Method of Defiance with Laurie Anderson

 In the deep subcellar of the human heart the dolorous twang of the iron harp rings out.

Build your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly like the bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, somber, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers, the devourers, the avengers. They emerge when everything topples into dust.

- Henry Miller

The program liner notes for the  Al'arme Festival Vol. VI titled this event : LAURIE ANDERSON & BILL LASWELL'S METHOD OF DEFIANCE: COLLISION & SHORT CIRCUITS.  This event landed on the first of August at the Radial System V in Berlin.

The method of this defiance consists of Guy Licata on drums, Doctor Israel on beats, dub effects, M.C. and vocals, D.J. Logic on turntables, loops and samples, Graham Haynes on coronet and efx, Bill Laswell on bass guitar and efx, and Laurie Anderson on electric violin, synth efx, and vocals; tech support and organization provided by James Dellatacoma, Yoko Yamabe and myself.

Bill and Laurie go back a long way.  He produced some tracks for her Mr. Heartbreak album in 1984 featuring William S. Burroughs.  It was Anderson that initially introduced Laswell to Burroughs.  Five years later Laswell would create the soundscape for one of Burroughs' most significant spoken word recordings, Seven Souls.  Burroughs read text Laswell had selected from his recent book The Western Lands, his uniquely vibrant  and colorful rendering of The Egyptian Book of the Dead.  Seven Souls is an extremely evocative guided trip through the bardo, the land of the dead.  It rates as a classic in the field of after-life technology.


Laurie Anderson has been on my radar a long time as well, listening to her albums since the mid 80's, seeing her exhibits at MOMA in New York and catching a performance at the Beacon Theater. I was fortunate to assist on one session for her Strange Angels album in the late '80s.  Strange Angels is a great title, there are other things called that, but the one that interests me the most and somehow seems obliquely connected to this concert is Strange Angel in the singular, the biography of Jack Parsons.  Parsons was one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Labratory.  He discovered the formula for the first effective liquid jet and rocket fuel which made jet planes possible.  He was also a major Science Fiction fan as well as a devout and very enthusiastic student of Aleister Crowley.  Crowley's magick, of course, has a firm foundation in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.  Hopefully Parsons was able to quickly up his after-life technology points because he tragically died at age 37 when he accidentally blew himself up.

The opening artist for Method of Defiance was a Norwegian avant garde angel, Maja S.K. Ratkje who created a very powerful and densely layered sonic environment with only her voice and electronics.  It definitely created a whole other world that, for me, recalled a quote from Dante's Inferno I had recently seen in Crowley's Konx Om Pax.  It occurs in the 6th Canto when Virgil and Dante enter the 3rd Circle of Hell:
“ ____________Look to your science
Where it is written: the more a thing is perfect
The more it feels of pleasure and of pain."

I enjoyed what I heard very much.

The Method of Defiance set was framed by two stories Anderson told, the first as an introduction and the second near the end.  Her first story incorporated one of the most ingenious uses of crowd participation I've ever witnessed.  In the event that she does it again, I won't write a spoiler and say exactly what it was, only that it effectively evoked the feeling of frustration nearly anyone of sane mind experiences when tuning into the Trump political reality TV show.  It created a powerful cathartic sensation that segued into an equally powerful music blast from the M.O.D. emergency broadcast system here at the Al'arme Festival.  Anderson's second story was about the stars.  From Trumpian angst to the stars suggests to me that the music, while it went in many directions from ambient soundscaping and melodic delicacy to furious drum & bass, hip hop beats and turntable scratching with rap dissent and poetics, overall it became a transformative voyage through a figurative and temporary death of ordinary identity. A realm of the dead, a realm which is another kind of very affective life.  This is the realm where real change can occur.

There were two sets to different audiences and they were unlike any other Method of Defiance or Material concert that I've mixed.  Laurie Anderson brought a unique sensibility that blended seamlessly with the drum & bass, dub & ambience, revolution rap of M.O.D. and guided it into uncharted territory.  I saw Graham after the second show and he was shaking his head with a big smile saying something like, "... she takes you to places you never expect to go." It was clearly an exceptional new musical adventure for him.  Bill also played differently, mixing in lots of melodic phrases and ambient environments with the heavy dub lines and the intense crescendos.

Laurie Anderson and Guy Licata

This, and the other MOD photo posted here is from Guy's Facebook page.  I don't know who to credit the photos too.

This was a challenging configuration to mix.  There was a lot of sound and it wasn't always easy to distinguish who was playing what.  I was soloing channels and checking them with headphones a little more than usual to determine the source of different sounds in order to know what faders to mix.  Beats could come from either Logic or Dr. Israel and, of course from Guy though it was easy to distinguish the acoustic drums from the sampled drums except in one instance when Guy completely locked in to a beat Logic looped.  In that case it was one powerful blend of sampled and live drums, you couldn't hear any flams at all between the two.  Laurie Anderson sometimes triggered lush and elaborate synthesized landscapes of sound that in itself could feel as big as a symphonic orchestra.  Bill also could create massive worlds and microworlds of sound with his pedals morphing his bass into timbres foreign to any conventional instrumentation.  Maybe mark it down to our location on the former divide between East and West Germany that some of sounds coming out of Bill's bass rig recalled scenes out of Burroughs' Interzone.

Gilt and red plush. Rococo bar backed by pink shell.  The air is cloyed with a sweet evil substance like decayed honey. Men and women in evening dress sip pousse-cafés through alabaster tubes. A Near East Mugwump sits  naked on a bar stool covered in pink silk. He licks warm honey from a crystal goblet with a long black tongue.

This wealth of sound generation could easily have become out of control, turning into a dense mass of sonic assault.  It never did even at its most intense.  You always had a sense of depth and articulation to the mix.  The dynamics were always moving and had a broad range.  The triple forte moments only lasted as long as necessary to get that aesthetic across.  The pianissimo sections became so soft that I had to gain up the mic pres on Laurie's channels to hear the delicate pizzaccato playing as well as the drum overhead mics when Guy lightly tapped ambient accents on the cymbals.  This assemblage of musicians seemed highly attuned to playing as one coherent unit rather than a collection of individual expressions.  That's why it worked so amazingly well.  Everyone listened, acted and reacted to each other, there was always give and take.  Playing a whole concert of improvised music with no pre-planned stucture and with a coherent high sense of aesthetic requires a kind of nonverbal communication that seems like a form of telepathy.  I could feel and was participating in this communication from the mixing desk.

A crucial part of any musical assemblage is the environment it plays in: the concert hall.  This hall is called Radial System V and has an interesting history.  In the 1880s the city planners in Berlin determined that they needed a new sewage system.  They came up with a circular design and built 12 pumphouses that they called Radial Systems.  This was the fifth one - Radial System V.  In 1905 an extension was added to it to handle the rapidly expanding city.  The main structure was destroyed in WWII leaving only the extension. Upon German reunification in 1998, the pumphouse was taken out and extensive remodelling took place.  In 2006 it was repurposed as a cultural exhibition and performance space while retaining its original name, Radial System V.  It's interesting to reflect upon this site's alchemical-like transformation: from pumping out crap and waste to pumping out high aesthetic art, music and culture.


This hall had a unique atmosphere that recalled the mood you get from reading Thomas Pynchon describe the insides of a WW II era missile silo in Gravity's Rainbow. It was very industrial with grey stone walls and red bricks.  Fortunately for the sound, thick black curtains lined the walls giving the perfect absorption/reflection index for the acoustics; just the right amount of liveness and reverb decay to the room.  The drums sounded huge, the room worked to their advantage.  The seating was on carpeted tiered levels, just on the floor, there weren't any chairs.  The tiers made for a very powerful, but tight bass response.  It also made it significantly louder near the front of the stage.  While I saw a tech's smart phone app registering peaks at 103 -104 dB spl back at the board where I was - on the top tier at the back of the house, I was told that it was ;peaking at 110 dB spl near the front.  Later, I was delighted to hear that Doc's partner, Melissa, was supplied with lots of earplugs which she was giving out freely to anyone who requested them. 

This group of musicians had never played together in this particular configuration. There was a rehearsal day at the venue to musically get to know one another and for the assemblage to take shape.  It gave me the chance to have an extended soundcheck and to get to know the acoustics of the space.  The sound of the room becomes a musical instrument.

Remarkable coincidences can be an indicator that one is in or around the bardo. At the airport on the way to Berlin I started reading Sexus, Part 1 of The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy by Henry Miller because of a recommendation by Gilles Deleuze.  Indeed, there are a number of illustrations of Deleuzian notions in this book, it probably helped inspire his philosophy.  The book also has several  bardo tips and sequences -  passages and anecdotes that give the sensation or feeling of being between bodies or provides useful information for that state.  A lot of the writing is very profound and has a feeling akin to Beat literature.  I strongly suspect that Burroughs and Miller read and were influenced by one another.

The first night in Berlin I googled Henry Miller and read his Wikipedia biography.  I was delighted to see that Laurie Anderson had supplied the music for the 1996 documentary Henry Miller Is Not Dead, a brilliant, impressionistic, first-hand account of his life, told from the end of it looking back, along with his philosophies on life and death. This documentary seems very bardoesque with Miller's stream of consciousness unraveling back through the years.  Anderson's music complements it perfectly.

I'm not interested in everyday reality, I want to penetrate that,
but that is a sort of inexpressible thing

Sometimes one thinks about death, about approaching death
One thinks of it as a very, very interesting part of life.
It should not always be shunned, frowned upon and put away,
it should be welcomed, don't you understand ...,
and maybe it has treasures unknown for us.

 - Henry Miller, Henry Miller Is Not Dead

Speaking of Egypt and death, I had heard that one of the best collections of Ancient Egyptian artifacts outside of Egypt resided in Berlin. so I woke up early and spent a couple of hours there before soundcheck.  Indeed, the Egyptian exhibit was more extensive than ether the British Museum or New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art which also have good collections.  

The priestly practices and culture of Ancient Egypt underpins Golden Dawn magick.  It's also one of the more advanced civilizations concerning the technology of life surviving after death.  This technology gets expressed in a series of ancient manuscripts collectively known as The Egyptian Book of the Dead also known as The Book of Going Forth by Day.  This image of "day" representing a transcendental new life influenced Friedrich Nietzsche to title one of his seminal works, The Dawn of Day while also influencing the title of Pynchon's classic modernist novel, Against the Day.  When similar, but different life after death technologies in Tibetan Buddhism became known to the Western world through the efforts of Walter Evans-Wentz and translated into English, he called it The Tibetan Book of the Dead after the Egyptian.

An occult hypothesis states that ancient priests and wise people were able to record teachings and impressions into artifacts of all kinds including those made of stone.  They did this to pass on their knowledge because they knew that books and written information were subject to attack and destruction.  The torching of the Library of Alexandria by the Roman army in 48 BC shows one well-known example.  

Retrieving information out of reading artifacts is the science of psychometry, a subject covered well in Visions in the Stone by E.J. Gold.  This information, as well as not, can be a mood, an emotion, or a unique sensation of some kind.  It doesn't always appear as intellectual data, though it can, and often does, manifest in that way.  

I have tried, and don't feel particularly adept at conscious psychometry, but I also suspect that you can get influenced and receive things that you don't realize until later.  So I embarked upon my voyage into the Egyptian Museum of Berlin with an open mind and heart, prepared to be as receptive as possible to any signs of reading artifacts or ancient knowledge lurking about in the unearthed carved stones that became their temple walls and statuary.

The highlight of the museum is an excellently preserved bust of Neffertiti, probably a main source for the legend of her incomparable beauty.  I thought this image below might have something to say.  I wonder what kind of music it heard in its day.

Of course, my favorite area of the museum was what they called the Underworld of the Egyptians.  Naturally, it was located in the basement.  The lighting of the funerary exhibits was mostly dark and moody.  They did an excellent job of making you feel you were dead and in the bardo with the architecture which featured multiple small rooms or chambers with arched ceilings.

I also saw some ancient papyrus fragments attributed to Homer, Hesiod and others.  There were  many artifacts uncovered by Heinrich Schliemann, the controversial discoverer of the historical site of the Trojan War.  I felt that all this exposure was excellent preparation for mixing Method of Defiance.  These artifacts defied time and survived.  I felt very alive back out on the daylight streets of Berlin.

I'll leave this report with a quote from Henry Miller that illustrates the value Gilles Deleuze places on nonsense to communicate sense.  We see obvious parallels to music from such groups as Method of Defiance.

The term "nonsense" is one of the most baffling words in our vocabulary.  It has a negative quality only, like death.  Nobody can explain nonsense: it can only be demonstrated.  To add, moreover, that sense and nonsense are interchangeable is only to labor the point.  Nonsense belongs to other worlds, other dimensions and the  gesture with which we put it from us at times, the finality with which we dismiss it, testifies to its disturbing nature.  Whatever we cannot include within our narrow framework of comprehension we reject.  Thus profundity and nonsense may be seen to have certain unsuspecting affinities.

In the realm of music, it seems that boundary between nonsense and sense becomes obscure and more fuzzy with an assemblage like Method of Defiance, all of whom have their feet planted in both worlds - conventional musical structure and free-form sound experimentation.  Nonsense can easily crossover and create a new kind of sense.  To paraphrase Miller: "Nobody can explain this kind of music, it can only be demonstrated."  You could hear it in this concert in the ambient passages of interstellar space excursions when the violin was calling and answering itself, hard panned to make an immense field, against a texture of electrically organic and atmospheric liquid noises and the clear tone of the trumpet harmonically guiding the rudder.  There is a recording of these mind-blowing, progressive modernist concerts and hopefully, at some point, they too will go forth by day.

The AL'ARME! FESTIVAL VOL. 6 held at RADIALSYSTEM V, as the program cover reads, placed a great value on the production of noise, i.e. musical nonsense. "Noise and feedback are the central principles of the AL'ARME! model." (program notes).  It appears obvious to me that whomever wrote of the concept behind the festival and the artists was either into qabalistic wordplay and/or  was visited by inspiration from Coincidence Control.  The first giveaway is their fondness for puns and dialectic opposites.  For instance, they begin the program book with a brief description of the communication model of a political scientist named Harold Dwight Lasswell, partly, it seems,  because it's obviously a play on Bill's name.  In the next paragraph they write: "In short, the Lasswell model is everything that this festival is not."  Their festival has the opposite Laswell, a nonpolitical artist.

One aspect of the festival I regret missing, only because I wasn't aware of it at the time, was a sound installation by Mark Fell called THE TRUTH AT ALL COSTS.  The description of it reads like a qabalistic process:

In this piece 23 speakers are arranged
in the form of a lattice structure, each
of which has a separate sound source.
The sound is made using three different
pattern generating systems that are
connected in various ways so that each
system permutes the behaviors of
the other two.  At this level of the work's
structure, a series of triangular rela-
tionships are defined that progressively
disrupt the musical content of the piece.

MaMuse: prayers for freedom

The properly musical content of music is plied by becomings-woman, becomings-child, becomings animal; however, it tends, under all sorts of influences, having to do also with the instruments, to become progressively more molecular in a kind of cosmic lapping through which the inaudible makes itself heard and the imperceptible appears as such; no longer the songbird, but the sound molecule. 

 - Deluze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus p. 248

The songbird becomes the sound molecule and retains its songbird life in the process.  Looked at in this way, we see an illustration visually and beautifully demonstrating this aesthetic with the front cover of the new album by MaMuse: prayers for freedom. The sound molecules expressed in their new music react and combine in alchemically significant ways.

Original artwork by Fiona Morehouse, Graphic Design by Lion Touch Design

The human design has three basic components or "bodies," sometimes called neurocircuits: the physical, the emotional and the mental.  I am greatly oversimplifying to make a point.  The physical body grows, develops and gets nurtured through food, water and sunlight. The mental body grows by learning things, taking in information and ideas etc.  Art, in particular music, nurtures, develops and grows the emotional body. Just like the physical body and the mind, the heart grows with good input, exercise and use.

To encourage that organ to grow and become stronger, to become mighty in its application, if music is what moves you, then I highly recommend a sustained cycle of prayers for freedom on an endless loop. To repeat: The sound molecules expressed in this music react and combine in alchemically significant ways.

You can get prayers for freedom HERE 

MaMuse is a folk/gospel duo consisting of Karisha Longaker and Sarah Nutting. Their sound on this new offering is fleshed out by new and old friends that include Mike Wofchuck on drums and percussion, Walter Strauss on guitar and production, and The Thrive Choir. Prayers for freedom is their best album yet.  I was honored to record a lot of it.

The best description of the nature of these sound molecules is in their own words from the MaMuse bandcamp site.  Also quite relevant to the music is their dedications and consecrations given in the cd liner notes.

The Muses have been generous with us in this particular set of songs for this album. We have been inspired to pull through powerful anthems for freedom and justice, soul filled serenades of generosity and kindness, playful explorations of presence and wonder, heartfelt melodies of grief and tenderness, and my goodness!!!  …. Rushing Rivers FULL of songs For the Love of Water!

From Karisha:

Praise for bikes, and Praise for hands in soil

Praise for seeds and seeds of heartfelt reparations,

daring to grow us stronger in our interconnectedness

Praise for poetry and harmony, dance and artfulness in action,

may they continue to unlock the prison of ignorance within us

and illuminate the embodied beauty way.

May this musical offering join the momentous gathering

taking place deep within our rivers and straems,

ready to ride the ways of our painful past right on down to the glorious ocean

of our children's future.

From Sarah:

Prayers for Freedom arrive in dreams, they are the laughter of children, the ripples on

currents sourced from depths unseen.  Let us eddy into kindness with a COURAGE

FIERCE and GRACE FILLED, unravelling all that is here in our collective wounding; and

may LOVE be the swords we yeild.

I need my feet on the Earth, for to be resourced

I need my hands in yours, for the strength to continue forth...

I believe in YOU. I believe in ME

I believe in these SONGS...

a simple and powerful offering.

May they do their parts in the arc of reclaiming the beauty within

in harmony with the reparations that are needed to connect us all as KIN.

And may we tend the fires of our WILD SELVES with

TRUST, INSPIRATION, PLAYFULNESS, RESPECT, SINCERITY,  and LOVE.

Know that I am here with you.

One aspect of MaMuse that I always appreciate at their concerts is their subtle confrontation with the subject of death and related matters.  This aspect is beautifully captured here with the song, Soul Sister:

Soul sister

I so believe in you

Soul sister

Though this water is wide

Oh sister,

This grief and pain are true

I am here with you

and I will see you through to the other side.

And in conclusion:

Unfold your ranks and waft yourselves apart,

That I may guess what pearl is at the heart,

What dew-drop glistens on the crown gold-wrought

Within the chalice of your coiled cohort!

- Aleister Crowley, The Blind Prophet, Equinox Volume 1 Number V

Enjoy these crystal-like molecules of sound and join in with these prayers for freedom.

Zorn & Laswell: Konx Om Pax

KONX OM PAX

 Look out honey 'cause I'm using technology,

Ain't got time to make no apology.

Soul radiation in the dead of night,

Love in the middle of a fire fight ...

- The Stooges, Search and Destroy, from the album Raw Power

____ tua scienza 

Che vuol, la cosa è più perfetta

Più senta 'la bene, e cosi la doglienza

 - Dante                                                  

This Dante quote was used by Aleister Crowley as one among many to preface his story The Wake World found in the book Konx Om Pax - Essays In Light.  It translates as:

 “ ____________Look to your science
Where it is written: the more a thing is perfect
The more it feels of pleasure and of pain."

The Wake World is a qabalistic allegory disguised as a children's fairy tale that Aleister Crowley wrote for his daughter Lola Zaza.

The origin of the phrase Konx Om Pax remains unknown.  It was said to have been given to candidates who had reached the degree of seer in the Eleusinian Mysteries of Ancient Greece upon their departure back into the world.  MacGregor Mathers, founder of the Golden Dawn, traces it to ancient Egypt with the meaning:  Light in Extension. 

A few thousand years later, Konx Om Pax took on a musical expression with two performances by John Zorn and Bill Laswell at the Chapel in San Francisco's Mission district this past Friday and Saturday.  Their music made audible forces manifesting the science and technology of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Golden Dawn, and Aleister Crowley's system of theurgic magick to give a few names to this multiplicity.  Zorn and Laswell's saxophone/bass duo tied in directly to this ancient lineage. Some say this lineage derives from Sumer, the oldest civilization known to recorded history.

The Zorn/Laswell musical alliance resumes a dialog that began decades ago and will continue into the forseeable future seemingly touching upon everything under the Sun at one time or another over the years past and future. The shapeshifting moods evoked by the music  the night I was there, ranged from a carefree stroll through a pastoral countryside to the apocalyptic blast of an atom bomb explosion.

The musicians appear a stark contrast contrast both visually and sonically joining forces onstage to form a disjunctive synthesis.

A disjunctive synthesis is a “relation of non-relation”. In Deleuze’s technical vocabulary, a disjunctive synthesis is a synthesis of divergent series that do not converge yet somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark.

 - Levi R. Bryant

Deleuze enters the equation because, as I have written in several previous posts, he provides the metaphysics for Crowley's Thelema. Deleuze also applied Paul Klee's famous quote, "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible," to music writing that music makes audible forces normally not heard. The forces driving Konx Om Pax were given a vehicle to manifest at the concert Friday night.

On the right side of the stage from the audience perspective, Bill Laswell plugs his fretless Fender Precision bass into an array of foot pedals that connect to a classic Ampeg  SVT amplifier wired to 8 x 10 and 1 x 15 speaker cabinets.  The pedals twist, turn, contort, distort, harmonize, metathasize and synthesize the timbre of the soundwaves creating a new landscape, a new space, a new dimension every time a footswitch is engaged or turned off.  A pallette of sonic worlds to choose from. 

The left side of the stage is completely bare of equipment except for a mic stand holding an Electrovoice RE 20 microphone and a chair never used except as a foot rest.  The sole sound generator here is John Zorn and his well-traveled alto saxophone.  Despite the lack of electronics he achieves a great deal of variability with his sound through mic positioning and how he uses the instrument, in particular, the mouthpiece.  For example, a muted sound comes from holding the bell of the sax into his leg.

 photo by Anil Prasad

At times it seems like the sax phrases become the thread  that guides the listener through the sometimes massive, sometimes delicate, labyrinth of landscapes expressed by the bass guitar and electronics.  But like anything having to do with Qabalah, the roles can and do get reversed with the bass melodically threading its way through a labyrinth of saxophone landscapes.  At one point I heard Bill quote the theme from Ornette Coleman's Dancing In Your Head which references a whole line of music.  For me, it conjures the Master Musicians of Jajouka because there is a track of Ornette playing with them on that album.  Coincidentally, I was wearing a Material/Master Muscians of Jajouka shirt.  This musical quote introduces what Gurdjieff called a shock - energy coming in from a different octave, a different series of becoming.

Zorn does these repetitive phrases of short scale runs that demonstrate what Deleuze means by difference and repetition: every cycle repeats the phrase yet it's slightly different each time.  He may sustain the last note slightly longer, the attack may be different, different degrees of intensity etc.  These differences in the repetitions allow something, a force of some kind to grow and develop; the process of creation.  The listener who has the attention and focus to hear these differences  will find themselves drawn deeper into the music and taken further.  It seemed that the audience had this intensity of focus the night I was there.

That was Friday night.  I was in the neighborhood so dropped in and offered to help with the sound reinforcement.  The Front of House mix engineer operates the sound system to bring sound in extension, extending it from the stage to the entire house.  Despite having two of their sub woofers down, the Chapel had a powerful and clean public address system that covered the entire venue well reaching all the way up into the back corners of the balcony.

There are other ways to extend the music.  This is what the science and technology of the opening quotes refer to.  Having the ability of uniting the microcosm with the macrocosm  (or at least having the wherewithal to try) the instigator of theurgic magick can extend the atmosphere of the space much further than the immediate environment the music plays in.  The uniting of the microcosm, in this case Konx Om Pax playing at The Chapel with the macrocosm of the World, starting with San Francisco and expanding out, is one function of what Thelemites call The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. This is an operation that originates in Tiphareth.

To some degree, every human sensitive to the music resonates in this way.  By the Hermetic formula, "As below, so above," every human becomes a microcosm of the Universe. Anyone who tunes in to the music to such an extent that they temporarily lose most or all vestiges of personal identity carries and extends the music into new domains.  The effects of the music also extended into the financial domain.  Some of the proceeds from these concerts were donated to the immigrant family reunification crisis. Konx Om Pax.

So that all life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work.  - Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution.

And now for something completely different.

The interior of the Chapel, the walls and ceiling, was entirely a solid bright red. Having the arched roof of a former place of worship, it reminded me of a gothic kind of Hell.  The backdrop was a solid blue curtain and the lights illuminating the stage were mostly blue which visually cooled down the red hall.  There were no logos, grafitti or words of any kind in sight.  No words were spoken by Zorn or Laswell.  Kill the word.  The night was free from standard semantic symbolism allowing the communication of a whole different language, a language expressed in music.

The  above quote from Dante that Crowley uses in Konx Om Pax is from the 6th Canto of Inferno when Dante and Virgil enter the 3rd circle of Hell. Inferno is a guided tour of Hell.  Hell, according to Crowley, is what qabalists call the space/time physical universe which sets up a paradox because it can also get perceived as the Garden.  Why is God in Hell?

The music Zorn and Laswell invoked became a Guide through the Land of the Dead, for those lucky enough to die to their personal story for the duration of the show.. They took us on a journey, one that was very dynamic, it went to different places at varying speeds and intensities, but never completely stopped until the end.  They played about 56 minutes straight through.  I heard someone mention circular breathing which also recalled The Master Musicians of Jajouka for me as they also go on for long stretches of time thanks to circular breathing.

The music this night was not composed or planned in advance.  It appeared as it happened in the moment through intention and necessity entering perceptible existence through a pure gesture of artistic expression. 

Pale Fire Part 2: Coincidences and Death

Continuing to look at the crossover of fictional, or virtual, events in a book, in this case Pale Fire by Vladimer Nabokov, and the actual events in a person's life, in this case your humble narrator.

Toward the end of the reading group cycle we discovered that the murder of Nabokov's father, Vladimer Vladimirovich Nabokov was a major inspiration for Pale Fire.  John Shade was murdered by someone who, for most of the book,  resembles a Russian political extremist .  Nabokov's father was murdered by far right Russian monarchists.  Displaying his penchant for reversing things, Nabokov implies a murder attempt AGAINST the monarchy in the story he tells.

Picking up Pale Fire, I was immediately reminded of the death of my father by the amusement park sounds mentioned on the first page.  The death of my father had an incredibly strong impact on me.  The reading of Pale Fire coincided with my body turning the exact age my father was when he died.   This brought the memory of his death into sharper focus to the point where I felt it in my body.  Like Nabokov, my father and I shared the same first and last names.

Nabakov valorizes coincidences in Pale Fire, I am valorizing them here.  The value of coincidences is that they can communicate information and instruction to your evolving self. Synchronicities and coincidences can be considered a pale fire for your spiritual growth.

This is how coincidences get valorized in Pale Fire:

In the commentary for Lines 734 - 735 Nabokov has Kinbote say: "A third burst of contrapuntal pyrotechnics.  The poet's plan is to display in the very texture of his text the inricacies of the "game" in which he seeks the key to life and death (see lines 808 - 829)."

Lines 808 - 829 describes the value of coincidences for John Shade.

"line 806: But all at once it dawned on me that this
               Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme:
               Just this: not text, but texture, not the dream
               But topsy-turvical coincidence,
               Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.

The next 5 lines refer to Qabalah.

line 811:    Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
                Some kind of link-and-bobo link, some kind
                Of correlated pattern in the game
                Plexed artistry, and something of the same
                Pleasure in it as they who played it found."

Qabalah does give a great deal of pleasure for anyone who likes to solve puzzles and make new connections.

Characterizing this game of coincidences and correlated patterns as "contrapuntal pyrotechnics" also points to qabalah.  One tradition says that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the basis for qabalah, are letters of fire; fire partly due to the active, energetic nature qabalah brings to language.

Qabalah introduces variability into language.  Many more ways, more paths, more neural connections open up for receiving and/or interpreting a communication with the application of qabalah.  The information of any given communication increases dramatically when put under this lens.

Here is how Pale Fire began to blow my head off.  The numerical value of my first name,
Oz = 77.  I have paid close attention to all kinds of coincidences and synchronicities since discovering the usefulness of such a practice from Wilson's Cosmic Trigger book.  At the top of page 77 in my copy of Pale Fire we see:

Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray

By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here ( gradual, gray) a man for whom he was to see for one fatal moment 3 weeks later ...

This is Kinbote's commentary introducing the reader to John Shade's murderer - he had various pseudonyms two of them being Jakob Gradus and James de Gray -  via an extraordinary coincidence.

John Shade's name itself suggests death.  From Homer to Virgil to Dante classic literature has a long history of referring to dead people as shades. The "contrapuntal nature of  Shade's art" suggests the contrapuntal nature of death's art.  Art usually appears as the creation of something.  Death's art can refer to bardo training, the art of surviving the death of the meat package, the physical body.  Death's art can also refer to the transformation that occurs in a death/rebirth ritual.  In magick rituals the everyday ego undergoes a temporary death to be reborn as something different.

Via an extraordinary coincidence Nabokov introduces John Shades murderer, or the murderer of Death, if we stay with Shade's etymology, by the lines "And then the gradual."  The murder of Death obviously  reverses the superficial meaning given, the murder of John Shade.  Nabokov constantly reverses many things in Pale Fire.  The murder of Death increases life, obviously.  The murder of Death (Shade) is gradual in Vlad's story.  Again, this correlates with bardo training and magick.  Proficiency in each of these arts usually appears gradual.  Obviously this line of pondering gets twisted and convoluted.  Once again, welcome to Pale Fire.

Coincidences have played such a huge role in my spiritual trajectory that I found it interesting that page 77 began with the phrase, "By an extraordinary coincidence..." When I first saw this no extraordinary coincidence appeared on the horizon, it simply reminded me of how much I value and use coincidences. I wasn't expecting any extraordinary coincidences either.  Expectations almost always seem invocationally defeating.

Synchronicities and coincidences, of course, have to do with Time and timing.  A month or two later I  passed through the point where my body was exactly the same age as my father was when he died on the operating table from a bad heart.  I had some strong bardo moments around that time including one night of feeling that I could die that night.  Probably psychosomatic, I'd been ruminating on his death and my age.  And/or it could be an empirical psychic connection to the event of his death through the resonance of my age, a resonance across time.

Right around this time, I got the notion to look up line 77 in John Shade's poem and it definitely startled me.

Such as "bad heart" always to him refer. 

Given my mindset with the consideration of my father's death, that became an extraordinary coincidence for me. 

I was on tour when the Pale Fire reading group finished.  The day of posting my final comment found me staying in a hotel outside a small amusement park just outside of Washington, D.C. It reminded me of the film, Carnival of Souls.

Pale Fire: Books That Blow Your Head Off

Not simply an intellectual intake of ideas and stories, some books contain the power to completely explode and permanently alter a persons empirical existence.  I am not alone with this experience.  Indeed, Robert Anton Wilson thought it prudent to warn potential readers about E.J. Gold's Visions in the Stone with his blurb published on the back cover: 

The book you hold in your hands is as dangerous as a letter-bomb.  It might blow your head off ... Be prepared for a weird journey and a Zen hotfoot at the end."

Wilson uses some of these dangerous letters to encode an Introduction to Visions in his Historical Illuminatus mode of using many footnotes and referencing deSelby. It's one of his best Introductions, in my opinion.

Tobias Churton recalls Aleister Crowley's diary entry about reading Fitzhugh Ludlow's The Hashish Eater: " ... a wonderful book.  Sleeping, I got a mild hashish dream!"  The next day Crowley writes that in his meditation his vision gets "confused with hashish distortion.  This book is clearly bewitched."  (A.C. in America p. 137) Note that he is not taking hashish, but rather observing a contact high from the book.

I recall seeing this subject covered in the Butterfly Language blog not so long ago. 

I have always granted certain books great power.  I would carry them around with me wherever I went believing that I could continue absorbing their contents by osmosis through the proximity of their physical corpus.  I fully resonate with the quote I heard somewhere that "great books are monasteries."I like to live in these monasteries for periods of time, absorbing their program then moving on.

For  about two to three months a year from the ages of 15 - 17 The Lord of the Rings was my constant companion.  This book had the effect of greatly broadening my vision beyond human society's consensual reality, norms and assumptions feeling new neural pathways opening up.

One sign of an exploding book occurs when things written in the book crossover and conflate with current events in external reality.  You can truly get the disquieting feeling of being a character in some large drama, some book that someone else has written that seems a bigger, multidimensional version of the book you're reading - the one that's blowing your head off.  This happened to me when I was reading Schrodinger's Cat by Robert Anton Wilson while working in Paris with Paris Combo.

Nabokov's Pale Fire recently exploded my brain.  I had never heard of this book until Tom Jackson selected it for a weekly group reading at Rawillumination.net.  The only thing I knew about Nabokov was that he wrote Lolita and appeared as a lyric in a Police song.  Beset with a busy schedule, I had no intention of participating in the group until I saw a comment by Eric Wagner that piqued my interest.  It looked like it would be right up my alley.  This became confirmed after reading the first page.

Pale Fire takes the form of an extended commentary by the character Charles Kinbote of an unfinished epic poem.  The poem is by John Shade who was murdered in front of Kinbote.  The book starts with a quote from James Boswell's book the Life of Samuel Johnson, then a Forward by Kinbote followed by the poem, then the last section, Kinbote's quixotic, often digressive, sometimes rambling, commentary on the poem which includes the events that led up to the murder.  It also covers Kinbote's personal relationship with Shade. This  relatively straightforward form disguises a narrative full of twists and turns, tricks and puzzles, deceptions and dead ends. Literary and esoteric references abound along with stylistic writing experiments.  You could call it a labyrinth of sense.

The crossover of events from the written word to events in the world often takes the form of coincidences and synchronicities.  For instance, the first page in Pale Fire has an abrupt non sequitur shift with Kinbote mentioning hearing sounds from an amusement park filtering into his room. I posted this comment after reading about half the Foreward:

Synchronicities dog me. Found it interesting that Shade's death is mentioned on the first page, that he started the poem shortly before he died. The loud amusement park holds significance for me. Amusement parks are considered bardo spaces (i.e. spaces that convey the mood of death or the bardo). A few days after my father died, I was told by a psychic I trust that he had first entered a carnival-like environment in his bardo trip, that he must have been thinking of some such memory when he crossed over. So this amusement park atmosphere mentioned right after Shade's death makes me think this novel will have a bardoesque aspect to it.

This morning I got a voicemail informing me that an old friend, Hassan Heiserman had died. It was an anonymous call from someone who'd seen a blog I wrote about Hassan. Hassan knew Leary and also said he had done something with RAW at one point. I don't have any details or even know if it is true.

 Tom Jackson replied: When Oz reads John Shade's poem, he'll discover that it's all about death.

Tom lives in the Cleveland area which is where I was born and lived for the first 9 years of my life.  Tom then mentioned Cedar Point in his comment, a huge amusement park my parents and grandparents used to take us kids to.  At the time, it seemed the ultimate experience like going to heaven, or for some people going to Disneyland, the ultimate kids paradise.  I hadn't thought of that place for years.  Two nights after the Cedar Point memory folded in, I was mixing with Achilles Wheel and met the drummer's wife.  She had heard I was from Cleveland and asked me if I'd ever heard of Cedar Point?  She was from Sandusky where it's located and informed me that she used to work there.  The amusement park in the book crosses over within two days to an encounter with someone who worked at the actual amusement park of my childhood.

Immediately before starting the Pale Fire adventure, I posted  a blog concerning the esoteric nature of the number 68 and how it frequently expresses itself through the combination of the letters "s" and "c."  These letters transpose to 68 with Gematria.  It seemed "merely coincidental" that the opening quote of the book has this line: "Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats." Given the ambiguous nature of Pale Fire and Nabokov's fondness for puns, references and multiple meanings, it doesn't seem farfetched to see a association between "shooting cats" and the Schrodinger's Cat quantum physics thought experiment. This experiment puts a cat into a black box in which a quantum process releases a poison pellet at a particular time that kills the cat.  Figuring out the decay time of the quantum process will tell us if the cat is alive or dead at any particular time with the paradox being that there can be more than one solution.  The cat can be both dead or alive and we don't ever really know until we open the box.  Welcome to Pale Fire.

I soon came across other instances that apparently affirmed my c - s / 68 bias:

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.
Our fountain was a signpost and a mark
Objectively enduring in the dark
Strong as a bone, substantial as a tooth
And almost as vulgar in its robust truth.

These are lines 759 - 766 from Shade's poem (p.61 in my edition) The first four lines look like a metaphor for discovering something in the Unknown then having it confirmed by someone else.  The second four lines beginning with "Our fountain ..." might make more sense after reading this blog and seeing one branch of what 68 signifies.

These lines started stoking a suspicion that Pale Fire functioned as a multi-level didactic experiment of an esoteric/transformational nature; magick and bardo training as the Department of Redundancy Department might put it.  Multiple levels because some points were explicit and obvious and at a neophyte level while others ranged up to very subtle and advanced.  The notion of a fountain as a signpost goes toward the latter end of the scale.

The first line of Shade's poem: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain strongly reminded me of the theme from Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day.  The image of wings that are growing, figuratively speaking, getting cut down and destroyed; obstacles, challenges, setbacks and defeats on the road of alchemical transformation.  Against the Day also contained passages teaching  magick, qabalah and alchemy ranging from straightforward and literal to arcane and occult.

Although it is evident that many of Pynchon’s literary mechanisms were inspired by the seminal works of Vladimir Nabokov, another literary giant of the twentieth century, not many people are aware that Pynchon was Nabokov’s student at the University of Cornell. - Domagoj Valjak

Isn't the internet wonderful?  Just discovered the above quote and an article about Nabokov's influence on Pynchon.  Pynchon was a student of Nabokov's - that direct connection explains a lot to me.  He was a good student.

Then came the Golden Dawn/Crowley connection.  These are comments I posted at the time.

By coincidence, about a week before this reading group commenced I discovered that MacGregor Mathers, the head of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley's teacher, was very active in the Carlist movement which had to do with royal succession in Spain and Britain. He was active to the point of arranging the purchase and shipment of weapons to the cause in Spain. Crowley also considered himself a Carlist at the time according to Churton, in "Aleister Crowley in America."

Second paragraph in the section Line 12 that crystal land: "Alas, he would have said a great deal more if a domestic anti-Karlist had not controlled every line he communicated to her!" Nabakov introduces the Karlist movement with a line against it, again recalling, for me, "Against the Day."

The exclamation: ".... venerable uncle's raucous dying request: "Teach Karlik!" on the following page reminded me of Mathers and the Golden Dawn. He wrote all the rituals.

Immediately following this exclamation to teach, Kinbote, whom Nabokov directs or misdirects the reader into believing could be King Charles, references teaching Finnegans Wake (James Joyce).  Not many pages later, Kinbote gives a very Joycean interpretation to one line from one of Shade's earlier poems, The Sacred Tree.  With this kind of interpretation Nabokov shows one way of reading Joyce.  It's been well established that Joyce uses Qabalah in Finnegans Wake. There is at least one other instance showing the reader an obviously Joycean interpretation.

Enter Sherlock Holmes, a character who exemplifies many of the necessary skills for solving a maze.

Sherlock Holmes gets introduced shortly after the Finnegans Wake reference through what Kinbote calls the "Case of the Reversed Footprints." Sherlock Holmes notices normally unseen clues by being very attentive and observant. 

 Looking at things backwards reveals a fundamental lesson of qabalistic practice.

The theme of reversals and opposites already turns up several times in "Pale Fire." Even in the comments here this week we see Kinbote suggesting reading the book in the reversed order it's presented in; the cat and mouse game in The Sacred Tree poem and the picture: "In the study I found a large picture of their parents with the sexes reversed." Also, "How persistently our poet evokes images of winter in the beginning of a poem which he started composing on a balmy summer night!" - beginning the comment for Lines 34-35.

The picture of the sexes reversed recalls an old gnostic injunction about the male becoming as a female, the female becoming male and the two becoming one. I don't remember how it goes verbatim, but RAW quotes this gnostic phrase at the beginning of one of the Schrodinger's Cat books when they were released as 3 separate books. Not sure if it made it into the single volume edition.

The bardo training aspect first becomes obvious at the start of Canto Two (p. 39) wherein the narrator dedicates himself to becoming a bardo explorer i.e. an explorer of life after death.  At the beginning of Canto 3 the poet introduces the Institute (I) of Preparation (P) For the Hereafter (H), IPH, the big "if."

While snubbing gods including the big G,
Iph borrowed some peripheral debris
From mystic visions; and it offered tips
(The amber spectacles for life's eclipse)
How not to panic when you're made a ghost;

Don't panic is a primary bardo tip.  It's ok and normal to feel fear, but you don't want to panic.

These are just a few examples of the many literary devices, tricks, references and so on Nabokov uses to fufill a Hierophantic task.  The connection with Crowley gets made pretty clear.  I have several more comments to that effect in the Pale Fire reading group which is accessible at the top right of the Rawillumination.net home page.

This blog also serves as a slight introduction to a post e in the near futurwhich will be about finding or creating a Spiritual Guide - a guide  to owning and operating the higher circuits of the nervous system: the neurosomatic, the neuroelectric, the neurogenetic and the neuroatomic to put it into Learyese.  By introducing these lines of instruction: Sherlock Holmes, James Joyce, the Qabalah, bardo training - and there appear many others, Nabokov reveals and demonstrates how to make contact, how to invoke such a guide.

To Be Continued ...

SIMRIT Spring Tour 2018 Part 3

Part 1
              Part 2

 April 21: Tonight we played at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church in the heart of Boston just around the corner from the Boston Commons.  I enjoyed getting a taste of this city's unique culture when there was a chance to take a quick walk around downtown. I always try to get outside of the venue after the soundcheck and before the show to get a read on where exactly we currently situate on the planet and how that might play into this evening's experimental music invocation.  I remembered something R.U. Sirius said that Timothy Leary felt it important to be aware of your geophysical location.  BAWSTON: a lot of sports fans here mingling with the ghosts of revolutionary soldiers; a bar similar looking to the one from Cheers serving excellent hearty pub food.  On the way downtown we got pulled over by a cop  who looked like he could be out of The Departed.  A vehicle matching our description had been involved in a hit and run ... or so he said ... He circled the Sprinter about four times apparently looking for damage.  I tried not to think anything in case he was a psychic reader.  We told him a couple of corny jokes and got passed that bardo guard.

This basement meeting hall underground in a church was a last minute choice when a different venue fell through.  The concert still sold out despite the last minute switcheroo.  This venue gets my vote for the funkiest on tour.  There was a balcony, and, fortunately, a QSC sound system already in place on the main floor which allowed me to daisychain our QSC mains off of them and posiiton our mains as fills up in the balcony.  The acoustics here were extremely lively.  There was a hard wall right behind the very shallow stage to contribute more unwanted reflections from the stage sound. A few dozen people chatting before the show sounded like a throng of thousands.

You would never know that this concert was a bit of an endurance test for the band - third show in a row and a four hour drive to get here from Staten Island. The additional stress added something, in my opinion.  Everyone dug deep into their reserves of energy and pulled off a powerful and moving show; second wind enriched consciousness phenomena.  Once again they were dancing in the aisles, on the sides and in the back.  A highly successful invocation judging by the response of the concert-goers.

A Wilson Cloud Chamber works as a special detector in subatomic physics for tracking the passage of the kind of particles usually imperceptible some of which flash into measurable existence for only seconds or fractions of a second at a time.  The glowing faces and the kirilian aura photographs of some of the audience following the concert seems like a Wilson Cloud Chamber for tracking the passage of the living being(s), the nonorganic life force that used this space as a landing pad after a series of calls placed by SIMRIT.

 Kirilian aura photograph.

April 26: We arrived in Montreal yesterday.  A circuitous route to our hotel in Chinatown gave us a tour of the lavish houses, estates and mansions of Mount Royal - the Beverly Hills or Bel Air of Montreal.

Tonight's venue is the St. George's Anglican Church.  I felt like a speck of cosmic dust inside the vastness of this edifice.  The promoter said it had the penultimate free-standing (i.e. no horizontal support pillars) church roof in the world second only to Westminster Abbey in London.  A stage was constructed about a third of the way from the altar by a theatrical production company. They provided and hung a quality lighting system along with a reliable electrical supply for the sound and lights.

A big portrait of St. George slaying a dragon hangs in the large dining hall that serves as a temporary Green Room. Lots of resonance here.  St George's Saints Day was April 23rd, three days ago.  St. George is how some Fourth Way cognoscenti refer to George I. Gurdjieff.  My middle name is George, same as my father and grandfather.  Today the news broke that Bill Cosby was convicted of sexual crimes, the first powerful celebrity in these times to face legal repercussions for unacceptable, multiple sex abuse offenses.  As I write this, Harvey Weinstein has just turned himself in and been charged with rape.  St. George lives on as an archetype to combat this disease.

I loved mixing in this big space even though having to drive our modest P.A. to the limit. It helps when you have a great band and performance.

April 27: Centretown United Church, Ottawa.  This being the capital of Canada, I half-jokingly asked one of the volunteers to invite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as part of my mission to expose World Leaders to transformational music.  It turns out this volunteer did business with the government and happened to have Trudeau's email address.  An invitation was sent though I didn't see the PM in the audience.  Probably too last minute.  Or maybe he had important business to tend to like talking Trump off a ledge.

I had the idea to tie in Simrit's harmonium to the massive pipe organ resonators behind the stage, but this proved technically unfeasible with the amount of time we had to set up.  This church had a balcony which would get enough sound coverage in the center seats from our speakers on the ground floor.  The side balcony seats only received indirect coverage, it sounded like you were in another room, but I was told no one would be sitting there.  It wasn't cordoned off so people chose to sit there anyway.  I didn't have any extra speakers to fill in that region so ended up running the mains as loud as I could get away with to get the sound up there.  I had fun mixing this way, I love loud clean volume and now had a good excuse.

Pipe organ in Ottawa.  The harmonium is the wood instrument in the middle of the stage.

April 28: Toronto's unique ambience instantly conjured memories of playing there for the first time with The Tickets in 1983; folds in time.  We drove through Kensington Market stopping to get groceries; breathing in Toronto.

Tonight's concert took place at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Trinity Square, downtown Toronto right across from the Eaton Centre. It looked like they did a lot of charity work for homeless people there.  I set up the Midas in front of a soup kitchen that regularly gave food to anyone who needed it. There was a feeling of being on the street yet inside sanctuary when in the church.  I met a Friendly Guide named Brian who was there to set up and operate the lights, but who was also a sound engineer. He helped me set up our P.A. and hipped me a little bit to the acoustic characteristics in this highly reverberant performance chamber.

After soundcheck, I was able to get away for about an hour to have dinner with some old friends, Terry and Lisa Tompkins.  We caught up as best we could in that short time span.  Brief as the visit was, like last year when we played Toronto, I received an "external shock,"  to put it in Gurdjieffian terms, a outside energizing influence to help complete the octave of the tour.  I gave my copy of M Train to Lisa and a new edition of A Thousand Plateaus to Terry.  We had discussed Deleuze & Guattari at dinner last year and he had expressed interest.

I suggested he start  with Chapter 11, 1837: Of the Refrain.  This is where I had first been drawn into Delueze.  I might have told him that I meant only the first few pages of this chapter.  I recently read the whole thing and found the writing becoming very complex and difficult after those first few pages.  It seems to be about creating order out of chaos using a musical framework. This chapter examines  the subject of genesis - how "things" and evolutionary processes come into existence.

"A child hums to summon the strength for the schoolwork she has to hand in.  A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the radio as she marshals the antichaos factors of her work. ... For sublime deeds like the foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or better yet walks in a circle as in a children's dance, combining rhythmic vowels and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the differentiated parts of an organism.

 - ATP, p. 311

"The refrain may assume other functions, amorous, professional, or social, liturgical, or cosmic: it always carries earth with it; it has a land ( sometimes a spiritual land) as its concomitant; it has an essential relation to Natal."

- ATP p.312

The refrain, in this instance, is a repeated motif of a special kind that D&G delineate at the start of the chapter.  The statement that the refrain always carries earth with it seems another way of saying that the work you do to raise consciousness accrues.  Any refrain of meditation, yoga, ritual, prayer,  etc. etc. you do adds up, it accrues; the alchemical process, the "spiritual land," develops with those kinds of refrains. 

For myself and the others on tour, the repeated concerts make a kind of meta-refrain, a refrain of refrains, that matches the conditions described by D & G. in that chapter - a consecrated space that opens up to the Cosmic.

 Loading out our gear in wintery temperatures, the night air was fresh and clear.  I joined Salif, Jared and Shannon on the 2 km or so walk to get the Sprinter.  The concert and events of the day had given me a whole different perspective on the city like I was an extraterrestrial seeing it for the first time.  Everything was packed and we were ready to leave when, Brian, who had helped with the load-out, pointed to Trnity Square and remarked that there was a labyrinth there.  I looked over and could see absolutely nothing so assumed that it must be painted or drawn on the ground. 

 April 29: Drove from Toronto to Chicago.  Stopped in Hamilton, Ontario for lunch: British-style fish and chips in a darkened bar watching the Cavs and Pacers basketball game with Devon while the others ate elsewhere.  I loved the ambience of this bar for the memories it evoked of my youth on the Western Canadian bar band circuit.  Some say that nostalgia ain't what it used to be though I often find the memories more pleasant than the original experience.

Cutting across Michigan on the way to Illinois.  A distant yellow Shell Oil sign high atop a pole reminds me of both a small sun and the old Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis film Some Like It Hot. 

April 30: Played the City Winery on the West Side of Chicago.  It's a small but great sounding room with a Meyer sound system - my favorite!  This appears a regular stop for recording acts.  A video monitor advertised upcoming shows by Corky Siegal, Al Stewart, Joan Armatrading and others.  Our Green Room hostess recounted the mad scramble to accommodate a last minute secret show by Prince back in 2013.  I noticed a band that I'd engineered and co-produced, Paris Combo had carved their name in the graffiti section of the Green Room.

One difference with this tour is that Salif and Shannon took turns opening the show with a 15 minute solo set.  Both of them have new albums out that I recommend checking out. Salif played his own arrangements of traditional kora compositions often dedicating them to his teachers and explaining a little about the tradition of jeli (griot) music between songs.  Hearing the cascading fundamentals, harmonics and resonances of the 21 string kora by itself would give me an excellent read on the acoustics of the room.  This was particularly helpful at the Angel Orsentz in New York.

Shannon played originals or a highly original arrangement of a cover.  If I took better notes, I could tell you which cover she covered.  Her electric cello pedal assemblage included a looper and a sampler so she was able to multitrack cello parts and layer in samples and electronics to create a one person symphony of sound.  Her parents were in the audience that night having made the trek west from Indiana.  They had nurtured and supported her musical passion since she was a young child so I imagine it was a great joy to hear their daughter playing like a world-class master bringing the illumination of musical sonority and adventure into existence.

Perhaps realizing that this was the last show on this tour, the whole band delivered more than ever.  Devon, who had been playing a little conservatively for most of the tour not wishing to overshadow or steal the band's thunder, really opened up and shone like the All-Star player he is.  Simrit's voice became like Ariadne's thread guiding everyone in the chamber through a labyrinth of musical exploration.

Odds and Ends: Or, items I forgot then remembered that I forgot.  When we were eating a pre-show meal in Ottawa, I remarked about my astonishment to Simrit that I had seen an advertisement for the Toronto show come up on my smart phone's google news feed.  She explained that her husband, Jai Dev, was very interested in and quite knowledgeable about social media advertising.  He regularly attends seminars on the subject to keep up to date.  She said that is what made these tours possible as  the majority of ticket sales resulted from these ads.  As she was explaining, I silently marvelled at all the logistics and details she personally did, with a little help from her friends, to pull off these musical journeys and felt much gratitude. 

In Toronto, Lisa Boudreau remarked that she had partcipated in at least one of Jai Dev's Kundalini Yoga online events and enjoyed the presentation.  It does seem indeed a small world. 

Once again all of the concerts were documented with multitrack recordings.  There may be a live album from this tour in the future.  Highlights from last year's Spring tour were made into an album that can be downloaded here.  I know at least one fan close to Simrit, who knows all her records, and has declared this one to be his favorite.

Last fall following the SIMRIT tour I recorded a podcast with Jai Dev.  At some point before, during, or after it I recommend that he read Cosmic Trigger Volume I by Robert Anton Wilson.  He told me in Asheville that he was reading it.  I've recommended this book many, many times over the years and have, I would guesstimate, about a 30% success rate of people who actually take me up on the suggestion and read it.  If I was a baseball player, that would be a .333 batting average which would be All-Star material in that game.  This tour certainly pulled a cosmic trigger.

SIMRIT 2018 Spring Tour Part 2

 Continued from here

"It's organisms that die, not life" 

 - Deleuze/Negotiations p. 143

April 13: After the Miami concert and reception, Simrit and the band generously meet and greet their fans for about an hour in the lobby as everyone gradually re-enters consensual planetary reality.  We then packed up and got on the road by midnight.  The next port of call on this voyage would be Asheville, North Carolina approximately 11 hours away as the Sprinter drives.  We drove north for 3 hours that night to make the drive the following day less taxing.  At 3 am we disembarked and checked in to a Holiday Inn in Melbourne, Florida.

Left for Asheville around noon.  I feel physically miserable under the throes of this headcold, glad that this is only a travel day. Twice on our journey up the country I noticed Midas shops by the side of the road . "Great!" I thought, if anything happens to our Midas mixer we can pull over and get it repaired at one of these roadside shops, how convenient!  I've never seen anything like that for Soundcraft. As a bonus, the Midas shops repair brakes and mufflers too!

My energy did pick up considerably a couple of times listening to loud music on headphones.  The album I had on rotation for this tour was: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. Had recently finished reading John Lydon's (aka Johnny Rotten) autobiography Anger Is An Energy finding it much better than expected.  Apart from being a Pistols and PiL fan, I'd been drawn to the bio interested to read about his interactions with Bill Laswell.  Although they had a major falling out not long after I started working with Bill, Lydon describes their collaboration as one of the artistic high points of his career.  Lydon seems to be saying that "anger is an energy," a lyric from the generic Album that Bill produced, can be a source for deterritorialization and transformation.  That would make him an alchemist of sorts, albeit informal and unschooled.

Never Mind the Bollocks is a high energy, well-produced (Chris Thomas) rock classic.  Rotton's lyrics contain a great deal of anger.  I plugged in Crowley's exercise, mentioned in the previous post, to determine the possibility of turning any of that energy into post-organic (spiritual) sustenance.  I recalled the anecdote where Vivienne Westwood asked Rotten to compose a song about submission, basically to advertise her bondage inspired clothing line.  He seemed to find the subject matter a little tacky so fulfilled the request with the Pistol's song Sub Mission ostensibly about a submarine mission.  I loved it.  Sub mission also represents another mission: sub = 68 - go here to see it.  Even without any elaborate fabulation, the song sings explicitly about mysticism.  The lyric, "It's a mystery," is one of the refrains.  Much like a qabalist, Rotten loves puns, wordplay and reversed meanings.  There are other explicit references to the mysteries: "I ain't equipment I ain't automatic, if you work for me just stay ecstatic." (Problems).  The declaration, "I am an Antichrist," which opens Anarchy in the UK obviously suggests Crowley and the ad lib "no dog's body" is congruent with a well known line in The Book of the Law, II:19: "Is a God to live in a dog?"

The lyric "God save the Queen, she ain't no human being," recalled a comment Devon made.  He said  he had seen a YouTube video where Vladimr Putin claims to have seen Queen Elizabeth II shapeshift in a giant lizard.  Rotten was right, she is  a Reptillian according to the unassailably truthful Russian leader.  Queen Liz apparently revealed this to show him who's boss.  Figuratively speaking, I associate "God save the Queen" with the 3 of Swords in the tarot. The music got me enough out of body to momentarily banish the misery of this head cold.

April 14: The venue for tonight's show was the Asheville Masonic Temple.  This was the first concert using the rented P.A. mains.  We soon discovered that one of the speaker stands was not a speaker stand, it was a stand for lights and didn't fit the QSC speaker.  This problem needed solving immediately.  Salif googled the location of a local Guitar Center then drove over to exchange the stand, dodging another bullet.  The small, two story performance area was circular and seemed mostly for small theatrical productions or dramatic ritual.  There was a selection of stage sets for the background on stage. Simrit chose an Ancient Egyptian themed one.  The circular shape of the space seemed to act as a natural amplifier for the enclosed sound waves.  That may have served well for theater or ritual, but it made our sound very loud particularly in the balcony.  I enjoyed it, but did get a few early complaints which I tried to accommodate.  My advocacy for people learning how to use ear plugs to get the exact right volume for themselves at amplified concerts hasn't caught on everywhere.  I always bring ear plugs to concerts just as I always use sunglasses when skiing on a bright sunny day.

The circular room also made for a strong bass presence which I tried to have not too boomy at soundcheck.  However, I was startled to find all the low end had disappeared when SIMRIT began playing.  The 200 - 300 organic sound absorption baffles, i.e. the people, that filled the room didn't seem like it would account for this drastic frequency response difference.  After some semi-paniced searching around I discovered on one of the lower pages on the mixer that the bus send to the sub woofer was inexplicably muted.  Grateful that this problem had an easy solution, I was baffled at what I took to be an oversight on my part.  Even the mildly psychotropic effect from inadvertently consuming food I was allergic to didn't provide a satisfactory excuse or explanation. All of the bus sends that fed the monitor mixes right beside the sub send had been turned on.  I chalked it up to a cognitive malfunction on my part.  This issue happened twice more on the tour.  Once during a soundcheck in D.C. where again it seemed another inadvertent error and more dramatically at the start of the last show in Chicago.  As I was unmuting the bus sends while SIMRIT walked on for its final performance this tour I mentally noted to myself to turn on the feed to Simrit's "in ear" monitors because they hadn't been used the past few shows.  I left that page when all was turned on to go to my effects send page, usually the top page when I mix.  I was shocked when Simrit asked me from the stage to turn on the "in ears" because I had consciously (or so I thought) just done so.  Thinking the in ears weren't working, I tried to guess what else it could be but brought up the bus send masters page to check and saw that the send was muted.  I am hoping it is just me and not a logic error with the Midas.  Taking a cue from Buckminster Fuller that mistakes can have a positive aspect by raising awareness to prevent them repeating, I will definitely be double and triple checking for this in the future.

April 15: Today the band would play at a special afternoon event, a Kundalini Yoga workshop led by Jai Dev Khalsa.  It wouldn't be a performance, rather an ambient, improvised live soundscape while the students went through some of the exercises.  We unloaded the equipment in the wind and rain into a small yoga studio at a local Asheville center.  It was a minimal set-up, only a bass drum mic for the drums, no sub.  We even managed to bypass the M32 and its large footprint substituting it with a small Midas system Matt had brought with him to work on his music in his copious spare time. It was basically a small stage box with all the mixing done with software.  It was the first music event I've ever mixed on a cellphone.  Matt stayed with me until I had learned the commands and enough of the system architecture to do what was needed.  Mixing on a cell phone and not a huge desk meant I could participate in some of the exercises to some degree while always keeping a portion of attention on the band in case they signaled a monitor adjustment.

Jai Dev began the workshop with a short, informal discourse keeping it light and engaging, but informative and meaningful.  It felt more pragmatic than metaphysical; like an icebreaker and invitation to enter the space he would guide them through. "Welcome to my humble abode in another dimension " might have been the subtext.  "My wife and these amazing musicians will help us voyage through the next two hours."   He brought up the topic of death and how remembrance of that can be useful; pragmatic.  Presented as a workshop, this also seemed like satsang.

I heard a warm buzz of murmuring students softly conversing while packing up following the event.  The weather was still howling as we got the gear back into the Sprinter.  We had the evening off so I got a lift from Jai Dev back to the hotel and worked out of  my room chamber that night.  The hotel had a definite mountain retreat vibe to it though without a big central fireplace as I envision in those kind of places.  The laundry room was a forest hike away.  The night was dark, the moon out of sight behind dark, towering cumulus clouds.  I opted to wait until the light of the morning to navigate the laundry expedition.  The wind made its presence felt but nowhere as strong as about 100 miles north where a tornado was reported to claim a life.

April 16: Prepared for a longish drive with an amazing Southern-style breakfast - biscuits, eggs, and fried chicken, the latter of which caused the internal enzymes and organisms of my body to have several committee meetings about how to digest.  We stopped at a possible future venue on the way out of town called The Orange Peel - I would love to get out mixing at the Masonic Hall.  Posters of past concerts lined the top of the wide front entrance.  Lou Reed and Bob Dylan had played there among many other notables.  The ghosts of all those rock-n-roll shows hung in the atmosphere of the dark empty venue.  The smell was old and stale, I was glad to get back outside.

We pulled into D.C. somewhere around 9 pm.  The route to the hotel took us on a driveby past all the well known Washington landmarks which were illuminated.  The Lincoln Memorial looked especially impressive to me.  Lincoln certainly seemed much larger than life when seen from that angle; pretty fucking huge, actually.  The organism called Abraham Lincoln died by assassination, but the stream of events called his life lives on.  We disembarked at another Holyday Inn in Hyattsville, a suburb in a grey urban zone between D.C. and Baltimore.  A small amusement park was directly across the other side of the highway.  In the morning, it would remind me of the amusement park in the cult classic film, Carnival of Souls.

  

Hyattsville was apparently named after radical therapist and Golden Dawn Adept, Christopher S. Hyatt. Hyatt was his initiated name, his birth name being Alan Miller.  See this post for why he might have selected the initials "CS" to be high at.   I used to experiment with his Undoing exercises in the 80's.  These are neo-Rechian "energized meditation" techniques.  My girlfriend Paula currently presents them in her Awake Mind Body sessions. Hyatt also famously started New Falcon Press which published important books by Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Aleister Crowley, Israel Regardie and others. He has many other credits in the brain change arena and deserves to have a city named after him just as George Washington did for crossing the Delaware on Christmas.  I was proud to be living, for the moment, in Hyattsville.

April 17:  Trump must have been tipped off that the musical resistance was coming to town because he fled to Florida and it wasn't even the weekend.  Corruption and sleaziness can't stand the light of day. The concert tonight was at the Kogod Cradle Theater, a performance space in the Mead Center for American Theater.  The name of of the theater was a bit of a coincidence.  I had been a full time engineer at KGOD radio station when I first moved to California and still work there from time to time.

This theater was top notch professional with equally professional technical support staff though a little formal.  I experienced some technical anarchy with the set-up.  Lines were run to connect the Midas with the house sound system.  The stage was all connected so I played some music from a cd player into the Midas to listen to the house system.  I got alarmed immediately when I saw no activity with the input meters on the board.  The signal wasn't getting in, I thought it was a cable and asked the theater tech if they had an extra.  Before he dug that up, I tapped on a room mic which was plugged directly into the mixer and that signal also didn't register. WTF? This brand new mixing desk won't receive any input?  Does not compute in my old school brain.   I rebooted the M32 then unplugged the CAT 5 digital snake from the board and tried again with no luck.   Having a major technical roadblock an hour before doors open and before soundcheck seemed to increase my stress level significantly.  I was not my normal, suave, chill self at that moment. I plugged the snake back in then descended the tiered theater steps to turn on the stage box to see if input might get in that way.  Lo and behold, after the stage box was turned on, the Midas came back to life and everything worked.   We emerged from a dead end path in the Labyrinth.  It had been a clocking issue.  The digital clock comes from the stage box so when the board is expecting to see it, but doesn't, then nothing works.  All was right with the world again.

To my ear, the concerts kept getting better and better.  This was the most professional, concert-like venue so far. The light system looked state of the art and they did an excellent job lighting the band, helping to supplement the strong shifting and dynamic moods the music created, territorialized, and traveled through.  It felt like a showcase, and because of playing D.C., a showcase for the world.  I made sure the sound resonated with the nearby White House, and the White House resonates with the World.

April 18: I had a health relapse last night; got a little chilled mixing up in the rafters with cool air on my bald cranium.  I awoke feeling mildly feverish with a headache and no appetite.  Fortunately, I only felt terrible on travel days. Waiting outside by the Sprinter for everyone to arrive on this cool, sunny day with the wind blowing.  A mono loudspeaker was playing a freak folk song at a healthy volume with a very passionate singer expounding crazy lyrics.  The Carnival of Souls amusement park across the street looked like it hadn't been used in decades.  I gained a noticeably surrealistic perspective on life just then.

Staten Island, NY was our destination today.  On the road, Simrit asked me to call Maidson, the house sound tech for the New York venue.  His phone number began with 666 after the area code.  Mention was made of its numerical symbolism in Revelations  Matt gave an alternate explanation that sounded good.  I piped in with story that Crowley said it was simply a solar number (6 repeated thrice) when he was questioned about it in Court under oath. "You can call me Sonny." 

We would be basing ourselves at the large, five-story home of two Kundalini Yoga students and very generous patrons of SIMRIT, Danielle and Chris for a few days.  Staying there was like finding an oasis in the desert, it was incredibly relieving and restorative mainly because of the really good food Danielle had stocked in the fridge and cupboards and for the healing remedy teas she had, including an ayurvedic concoction that proved effective.  We arrived in the late afternoon with just enough time to choose our spaces and unload our bags before going out to dinner.  Chris took us all to this amazing old school Italian restaurant nearby.  My appetite had returned and this truly amazing food, best since leaving California, really warmed all my innards and did wonders for my body.  Chris and Danielle truly and profoundly know the art of hospitality.

Our mansion, as I called this temporary home, was a block from the ocean.  My health bounced back enough so that I could go for runs by the ocean a couple of times though it was still very cool and the wind brisk.  The ocean reminded me that all the oceans are connected.  Meditating beside a massive body of water stretching around the world had a calming and restorative effect.  Maybe one reason why the element Water is often the first element the student is advised to empirically discover in some mystery schools.

April 19:  Westport, CT.  Played the Westport Country Playhouse, a historical theater that Paul Newman and family had rescued from oblivion some years back.  Once again, I was thrilled to work on a stage that Groucho Marx had once performed on.  The show and the house sound were both superb.  I heard that the stage sound was a little muted and dry.  Due to the architecture of the space the stage wasn't hearing much ambience from the mains.  Despite the less than ideal acoustics on stage everyone sounded great.

April 20: New York City, or as I inwardly felt it: NEW YORK CITY!!!  I always love visiting and working in New York which had been my home at various times totaling over ten years.  We were again playing at the Angel Orsentz on Norfolk, a block south of Houston on the Lower East Side.  This building was the oldest synagog in New York before it went secular.  It's a beautiful space that still suggests holiness and higher dimensions through the architecture and ambience.

It seems appropriate to play a holy space as this is a holiday of sorts.  4/20 - International Marijuana Day to the aficionados.  I was told about twenty years ago by a high school student that at 4:20 pm those in the know were supposed to stop what they were doing and smoke weed.  I've never heard an explanation as to why that particular time but do find it interesting that, as Eric Wagner has pointed out, one correspondence of 420 given in the Sepher Sephiroth (the Gematria section in Crowley's 777 and other Qabalistic Writings) = "Vapour, smoke."

At 12:30 pm a lone volunteer turned up to help us load in the equipment.  No house sound tech in sight.  I called Maidson's 666 number and he told me he was stuck in traffic court and would be there within the hour.  Another manager type was able to tie our audio into their PA - the loudest sound system yet as needed to cover this cavernous space.  Soundcheck runs smoothly.  We put our subwoofer on the stage behind Simrit.  Tonight the bass response will rock the band's world.

We finished soundcheck early, around 3:30 pm. With four hours open until show time I opted to go on a Manhattan walkabout and visit two of my favorite bookstores, The Strand, and Barnes and Noble at Union Square.  The latter usually has a good selection of obscure Deleuze titles and sells music as well.  I headed almost due east in order to walk past familiar haunts when I had worked at Platinum Island studios on Broadway between Great Jones (3rd St.) and Bond.  About a block south of Grace Cathedral I checked the time on my phone - it was exactly 4:20.  I half expected everyone to stop and light up, but alas, the Manhattan machine roared on with nary a pause, oblivious to this pivotal moment.  I didn't smoke but did improvise a short poem under my breath of acknowledgement and gratitude for this herbal medicine as celebrated in psalm 104.

At the Strand I found inexpensive new editions of Nabokov's Short Stories, Anti-Education by Nietzsche - some of his earliest writings, and Deleuze and Futurism by Helen Palmer.  In Barnes and Noble I picked up a copy of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus to gift a friend I would see in Toronto, and a copy of Dialogues by Deleuze and Claire Parnet.

The concert was the strongest and best yet. Simrit declared it the best stage sound on tour, so far.  Having the sub on stage really helped.  In the house, I felt able to get a much better handle on the lively acoustics than last year. Invisible forces were rendered audible.  We had a confluence of forces and intensities; this day, this city, this musical assemblage.  Mercury designates the coherent multiplicity of forces, the deity, that rules over New York according to Aleister Crowley in Aleister Crowley In America: Art, Espionage and Sex Magick in the New World by Tobias Churton. I noticed all the Mercury iconography in the City years ago when I lived here like, for instance, the Mercury statue above the entrance to Grand Central Station. I had been tuned to that frequency.

Photo by Mark David Thomas

For more on what Mercury does see the always excellent Butterfly Language blog here

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Salif, Simrit and Jared at Angel Orsentz 

On the right: one of Devon's cymbals and a Overhead mic (AKG 414)

Photo by Jila Ji

420 not only corresponds to "smoke," it also corresponds to "Pacifica," i.e. Peace. The next morning, 4/21, the world received news that North Korea did an about face by announcing that it was suspending its nuclear weapons program.  Complications have arisen since then, but it's always one day at a time; one spatio-temporal chamber at a time.  Today was a good day.

To be continued ...