Top of the World

An old post, lost and now found:

Floating in the tank on the eve of departure to Africa contemplating death. The subject came up for me as a result of listening to Led Zeppelin IV the evening before.

I highly recommend listening to this album both to students of sound engineering and to students of Aleister Crowley's system of transformation. Listen to it with headphones. Jimmy Page's production techniques were groundbreaking, a big influence on yours truly, and a big reason why Led Zeppelin became so popular. His invocation techniques appear equally uplifting and effective.

The cause for considering the increased possibility of death ( my paranoia, if you will) was a line from Going to California:

Took my chances on a big jet plane.
Never let them tell you that it's all the same...

I could no longer take flying for granted, it did feel like taking a chance especially since I wasn't just going to Mali. Once in Mali, I had another series of flights to get to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and back. I had even less confidence in the African airlines booked to take me across that expansive continent. All the recent unrest in the area was just beginning.

When death feels closer, it seems possible to get more of a taste of it. That is to say, to get more of a sense and feeling for what might occur when it actually happens as it inevitably will. Several world mythologies and belief systems describe some sort of afterlife that the soul or being, one's essential nature ( called a voyager in modern terminology) goes to or through when it separates from the body at the moment death. The Tibetan and Egyptian mythologies map out the voyager's journey in great detail. Not in the sense of knowing exactly what will happen, but in the sense of describing the territory along the way.

Preparing for death, known in Sufi terms as "waking up," also known as bardo training, can take many forms and approaches but they all end up giving a taste of death one way or another. Paradoxically enough, when it works, you feel vitally alive.

What exactly do I mean by a taste of death? Hard to put in words but I think this poetic description from Timothy Leary's, Richard Alpert's, and Ralph Metzner's Book of the Dead manual gives some idea:

O friend, remember:
When body and mind separate,
you experience a glimpse of the pure truth -
Subtle, sparkling, bright,
Dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome,
In appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in springtime.
One continuous stream of vibrations.
Be not daunted thereby, Nor terrified, nor awed.
That is the radiance of your own true nature.
Recognize it.

Their book and other Books of the Dead elaborate a great deal further.

Going on a major trip always seems like a kind of death to me whether concerned about plane flights or not. The act of traveling, especially flying, seems to bring about a subtler type of body/mind separation. This partially explains jet lag. In other words, the sensations, feelings, and perceptions of voyaging through the bardo can get more easily accessed by traveling around Earth.

A perfect storm of events had conspired to make it so that I had less than an hour to pack. When it's time to go, it's time to go. I was on a red eye flight to New York that left at midnight. I could hardly believe it when I made it to the airport in time.

I was 'dying' to everything I knew in California to travel through the airline bardo and get reborn as a sound engineer in West Africa. Well, as it turned out I didn't die to everything I knew in California just yet. I was pleasantly surprised to see an old friend, Christina Wiebe, at the departure gate. She was on the same flight, going to New York to help celebrate her sister's birthday. We caught up for a bit before boarding then continued on the plane when, by coincidence, she had the seat immediately behind mine. Christina behind me reminded me of an exercise Robert Anton Wilson gives in Masks of the Illuminatti that's basically a shorthand form of the Golden Dawn's Rosy Cross instruction.

Arrived at the JFK International Terminal in New York at about 7am. Prepared for the long layover, my flight to Casablanca boarded around 3, by heading upstairs to the Food Court and getting a Tazo Awake tea, strong black tea, at Starbucks. I decided to make an audio retreat from the early morning, business suit wearing, rush hour crowd and put Shine A Light by the Rolling Stones through my headphones. A genius mix, very dynamically innovative, by Bob Clearmountain on that album, I might add.

There is something about sitting in the International Terminal at JFK, high on tea, after an all night flight that literally makes you feel like you're on top of the world when listening to inspiring music. It's not the first time I noticed this at JFK in a New York dawn.



In case you happen to find yourself in the same situation, 2 songs from Shine A Light thematically relevant and useful for inducing an ecstatic mood when drinking tea or coffee at an airport are: Loving Cup, the duet with Jack White, and You Got the Silver sung by Keith. This was the high point of the trip enroute to Africa, although 36,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean felt pretty high too!

Bad Dog by Iggy Pop

Well, it's short, less than a minute, but I find it inspiring. Iggy is in fine voice, strong and passionate with his delivery.

He starts with a growl then a couple of short barks. Bill's prepared piano stabs during the opening barks and words adds a sense of urgency, one might even say dire urgency to the proceedings:

Bad dog
Just keep going
Going going going
Never never never stop
If you stop, you will suffer
They all wish you would stop
They all wish that you would stop
And curl up by a puddle somewhere
And just lie around and absorb KICKS
They wish that you would cringe and fold back your ears
And squint your eyes, and cover your nose with your paws
Because YOU are a DIFFERENT dog.

Iggy then barks and howls as the prepared piano crescendos the "I Wanna Be Your Dog" chord progression.

It's brevity has me considering it a fossil poem. It certainly says a lot with few words and barks.

The opening few lines recalls how Israel Regardie begins his opus, The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic:

PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION

Over the years I have been asked over and over again what are the most important qualities that a student should possess in approaching the Great Work. Other than normal intelligence and emotional stability, I find two other qualities which are essential for success. They are best summed up in the following quotation (by Calvin Coolidge):

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Regardie left out the last line of the quote but I find it appropriate:

The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

four-square Crown of Nothing

To continue a little further with the poetry and lyrics theme ...

Earlier I brought up the Tales of the Tribe online course by Robert Anton Wilson that had such a strong effect on me. One of the things Wilson introduced was the idea of "fossil poems." As I understood it at the time, "fossil poems" meant viewing short phrases with a poetic eye, sometimes common phrases you wouldn't think twice about. For instance, you might be watching CNN and hear the anchor say something in the course of reporting that rings a poetic nerve.

Researching "fossil poems" right now, I find that the idea originates with Emerson in the Second Series of his essays circa 1844:


By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.

The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses for, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolizes the world to the first speaker and to the hearer.

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.


This Emerson quote which I just found comes courtesy of an old friend, Toby, who often goes by the name Bogus Magus on the Maybe Logic Academy boards. Bogus was one of the dozen or so people who made it all the way through of the Tales of the Tribe course.

All this preamble about fossil poems sets up a fossil poem I noticed that abstractly fits with Iggy Pop's Squarehead lyrics. Squarehead is the 10th and final song on Instinct.

You can kick me out of a real good jive
You can use my friendship like a doorknob
You can make me super styrofoam
You can make me feel all alone
You can stuff hamburger in my head
But I ain't gonna be no squarehead

You can tempt me with a pretty girl
You can call on me in fancy fur
You can say, "Just do it, everyone is"
You can tell me that it's just showbiz
You can turn my life from green to red
But I ain't gonna be no squarehead

You can burn my bridges down for laughin', ha ha ha ha
You can call me a fool for crashin', woh
You can make me stare down at the floor
You can make me listen while you snore
You can do all these things that I have said
But I ain't gonna be no squarehead Let's go!

You can make my position low as a dog
You can trick me with your social fog
You can criticize my very bag
You can call my treasures a heap of slag
But you might as well eat lunch instead
Cause I ain't gonna be no squarehead
I ain't gonna be no squarehead
I ain't gonna be no squarehead
I ain't gonna be no squarehead
No, I ain't gonna be no squarehead
No, I ain't gonna be no squarehead
No, I ain't gonna be no squarehead
No, I ain't gonna be no squarehead
I ain't gonna be no
I ain't gonna be no

The fossil poem comes from a book of potent poetry called The Path Workings of Aleister Crowley: The Treasure House of Images. The author is not Crowley but one of his students, J.F.C. Fuller.

O Thou four-square Crown of Nothing, that circlest the destruction of worlds! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, IAO!

IAO is a gnostic name for God.

Ok, so it seems a bit of a stretch, I'm just in one of those moods ... it helps to listen to Squarehead with this fossil poem close by.




PS The Treasure House of Images has been known to work as a sort of bhakti grapple hook for jumping brain circuits, or accessing parallel worlds etc. The book was published by Christopher Hyatt's press, New Falcon in the 1990's.

Squarehead

LJ said..." I love "Instinct". Its always been my favorite Iggy solo album, I think was the first album I bought with Bill Laswell's name on it. It has lot of power and understatement. Steve Jones' guitar fits beautifully. The sound is crystal clear and haunting.

The lyrics are deep in places, or just funny as "Squarehead"."

This comment recalls another story from the Instinct mixing sessions.

Iggy arrived at the beginning of one session to recut a vocal. My understanding is that he had written completely new lyrics to one song, the song that became Squarehead. I didn't ever hear the song before it became Squarehead.

We set up a Neumann U47 Tube 47 and gave it some mild compression with a Summit TLA across the insert. Iggy knocked out the lead vocal in one take. There might have been a punch-in or two along the way, I don't remember, but I do remember it going very quickly.

After he got the lead vocal, Iggy went in and did a 3 part doo wop style background vocal part for the bridge. Each of these vocals were also done in one take. They were not perfectly in tune but the dissonance and rawness of the part perfectly fit the mood of the lyrics. It took less than an hour to do all the vocals for Squarehead.

Two days later a new Rolling Stone magazine came out with this picture on the cover of Talking Head frontman David Byrne:

Iggy Pop's Poetry

We were tracking overdubs for The Swans album that eventually became The Burning World at Platinum Island's Studio East. I was assisting Bob Musso, Bill Laswell was producing, when Iggy Pop walked in to check out the music.

After listening to a track, Iggy asked Bill for some help with a performance piece he was making for a festival honoring genius and pioneering avant garde music composer, John Cage. Iggy had written a poem for the occasion and wanted a backing track of some kind to go with it. Bill had the idea to make a "prepared piano" and play the melody to I Wanna Be Your Dog which I think could safely be called Pop's theme song.

A prepared piano is a technique of altering the timbre of a piano by putting objects on, and in-between the strings. John Cage was known for these experiments and composed pieces for the prepared piano. So we "prepared" the grand piano with paper clips, rubber bands, nails and other things that rattle in the night. I don't remember exactly how we miced it, maybe with a couple of U87's one closer to the hammers aimed toward the high strings, and the other at the back capturing the low strings.

Bob quickly got a blend between Iggy's voice and Bill on the piano and recorded the piece live to a Studer A80 1/2" tape machine. They only did it once, one take, and that was that. I only vaguely remember the poem but recall as it feeling both "beat" ( as in Kerouac and Ginsberg etc.) and punk with a strong emphasis on the right of the individual to be who they are. I should have a copy of it somewhere which I'll have to dig up. At the time it sounded incredibly right on, hitting the nail squarely on the head in terms of where I was coming from.

We dubbed a 1/4" copy for Iggy, the format for submission to the Cage Festival, and Iggy went on his way, mission accomplished.

In the latest Rolling Stone magazine Paul Simon raises the question of whether song lyrics can be considered poetry or not? I think they can. If the words move you just as strongly what difference does it make what you call them. Both poetry and song lyrics effectively use words to conjure images, feelings and moods that can alter consciousness to greater or lesser degrees. Ritual magick is often not much more than the imaginitive reading of inspired poetry. Poetry that exalts the consciousness outside of the mundane. Great songs do the same for me.

After we finished mixing Instinct, the album Laswell produced for Iggy Pop not too long before the Cage project, we had a playback of all the mixes in sequence for Iggy. The album sounded great! The production was as raw and noncommercial as the old days with the Stooges but pushing the envelope with modern technology and know how. Iggy's lyrics and delivery were brilliant and passionate, classic rock-n-roll.

Maybe it's because I heard them a lot in the mixing sessions - and at home to check the mixes out, and just to enjoy listening to the latest offering from a genius songwriter, but the lyrics seemed to reach to the core of my being and back out again to some of the further regions. I heard Jungian style archetypes in them that had immediate and practical applications for my life's journey as it then unfolded. I thought the name Instinct was perfect for it.

Iggy didn't react much and gave little expression during the playback except for rocking a bit in his chair. At the end, he said everything was good except for one thing. He was concerned that his singing on Cold Metal, the opening track, got boring as it went along. Bill Laswell and Bob Musso both told him it was great.
Iggy responded, shaking his head, "I don't know..."
Bob mentioned a teenager who had heard and really liked it. Iggy wasn't convinced and stood there struggling with the decision.
Bill said, "We're scheduled to master tomorrow, but it's your call, we can cancel, whatever you want to do..."
Finally, I couldn't help myself ( I was the assistant engineer and wasn't supposed to offer an opinion unless asked) and blurted out, " Those lyrics are so intense it doesn't matter how you sang them!"
Iggy immediately lit up and said, "Ok! Let's go with it.

I believe he was reacting more to my enthusiasm rather than to what I actually said.

To start with, Cold Metal seemed to describe my living situation with pinpoint accuracy. At the time I was residing on South Street in Manhatten's Lower East Side. It was a 26th floor apartment with a balcony overlooking the East River, Brooklyn, and you could easily see both the Brooklyn and Williamsberg bridges. FDR Drive was directly below. Also right below, and a little to the North was a floating prison barge docked on the river.

The lyrics start, after a heavy Steve Jones played guitar riff:

I play tag in the auto graveyard
I looked up at the radio tower
Rag tent by the railroad tracks
Concrete poured over steel bridge
Pondered my fate
While they built the interstate

I'm a product of America
From the morgue to the prisons
Cold metal, when I start my band
Cold metal, in my garbage can
Cold metal, gets in my blood
And my attitude

Threw my hide in an automobile
Heard a song called "Drive the wheel"
Truckers, trailers, tractors caught me workin'

This is the song of my heritage
From the bad to the Buddha
Cold metal, that's what it be
Cold metal, from sea to sea
Cold metal, it's how we win
And also how we sin
How we sin, how we sin, how we sin, how we sin

Cold metal, in the afternoon
Sounds lovely like a Hendrix tune
Cold metal, it's the father of beat
The mother of the street
Cold metal, it rolls on by
Cold metal, gonna raise it high
Cold metal, it'll even fly
Rust buckets in the sky
Cold metal, got to be
Skeleton of the free
Cold metal, it's gotta be
Better save a tree
Save a tree, save a tree, save a tree, save a tree
Yeah

Cold metal was the song from Instinct that made it onto Iggy Pop's Greatest Hits cd. It was also featured in an episode of Miami Vice.

Looking at these lyrics years later, they ring more profound than ever for me. Viewing them through the occult language known as Qabalah, as developed by Aleister Crowley and others, one can clearly tap into a different kind of information useful for personal transformation and evolution.

One of the linguistic techniques Aleister Crowley applied in his Qabalistic lexicon was to associate very simple everyday words with particular magical formulas, that is, specific techniques for transformation. Words such as OUT, PLACE, THAT, and IT were given specific metaphysical meanings in Crowley's Book of Lies. For instance the word IT corresponds with Absolute Reality.

Looking at in this way can give a whole new angle to song lyrics. For example, just knowing about a different meaning for the word it puts the lyrics from John Coltrane's A Love Supreme in a new light:

A Love Supreme

I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee, O Lord.
It all has to do with it.
Thank You God.
Peace.
There is none other God is.
It is so beautiful.

Similarly, the first line from Cold Metal:

I play tag in the auto graveyard

can have a much more expansive meaning especially when interpreting "auto" as something other than a car.

La Fabrique

Currently enjoying the pleasure of working at one of Europe's premiere residential studios, La Fabrique. Located near St. Remy in the Provence region in the South of France, the recording studio rooms of La Fabrique are set up in one part of a very long 3 story building that's been divided up into various residential and working facilities.

Assistant engineer Damien Arlot said that the building dates back to the latter part of the 19th century and was originally a textile mill that made red uniforms for the French army, hence the name La Fabrique. I also relate it to the notion of music weaving together the fabric of the Universe.



Apparently the textile making ceased sometime around the First World War when it was quickly discovered, by painful experience, that red unforms make great targets.

La Fabrique's Control Room is quite large, over 300 square feet with an equally spacious recording area adjacent to it. The walls on either side of both the Control Room and Recording Area are lined with one part of a massive collection of vinyl stored in oak paneled, glass encased shelves. I asked Damien how large the collection was and was told about 3000 but that figure must be a mistake in translation. According to an interview in Resolution magazine with Herve Le Guil who owns and operates La Fabrique with his wife Isabelle, the collection contains about 200,000 vinyls (almost exclusively classical music), 40,000 films and 160,000 books on music and film. It was assembled by musicologist Armand Panigel.

A Pro Tools 002 work station is set-up in one small room, lined floor to ceiling with books on music, for the purpose of digitizing this collection.

The rear of the Control Room has two large picture windows that bathe the room in natural light all day long. The mixing desk is a 72 channel Neve 88R that sounds warm and beautiful and comes equipped with Encore Flying Faders automation. The standard Pro Tools HD rig is augmented with top of the line analog recorders, a 24 track Studer A800 and a 1/2" Studer A80 that I mixed down to. Monitors consist of a set of K & H near fields and a large Amadeus speaker stack for the big speakers. I found the sound of the Control Room to be clear, accurate and easy to get used to. No doubt all the oak paneling helped.

A favorite La Fabrique feature for me is the choice of various "live chambers" that could be utilized for natural reverb. I took full advantage using various reverb chambers on different songs. A very large storage room with a high sloped roof and stone walls gave a bright and lively natural ambience without sounding too big. An arched stone corridor with stairs leading up one flight had hollowed out walls and a sound much more reverberant - great for drums.

The entrance to the Control Room leads through the old mill, a stone room with lots of irregularly shaped surfaces, It gave a very live and warm ambience, also great for drums.

Another interesting acoustic area was in the stairwell leading to the two floors above where the client's and visiting staff residential suites are located. I had a speaker placed on the ground floor pointing up and miced it with 2 stereo condenser mics up on the third floor. This also gave a powerful reverb sound that reminded me of the classic drum sound from Led Zeppelin's, When the Levee Breaks.

Herve, Isabelle and the La Fabrique staff really go out of their way to support the client and visiting technicians. As soon as I set my bags down on the evening I arrived, Herve, also an accomplished engineer, asked me what kind of monitors I like to use? I said Pro Acs. The next day a pair of Pro Acs showed up brought down by their son Maxime who manages and engineers at their sister studio in Paris called Plus XXX and who happened to be coming down for another matter.

One day my laptop decided it wasn't going to power up anymore. The studio very thoughtfully provided me with an Apple Imac to access the internet in my room.

Maxime is also involved with organizing a set of mixing workshops with well known audio professionals such as Michael Brauer, David Kahne, and Andy Wallace. Collectively known as Mixing with the Masters, each workshop is a week long and has limited enrollment. The first workshop is scheduled right after my project with engineer Peter Katis. Tchad Blake has just come on board and is scheduled for a couple of weeks later in the fall.

St. Remy is close to the city of Arles. Both places and the surrounding region were settings for famous paintings by Vincent Van Gogh who spent much of his life in this area. It is said that the light in the south of France is inspirational for artists. I can verify this, although I find it hard to describe. The incredible quality of light gives the effect of everything seeming to be illuminated from within. The psychedelic, luminous quality of Van Gogh's paintings is understandable after seeing the light here.

Every morning I descend two flights down well worn stone steps with this beautiful, invigorating light streaming in. Often, at the bottom of the stairs, a door is open looking out to the lavishly green, well kept landscape of the La Fabrique grounds. Two small potted trees with well-pruned, symmetrically spherical tops line each side of the doorway. They look like bonsai plants only too big, yet much smaller than regular trees. This attention to detail and the light, combined with staying in a large older house near the forests of south France gave the feeling of what I imagined it was like staying at the Prieuré, the school established by G.I. Gurdjieff in the early XXth Century in Fontainebleau.

One morning I noticed that the light even made the ordinary breakfast items: the bottles of juice, the bread, preserves, the cups, saucers and eating utensils appear magical, as if illuminated from within. I can't help but wonder what effect this light has on audio perception because, as I mentioned, it bathes the studio Control Room all day long.

St. Remy also has the distinction of being the birthplace of the famed visionary Nostradamus.

I will talk more about the incredibly talented artist I'm working with at another time when the project is complete.

Bear Comes Home

A counter-cultural icon, and ground breaking audio engineer, Augustus Owsley Stanley III aka Bear shuffled off his mortal coil after a car accident about a week ago in Australia.

Bear was the alchemist who brewed up the acid used in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests given by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the '60's. The Grateful Dead were the house band for these events. The Beatles and Hendrix also gained inspiration from his services and it reflected in their music.

Bear was also a sound engineer with the Dead for a number of years.

The New York Times obituary says about Owsley:

He also lent the era much of its sound, developing early, widely praised high-fidelity sound systems for live rock concerts, including the Dead’s towering “wall of sound.”


A highlite of my audio education at The Institute of Audio Research back in 1984 was a lecture by Dan Healy who was also an early, and long time engineer for the Dead. He talked about putting together sound systems starting in the mid-60's when sound reinforcement for music was unheard of. The only public address systems where designed for speeches and announcements. When the Beatles played Shea Stadium in 1964 the only sound reinforcement was the Voice of America loudspeakers used for announcements.

Healy talked about how a group of young audio researchers in the Bay area that included John Meyer of Meyer speakers and Dan Countryman collectively got together to figure out the most efficient ways for sound system designs to broadcast rock music in a loud, clean way. They were pioneers of audio design in the live sound field.

Healy mentioned that the Grateful Dead, rather than spending their money on yachts and other frivolities, invested their profits back into audio research and development. Bear did the same with the profits from his Brotherhood of Love ventures.

A few weeks after that lecture I experienced the latest Grateful Dead sound system, engineered by Healy at a concert in Giants Stadium by Bob Dylan and the Dead. The sound was incredible! Loud but with the smoothest mid-range, great for vocal clarity.

I don't own or know that many Grateful Dead recording's but one of my long-time favorites is a collection of live songs called Bear's Choice. It's mostly on the acoustic country blues side of things.

For anyone who may not know the pun, The Bear Comes Home, is a book by Rafi Zabor that I highly recommend to anyone interested in music and consciousness. I also feel it's not unrelated to some of the exploits of Augustus Owsley Stanley III.