Apocalypse Across the Italian Sky

Material and the Master Musicians of Jajouka going full tilt through the bardo....

From left to right: Graham Haynes - trumpet, Peter Apfelbaum - alto sax, flute, melodica, Aiyb Dieng - percussion, Hamid Drake - drums, Bill Laswell - bass, Bachir Attar - rhaita, gimbri, flute, Ahmed Bakhat -violin, Mustapha Attar - rhaita, dumbek, flute, Mohamed el Attar - tebel drum, Abdellah Bokhzar - tarija drum, rhaita  Not pictured: James Dellatacoma - bass and stage tech. Photo supplied by Ludmilla Faccenda.

Upon meeting us in the lobby of the Majestic Star Hotel in Torino, Italy, magician musician Bachir Attar pulled out 3 or 4 buttons showing the Jajouka Moroccan lion calligraphy design, each one a different color, and asked us to choose.  I saw this same forward thrust of energy the next day when he began playing the raspy high-pitched rhaita, the Moroccan mountain horn, introducing a musical induction and voyage through space. The drums kick in right away shaking the room without excessive volume, a second rhiata weaves in and around, along with and counter to Bachir. The rhaitas sound like different currents and eddies in a river of sound; the violin echoing and underscoring the melodic line, a nice warm opposite texture to the rhaitas.  Hamid and Aiyb join in on drums and percussion immediately opening up the rhythm to new dimensions of depth while keeping the same beat; they slide in and lift up the groove; sax and trumpet start with James Brownish melodic punctuations, a precursor of the funk that's about to unleash when Bill starts a bass line that ties everything together into a strong, coherent motion forward driving this musical engine through the night.  

These musicians, never having played together in this configuration, became a solid unit, a living musical entity with nothing more than about a half hour to forty minutes of playing together at soundcheck, and that was more about making sure the stage sounded right.  Bill had drawn up a structure of ideas for a set list.  Everything was improvised on the spot. There were shaky moments once or twice, but they always stayed aloft and kept going.  It did turn into magic, I lost all track of time.  When they stopped I thought it was way too soon, I couldn't believe that much time had gone by.

The Master Musicians, particularly Bachir,  know how to use their instruments to play calls - calls for whatever, there are a variety like the Enochian Angelic calls of Elizabethan and Golden Dawn fame.  Calls can be a special kind of prayer - not for the person making the call, for something else.  E.J. Gold has been playing calls on the didgeridoo every morning for the past few weeks.  I heard Bachir say, " I think it can make a difference" around the time he gave out the magic lion discs.

The rhaitas, flutes or gimbri make the calls with the violin support, though the violin will take the lead at times.  The drums greatly expand their capacity and throw with the Material drums and percussion like an overdrive thruster reaching much further and beyond.  The trumpet and sax become two tonal support pillars and alternate funkster melody corridors; sometimes they'll take the lead and play the call.  Sometimes even the bass will play a call.  Through strongly coherent low frequency communication the bass expands the whole operation planet wide.  I'll tell you how.

Humpback and blue whales can communicate thousands of miles using low frequency "whale songs" combined with an innate acoustical knowledge or map of the ocean's geological features to resonate and bounce the sound off of.  It's been said that a whale can communicate to another one on the other side of the world in under 9 minutes. I run the bass and drums through a  Kosmos Subharmonic synthesizer which amplifies the same 10 - 40Hz range that whales communicate in.  I love my work.

Music playing, word falling, photo falling breakthrough on the planet of violent robots; a temporary respite, but you have to start somewhere.  CNN reports the day after the Torino concert: "The truce in Eastern Ukraine is holding. (news anchor sounding pleasantly surprised)." The government in Kiev passes resolutions giving concessions to the rebels described as holding out an olive branch.  Italy is famous for it's olive groves rife with branches.  Ginger Baker, another world drummer with strong African roots, retired to an olive farm atop a hill until called back into service by John Lydon and Bill Laswell.   Michael Corleone finds a little peace on his family's olive farm in Italy in the Godfather.  Livia is an Italian girls name derived from Olive or Olivia as in Anna Livia Plurabelle, the overarching female presence in Finnegans Wake.  At the end of the documentary series, The Untold History of the U.S., Oliver Stone, remarking on the disease of constant war, says that we need to feminize the world.  Associations across the sky like meandering rhaita lines calling healing baraka force into manifest existence.

It began with the Moroccan lion.  At the Egypytian Museum in Torino, the largest outside of Cairo, I discover its collection had dozens of  large statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet housed in two dark rooms with walls of black mirrors creating an atmosphere of infinite dark corridors through the underworld. The statues lit up standing in majestic silent presence.  They came from the temple of a Pharoah who had commissioned 365 seated and 365 standing statues of Sekhmet, one for each day of the year.  Now that's what I call protection. She was a warrior goddess, a healer, and  a protector of Pharoahs especially in war.  Pharoah Saunders was originally booked to play these shows, but couldn't make it.  He would have felt right at home.

Minutes before Bachir arrived with the lion buttons, just after saying hello to Cherie Nutting and James, Bill Laswell gave me four more Sun Ra cds: Sun Ra Visits Egypt, John Cage meets Sun Ra, Cosmo Funkmythology - The Last Studio Recordings, and Second Star to the Right ( Salute to Walt Disney) as well as new book by Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography.  On page 3 Jodorowsky talks about his introduction to the tarot which would become such an important vehicle for him:

"...but what fascinated me most was a rectangle inside which a princess, wearing a three-pointed crown and seated on a throne, was carresing a lion that rested its head on her knees.  The animal had an expression of profound intelligence combined with an extreme gentleness... Concealed beneath a floorboard the card STRENGTH became my secret treasure.  In the strength of my innocence, I fell in love with the princess.

The next page, Jodorowsky tells a story of going to "the circus of the Human Eagles" with his father who had been a performer at one time.  One of the clowns placed a lion cub in his arms that lead to a strong experience which he recounts.  Jodo says that he absorbed his animal energy.  These coincidences with lions recalls Robert Anton Wilson's Coincidance - A Head Test where lion symbolism pops up here and there in regard to it's designation as one of the animals of Tiphareth.

If a tape recorder had been running the first night at dinner an incredible book of inside music stories could have been written.  Graham Haynes, automatically jazz royalty being the son of drummer Roy Haynes and, according to Bill, perhaps currently the best trumpet player around these days, tells a number of Coltrane and Ornette Coleman stories.  Alice Coltrane told Graham about the  three month process John had gone through writing A Love Supreme.  Another time Coltrane took a harmony lesson from Ornette paying him $100 by check.  Ornette kept and framed the check.  Bill mentions seeing B3 organist Larry Young play in Lifetime, Emergency!  The description of Young's playing in the encyclopedia also helps describe the music of Material/Jajouka so I'll include it here:

His characteristic sound involved management of the stops on the Hammond organ, producing overtone series that caused an ethereal, drifting effect; a sound that is simultaneously lead and background

Later, Bill was at a club in New York waiting to hear Larry Young debut with his new band when word came that he had died enroute to the gig.

The evening ended for me shortly after Ludmilla Faccenda, the promoter of these shows, and general guide to our time in Italy told me about the Egyptian treasures and the Shroud of Turin both within walking distance of the hotel.

The Egyptian Museum had several original hieroglyphic scrolls from the ancient texts collectively known as the Papyrus of Ani, popularly called The Egyptian Book of the Dead.  The ancient Egyptian name for these writings transliterates into English as Utterances of Going Forth By Day.  Another translation calls it The Book of Emerging Forth into the Light.  They were in very good condition for the most part, much color still present.  These writings played a significant role inspiring the Hermetic Magic of the Golden Dawn.  I scanned some of the instructions ( they call them spells) into my tricorder for possible use as navigational guidance for tonight's concert. 

The museum also had a carved stone block from the temple of the renegade Pharoah Akenhaten.  It had a large hieroglyph of a hawk carved into it among a few other figures, the solar Horus hawk was the most prominent.  I tried to psychometrize it with no apparent success... or so I thought at the time.

On the way to the museum, up a narrow side-street which turned into a pedestrian walkway, I cast an audio net fishing for sound with two silver omnidirectional microphones attached to a portable Tascam PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) recorder.  Recording street sounds you often hear nothing unusual then suddenly an interesting bell will strike, or some random poetic conversation will drift by, perhaps a loud boom with great natural reverb will sound out and you will have captured a rare audio event, landed a fish in your net.  The walk to Ancient Egypt was particularly musical that day - a string quartet playing Beethoven's 5th in front of a fashion shop, a guitarist playing Andres Segovia guitar runs on a quiet, but overdriven electric guitar.  A trumpet player with a clean, pure tone had found a post on the far side of the ground level museum entrance where the walkway becomes very narrow before opening up into a small square.  He would play some phrases down the narrow corridor then swing his horn 180 degrees to play into the square.  I recorded both sides. 

The audio net was out in the museum, pcm'ed ambience the whole time in it and also read the catalog descriptions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead texts into the record.  Thankfully, there were English translations.

Mine is the radiance wherin Ptah floateth over his firmament.  I travel upon high!  I tread upon the firmament of Nu!  I raise a flashing flame with the lightening of my eye, ever rushing onward in the splendor of the daily glorified Ra, giving my life to the dwellers on Earth.

Found a large square two streets over on the way back to the hotel, a medieval church with ornate statutory at one end, and a percussion troupe doing it's thing at the other. People, not a whole lot, milling about or drinking cappucinos in one of the outdoor cafes.  I recorded these drummers at varying distances from right up close to the other end of the square for a variety of acoustical pictures.  The weather was perfect this day. 

Teatro Regio Torino ( the Royal Theater) is a 1500 seat venue that normally hosts operas and symphonic concerts.  They rarely use sound reinforcement I was told.  I can believe it, the Front of House sound mixing area was at the very back, but you could hear someone whispering on stage when it was quiet.  The sound projected well.  This made for a loud stage volume, but it wasn't so bad as all the instruments were acoustic except for the bass which carried everything.  The slightly domed ceiling had what looked like a few hundred narrow glass tubes of varying lengths attached to disperse standing waves. 

The concert starts with Bachir's rhaita calling, a secular muezzin call instantly transforming (trance forming) the chamber into a sacred mosque inner sanctum holy ground space vehicle. The theater is instantly alive as one unified entity begins jelling into motion slowly but surely lifting itself across the sky -  another Funkadelic Mothership Connection this time via North Africa.  Music is one way for God to say, "here I am."  The sound is rumbling, cavernous, but also defined and clear, crystalline percussion, warm, solid articulate drum kit; the low end of the bass reaching subterranean depths but never boomy or obscuring.  When the appreciative audience claps their approval they sound like a crowd of thousands roaring from a distant city thanks to the echoing acoustics.

Hamid Drake, Bill Laswell, Bachir Attar, Ahmed Bakhat, and Mustapha Attar.

photo by Cherie Nutting

The music is dynamic, sometimes apocalyptically loud, then later it gets tender, as delicate as a butterfly's gossamer wings when the Moroccans pull out their bamboo flutes weaving hypnotic melodies then joined by Peter playing a western transverse flute with its clear, angelic tone.  Bachir pulls out a gimbri for one song, its rich warm plucked tone guiding the spaceship in another direction.  Naturally, there were dub beats and bass lines which the Jajoukans sounded right at home with.

I had breakfast with Peter that morning and he reminisced about when Timothy Leary, a family friend, used to visit when Peter was a child growing up in Berkeley.  Leary would bring a bamboo flute and play with Peter on the drums.  I suspect this had some kind of subliminal influence on Peter's flute playing.  This is the first I've heard of Leary playing a musical instrument.  Apfelbaum has warm memories of his time with Tim, he was like a friendly Uncle who made time to be with the kids.  It's nice to hear something positive and human about this controversial figure who would later get demonized by the media as the LSD guru.  Leary visited Jajouka, so its fitting to my associative mind that Peter would eventually share the stage with the Master Musicians.  Leary's other significant contribution to planetary evolution the SMI²LE formula (Space Migration + Intelligence Increase + Life Extension) also describes the metaphysical effect that these Material shows had.


This band was challenging to mix especially at the start partly because it was a new combination of musicians playing improvised music; they were finding their own mix on stage.  It was made easier by the fact that the instruments had distinct ranges, distinct frequency bands of their own.  Everything sounded clear and separated, but cohesive.  I suspect that not having any electric guitars helped.

Random comments: Hamid and Ayib often play like twins who came out of the same womb, four hands and four feet, two central nervous systems energetically linked to form a single drum and percussion entity.  More of a media event than I am used to; rave reviews in the papers the next day.  The audience looks older and conservative yet they respond enthusiastically establishing a strong rapport; looks can be deceiving.  No one complains about the volume even when it's thundering across the sky.

Post concert dinner begins at midnight, a restaurant stays open specially for us run by a short gregarious Italian matron and two younger staff who might be her son and daughter.  We are seated at a single very long table.  Across from me are the four Jajoukans who are not Bachir.  We don't have a common verbal language, they speak Arabic yet there is communication of sorts between us.  As everyone else makes conversation, they sit silently and patiently not even talking amongst themselves, nor do they look bored.  They remind me of monks with that kind of reserve and discipline.  They are master musicians even offstage.

Bachir, with the help of Cherie talks about all the musicians who have made the pilgrimage to Morocco to meet him and his musical family and soak in the Jajouka vibe.  It started with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones who was brought there by Brion Gysin.  Later Bill remarks that if Gysin hadn't liked the music of Jajouka we might never have heard of them. Several years later Mick and Keith and the rest of the Stones made it as far as Tangier.  Ornette Coleman recorded in Jajouka; recently the Jajoukans reciprocated playing at the tribute to Ornette held at Prospect Park in Brooklyn as part of Celebrate Brooklyn.  Donovan made it to Jajouka and became friends with Bachir and Cherie.  A band called Happy Mondays holed up there for awhile and they were expecting another one called Zero Magnetic Attraction to visit not long after returning home.  Bachir tells a story of the time Jimmy Page visited, in the early '70s I guess, and no one knew who he was.  Page drove up in an expensive black car got out, pulled out a bunch of hash which he set on a table then was immediately asked to leave.  He didn't identify himself and the villagers thought he was a drug dealer, so he left without a fuss.  Some years later Bachir  recognized him at a restaurant in Paris and walked up to him saying, "I know you, you were in Jajouka."  Page just laughed.  Someone told  Bachir who it was and that's when he discovered the identity of this mysterious visitor to his home village some time ago.

The next morning we drive to Milan for a concert the following night.  I spend the afternoon writing then take a long walk in the Chinatown neighborhood around the hotel fishing for sound.  A short poem by Kerouac from Some of the Dharma illustrates this scene:

It's Saturday morning in China, and I see the fantastic blossom
          sparkling in the emptiness,
              and intuition smiles brightly everywhere -
                  the jewel in the lotus,
                       the transparent crystal clearness of the world.

Another gorgeous day of perfect weather.

Before soundcheck the next afternoon I give Graham, Aiyb and Hamid copies of a cd I recorded and produced of the piano jazz trio Too Noisy Fish.  Hamid reads the lettering as God Noisy Fish, not an inappropriate mistake likely a result of years of zikhr and music; what might whimsically get called a Jungian slip. 

A new guide from the Milano festival organization, Francesca Scarinci, joins us in Milan to escort the group to the theater.  Francesca resembles the woman in Jodorowsky's STRENGTH card, the same eyes. Flirting has been outlawed in the Higher Dimensions, but spiritual contact goes beyond gender and says hello to the night. I tread upon the firmament of Nu. 

We play this night at Teatro Manzoni situated in the center of Milan's fashion district and tonight is the first night of Fashion Week.  The street in front of the theater is closed to automobile traffic.  We have about a 3 hour break after the soundcheck so I go for a walk.  If there's a prevailing new fashion I can't tell what it is from the celebrants in the street.  Lots of people looking very original in this low key European festival atmosphere.  It didn't feel at all pretentious, frivolous or overly serious.  I took a respite outside a jogging park eating a fish sandwich, drinking cappuccinos, writing poetry and taking notes.  Mother Notte showing her finest wares in a pageant of color and style - "the beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in town."

I left through the backstage doors with assurances that I could easily get back in.  Upon returning the doors were locked, no one was around and there wasn't a buzzer or intercom in sight.  The main entrance to the Manzoni is accessed through a gallery on another street.  It could have taken some time to find it in the festive chaos of the fashionistas.  As I was banging on the doors, an Ethiopian live sound engineer now living in Rome, alas I didn't note his name, asked if I needed help and directed me to the entrance. The concert T-shirt I was wearing clued him in to my intention.

It's been my experience that when something positive is trying to manifest a certain amount of resistance springs up presenting an obstacle to overcome.  This happened right away for me when a nail punctured my tire less than five minutes after I left for the San Francisco airport.  The tires had been rotated and check just the day before.  I went to put a spare on, but there was no jack to be found in the vehicle.  Drove back to the farm where I live, borrowed a jack from Patricia and was soon on my way.  As I was leaving she said, "That's it, no more bad travel karma for you on this trip." Her words proved to be right, travel for the rest of the trip went unusually smoothly.  There wasn't even any air turblance along the roughly 12,000 miles I flew there and back.

The other major piece of resistance occurred at the start of the concert in Milan.  When the full band kicked in the sound was much brighter and louder than at soundcheck.  I adjust to compensate for this.  Five minutes into the concert, Max, the house sound tech tells me I have to turn down because people are leaving.  This sounds like BS to me, people will say anything to you to get you to do what they want, but I attempt to compromise.  Not good enough though, Ludmilla steps into the booth and very nicely asks me to turn it down.  By this time the band is naturally playing a little quieter made obvious to me by the fact that she's talking to me in at a normal conversational level and I can hear her easily a few feet away.  Then I notice LED lights on a processor activating to indicate that the whole system is being compressed.  That wasn't happening at the soundcheck.  I look at this piece of gear and see that it's a TC Finalizer which is normally used to master recordings at the final stage before manufacturing them enmasse.    I work with the software version of this box, the TC Masterworks when mastering in the studio and I know that when you lower the threshold to bring on more compression, the sound actually gets louder and brighter.  Basically, what's going on is that while I'm trying to contain the volume, he is making it louder and brighter while believing that the added compression will lower the volume.  So I lean close to him and calmly say in a command tone, "will you please back off the compression?"  Max gets a little agitated and reaches over pushing a button on the box saying, "there, I've bypassed it, no more compression at all!"  As soon as the bypass switch activated the sound immediately got quieter, warmer and the mix sounded much more open.  I was very grateful, this was more than I asked for.  When the mix got a bit more settled I took a walk around the theater, nearly going right up to the stage to hear for myself how loud it sounded.  I was admittedly mixing at rock concert  (but not heavy metal) levels, however the Master Musicians have been called a 4000 year old rock 'n roll by no less than William Burroughs and who am I, or anyone, to argue with Burroughs on this point?

If I may be permitted a slight rant.  I see the volume issue as another indication that eyesight has a far more dominant role than hearing in our culture by the fact that no one thinks twice about wearing sunglasses when the light is too bright yet most people can't even conceive that the same kind of sensory attenuation can reduce sound pressure levels by wearing ear plugs and adjusting them for optimal volume.  Maybe it's because sunglasses make a fashion statement while reducing light that's too loud.  So I call upon the fashion designers of the world to make ear plugs a fashion accessory ... ok, maybe that's ridiculous, but it doesn't seem absurd to ask people to learn how to change their own reality in this regard instead of expecting something external to do it for them.  If going to a concert that might get too loud for you, bring ear plugs and don't be afraid to use them if necessary.

The concert was completely different from the one in Torino.  Just as powerful, intense and time warping, but musically something else.  I have recordings of both shows.  Audience response felt even more enthusiastic in the sold-out house  No one seemed put off by the volume and it seemed like the theater was just as full as the start of the show. One notable difference between the two shows occurred when the Master Musicians left the stage and walked through the audience playing while Material held the groove.  The last time I saw that was at a Sun Ra concert in the East Village circa early '80s.

The Milan concert was even more of a media event.  Bill and Bachir shot a pre-concert interview segment with a popular Italian TV personality who seemed genuinely interested in the music.  Imagine seeing something like this on David Letterman ... I don't think so, not yet anyway.  Two camera crews shared the sound booth with me one for Web TV, the other for the mainstream network running the interview.  They were both provided audio feeds from the board.   There was another clip made for the internet that unfortunately sounds like they used the camera mic to record the sound and the video image is much more low resolution.  Here's a clip with the good audio and picture:

Despite not having much rest the past few days and being jet lagged, I felt incredibly energized.  Stayed up all night writing then packed for an early pick-up to the airport.  Said goodbye to Bill, James and Aiyb in the lobby, we were going to different airports.  Aiyb got a little emotional, but then so did I.

Stopped at a traffic light alone in the back seat of the taxi, the early morning sun  shining through, my state calm, but definitely altered from the music and working all night, everything combined in that moment to produce an experience I've only felt this completely a few times before.  It only lasted the minute or so we stayed at the light, but seemed much longer when I was there,  I can't describe it, but Jack Kerouac comes close:

The form of emptiness which has taken the form of form, is what you see and hear and feel right now, and what you taste and think as you read this.  Wait awhile, close your eyes, let your breathing stop three seconds or so, listen to the inside silence in the womb of the world, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, re-recognize the bliss you forgot, the emptiness and essence and ecstasy of ever having been and ever to be the golden eternity.  This is the lesson you forgot.

 - Sutra 14, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity.

Until next time ...

To Exercise Will - A Position Paper

Every morning whenever possible I go to the local gym to exercise the physical body that carries me around.  The gym has plenty of treadmills, weights, and body-building machines to address all the muscle groups.  Personal trainers are on hand for those who wish for guidance with a physical fitness program.  Anyone can walk in off the street, sign-up and slowly begin to transform their physical body into something more efficient.  Anyone.  It's not all that difficult to build muscles.

A sizeable culture of health, wellness and physical fitness has sprung up as predicted by rascal philosopher Timothy Leary in his 8 circuit model of the development of the human nervous system  published in The Game of Life and elsewhere.

We see the results of extreme body development in competitive sports.  The art, science, and sometimes grace of going for the max with the body.  I'm not suggesting to go and do this only making the point that the physical vehicle - circuit 1 (C1) in Leary's model, can develop far beyond ordinary capacity through consistent practice and exercise.  I'm stating the obvious.

The same gets said regarding the intellectual mind, the intellect. It can learn and develop far beyond ordinary capacity through consistent challenging use. Vast institutions of learning, Halls of Science, think-tanks, research laboratories and schools of all kinds exist to develop and expand our intellectual capabilities.  There are all kinds of ways to get smarter.

It seems so easy to develop the body and/or intellect if one is so inclined and has sufficient economic means.  When walking on the treadmill I always read a book.  Realizing I could catch up on reading is what got me addicted to exercise in the first place.  I don't read anything extremely difficult, but get a lot from what I do read and it passes the time enjoyably.

To continue with Doc Leary's model we shall take one step back and view it as Gurdjieff did.  He said that ordinary (wo)man has the potential  to have three "brains" or centers operating: the physical, emotional, and intellectual centers.  However ordinarily only 2 and 1/2 work, because the emotional centrum almost always remains little developed compared to what it could be.  Hopefully things have changed since Gurdjieff''s time, but they haven't changed enough.  According to a Professor Amaral at a convention about Gurdjieff and Steve Jobs:

Mr. Gurdjieff identified the second, emotional brain as 'atrophied,' characterizing this as the chief cause of war. 

The future of human life depends on Man's ability to bridge this gap and to reconcile the rapidly accelerating technological innovation since Maxwell, beginning 1875. Apple, Inc.'s products can generally be understood as focusing, amplifying and facilitating tools for the growth and expansion of emotional-brain capacity. Apple's tremendous success in the marketplace can be seen as an existence-proof of the effectiveness of this strategy. This success may now be in jeopardy."

Damn right about the jeopardy! With the Third World War possibly brewing in the Baltics, and horrendous inhumanities done in the name of ISIS, the Islamic State, in their reality tunnel throwback to the savagery and brutality of the Middle Ages as just two examples.  Obama looks greyer every day. I know Amaral wasn't talking about the World Situation, but the collapse of (so-called) economic order or a World War would likely hurt Apple sales too!

Computers may very well potentially focus, amplify and facilitate the growth and expansion of emotional brain capacity and though it may have effectively helped sell and brand Apple products, so far no evidence can be seen of any significant change in the collective emotional brain on a global scale.  If anything, the possibility of a planet-wide war increases.

So how can the fitness minded citizen amplify the emotional brain?  I seriously doubt it will be through social media, which brings up another point to get to in a second.  Knowledge of the mechanics and operation of the emotional centrum is so obscure and buried to the mainstream that most people aren't even aware that it can be made to function more consciously and efficiently.  The point of bringing up the gym is to show by comparison that the emotional center of humans can be exercised and strengthened far beyond its common half-life state.  However, that doesn't answer the question.

Let's restate the question or problem working off of Prof. Amaral's formulation:  How can the fitness minded citizen amplify and focus the growth, expansion and radiation of the emotional brain?  In Thelemic terminology this is called "love under will" when done in alignment with all the brain circuits.

To answer the question or solve the problem we must define better what we mean by emotions.  What we wish to get to has been called higher emotions or real emotions but both terms seem misleading in some way, they don't really catch it ... only approximately, probably due to the difficulty of using words.  Leary's 8 circuit model provides a clearer picture.  He connects each of the basic 4 ordinary human animal circuits with a more refined non-human circuit.  Circuit 1, the physical, is the base for Circuit 5, somatic intelligence.  Circuit 2, the emotions, is the ground and foundation for the 6th Circuit which Leary called "The Neuro-Electric" in The Game of Life.  There are other names for it, but what you call it doesn't matter a great deal.  Leary was a qabalist, his whole model is qabalistically based, and if you learn about, taste and experience the emotions associated with the 6th key, the domain of Tiphareth - the usual ones associated with Christ, Buddha, Krishna etc ( see Crowley's 777, or Skinner's Complete Magician's Tables for a full list of correspondences with Tiphareth.) compassion for all, etc. you'll get a notion of C6 emotions.

The range of emotions experienced in the usual 2nd circuit are more like sentiments than emotions.  Shallow, superficial  emotions of the Hallmark card variety without much resonance or conscious attention.   Sentimentality has no radiance beyond a few inches and seems a damaging waste of time to the alchemist.

After writing the last paragraph I broke for the night.  Recording E.J. Gold the following morning doing his morning didgeridoo session on internet TV, he made some interesting comments related to C2: 

Everybody's working on getting hold of the negativity, getting the negativity out and the positive stuff in and getting things working and so on.  And there's all this neurosis kind of obsession - especially Americans, Western Europeans have also - this obsession with the inside of yourself - am I doing right? Am I put together properly or am I a mess? And ... chaos inside.  The chaotic interior is NORMAL for people because you're built chaotically, you're not built structurally in any kind of sensible way.  What happens is that your experience, as life unfolds for you, your experiences are sort of chaotic coming in and so your learning process is chaotic.  Psychologists today do not understand  that the learning process is a chaotic process.  It's an overlay of chaos, chaotic information which sorts itself out by emotional tags.

And it's weird because you can have this thing happen that triggers off these emotional triggers, that triggers off this reaction where you remember - you may not even know you're remembering it, but you relive, your body relives all the body reactions from some event and so forth..."

This emphasis on the 2nd brain shouldn't be mistaken for concentrating effort on that area alone.  It's just that this seems the most neglected, overlooked, and least understood part of the human psyche.  To reach and consistently maintain position in the 6th circuit, the non-human side of C2, requires the equilibrium, balance and focus of all the centers working in both unison and harmony.  Also, it seems wise to remember this remains only a model in an attempt to describe or point to something way beyond words.  It's not as compartmentalized as it sounds when you start differentiating between the various aspects of the human machine.  The boundaries are fuzzy.  They actually get fuzzier as the centers fuse.

Working with the aim of fully opening the heart chakra, as C6 also gets called, requires a great deal of Will, conscious, focused intention and .... lessee, oh I forgot ..... oh yeah,  memory!  "Remember yourself" are the 4th Way watch words.  Thelemites call the full realization of C6, the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.  They say it's the seat of True Will; generally speaking, the knowledge of one's path and purpose in life.  That's consistent with Castenada's shamanic cosmology (wherever he got it from) when he wrote, paraphrasing from memory - "when at the crossroads deciding where to go, always follow the path with heart."  Sufis and various Eastern mystics call it the awakening of essence or being.

The fulcrum, the backbone, the guts of Will is attention.  Similar to the physical, emotional and mental circuits, attention acts like a muscle group that responds to exercise by becoming strong.  Anyone of reasonable health can make their attention bigger and more fit as easy as walking in a gym and using the exercise machines.  You can work out and buff up your attention just as much as any muscle group on your physical body.

Now here's some incentive though it likely won't be believed until experienced.  Strengthening attention acts as a form of life extension.  Attention slows down time, or, if you like, slows down the perception of time ... same thing as far as the body's aging mechanisms are concerned.  You hear about people in car accidents saying that everything went into slow motion during the accident.  This is because the crisis reflexively triggers attention far beyond normal.  Time seems to slow down as the velocity of brain activity speeds up.  This can be more subtly noticed in learning a new activity or the protocols of a new situation such as the first day on the job.  Everything happens very fast as you struggle to learn and keep up.  As you learn the ropes, the pace of activity slows to a manageable rate.  The so-called learning curve is a gathering, concentration and crystalization of attention related to the new subject or activity.  Experienced music producers can hear more in one playback of a song than the average listener because they've increased and trained their listening attention to an advanced degree such that the music doesn't go by as fast as it does to the untrained ear.

How to open the lotus flower of the sixth circuit remains mostly an occult activity.  Occult means hidden.  It doesn't mean dark or scary it means hidden.  It's my wish to make this knowledge less occult.  In Crowley's system the student is initially instructed to devote all their practices and magick to the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.  Though a somewhat archaic term for activating C6, it does reveal an aspect of that circuit not so obvious until experienced which is that the intuition becomes quite pronounced and expanded to a point where it can seem like a dialogue with an external Greater Intelligence.  Maybe that gives some idea about how foreign to common experience C6 will seem.

Esoteric schools such as Crowley's and the like serve as one kind of gymnasium for exercising Will and Attention; for activating and establishing a foothold in the non-human circuits slowly bringing to realization the hidden potentials of WoMan.  Participation in these schools doesn't necessarily require joining any organization.  You can do it from your home.  It can be as easy as walking in and out of a gym where you do as much or as little exercise as you like.

The eclectic approach to enlightenment gained currency in modern times through the efforts of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists to find a consistent inner truth threading through all religions and mythologies, the so-called perennial philosophy.  Crowley used this eclectic approach to marry Eastern Mysticism with Western Hermeticism and Alchemy to create his system of magick.  It also includes elements borrowed from various philosophers and poets, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, modern psychology and physics among other things as well as a great deal of his dry humor.  Gurdjieff's school was similarly syncretic weaving a variety of sources together into a system of personal development. 

Still, how do we do this?  Unfortunately, we don't have a stock answer.  Every individual requires an individual approach.  We are only here to say that it can be done.  By anyone.  Yet everyone has to find their own way.  A wide variety of methodologies and exercises are out there.  Find what suits and works for you.  In the '60's one of Timothy Leary's advertisements for enlightenment urged everyone to "Create Your Own Religion."  In other words, take full advantage of the eclectic approach.  I read where Iggy Pop used to practice yoga while listening to heavy metal music.  That's what worked for him.  Tailoring and utilizing the eclectic approach to suit one's temperment and life goals is one meaning of Crowley's instruction: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

The fine arts, creative arts in general is another major avenue for exercising the feeling centrum.  Some music, dance, theater, poetry, literature, paintings etc. can make us really feel.  Acquiring expertise in any of those fields either as creator, consumer or both, refines and increases aesthetic appreciation all around.  A high aesthetic, meaning a developed sense of beauty reflexively illuminates the heart.

Read great books that stir the soul, fall in love with everything and write poetry meant to move your beloved to unknown heights and depths.  Take a cue from Sonny Rollins and play the saxophone from the Williamsburg Bridge in the dead of night or something similar.  Any creative endeavor can tap and stimulate the intelligence of the heart as can taking in symphonies or concerts, plays and films.  Certainly not all of them, maybe only a minimum percentage, but C2 like all the circuits does behave like a "brain" with it's own intuition and instinct.

In the film Beetlejuice we see a metaphor for a newly born non-human intelligence ( the Maitlands, the dead couple) having to develop skills and functions in the strange new territory ( the Bardo) they find themselves in.  Their guide Juno suggests: 

 "Start simply, do what you know, use your talents, practice."

Strange new territory succinctly describes the vistas and valleys, highways and byways encountered on the way to full C6 blossoming.  Like a stranger in a strange land.  Heinlein in that book (Stranger...) gives a formula of attainment in the protagonist's name: Valentine (heart)  Michael (fire) Smith (anyone/everyone).

Real changes will start to occur as the feeling centrum catches up with the body and mind in functionality.   Empathy may start to get experienced more often as sensitivity increases.  Another  side effect is the awakening of conscience toward the bigger picture.  A Gurdjieff website writes:

The need for the awakening of conscience is a primary theme of Beelzebub’s Tales, especially given the horrors of the situation, with humankind engaging in the processes of reciprocal destruction, war and animal slaughter, and producing an increasingly inferior quality of Askokin vibrations.

Askokin vibrations are what the Beach Boys were singing about in Good Vibrations; very much a C6 product.

Gurdjieff assigns a central role to the awakening of conscience in the alchemy of transformation.  Conscience is a state in which a human “feels all at once everything that he in general feels and can feel.”  (Ouspensky, 1949)  This form of feeling together serves to unify an individual’s presence, overcoming the inner inconsistencies and contradictions maintained by “buffers” or defences.

It will be observed that Conscience, as defined here to be capability of feeling, expands with practice although this might not be noticed day to day.  Sometimes it can feel like nothing there.  Progress isn't linear yet all efforts are cumulative.  It can feel dry for weeks at a time.  However, one's progress can get verified and tested.  For example, the next time you get stopped by a cop, remember yourself enough to make silent being contact with them by however you do it and see what happens.  Children and pets can also be good for this kind of feedback.

Crowley's contribution was to join Will and Love.  His system is called Thelema, an ancient Greek word for Will that adds up to 93 by Greek numerology.  Agape, a Greek word for Divine Love also adds to 93 hence the identity.  Also, the Thelemic complementary pair: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" and "Love is the law, love under will" unite Love and Will in a potential dyadic cyclone of activity.

Unfortunately these days it's hard to write anything about "love" as the word has been sentimentalized to death while being co-opted by a new age love and light crowd that use the idea of it as a form of self-calming.  It may again be helpful to refer back to the Greeks with their three types of love: Philos (brotherly/sisterly love), Eros (romantic love), and Agape (sacred love). 

Love under will indicates that it can get intentionally directed.  Focused attention emanating from the heart drives the intention.  Love can be considered a substance that can be placed anywhere.  It's a form of communication.  Handle with care.

Material 2014: Bill Laswell and the Master Musicians of Jajouka

Hindus say that Brahman created the Universe out of sound, the primal sound OM.
A primal sound resplendent in multitudinous variety. Concerts can become great cathedrals of sound lifting spirits to the heights.  Music acts as a carrier wave, a direct connect contact point to the infinite eternal in its multitudinous variety, forging new tunnels into alternate dimensions, gateways into realms of choice-points where magick works most effectively ...when fully present with the sound.

"In the ears of the Buddha as he thus sat in brilliant and sparkling craft of intuition, so that light like Transcendental Milk dazzled in the invisible dimness of his closed eyelids was heard the unvarying pure hush of the sighing sea of hearing, seething, receding, as he more or less recalled the consciousness of the sound, though in itself it was always the same steady sound, only his consciousness of it varied and receded ... (Wake Up by Jack Kerouac p. xxv)

A third force arises when two other elements, forces, or currents combine resulting in a unit far more powerful than the sum of the individual parts.  This effect is known as synergy.  When done intentionally it's magick.

Bill Laswell and his band Material - Hamid Drake, Aiyb Dieng, Peter Apfelbaum, and Graham Haynes will join forces with Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka for two unique concert events, September 14th in Turin, Italy and September 16th in Milan.  The Master Musicians meet master musicians.

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Sound can act as a painkiller.  It can also act as a timekiller which also eases pain.
To be fully present with the music, right there with the musicians as they use a rhythmic harmonic sound vibration structure to go out of ordinary time and into space.  Waking up fully kills the chattering associative mind and accelerates consciousness.  Sound can wake you up.  The Tibetan Book of the Dead aka The Bardo Thodol  means liberation by hearing.  Liberation kills pain.

As accelerated consciousness approaches the speed of light, time slows down and can even stop as per Einstein's Relativity observations and conclusions.  This temporarily, however long it lasts, slows down and can even stop the brain's time-released aging program.  Waking up = Life Extension as per my current observations and conclusions.  Come listen to a great concert, get taken on an induction voyage out of time and into space and perhaps live longer!  The formula goes: presence with great music ⇒ waking up (death of brain chatter) ⇒ longer life.

The Master Musicians have been conjuring Boujeloud, their representation of Pan, for hundreds of years connecting it to a tradition thousands of years old.  Pan = all  therefore cognate with OM  sometimes known as OM the timekiller.  OM the painkiller.

The Master Musicians connect directly with Sufism.  From their website:

It is generally accepted that Jajouka owes the origins of its magical healing music and continued existence to the learned saint Sidi Ahmed Sheikh, who came from Persia around 800 A.D., to spread Islam to northern Morocco. His tomb is both the spiritual and geographic center of the village of Jajouka. ...

(Sidi Ahmed Sheikh) was invited to Jajouka by the Attar family. He was a great lover of music and formed a close bond with the people of the village and never left. In exchange for teaching him their special music, Sidi Ahmed Sheikh taught the musicians his metaphysical techniques of spiritual healing and blessed them with his baraka, which is now transferred to people through the Masters’ music.

Combine that with Material, expand and transfer it to the world and beyond. An ancient musical tradition alchemically blending with musicians creating future traditions who meet in the present.  "Bill Laswell presents..." as the poster with the Moroccan lion says.  Creating a music that's never been heard before, a once in a lifetime.experience.  Unique, like the Grateful Dead playing at the Pyramids in Egypt, though I don't know how that went?

"... the sound neither outside nor within the ear but everywhere the pure sea of hearing, the Transcendental Sound of Nirvana heard by children in cribs and on the moon and in the heart of howling storms, and in which the young Buddha now heard a teaching going on, a ceaseless instruction wise and clear from all the Buddhas of Old that had come before him and all the Buddhas a-Coming. Beneath the distant cricket howl additional noises like the involuntary peep of sleeping dream birds, or scutters of little fieldmice or a vast breeze in the trees disturbed this peace of this Hearing, but the noises were merely accidental, the Hearing received all noises and accidents in its sea but remained as ever undisturbed, truly unpenetrated and neither replenished nor diminished as self-pure as empty space.  Under blazing stars the King of the Law, enveloped in the divine tranquility of this Transcendental Sound of the Diamond Ecstasy, rested moveless. (Wake Up by Jack Kerouac p. xxv-xxvi)

The Attar lineage, now present in Bachir Attar, the leader of the band, shares its name with another Sufi mystic, Farid al-Din Attar who wrote The Conference of the Birds. No direct connection appears known between the two Attar branches yet this profoundly wise Sufi classic nicely complements the Masters' music and vice versa.  The invocation of Pan and the search for the Simorgh in the book have similarities.  Material also has a healthy Sufi influence.  In the case of a concert, the Simorgh, when experienced = the collective unity of the band and audience.

photo by Cherie Nutting

This excellent photo gives a sense of the multidimensional nature of the music.  

Join Bill Laswell, Material, The Master Musicians of Jajouka, myself, and possibly a harmonically induced Angelic choir in Italy for the next major event in the annals of music.

Aleister Crowley - Magick, Rock and Roll, and The Wickedest Man in the World

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name

But what's puzzling you is just the nature of my game

- Sympathy for the Devil, The Rolling Stones

Aleister Crowley - Magick, Rock and Roll, and The Wickedest Man in the World, by Gary Lachman is the latest bio on ole Beastie to come out.  I was going to pass on it having read every other bio on Big Al I could get my hands on, but then considered there might be a good look at Crowley's immense influence on rock and roll from a qualified source who had played in a band I liked.  The author is the bass player from Blondie.  I'm very glad I changed my mind.  I'm finding this to be the most engimatic of all the Crowley biographies apart from his own autobiography.

Superficially and ostensibly, this book aggressively brands Crowley in the persona I call " the demon Crowley" ie his popular legend of living as a drug addled black magician pursuing Satanism and Evil without regard for anyone but himself and just all around being an egotistic naughty boy.  This is the Crowley most of the public knows, if they've heard of him at all, due to John Symonds publication of The Great Beast in 1952.  Symonds was clearly biased and prejudiced against Crowley, but nonetheless this image caught on, an image that Crowley had helped foster to some extent.  In this new bio, Lachman calls Symonds' book "flawed" but still feels it's the best Crowley bio out there.  Israel Regardie called Symonds, "that most hostile biographer."

AC -MRRTWMW seems the spiritual heir of Symonds' book, but taken to the next level.  It appears by far the most negative biography about Crowley and everything he stood for.  The demon Crowley gets fully evoked in all its dark and dreary counterglory.  Through very clever selective perception, much judgement and amateur psychological evaluation this perspective paints a picture that seems far blacker than Symonds. Damning comments from his diaries seem taken out of context in this case against him.  Eyewitness accounts by anyone who ever had anything bad to say about Crowley get stacked up against him.  The writing, however, goes far beyond the citation and judgement of bad deeds.  It makes irrational associations to give a worse picture as for instance when talking about another writer who put forth that Cagliostro was a charlatan, the writing in this new bio says One of Crowleys former incarnations, Cagliostoro was considered a charlatan, by such and such.  In fact the negative reinforcement gets so strong and continuous that it seems like the pov of this book operates as a program to get the reader to permanently enter an anti-AC mindset or reality tunnel.  It seems like a form of subtle hypnosis or neuro-linguistic programming.  For example, from p. 177:

"Like Crowley, Randolph used drugs as an aid to mystical states; he has been described by the esoteric scholar Christopher Bamford as " in equal parts authentic and a fake" - again like Crowley. Randolph, an unstable character, blew his brains out in 1875 at the age of 45."

Another superstitiously extravagant claim holds that some of the mischief Crowley did with his magick back in 1909 helped to cause the disastrous circumstances at the free Rolling Stones concert held at Altamont.  Richards and Jagger studied AC with Kenneth Anger which had something to do with it the book alleges, though it's left unexplained.  Crowley and his philosophy gets compared with  Charles Manson.  He's called an admirer of Adolf Hitler.  It goes on and on never seeming to miss a moment to get a dig in at Crowley.

In fact it begins to feel slanted to the point of ridiculousness.  The bias looks extremely transparent and some of the statements appear to say much more about the author than about AC, like obvious psychological projection - mirror reflection.  It fact, it seems so obvious that I suspect it' s a dodge, a misdirection to get the reader to consider the author in a particular way.  I suspect that behind this  negative Crowley mask the author wears lies an adept communicating genuine teaching.  I suspect this book to be a trick, a teaching device applying shocks in a particular way with a lot more to it beneath the surface.  It seems like something Crowley might do or someone very advanced in his teaching techniques.  I remain open to all possibilities.
 
This bio started to look like more than it seems when I noticed the author deliberately discredit the source of one of the quotes that opens the book -  not just once, but twice.  It begins with two quotes, a rational, even one from Crowley and a hysterical one from Vittoria Cremers that reads:

"It was sex that rotted him.  It was sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, all the way with Crowley.  He was a sex maniac."

Lachman tells us later that Crowley accused Cremers of embezzlement making her prejudiced against him.  Then we are told that she held a grudge against AC.  These are the only credentials given for her to make that quote, it doesn't even mention if they were lovers.  So why use a quote with dubious truth and no authority to back it?  Well, for one thing, the two quotes by Crowley and Cremers very nicely anticipate and encapsulate the flavor of the book's subject matter - what opening quotes are intended to do - ONLY in those quotations, Crowley sounds totally rational and gives a completely sane explanation for much of the rest of the book, while the accuser here, Vittoria Cremers gets deliberately discredited by the author.  This seems completely opposite to the atttitude of the rest of the book where Crowley seems to take all the blame.  The book starts with Crowley's quote giving a reasonable defence/explanation why people see the demon Crowley.

Another possible reason for the quote - sex sells!  Every advertiser knows that.  I submit that one hidden agenda of this new biography is attract people to the current of the Great Work as Crowley presented it.  Are young people reading about Crowley for the first time going to see that quote and consider, "oh that bad man, he liked sex too much"  or " hey, sex, let's check this guy out."  A kind of bait.  The author practically tells you that in so many words when he comments favorably on the Symonds bio saying it's the best of the lot despite its flaws, then says quite rightfully that The Great Beast was responsible for keeping Crowley's name alive until it he became more widely known.  The public gets attracted to the sensationalism of the demon Crowley legend, but it also gets into the hands of many people who saw through the author's bias and searched further.  Aleister Crowley - Magick, Rock and Roll, and The Wickedest Man in the World will likely have a similar effect, maybe moreso, now that there's rock and roll to help with the marketing!

The bio started to look  like active magical ammunition, when I began experiencing mildly precognitive coincidences.  For instance, I kept  thinking of the Shakespeare line: "Methinks he doth protest too much"  from the constant put downs when to great amusement I read Lachman suggesting the same quote applies to Israel Regardie's so-called protestations of AC's innocence in The Eye in the Triangle then writing: "... and is therefore suspect; at the end of it, Regardie himself admits that it is with real relief that he can unburden himself of the task of exonerating Crowley." The Eye in the Triangle seems pretty balanced with the pros and cons of Crowley.  One wonders if Lachman anticipates real relief from the burden of implicating Crowley?  If he was referring to himself?  This bio does end graciously toward Crowley on a positive note, in my opinion.  It could get read as sarcastic, but I suspect it's genuine maybe because I also agree.  Toward the end I wondered if there would be mention of AC's second most popular saying: "Love is the law, love under will" and discovered it a few pages later with the only explanation that Crowley ended all his correspondence with it.  It gets mentioned again a few pages after that as if the author wants to be sure the reader sees it, but again with little explanation.

Next, I happened to look closely at the front cover which depicts Crowley in magical regalia making horns with his thumbs in front of his ears in the posture called Vir which represents the Hierophant.  The book's title and author's name is printed in a white band across AC's forearms.  A graphic of a dark gold sunburst resides in the center behind the "I" and "S" of Aleister and the "W" of Crowley.  The letters inside the sunburst read IS W.  W = vau = the Hierophant.  Looking at this sun placed over AC's chest made me suddenly realize for the first time that he was making himself into a rough form of the Tree of Life in this photo.  I now saw it as a powerful magical statement.  His upright forearms indicate the twin pillars of Mercy and Severity, his hands and thumbs = Chesed and Geburah, the radiant triangle on his hat = the Supernal Triad, and his eyes and forehead are positioned perfectly to suggest Daath and the Abyss.  Crowley's name in large letters expands out from the Tiphareth region, the subtitle covers Hod (Magick), Netzach ( Rock and Roll) and Yesod ( the Wickedest Man in the World, the foundation of this book).  The author's name. Gary Lachman, appears appropriately in the position of Malkuth, the material world which this book seems mostly to dwell in as you would expect.  I find it interesting that Crowley gets belittled frequently about his physical condition, and the narrative often talks about how he's battling disease or drugs when not engaging in degenerate sex or ruining people's lives yet they use one of his strongest looking photos for the front cover.  He's looking his best.

The sunburst on the cover recalls another Crowley book which has always had a radiant sun graphic on its cover, The Book of Lies.  Perhaps this bio identifies itself as another book of lies, another series of koan type puzzles with great truth underneath?

A qabalist gets trained to see multiple points of view.  Part of that training involves learning to read things backwards or in mirror image; to consider the opposite pov of any communication.  This has a basis in Taoism, a philosophy Crowley was fond of, with the notion that every thing contains the seed of its opposite.  This is shown in the well-known yin/yang symbol.  In Sympathy for the Devil, arguably The Rolling Stones most Crowleyesque song, they sing of this identity of opposites in the bridge : 

Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners Saints ...

A qabalist might apply this same logic to the title and hear it in a whole new way.

Some of the interpretations the writer draws from Crowley's work seems exactly opposite from common understanding by people who have tasted the pudding.  For instance, stating that to 'do what you want' as the highest aim of AC's magical system.  On p. 58 he writes: 

"... Crowley would espouse a philosophy expressing this antinomian rejection of opposites." 

This sentence itself seems opposite to Crowley's espousement in that he accepted opposites, or maybe we're just talking semantics, however the next sentence in the book looks very interesting.  It appears the author instantly reverses himself with the opposite attitude.
 
Almost all skepticism in this bio seems unbalanced against Crowley, and the author usually sounds very sure of himself.  He speaks as if with a voice of authority.  Yet in a paragraph on p. 341 that begins by talking about the inspiration behind The Matrix,  a movie about an illusionary, programmed surface reality, he writes:

 "Today we all live with a sense of reality not being quite what it seems.  Rightly or wrongly we have - at least in the West - grown suspicious of every authority; to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Paul Ricour, we live under the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and the once firm fitting for our beliefs is now little more than thin ice.  This sense of ontological disorientation has reached contemporary pop."

Like Timothy Leary, one of Crowley's successors, the author suggests that his own authority be questioned or at least approached with skepticism.  Again, this seems completely in accordance with Crowley's training of rigorous, but balanced skepticism.

Perhaps this bio appeared with the intention to stimulate a 'sense of ontological disorientation' amongst Crowley true believers or people who regard him as a hell of a holy guru?  Actually, that one person could be so black and horrible yet so profoundly influence a cultural movement based on peace, love and understanding seems another kind of ontological disorientation. 

AC - MRRTWMW will also serve as a filter.  People who unquestioningly believe this account will likely not pursue the subject any further.  I see it as kind of a preliminary test to see if one can get past the mask of the demon Crowley.

Teacher's of Crowley's caliber will deliberately create obstacles for their students to overcome at certain points in the training.  This biography could be serving that purpose by putting the reader in confront with the demon Crowley.  As well as functioning to keep Aleister's name, then his work in the public eye through the vehicle of John Symonds, the demon Crowley also seems the first Guardian of the Temple.  It helps to have a sense of humor.

If AC - MRRTWMW did get written by a student or graduate of Crowley's, then it seems a sheer act of courageous love to slosh through all the pain and misery of constructing the demon Crowley image, faux as it may be, for the benefit of current and future travelers.  It reminds me of an esoteric interpretation by Gurdjieff regarding Judas' betrayal of Christ.

Some more curious things in a bio that seems to have Paint It Black playing in the background for most of it:

1. We are told about Crowley's identification with Christ in his oath for the assumption of his Holy Guardian Angel, the pinnacle of his True Will.  The writer then, very disingenuosuly for a prolific writer and researcher of esoteric subjects, mistakenly confuses Christ with Christianity by way of misdirection/explanation.

2. The author has no problem passing judgement and giving strange moralistic interpretations on statements from The Book of the Law, but says on p. 118 that it requires

"...a knowledge and expertise of Kabbalah and other arcane hermeneutic disciplines most of us do not possess or have the time inclination or inclination to acquire."

Again, it seems the author shows us a rationale for rejecting other statements and conclusions made in the book.  He gives valuable direction on what's needed to fully understand Crowley and The Book of the Law, ie qabalah, while letting us infer that his arguments don't necessarily have that same background.  Yet the front cover depicts a subtle Tree of Life?

3.  This seems only pure coincidence, but some may find it curious - the phrase, " But this was the aim of his entire magical system..."  occur on p. 36.  Chapter 36 from The Book of Lies has The Star Sapphire ritual which definitely speaks to "the aim of his entire magical system."

I recommend anyone interested in Crowley to read  Aleister Crowley - Magick, Rock and Roll, and The Wickedest Man in the World while monitoring their own reactions to some of the more outrageous and salacious commentary.  At times the author shows adeptness at stepping on corns ala Gurdjieff.

Massacre - Killing Time In Lisbon!

photo by Márcia Lessa. Caption supplied by Bill Laswell and Yoko Yamabe

Rising out of the ground behind the stage in a lush, verdant, natural forest setting the three musicians that make up Massacre step onto the crisply lit stage, same shade green as the photo, and take up their instruments very casually, understating, and in stark.contrast to the upcoming  musical excursion.  Here to go and kill some time.  We, the mixing board, my Kosmos subharmonizer, and I, - are eleven rows back and elevated in an outdoor stone ampitheater that sounds almost as good as the ancient Roman ampitheaters it was designed after.  Seated in front of me in row ten is Fred and Charles' wives Heika and Lesley lending moral, magical, and mystical support in subtle electrical ways that only women know about.  After the initial applause, a soft silence descends upon the 360 or so passengers that have signed up for this trip.

The concert is part of the Jazz em Agosto 2014 festival sponsored by Gulbenkian Musica.  The mission statement of their Foundation is:

We are an international charitable foundation with cultural, educational, social and scientific interests, based in Lisbon with offices in London and Paris. The purpose of the is to bring about long-term improvements in well-being, particularly for the most vulnerable, by creating connections across boundaries (national borders, communities, disciplines and sectors) which deliver social , cultural and environmental value. 

They got started from a huge amount of money willed to them by Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian who made his money with oil.  This garden ampitheater is just one part of a huge complex that also includes  an "auditorium, an exhibition space, a congress area with auditoriums and other rooms as well as a large building that houses the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum and the art library. The entire complex is set in Gulbenkian Park, which was designed by Ribeiro Telles. In 1983, the Modern Art Centre, consisting of a museum and an education centre, was opened at one end of the park. The Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (a science institute) is situated inside a multi-building complex in Oeiras (outskirts of Lisbon), near the palace of the Marquis of Pombal."

They may call it Gulbenkian Park, but I called it Horus Park not knowing it's official name.  Walking with Fred and the band MMM the night before to a fresh seafood restaurant we passed by the front of the park which had a statue of a man seated in a chair in front of a huge, upright hawk, the totem of the Egyptian god Horus said to represent the energies of this new era, the limitless potential of the expanded being.   I asked the festival Promoter about the statue, he said they based it on a photo taken of Gulbenkian in Egypt confirming it as a symbol of Horus.  That got me looking into their Foundation more.  I found out that they also sponsored an Orchestra, a major one in Portugal. 

,,, improvements in well-being, particularly for the most vulnerable, by creating connections across boundaries  

Large amounts of money, time and peoplepower invested in making possible all kinds of cutting edge progressive music from around the planet. A permanent Orchestra, or as Sun Ra calls it, an Arkestra. More on this later.

 Horus also kills time:

"Behold! I am Yesterday, To-day, and Tomorrow!
I am born again and again
I travel upon high!
I tread upon the firmament of Nu"

 - The Great Invocation from Magick p. 673

 in lines likely borrowed from The Papyrus of Ani, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, an old bardo guide book. To kill time by transcending local conditioning/brainwashing of all experience measured by the clock.  Kill the monkey mind and time goes with it.  Kill time and there goes the monkey mind.  No time in the bardo.  To see a Massacre show means to face certain death ... if only temporarily forever, death to clock tempo, death to the mind.  Something else takes its place. 

Killing time also means it's common expression, just killing time, something to do while waiting for the next thing to come along, maybe the Apocalypse, the total collapse of civilization which for the moment seems to be collapsing just fine in Israel, Palestine, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, Nigeria, Mali, Afghanistan, Pakistan with the United States barely holding on.  Perhaps I don't expect civilized people to kill each other and engage in continued violence.    CNN reports that the "most vulnerable" currently ( at the time of the show) seem to be the Palestinians and the Yezidi, an ancient magic based culture that inspired both Gurdjieff and Crowley.  Maybe we won't have long to wait?

Buckminster Fuller wrote a book in 1969 called Utopia or Oblivion which basically says that the inhabitants of this planet have to get their act together or face self-destruction, and that they could get their act together so successfully that it would seem like Utopia compared to how it is now.  He makes several good suggestions.  It doesn't look good, the locals can't even figure out how to keep that book in print.

The music is about to start, right on time, 9:30pm local time, 21:30 as they say here.  The audience sees three anonymous figures coming up from the ground, no building around, just stairs emerging from subterranean depths.  The green room is underground.  No wall or backdrop on the back of the amplifiedtheater stage to block the view of the musicians approaching.  Applause, then expectant, pregnant hush.  The music starts, rises vertically more like a stellar vehicle lift-off than a plane ramping up speed on a runway to begin the voyage.  Escape velocity seems to occur almost right away.  The sound is good, dynamically weaving reaching a peak massacre in not much time.  Zero to infinity in the flash of an eye.  I have to turn up the drums to meet the  loud stage volume (LSV, as we professionals call it), fortunately, the drums sound much better turned up - clear, articulate punchy and tight, a cohesive pillar of rhythm, sound, and motion against the bass and guitar's harmonic/noise excursions into Space via chordal, rhythmic dialogues in sound wash tapestries of processing effects, tempo accelerated loops, delays, chorai, harmonic pedals with angelic asian choruses, envelope filters, backwards time modulators, fuzztones, etc. etc, etc.  Worlds created and destroyed while you listen.   Space, Sun Ra quite fervently and cosmelodically wants us to know, is the place.

So far, the decibel watchdogs are leaving me alone.  Issues  and calm but strong words exchanged regarding the subject of volume at soundcheck. Like meter maids of the future, which is now in Lisbon, the decibel cops have SPL and Real Time Spectrum Analyzer apps for their Apple Tablets.  I was clocking in peaks at 103 -104 dB SPL at soundcheck.  The laws in Portugal mandate a maximum of 96 dB SPL so thy said.   I told them I would try to keep it from going over 96.  To me, it was louder in concert.  I did turn up the bass and drums a fair amount, and the guitar when it played quiet and fast.  The Promoter stood to the right of the sound desk for the whole show, absorbed in the music, obviously enjoying it.  He didn't say a word to me about the volume but let me know he was having a good time.   At one point, Joao Paulo Nogueira, the house sound system tech who helped and watched over me, he with the enforcer Apple Tablet app, got up from where he sat beside me, and pointing to the output meters frantically exclaimed, "It's not possible, it's not possible" about four times with little breaks in between.  The meters appeared perfectly fine to me, the sound was clear and clean; by his admission we were doing the impossible.  I put my hand on the master fader but didn't move it, the music moved on as it does, it's very dynamic, maybe the music naturally got a little quieter? The extreme Massacre volume moments don't last all that long unless you're completely involved, time has been killed and you've entered a moment of eternity.  Maybe that's what Joao meant when he said "it's not possible" repeatedly.  He seemed satisfied, sat down and didn't say anything for the rest of the concert. He had been extremely helpful getting me set up with the digital mixing board.

Bass pedals, guitar pedals sometimes used like Burroughs cut-up text, sonically jaunting into a different dimension at the flick of a switch. Jaunting- a futuristic, Horus-like, mode of travel from Alfred Bester's, The Stars, My Destination sf classic where one can teleport vast intergalactic distances instantaneously through visualization ... or changing pedals in this case.  I was adding in big Hall reverbs and killing time delays.  Bill has a pedal with the sound of an Arkestra.

Earlier in the Hotel Acores lobby (named after the volcanic Azores Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean) Bill gave me a treasure trove of new music that includes 8 discs of rare Sun Ra recordings, studio and live from the '50's and '60's which I've been playing whenever possible.  For me, that's like hitting the jackpot!  Sun Ra changed my life when I saw him perform with over a hundred musicians and dancers in a small East Village cabaret in 1982.  I was visiting New York and had never heard of him before, but liked the name.  Besides the music being very loud and powerful, most powerful jazz I'd heard up to that point, it was the first time I'd seen someone doing the whole schmuru/School/teacher trip in the context of a Big Band.  Also, to me, it appeared obvious that he was whipping up and using the energy of the music for some other, far flung magickal motive, I don't know what.  I suspected he was sending the energy somewhere, but who knows?  It did give me ideas.  The music and theater Sun Ra choreographed and created made the event a powerful magick ritual and I felt initiated afterwards.  The cds Bill gave me seem like postcards from an old friend.  I was delighted to read a note regarding Rocket Number Nine Blast Off for the Planet Venus: "covered by NRBQ, this 1966 version was picked by Ra-fan Bob Dylan as his favorite Sun Ra tune, and included it on the third volume of CD compilations from Dylan's radio show "Theme Time Radio Hour."

Much High Definition blood on CNN at this time on this day. Breaking News .... Lots of Palestinian blood. Thousands of Yezidi fleeing up a mountain. Breaking News ... the US bombing again in North Iraq fighting against their own weaponry and they're all just killing time in very boring, repetitive and painful ways. ,,, improvements in well-being, particularly for the most vulnerable, by creating connections across boundaries ... hands across the water, water, heads across the sky; sound can act as painkiller; music can act as a time killer to resurrect another day.

 Soundcheck:  learning exactly what buttons to press to program this Yamaha digital desk.  No outboard except my Kosmos, everything loaded into the Yamaha - dynamics (noise gate and compression) on every channel which sound good and help.  All the effects are also on outboard, they sound non-descript, a little wooly but they do something.  Serious lack of power in the low end is my first impression.  The sound is tight and clear, but lacking punch.  Thankfully, Joao sees what I'm trying to do with the system and has the excellent idea to move the sub woofer cabinets together to create a coupling effect.  There were four cabinets spread out which got moved to two cabinets coupled together on each side of the stage.  After all, the dude brought a subharmonizer halfway across the world, let's give him his money's worth, I hear him thinking.  This changed everything and solved the problem giving me good low frequency response that you could feel.

Second day back home transferring the concert recording this music seems like the most progressive I've ever heard.  After hearing one piece that started slow and kind of funky, starts and stops (around 20: in) then went to a jazz ride cymbal rhythm, a spontaneous subconscious message swam up from below saying that this is the one of the most important documents of music to come out in the last 30 years.  I don't know where I got that number from; this music sounds way far ahead of anything else.  Some of it reminded me of post post Bitches Brew  - where that music could have gone if they had kept going in that direction.  Even that can't adequately describe it.

Statue of a man sitting perfectly still in a chair in front of a giant Horus hawk looks like a Guardian to the entrance of Gulbenkian Park where we are playing.  Charles Hayward seated on his drum throne in constant, driving motion measuring time at the drum kit in front of the entire Universe represented by a pastoral forest glade.  Charles gave a brief post mortem:

almost seems to be something happening beyond the telepathy, like a sort of strobing between sounds, constant interlocking, but with shapes to help the listener make sense. Don't know about you but I know where I am in the structure at the same time as being lost in the waves and pulses.

Fighting slows down in Gaza the day after Massacre plays.  A 3 day truce gets signed a day after that which is still holding.  I guess that situation rings closer to home from just having worked in Israel.  The contact still feels strong.  I remember my friend, Mustapha, and wonder how he's doing?

The environment helps shape the music. Always seem to have amazing shows in Lisbon. My favorite Painkiller show was here years ago in an airplane hanger when all the theaters were dark from a strike. Now, the beautifully landscaped glens and gardens and balmy Mediterranean air evokes for me the naturalist poetry of Walt Whitman to describe the Massacre concert:

I have heard what the talkers were talking ... the talk of the 
               beginning and the end, 
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There is never more any inception than there is now, 
Nor any more youth or age than there is now; 
And never will be any more perfection than there is now, 
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. 

Urge and urge and urge, 
Always the procreant urge of the world. 

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance ... Always substance
                 and increase, 

Always a knit of identity ... always distinction ... always a breed of life. 
To elaborate is no avail ... Learned and unlearned feel that it is so. 

Sure as the most certain sure ... plumb in the uprights, well 
                 entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, 
I and this mystery here we stand. 

Clear and sweet is my soul ... and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. 

Lack one lacks both ... and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn. 

- Leaves of Grass

One  theme of  Jazz Em Agosto 2014 was guitar players.  They presented concerts by James "Blood" Ulmer with Vernon Reid, Marc Ribot and two trios and a quartet with Fred Frith.  Now, a qabalist might look at the genre "Guitarist" or the word "Guitar" and decide that this discipline could correspond with the path called Gimel which connects Tiphareth with Kether on the Tree of Life.  Gimel, which translates as "camel", travels across a barren desert called the Abyss, known to be difficult, chaotic, and treacherous.  Especially so those guitarists who used the instrument experimentally to explore different spaces with sound like Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Robert Fripp, Townshend, or Fred. It can be seen as an elaborate metaphor for exploring the Unknown, breaking new ground.  Guitar playing guided tours across the sandstorm, dry, dusty desert of the dark night.  The whole principle of creative excursions into the Abyss gets an explanation in Chapter 42 from The Book of Lies.

Returning from the soundcheck Bill gives each of us blue envelopes that contain mastered cd copies of last year's second Massacre concert in Tokyo.  Blueprints for the future of music ... one future of music, one that goes out beyond planetary considerations and suggests new modes of space travel.  Aural documentation of jaunts to different worlds.  Time also dies in Tokyo, goes off the grid.  I wrote about that show here.  Charles wrote:

The Tokyo gig CD Bill gave me is on the player all the time, it seems to just move into the next arena like shifting gear/tape splice/ hairpin bend. Total excitement, strangely emotional. Tunes stuck in my head. Sounds great. 

8:30pm August 8, The day before the Massacre concert I go down to the lobby to meet Pedro for a ride to the venue. I'd already been there a couple of hours before to get a lay of the land.  I meet Fred and Heika for the first time in Lisbon and ride over with them catching up.  Fred will perform with the  M.M.M.Quartet: Joelle Leandre- double Bass and voice, Urs Leimgruber - tenor and soprano sax, Alvin Curran - piano, keys and samples.

I had arrived in Lisbon that morning coming from Grass Valley, Sacramento, LA, and Philadelphia.  Got to rest for a few hours so was in a pleasant, slightly nonlinear jet lag space.  Waiting for the show, Heika turned into a Friendly Bardo Guide and told me about an exercise called "Morning Pages" from a book called The Artist's Way.  This involves writing 3 pages of stream of consciouness, no matter what, as a way to create the habit of writing.

I've never heard anything like M.M.M. before, futuristic, post modern, post present, past pluperfect, as non-linear as Finnegans Wake except with instruments making sounds not word flow sound generation.  It's so far out that I wonder how music like this is allowed to be performed, but grateful for it ... there is still hope.  A plane flies over at the start of the 2nd piece fitting right in to the soundscape. Reading nearly an entire biography on Madame Blavatsky on the flights over has my head swimming with thoughts about the music of the Hidden Masters sounding like M.M.M., and later a 4th M - Massacre.  The music reminded me of dreams I've had where a lot of information has been downloaded to me, but I only understand a little of it.  Same feeling the first and second times reading Finnegans Wake (hasn't been a third time yet). Heika points out a tree she likes swaying in the wind on a hill behind the audience. Through her eyes I can see its personality, its dryad spirit dancing with life.

I am amazed by the way M.M.M. improvises that the music always stays in the same key.  Usually music as "free" as this has moments of dissonance and atonality, but I don't hear any of that.  I remark about this to Fred afterwards as we walk to the restaurant and without hesitation he says, " I'm a rock musician, I play changes, it's my job to establish a key."  I look to the right and see a statue of a man seated hierophantically in a chair like Abraham Lincoln without the beard.  Behind him stands a giant bird statue; the head gives it away as a hawk.  I wonder if this relates to Egyptian mythology?

In the restaurant there is some speculation from the band about what M.M.M. could stand for.  I forgot the one that sounded most logical, but there was a consensus that M.M.M. didn't stand for anything in particular.  That night I read  that Aleister Crowley named his first O.T.O. order with the initials M.M.M. which stood for Mysteria Mystical Maxima.  Back home the shirt I randomly choose to wear the next day is from a John Zorn/Bill Laswell O.T.O. event called Musica Mystica Maxima.

Post Massacre: talking a bit with Fred about his days going on long walks and talks with Brian Eno in  London.  Eno still is a big inspiration for me and has been almost from the start.  I discovered in his biography, On Some Faraway Beach by David Sheppard that Fred had done a lot of work on Before and After Science.  Fred said that Eno was always someone you wanted to talk to because he always had interesting ideas on all kinds of things.  I mentioned the rumor that Eno experimented with altering the tape chemically.  Fred said that he and other collaborators had tried physically altering tape in a variety of ways including burying it underground once for 3 days.  He said it's amazing how resilient the tape was, it never changed appreciably.

Last instruction from Heika while saying goodbye - "Do the morning pages exercise, ritualize it."