Tag: music

Wednesday March 28, 2018

Eve Essex interrupts to announce that she accepts my “satisfaction theories.”

According to these theories, power is to be sought not to acquire wealth or to gain dominion over others, but to manifest the unknown and to gather meaning. It is the duty of the humanities to cultivate and preserve this power. Sarah recounted on our walk yesterday a dream she’d had the night prior involving a grape gazpacho. Nature in this way calls to humanity, beckons, as with bulbs beset with the breaking virus during Tulip Mania, history’s first speculative bubble, in the midst of the Dutch Golden Age. These calls upon us have been growing louder lately. Through a pair of binoculars I observe what appears to be either a Brown Thrasher or a Wood Thrush arriving with a great flutter of wings to scavenge beneath a bird feeder in my yard. For these appearances I am grateful.

Monday March 26, 2018

Reality expands, splits along a seam, opening a path, a trail for bikes and pedestrians beside a downtown railway, linking formerly disparate parts of the totality. Cells and cell-clusters travel through veins beside arteries. The name of an appearing and disappearing cat scrolls across a screen. One can imagine universes suffused with entities of this sort, on whom one may call through performance of ritual, as in The Teachings of Don Juan. Among incalculable potential pathways through life’s labyrinth, I’ve wound up here, eyes scanning across rows of books. Let us make of our path a joyful journey. Planes streak the sky at twilight as I listen to Brett Naucke’s “The Vanishing.” Ignore the monorail and advance toward the glowing pyramid.

Sunday March 25, 2018

Sarah and I listened to Ought’s “Beautiful Blue Sky” off their album Sun Coming Down while driving to see Godspeed You Black Emperor the other night, the last moments of sunlight shining through the rear window, warming the backs of our necks. Standing at the show afterwards, I wondered: “Who today are my countrymen? Who today stand opposed both to machines and to those who make them?” Recalling these thoughts now, I wonder: is the true power of witchcraft and sorcery their ability to provoke consciousness-alteration in oneself and in others? Those affected vape and dance despite their dehumanizing professions, as nonhuman nature finds its springtime groove. A television in the corner of a Chinese takeout disturbs my peace of mind with an infomercial hawking beauty products: some sort of ‘Cindy Crawford’-sponsored age-defying skin treatment super-serum. The ex-‘global supermodel’ collects a tax, even if just as burdensome interruption of one’s soundscape and field of vision. I’d rather lie around all day in a state of jouissance. Kicking up dust, reading old reports, watching The Godz, a short work by psychedelic filmmaker Jud Yalkut.

Wednesday March 21, 2018

Voices lead a roving imagination — let’s call it the camera-eye — on a tour of a menu screen leading to Alice Coltrane’s “Galaxy in Turiya.”

Floating in a void, grasping at straws. I am but a mere vessel, like the “Black Panther” figure, multiplying into several semi-autonomous guises over the course of 1965 and 1966: first as the mascot of Stokely Carmichael’s Lowndes County Freedom Organization, then a second time on newsstands as a character in an issue of Fantastic Four (Stan Lee, the character’s creator, a fan of Huxley’s The Doors of Perception), only to return transformed into another political party, this time out in Oakland, the invention of Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Hallucination? Spirit animal? Archetype? Fantasy? What is this product of mind that erupts synchronistically into reality, in what seems a coordinated manner — conjured, planted, determined, dreamt?

Tuesday March 20, 2018

Is everything I write about in these trance-scripts curated by algorithms? Let us go right through it: you think after all this time, something asking to whisper in my ear would be heard: the “Soul,” floating in an ocean of sound. What would be its message? Egg’s “Fugue in D Minor.”

The dramatic idea dissipates into confusion. Vectors in 2- and 3-dimensional Euclidean spaces. I want utopianism to triumph over unthinkable disaster. The truth of the matter is that divination falsifies whenever it imagines its hand on the rudder, as with Norbert Wiener’s helmsman. Human control systems. Instrumental reason. Intuition is more like reality reloading with updates, extra levels, bonus rounds. A cartoon ghost escapes from a head, exploring by taking the will of others as its guide. Data rate rises and falls. Terry Riley’s “Cactus Rosary” announces, “Some of my work has been altered!” Peyote rattles, aluminum pepper shakers. “Dead artist!” chant voices in unison. My inclination is to reach for a book.

Saturday March 17, 2018

“Say something warm, say something bright,” sing the words in my head. I concentrate upon lyrics to songs from an algorithmically-generated playlist, seeking sense amid chance. That sense arrives when thought begins to throb to the beat of “Beat” by Bowery Electric.

A reveal occurs: I see sacred geometries. Mind invents ideograms — first languages, perhaps — by abstracting experiences into memory-derived essences. Picture Terry Gilliam’s animations from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Escape from grim reality. Final thought of the day: Black Panther is thrilling in many ways, but the film’s imaginary resolution to real contradictions is one and the same with its backstory and founding premise: namely, the Vibranium-powered alternative modernity represented by Wakanda.

Wednesday March 14, 2018

I imagine Sarah as Wonder Woman, jetting invisibly through the sky above Metropolis. We tour old neighborhoods with our nieces, sunlight flickering through the branches of an ancient tulip magnolia. Afterwards, I sit beside a staticky baby monitor, hypnotized by its bursts of low-volume noise, sensing in the experience some foretaste of life ahead. A portal opens, out of which emerge the drones, hisses, and pulses of The Von Einem Tapes. On the other end lies Robert Stillman’s Portals.

Dive into one of these, and George Orr and Dr. Haber, the characters in The Lathe of Heaven, appear as components of a single mind. The “improver,” animated by an ever-increasing will to power, enslaves the dreamer, turns the latter into an indentured Jinn.

Sunday March 11, 2018

I’m galloping along, clearing error code 4s, reminiscing about the past, contemplating workload, when out of nowhere bursts the opening notes to Lloyd Clifton Miller’s “Gol-e Gandom,” followed by a sequence of environmental sound: dog, blender, bird, down the block a team working at a downed tree with a chainsaw. “Jump to, take action!” And I’m up and about, anticipating future events. A muting occurs. Unscripted passage of time. In a moment of calm, I lose myself in flight between subjectively distinct galaxies. I advance in brief increments through Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, savoring each moment. The psychological establishment, like any establishment, corrupted by the Judeo-Christian Capitalist West’s False-Enlightenment Prometheanism, collapses into the state evoked by Sun Ra & His Arkestra’s “Lanquidity.”

Relax, drift free of the value-form, I tell myself. The reverb on my voice leads me into a trance. My face struggles to match my mood.

Thursday March 8, 2018

Passive Status’s “forest” uses sound to transport consciousness to an elsewhere. A murky cosmic dungeon.

The beam of the mind’s eye blanks in and out during vertical retrace, at the end of each scan of the proscenium and the great beyond. Aldous Huxley called this beyond a “luminous living geometry.” The self in its cat’s cradle, its Metatron’s Cube. The god-mind as it precipitates into objects. Forms appear as clear as daylight, awaiting incorporation into being. Bands, spectrums, vibrational fields. Clusters of energy. Patterns. Particles communicating across the Planck length. Seeds of life spinning into tube tori. “Mentation in s-sleep,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her novel The Lathe of Heaven, “is like an engine idling, a kind of steady muttering of images and thoughts. What we’re after are the vivid, emotion-laden, memorable dreams of the d-state.” What if, from this point forward, however, ancient rules of epic narration were to be faithfully observed? Answers would have to come with their own questions attached, with the whole designed to reveal reality for what it is: stroboscopic, multi-sensory class warfare.

Wednesday March 7, 2018

Using an app designed to replicate the stroboscopic “flicker” effect of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s Dream Machine, I begin my journey. I pass a semi-translucent energy field shaped like a dog. Trails lead to experimental grammars and readings in phenomenology. Friends and I over drinks speculate about socialist strategy in light of the strike in West Virginia. During brief lulls in the conversation, or while friends and I renew our drinks, I wonder about non-player characters and the representational challenges posed by collective subjects. Tools, remember, enable a prosthesis or “doubling” of the self. While Cluster & Eno’s “One” keeps me awake and hopeful, Jack DeJohnette’s “Aho” is what finally takes me beyond my skin.

Aggressive, utilitarian: the commodities that populate today’s indoor capitalist shopping malls no longer possess an erotics. Fonts and signage aim for instant legibility, leave nothing to the imagination, all artifacts and all actors of this world turned exclusively toward securing of utilities. Yet hypnotic props remain essential to the mall’s magic. Mirrored surfaces, confusions of scale, multiple conflicting pop songs played simultaneously: these and other methods induce a trancelike readiness to consume. Thankfully, “I AM THAT I AM” can escape these self-made confines. We can teach ourselves to race at lightning-quick speed up the inner canal of the optic nerve, thus allowing consciousness to awaken in the space behind the eyes a new era of sensitivity and interior vision, somewhere between heaven and earth.