the Sun” has thus, in a relatively short period of time, become one of those albums that will forever after mark a distinct period in our listening evolution: there is the music we heard before “Drink the Sun,” and there is the music we hear after “Drink the Sun.”
But why? What is it about “Drink the Sun” that gives it such tremendous force, such unfathomable impact?
Who knows? If we could answer that question, we would be one step closer to solving the mysteries of the universe, or at least, be counseling all other bands on the planet on how to achieve such world-eating sounds.
Certainly the answer lies beyond merely the sounds produced by Eidetic Seeing – though we’ve been listening to heavy and otherwise “out there” guitar sounds our entire life and cannot ever recall hearing a more thrilling example of “controlled chaos” than that exhibited on “Drink the Sun.”
The answer will remain undiscovered, which in and of itself is part of the thrill of listening to “Drink the Sun” and Eidetic Seeing. This is the sound of head-melting space-rock equally devoted to exploring the inner and outer reaches of our human (possibly transhuman?) experience – and doing so loudly. In the best possible way, Eidetic Seeing have assumed the nature of their own name, observing deeply and determinedly, and achieving a sound quite beyond that which can stem from the thoughtless glance or the cluttered gaze.
Not so simply put, there is no album this year that will carry us further toward seeing what we want to hear – and hearing what we want to see – than that of “Drink the Sun” by Eidetic Seeing.
We’re thrilled to get a closer look at the atomic core of Eidetic Seeing, by virtue of the band answering our ridiculous questions below. Enjoy.
What is the single most transformative musical experience you’ve had in your life up to this point, be it seeing another band live, listening to a particular album or artist for the first (or perhaps what felt like the first) time, or even performing live? What was it about that experience that keeps it in such a prime position within your mind? What did you learn about music in general from that experience? What did you learn about yourself?
Sean: In terms of forming Eidetic Seeing, the most transformative moment that I had was seeing Michio Kurihara play with Boris for the first time. I had already been listening to Boris, but had no idea who the guy in the shadows on the right side of the stage playing an SG was. His solo in the song “Rainbow” totally blew me away. I love the way he combines beautiful melodies with harsh noise. Seeing him play definitely impacted my own guitar sound and exemplified being able to make a guitar shine through even the grossest fuzz.
Paul: Seeing a gamelan ensemble perform at the New York Indonensian Consulate and seeing Stockhausen’s “Stimmung” performed as the sun rose in lower Manhattan. I didn’t like “Stimmung” until a half-hour after it finished, when I realized it was amazing.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your own musical history and evolution? Who were the first bands that captured your attention as an adolescent? How do you interact – if at all – with that music today? Which bands do you credit with awakening your love for musical exploration, for creating the “out there” sounds made by Eidetic Seeing? What has been your own most important musical discovery of the past few years and what impact has it had on you, both personally and as a member of Eidetic Seeing ?
Danilo: As a kid, I grew up around a ton of out-there stuff, as a result of my dad, who’s an avant-garde pianist with an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and most everything else. As a result I was exposed to a lot of “out” stuff really young but it took me a while to re-discover those sounds as an independent listener. Nirvana was really the first band that opened things up for me individually. Through them, I discovered The Melvins (who need no introduction), Ruins, and Boredoms (who opened for Nirvana on a 1992 tour) – three bands that have certainly exceeded Nirvana’s impact on me but I couldn’t have discovered without.
Because Eye was in Naked City, I circled back into the NY downtown scene and also got into the No-Wave scene of the early 80’s, like DNA, Mars, and Cop Shoot Cop. Over the last few years, I’ve been most attracted to complex instrumental rock (like Laddio Bolocko, Battles, Acid Mothers Temple and Psychic Paramount, to name a few) and that interest has definitely guided me into what Eidetic Seeing has become.
I think my most rewarding, challenging, important musical discovery has got to be playing with Eidetic Seeing these last three years. At the risk of sounding corny, I definitely have learned more about music and more about making it through our work then I have in any other context.
Sean: Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath.
The name “Eidetic Seeing,” for us, conjures the notion of something beyond “photographic memory” and more towards a perfect vision – perhaps even vision beyond what we think of as possible for the human eye. What does this name represent to you? In what ways do you think the members of Eidetic Seeing view the world differently than many others?
Sean: Well, I think we certainly view the name differently than others, because up to this point, I think a total of two people have approached us knowing what the name means. I took the name from a term coined by Edmund Husserl. It means seeing the essence of an object. Husserl believed you could see essences in this world. He took Plato’s ideas and changed them in that way. Explaining beyond that will put you to sleep. Honestly, I chose the name because I thought it sounded psychedelic and out there. Nothing really beyond that … I don’t really like Husserl too much …
Paul: “What was it? Eidactic Scene?”
We’ve been absolutely, positively rocketed out of the earth’s atmosphere by listening to your full-length debut, “Drink the Sun.” What is the origin of the album title? What did you, as a band, hope to accomplish with this album, and how close do you think you came? La Otracina guitarist Evan Sobel produced the album, which truly sounds like no other we’ve heard this year – what did Evan bring to the band via the recording process? We’ve add the pleasure of seeing Evan play guitar in person on a few occasions, but since you have worked directly with him, we have to ask: Do you think he is human, or a mutant? And what planet do you believe he is from originally?
Danilo: Our approach to recording is to come as close as possible to our live sound, warts and all; in order to capture the natural dynamics of the room, our natural sound, and the erratic spontaneity that occurs between us as a unit. For that reason, all the songs are recorded live as full takes. We recorded the LP in our tiny recording space in the basement of a moped shop, and the record definitely captures the density of that room and how explosive it sounded within it. As a result, it was really successful in getting everything we could out of both our playing and our environment at the time. Evan recorded our EP as well, and mixed and mastered both, and his familiarity with our style of music and our songs specifically made him an easy choice. We were all squeezed in this tiny 8×12 room with so much sound popping off the walls and he balanced it all really beautifully. He is certainly a mutant of some kind, but no one can be sure from where.
Paul: I used to get really OCD with editing when I would record, especially with the drums. It was really nice to have somebody basically say, “NO. Just leave it. That’s how it happened, and it’s fine.” It does make performing for the recording a bit more stressful though; these mistakes will last forever.
Among an album that is consistently intense and mind-expanding, we might pick “Primeribneon/Waves and Radiation” as our personal highlight. What can you tell us about the origin of this track – or is it two tracks Frankensteined (Evan-steined?) together? Is the intergalactic ray gun that we hear at around the 3:10 mark a guitar or a synth? Can you tell us anything beyond what we might think of as the obvious about the song’s space-mantra, “It’s in your head/It’s in your mind/It’s in your soul/It’s in your head/Yeah!”? What in the world is “Primeribneon,” anyway?
Danilo: I recently told Sean the exact same thing! Those two songs, which we referred to informally as our “suite,” originated separately but were written simultaneously – we usually have a couple going at once. As we were writing them, and decided on the long keyboard intro for “Waves,” we came up with the idea of segueing directly into that from the long drone that ends “Primeribneon,” and it worked perfectly. That was the first time we tried doing that, and it’s now become a staple of our live show – for the last several months we’ve been doing gapless sets where every song segues into the others – and likely a big part of the upcoming album as well.
The space laser at 3:10 is Paul on his synthesizer, and he plays that and the drums simultaneously. I know … playing bass is hard enough for me to pull off.
Paul: In the earlier days of Eidetic Seeing I was using a Micro-Korg synth in performance. After it got stolen I decided, being a programmer, I would code my own synths, and now my synths are custom coded in SuperCollider.
Speaking of which, where does the title “Deep Falafel Prophet” originate? Where does one get the best falafel in Brooklyn, and what makes it the best? Would you care to comment on the rumor (the rumor that I am attempting to start right now) that the follow-up to “Drink the Sun” will feature a new song called “Shallow Gyro Guru,” featuring the dude from RevoltoftheApes.com on vocals?
Danilo: Our titles come from all sorts of random places; sometimes they’re phrases that we come up with spontaneously while bullshitting (“Deep Falafel Prophet”) or quotes from books we’ve read (“Waves and Radiation” is from DeLillo’s “White Noise”). “Rift Canyon Valley” originates from me misreading something Sean had written, whereas “It’s Brick Out” refers to the cold during brutal NY winters. More often than not they come before the lyrics and are just ways for us to have fun with language the way we do with sound … for example, “Primeribneon” – in the suite’s spirit of connecting disparate fragments – is a conjunction of Prime Meridian + Prime Rib + Neon.
I’ve heard murmurings in the ape community that somewhere in the deep recesses of the Amazon, there is a pressing plant waiting to print the RevoltoftheApes compilation, but only one man would know for sure…
What’s the best thing about being an insanely heavy, insanely spacey rock band in Brooklyn, NY? What are the obstacles that arise from doing what you do in Brooklyn?
Danilo: Well, you really can’t complain about living in the best city in the world too much, but I guess the one thing you miss in such a large place is the tight knit community thing; it seems crazy to think that it’s harder to connect to people when you’ve got almost nine million to choose from, but NY has got so much going on that it’s sometimes hard to grab the random fan the way you’d be able to in smaller towns. Still, being able to see all the bands I want to see come through town, and being exposed to so much great local music makes it hard to complain too much, and I’ve been here for 25 years!
What music have you been listening to lately? If push comes to shove, what is your favorite Hawkwind album and why? Please show your work.
Sean: “Black Sabbath” has to be my most listened to album ever. Always spinning Les Rallizes, too … super lately, a lot of “Born Too Late” by Saint Vitus. Contemporary band I listen to the most probably is Psychic Paramount. The best Hawkwind album is “Space Ritual.” Mainly because it’s live. I also don’t think any of their studio recordings sound as heavy and as raw as that record. It’s really wild. That riff in “7 by 7” that comes in … damn.
Paul: Lately a lot of free jazz and free improv. I’ve been listening to Han Bennink a lot.
Antoine de St. Exupery – the author of “The Little Prince” and (a lot of people don’t know this) the dude who played theremin on Hawkwind’s “Space Ritual” – wrote the following:
“No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.”
Your thoughts?
Sean: I’d like to think Eidetic Seeing sounds more like slowly dying then slowly being born.
What’s next for Eidetic Seeing?
Danilo: We’re gonna try to play a ton more shows this year and then have that lead up to our next album, which we hope to start recording late this year or early 2013. Until then we’ll be bouncing around the northeast and hope to put some grander tours together so we can visit the Apeman himself!
When examining the profundities of the arts – and specifically, those statements of universal transcendence stemming from the music that has enhanced our lives for all these years – there is one statement that, for us, carries as much truth, as much weight, as much direct definition of the undefinable, universal, shared nature of our consciousness as any other.
“There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”
Truer words have never been spoken and – with apologies to Mr. Eddie Cochran – more moving sounds have never been amplified. The summer, for us, is the domain of bands like Blue Cheer, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and similar bands – even a few that don’t have a color in their name. Our brain – no high-functioning device even within optimal temperature range – reacts to the stifling, sadistic sun with an unquenchable desire for drums, distortion and vocals that say, “C’mon, baby – don’t fear the shrieker.” Luckily for us, there is no shortage of bands born to sate said desire.
Take Blues Pills and call me in the morning. We’ve been hooked on repeated, recommended doses of their international air-raid siren sound since being introduced via the wizardry of Beyond Beyond is Beyond some months ago. Yet contrary to the frigid facts of their formation – half from Sweden, half from Iowa, all no strangers to the lands of the ice and the snow – the summer provides the perfect prescription for overdosing on these overdriven pills.
“Bliss” is the name of the song that serves as the title track of the band’s unfuckwithable four song EP, and “Bliss” is precisely what the song – and Blues Pills in general – delivers. Blues Pills’ sound is one that seems to have been born fully formed, warmed in the womb of brain-melting riffs and spectacular shriek. Easily one of our favorite releases this year, we’ve no problem admitting our pill-popping Blues Pills addiction and look forward to the sounds that stem from scoring a refill.
Summer shines brightly on Dirty Streets as well, another out-of-nowhere blast of instantly infectious rock and/or roll music that has been infected our ears. We’re tempted to say that we fell in love with Dirty Streets the moment we heard they were from Memphis and that they love The MC5. This, of course, would be untrue. We fell in love with Dirty Streets after we heard they were from Memphis, love The MC5 … and love Humble Pie.
Luckily, our love was not in vain, as exemplified by the band’s easy-to-love debut LP, “Movements.” To begin at the beginning, even the cover of the album captures visually our need for a summer soundtrack that is buried up to its neck in waves of sound, walls of drums, and wailing songs of dirt and desperation. Dirty Streets do all of this and more, letting loose a straight-no-chaser, Tennessee-whiskey shot of rock music, as confident as you’ll hear all year.
But in between the rock and roll party that is “Movements,” there emerges the sense that when the party is over, Dirty Streets are still there, sweating it out and working hard on the next unforgettable hook, the stinky, sticky kind that gets deep, deep in your brain and doesn’t let go easily. These hooks are absolutely all over “Movements,” littering the Dirty Streets and giving their gutter of guitars the fit and feel of angel wings. With these “Movements,” we all get lifted.
Somewhere further up in the atmosphere, where the skies actually are cloudy and grey, you’ll find Overcasters, rolling about with all the subtlety of a thundercloud. As befits their name, Overcasters vie for a vibe we would describe as somewhat less than sunny; they describe their sound as “Post-Space Blues-Noise Pop,” their influences ranging from The Black Angels (who?) to our shared, surely underrated heros of Catherine Wheel. It makes sense, then, that the result is a sound that’s black metallic, shined to a scorching sheen, dangerous and altogether undeniable.
“Storm of Crows” is the opening incantation on the band’s collection of “Curses/Prayers,” and in these hellish temperatures, the perfect summoning for the reign of something other than the Sun. It’s strange that we find the dark disposition demonstrated by these Overcasters to be so damned smile-inducing, but what can we say? We may be crazy from the heat – we’ve often been accused of worse – and we’re certainly still searching for the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.
” … When I watch a performer, I don’t know what image he or she is perceiving. But, the fascinating thing is, as long as I perceive that person perceiving, I will fill in my own image. My imagination will take hold of my perceiving that person perceive and do it’s own thing, seeing around to the hidden side of that performer’s psyche. My own psyche meets that person’s psyche and fills in the image. We create a communion of images, which need not be identical. That’s the fun part – I fill in my own images and make the experience personal (which takes me back to anima, the archetype of personal, felt experience. Anima itself is paradox because it is the general, universal archetype of personal, individual felt experience.” – Jared Dorotiak, “Images Are Everything,” (via SoulSpelunker)
Of all of the monikers and descriptions that fit Maja D’Aoust – lecturer, astrologer, former librarian in residence at the Manly P. Hall Philosophical Research Society, and grandest of all, “The White Witch of L.A.,” – the one that heralded her existence for us is perhaps the one that sounds most uninspiring: “podcast co-host.”
Yet inspiring is exactly how we would describe “Expanding Minds,” the weekly show on the Progressive Radio Network hosted by D’Aoust and author Erik Davis (who, we can never resist mentioning, is our single favorite living author) that we’ve listened to religiously for the past couple of years. Dedicated to exploring “the cultures of consciousness,” the program is the closest thing we have to guaranteed revelation, each episode promising – and delivering – intense, informative, intriguing and, yes, inspiring conversations with some of the brightest minds from the worlds of magic, spirituality, psychology and technology.
Left in less capable hands, these conversations also hold the potential to veer towards the dry and painfully academic or, perhaps worse, the boring and ill-informed. But this might be the most magical thing about the duo of Davis and D’Aoust: that absolutely never happens.
Davis – author of such must-read books as “TechGnosis,” “The Visionary State,” and “Nomad Codes” – was a known entity to us even as the podcast began its run. D’Aoust, however, was completely off of our radar.
Who was this woman with the uncommon name, and the even more uncommon ability to converse with grace and humor about both ancient tantric tradition and contemporary brain science? Who is equally comfortable discussing Ravi Shankar as she is High on Fire? Who seems to know the origin – and thus the deeper meaning – of every word in the dictionary (and surely a few that have been left out)?
We couldn’t die wondering , we couldn’t be happier to have been introduced to D’Aoust, and we certainly couldn’t be more thrilled to share her answers to our ridiculous questions below. Enjoy (and keep your minds open).
We listened with great enthusiasm to your enlightening lecture entitled “Music and Magic,” wherein you early on assert that the most ancient forms of magic, notably shamanism, used music and songs as the mechanism to effect change (magic here defined as “the ability to perceive connections and influence through connection”). How do you see this notion manifest itself in the world around us today? Where do you see the biggest impact of this magic/music connection in relation to the music being created today, or the music of perhaps the past forty to fifty years? What current examples do we have of this mechanism being employed with intent? Are there current examples of ways in which you see this magic/music mechanism being employed without conscious thought (or, in the immortal, blunt and pejorative words of King Diamond, “Oh, they should have known / not to play with the powers of hell”)?
The manifestation of the invoking power of music in the world today is prevalent everywhere. I mean, how much influence has the music you have listened to had in your life? The power that music holds over people formulates their entire outer image in many cases. Look at high school – there will usually be the person who looks JUST LIKE one of the Ramones, the hesher who wants to look just like James Hetfield, the emo dude who looks like Morrissey. The musicians actually influence their listeners to want to BECOME THEM. Now, you could of course say this is not done on purpose by the musician, but tell that to all of the people who run around with their faces painted like Ziggy Stardust. The most perceptible way in which we can actually see this with our eyeballs is to look at all the people at a concert who try to look exactly like the musician they are there to see. Many bands, or musicians, get what is called a “cult” following in which the devotees see them pretty much like a form of religious experience, or like going to church (The Grateful Dead obviously being the peak of this, with a traveling commune that surrounded them). Because music has the ability to open a “magic” perception, it can very well be one of the best mechanisms for inducing altered, or ecstatic, states, and this opens a space to have a mystical experience. In terms of a musician using conscious intent to perform such a feat, apart from King Diamond of course, there are too many to list … but you could start with Jay to Z.
Continuing on the theme of music and magic for another moment, we’d love to know what your impressions or direct experiences are with the intersection of music and magic during your adolescence. We grew up during the height of the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980’s, wherein the most comically unserious and unthreatening bands (Kiss, Venom, Judas Priest) were accused of being only a few degrees shy of Charles Manson. Later, we became involved and obsessed with the early death and black metal scenes, wherein many of the artists actually were dangerous and committed to “satanic” ideals. When did you first become awakened to the power of the music/magic connection, both from the standpoint of the connection being used as a bit of shtick and from the standpoint of the connection being very real and often very powerful? And “shtick” is a kabbalah word, right?
Haha … wellllll, you are talking to a girl who was obsessed with metal as an adolescent so, I too had a run in with the “Satanic Panic.” When I was in 7th grade, Metallica’s “… And Justice for All” came out, and it was in my Sony walkman for the whole year. From there it went to Sabbath, “Bark at the Moon,” Anthrax, Pantera, etc., all the while my art skills were developing and I constantly drew devils, angels and massive battles between them.
I received a lot of criticism and comments for my preferences in this area, and more than a few dirty looks for my “Damage, Inc.” patch on my jean jacket. To this DAY I get accused of being satanic, but that is just because some people’s minds are too small to contain the word “witch” in any other place than one of fear and ignorance.
Mind you, I was in the middle of the woods at this time also, living on a small hippy island where my friends and I would hang out in the forest, like the middle of the forest. So I can easily say, if you would like to open a magic portal, put on some metal, and go into the woods. It’s kind of like a duck call for the pagan gods.
In terms of shtick, my first confrontation with the “power” of shtick was in high school – my friend came over to a table of friends at lunch and told us that he went to see a band called “GWAR.” “What the hell is GWAR?,” we all asked innocently. In response, he reached into his backpack and pulled out a mass of hair with blood on it – it had been attached to his boot when he left the show. “A souvenir,” he said.
Just because something is shticky, doesn’t mean it’s not real. As real as a scalp on yer’ boot.
What is your impression of the conventional wisdom held on the topic of magic by the general population writ large, to the extent that there is one? What is the most common misconception about magic that you encounter, both from those utterly opposed to and frightened by it, and by those who, at least nominally, claim to support and/or understand it?
My favorite thing that people say to me is, “I don’t believe in magic,” or, “I don’t think your beliefs are true.” The biggest misconception about magic is that it is religious dogma, when in fact, Magic is more like Science than anything – nearly ALL of our scientific systems come from magical practices … astronomy from astrology, chemistry and medicine from alchemy, pharmacy (which actually means “sorcery”) comes from shamanism … DNA was discovered in an LSD-induced state, for crying out loud.
You don’t have to BELIEVE in magic any more than you have to BELIEVE in the ocean. You can just go take a swim. Just do magic and see what happens. Magic is about developing your awareness to greater capacities to see reality that might otherwise be hidden, like a microscope. And it’s not that shocking to learn, the only reason we have microscopes is because the ancient Egyptian Alchemists were messing around with lenses and figuring it out.
Take a look at some of your favorite scientists – many of them were studying the old magicians. Isaac Newton, when not writing the “Principia Mathematica,” was an avid astrologer and alchemist. Niels Bohr based his model of the atom on the harmony of the spheres (kabbalistic). Wolfgang Pauli figured out the exclusion principle from esoteric music studies. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (p.s. JACK PARSONS – who invented rocket fuel – did occult magic) to see that Magic isn’t just about believing in ghosts. It is about the laws of the universe, and the force that pervades all things.
What methods do you employ to keep yourself from stagnating when it comes to the evolution of your own personal relationship with magic, esoteric thought and transpersonal psychology? Do you think you were born equipped with a natural sense of curiosity with regard to these topics, or is it something that you feel was fueled by very specific encounters or experiences?
Yes, I have lived in freaky magic town my whole life. I can remember supernatural experiences from when I was two years old. The biggest danger for me with my magical practices is clearing and cleansing. I work with people everyday in a magical capacity through divination. Because my memory is ridiculous, I can remember the exact tarot spread of a client who may have come to me 2 years ago. If I can’t clear out, I can easily become a tragedy battery, storing all the sins that people give me to eat through the course of the session. Because I work through contagious or sympathetic magic, I open completely during a reading and so I take everything in. If I don’t have proper elimination, I suffer physically. So, Nature gives me a sickness, or a crisis to make sure I get it out. That really is my biggest concern, otherwise, I get hit by amazing, off the hook synchronicities, miracles and awe-inspiring events almost everyday … THANK GOODNESS!! So, yes, I am fueled by experiences, experiences which undeniably flip my wig to keep me on my toes. One such example: going to Santa Cruz forest with some friends, in the car on the way there I said aloud, “Maybe we will see a salamander.” Which was weird, because we weren’t by the water – we were in the woods. Everyone thought it was weird, and I had never “hoped” to see a salamander before … sure enough, about ten minutes into the hike, my friend stopped and turned to look at me with her face pale. She just pointed, there on the exact center of the trail, staring us right in the eye was a bright, flaming-red salamander.
Magic.
In what way – if any – did becoming a parent yourself alter your impression of magic, your impression of humanity, your impression of yourself? What do you find the most challenging aspect of being a mother? What aspect do you find to be the most rewarding?
Throughout the process of incubating my Homunculi, I never ceased to be amazed at the supremely strange and utterly primal nature evoked in being “a mother.” You are never more of an animal than when you are giving birth and feeding from your breast. A LARGE part of my soul was awakened with the birth of my children, and they have a huge effect on my magical nature. Firstly, they ARE magical, there is no resistance in their minds, and children see magic automatically, without interference. Secondly, through the actions of humility, service, sacrifice and patience involved in being a parent, any magician is sure to get closer to the higher forms of magic than the lower. This is also possible to achieve without children, but you have to actually engage with and help others in the form of service. It is one thing to be a magician on your own, in your basement, and never interact with another human being, but it quite another to attempt to bring it into the world and engage.
The most challenging aspect of being a mother for me is remembering temperance. The most rewarding is the laughing, laughing, laughing.
In both your lectures and in your writing (as evidenced within your sensational thesis, “Dis-Inheriting The Sins of Our Fathers,”), you display a true fascination with and fluency with etymology, using word origin to further illuminate many fascinating discussions. Where do you think this impulse stems from? Have you always been interested in word origin? What authors most directly capture your own imagination with their creative use of words? What book on your bookshelf do you think some people would be most surprised to find, and most surprised to hear how deeply moved by it you were?
I come from a long line of literary women. My grandmother had me memorizing Edgar Allan Poe when I was seven years old. My mother had me knee-deep in books while I was still in her belly.
The word-chasing really started when I began investigating the meaning of my own name, and found ridiculously delightful significance for me as I unearthed its history. After that, it was on. Words really are codes that contain DNA for the thing they are talking about. Language could possibly be one of the biggest mysteries ever and I find the more I get into it deeply, the more awe-inspired I become. But it goes a bit further than that I must confess – I am a source seeker of most things. I HAVE to know where things come from, because that tells you more about what they are. As a species, human beings really don’t know our own origin stories – we can’t even remember our own births – so trying to hunt down where things come from can help you to get closer to solving your own origin by proxy. Plus, I think I am just kind of naturally Nancy Drew-ish.
Books, man. I have read, maybe, tens of thousands of books, I think. Some of my favorite prose is Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel,” Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, the romantic poets kill me, Percy Shelley is a long-lost soul mate for sure … as well as Charles Baudelaire … Langston Hughes is like lava to me.
How did you first meet your co-host on the “Expanding Minds” podcast, Erik Davis? What is the most compelling thing you have learned about yourself from the time you’ve spent with him? What is the most compelling part of being a part of this podcast for yourself personally?
I love Erik!! He is one of my favorite people on earth. I first met Erik at a salon at my good friends Adam Parfrey and Jodi Willie’s home. He was giving a presentation on his book, “Visionary State,” which is epic and beautiful. We started chit chatting on and off after that and found we were kindred spirits. I have learned lots of things about myself spending time with Erik. I find all of our discussions go to great places that I can’t always access with other people. He truly has an expanded mind, so he can flow along without resistance to lots of topics. In that way, I think he has helped my mind grow immensely, by simply opening. In terms of being on the show, it is like my weekly candy. I get to talk to AMAZING people and laugh and have fun and get smarter. All of my favorite things!!
What music have you been listening to lately? Can you identify one album or song that you consider as having a direct impact on your spiritual evolution (for lack of a more cloying term)? Have you ever heard the early 70’s glam rock pioneers from the mystical land of Orlando, Florida, known as White Witch? Is there a more popular occult song ever writing than The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe In Magic”?
Ahhhhhh, music is SO big to me … that is tricky to answer. Lately, it has been a shuffle of the Smithsonian “Anthology of American Folk Music” anthology, Tool’s “Lateralus,” Ides of Gemini’s new album, “Constantinople,” Mahalia Jackson, John Fahey … for this month anyway. ONE song that impacted me greatly spiritually and can still take me to a place pretty quickly is Nina Simone’s cover of the George Harrison song, “Isn’t It a Pity?”. Well, really, Nina Simone assassinates me with everything. I watch her YouTube performances and my soul rises up to try to give her a high-five.
I have so MANY amazing musicians in my community that constantly inspire me. I love all the folks who I have met, like Lavender Diamond, The Entrance Band, White Magic, Jefferttitti’s Nile, Nora Keyes, Diva, The Silver Chords, Daniel Brummel, Featherbeard and so many more … I could be shoutin’ out alllll day.
Haha! I have indeed heard of White Witch – my good friend Jodi Willie (who made The Source Family documentary) brought that album to my attention and I must say, it’s pretty good. I am always down for some good 70’s rock.
And I think “Season of the Witch” might give The Lovin’ Spoonful a run for their money, but it’s a close call.
In his book, “Behind the Crystal Ball: Magic, Science and The Occult from Antiquity Through the New Age,” author Anthony Aveni writes the following:
“Magic succeeds at the popular level not because it passes the empirical tests of science, which few laypeople really understand or pay attention to, but simply because it satisfies. Magic is a feeling – an attitude. It is emotional and tactile and whether it consists of making an incantation or gazing into a crystal ball, it is a one-on-one operation. Like religion, magic possesses an active principal because it is all about responding to our own self-centered psychic needs.”
Your thoughts?
Haha … well, firstly I have to say, as stated above, science comes from magic. And as far as scientific empirical tests … according to those, the radiation leaking out of Fukishima is perfectly safe. So we all know how far that goes. Obviously, I don’t HATE science – I LOVE science. But people need to understand it is not infallible – just ask Karl Popper. But, yes, the good thing about Magic is you can actually DO IT. You can feel it. It is palpable, present and effective. All you have to do is put your mind to it, say some words, and let it go.
I would argue with the statement that it is self-centered psychic needs. There are many KINDS of magic, high low and in-between (those are the most fun). Magic responds to needs that are completely outside the individual and reaches some thing greater than the self, beyond the self and that connect the self to the entirety of the universe. Magic is SYMPATHY and EMPATHY – that is the opposite of being psychically selfish. Just because some people USE magic to be psychically selfish does not mean that is what magic is. In terms of one-on-one operations, group magic is rad and fun, much more selfless and can reach amazing levels of service. Magic is not just something dorky dudes do in their basement. Really, it is a perceptive force in the universe that applies to all things. To restrict that to the self or even humanity would be truly tragic, and a real “pity.”
One listens to Aqua Nebula Oscillator less than one is abducted by Aqua Nebula Oscillator.
If that statement brings to mind a world of unidentified flying objects, nonhuman entities and complex psychological procedures, welcome aboard the craft known as Aqua Nebula Oscillator.
Which is to say that, yes, Aqua Nebula Oscillator is a band, purportedly from France, purportedly playing psychedelic music, purportedly of the highest quality available. But more than a band playing psychedelic music, more than a spacecraft, Aqua Nebula Oscillator itself is an expanded, unexplainable mind-state being transmitted and translated through a band.
That mind-state was recently translated into the third full-length Aqua Nebula Oscillator album, coincidentally titled “Third.” Strictly speaking, “Third” is an awesome album, a combustible mixture of all the distortion and debris ANO has ingested and inhaled from flight through the 20th century, finally exhaled and expelled into a fine, fierce 21st century vapor, daring the listener to get high on the fumes, daring the listener to allow an abduction. Wherever Aqua Nebula Oscillator trace the flight patterns of their paranormal predecessors – from the gargoyle-garage and lead-foot lunacy of “Turn On” and “Black Sun,” to the introspective, interstellar overdrive and orgone accumulations of “Saturne” and “Incandescence” – they do so in a different atmosphere, taking off from an alternate launch pad and reaching a destination where the only landing is a crash landing.
But is Aqua Nebula Oscillator real?
We put the question to John Edward Mack, the American psychiatrist, writer, and former professor at Harvard Medical School. His answer was compelling – especially since he died eight years ago.
“There is a—I believe – a gradation of experiences and that go from the most literal physical kinds of hurts, wounds, person removed, spacecraft that can be photographed, to experiences which are more psychological, spiritual, involve the extension of consciousness. The difficulty for our society and for our mentality is, we have a kind of either/or mentality. It’s either, literally physical; or it’s in the spiritual other realm, the unseen realm. What we seem to have no place for—or we have lost the place for—are phenomena that can begin in the unseen realm, and cross over and manifest and show up in our literal physical world.
So the simple answer would be: Yes, it’s both. It’s both literally, physically happening to a degree; and it’s also some kind of psychological, spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it asks us to stretch to open to realities that are not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which our consciousness, our, if you will, learning processes over the past several hundred years have closed us off.”
We also put some questions to the pilot of the Aqua Nebula Oscillator, David Sphaèr’os, who has kind enough to answer our ridiculous questions below. Enjoy.
Do you believe you have had direct interactions with life from other planets, or life in other forms other than human or earthly animals (aside from the other members of ANO, of course)? Can you describe that experience and what does it mean to you today? When did your fascination with the alternate dimensions or alternate worlds that the music of Aqua Nebula Oscillator seems to explore begin? How does that fascination and exploration inform the music of Aqua Nebula Oscillator?
Well, my belief is that WE are coming from other planets. I think the human race have been traveling from planet to planet and has left those planets just after they’ve destroyed it! I believe that each time a planet arrives at its end, a few humans, the “chosen ones” will move to another one, and do their nasty destroyer-job again! But to destroy … it’s also a part of life, so we can’t issue blame for that. It’s a kind of an ecological thing.
It’s proven that on Mars and Venus, there was water before, so where there is water there is life!
And, yes, I believe there is other life somewhere else! I have been to Palenque in Mexico, and saw this carving of this two-meter high man with six fingers and a huge head called, “The Astronaut.” Why should we be the only ones in the universe? It’s stupid … life is everywhere!!
And the story of parallel dimensions and the sound of Aqua Nebula Oscillator began when I was born!
I’ve always been in contact with spirits, ghosts … it’s a family thing. My mother and grandmother were always in contact with those spirits, too! And to tell you the truth, in this everyday reality world, I always have half of me in a parallel dimension!! I’m here and I’m not here at the same time!
I’m an hermit, in introspection most of the time, but sometimes I come back on earth to have fun with my human colleagues … ah-haha! And that is the sound of Aqua Nebula Oscillator!!
What were your experiences playing in other bands prior to ANO like? How do you think those experiences influenced what you create with ANO? Apart from the end result of the music that you unleash upon the universe, what is the most beneficial or pleasing element of being in a band for you?
My other band’s experience was really strong! I’ve never made a band with what we’ll call “normal people,” even if in reality, normality doesn’t exist!! All the people who think they are “normal” are the weirdest I ever see, so I don’t like them! With the principle “to be normal” in your head in this society, you’ll become the greatest killer of everything.
All the people have played for fifteen years. I will call them “psychedelic monks” or “brothers” playing music to get to this ecstatic trance, where you can reach other dimensions, and put out the real, pure, raw, psychedelic-soul sound … the one who doesn’t lie!
I think the most beneficial thing in music is this point when you reach the trance, where you are not here anymore, and acting instantly without thinking, like when you make love, mediate, or when you do a painting, sculpture, or any kind of live performance!
I make music to heal people and myself, not to make them dance, or to be in the chart or whatever!! That has no point to me!!
Is it important for you to view each Aqua nebula Oscillator album as a part of a larger whole – another part of the mothership being attached – or do you view each album as standing alone, being its own, self-contained expression? Or is this something you are even conscious of or even take under consideration?
Mmmm … well, I see myself and some of my brothers I’m playing with as psychedelic warriors! I think that since the existence of humanity, it has always been a few people who have been chosen to keep this particular flame lit! It’s a really ancient society created by the womb of the universe, something that will never die … an infinite spiral!!
And please don’t see any pretentiousness in what I have said. It’s just a fact. Some are working for money, some for religions, some for Kali, the Great Destroyer, some for a colorful spiral … that’s it!!!
We mean this solely as the highest form of compliment, but the new album, entitled “Third,” is positively the UGLIEST of all ANO sounds thus far – absolutely beautiful in its hideousness, overdriven overtures to other worlds, sounding like the aural equivalent of an H.P. Lovecraft tale. What are your thoughts on the album now that it has been completed? What do you hope people will take away from listening to “Third”? What is the most appropriate atmosphere in which to listen to this album?
Thanks a lot. H.P. Lovecraft, to me, is an initiated man. I love him. I don’t see what he wrote as “tales” – to me, what he wrote about is “history”! Spirits are there, around us, watching us behind the mirror … always!!
The message of third is the same of the other albums! The law is that there is no law. Be as free and pure as you can. Experiment with everything you like. No matter what, do what you want. Be the weirdest and as creative as you can. Be positive. Trust in you. Always follow your first intuition as it’s the right one. We are our own master. The verity is inside us, be aware of that. We rule the world, not them!
And see your own life as a fairytale. You are your own writer. You can change things when you want and make it beautiful! Please don’t be miserable – it sucks!! And be real, not fake!
And listen to “Third” just when you’ve decided it … it’s the best.
“Turn On” is one of our favorite songs on “Third,” a perfect distillation of pure psychic energy, coupled with an almost MC5-like jet propulsion. What can you tell us about the origin of this song? Are we hearing correctly when we hear the vocals say, “everything’s gonna be alright”? Is everything really going to be alright – especially in light of the following two songs being called “Final Solution” and “Kill Yourself,” respectively?
Mmmm … well, when I wrote this song, I was so sad, and the only thing that made me glad was to watch the stars and the moon. I love them … I’m a moonchild, living only at night … it’s like a god to me!!
But do you think everything is gonna really be alright? Mmmm … it’s quite sarcastic! But we’ll keep the head high, no matter what!
We can’t help but think of the song “Lucifer” as being the perfect compliment to the album’s final track, “Incandescence” – given the origin of the word “Lucifer” as being the “morning star” of Venus, and defined as a “bringer of light.” Are we way off base? Do the two songs have any specific relationship with each other? What are your impressions of each song?
I’m in love with everything that shines, especially fire and light. It’s all the point in life – to find the light!! Lucifer to me is the greatest angel. I don’t see anything bad about him. People are so stupid. Lucifer, he’s just the one who knows the real truth to me!
But people are scared of the real truth, so lets burn them … they are useless … ahaha!!
Thanks for your really sharp questions!! You are a good man. Come in the Aqua Nebula Oscillator … there is a place for you … ahahaha!
Revolt of the Apes 
