my own public-domain hyper-Idaho

"And I really think, you know, what we need to do is put the art-pedal to the floor, and understand that this is art - we are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western civilization and, you know, it's been a C-minus performance so far... And they are just about to reach out with the hook and drag us offstage, unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously." Terence McKenna

heavily weighted by sleep and solemn thought, i staggered sluggish onto the balcony.
sharp-cold and clear, porch lights sprinkled the valley for miles in the pre/dawn blue/black. i shivered awake, and watched the bats snatch insects from around a nearby light pole. Through mushroom experiments I've decided that within my thoughts, in their progression to some kind of moving/evolving emotional imagery battery and away from words and still pictures and video (for horrible lack of better terms) I have progressively lost the ability to articulate my thoughts as effectively as maybe I once had (or maybe my unconscious/subconscious/overmind or whatever it is being called these days knows what needs to be said but is horribly out of practice since the clumsy idiot beast Ego took control of the mouth in bloody combat so many years ago. Difficult to win a war if you're a pacifist.), my flapping lips and acid tongue also are imperfect tools on the best days and possibly even wildly inappropriate for the task. you're simply going to have to plug in to find out what I mean…take that how you will/

it's like a black hole now, i can no longer touch the outside and feel its shape. i feel distorted when i come too close. void approaches and it hurts to be so scared like a despair, regretful, black hole scared and i instinctively shy away. can feel it spiraling, just out of reach. solid as metal and cold again. i immediately begin testing it for weakness; trying to find a way inside, fool that i am. lay my head under the microscope and bash it in with a hammer. look at the tiny pieces running about, you'd almost think they know where they're headed. sometimes in the breath between words I will (internally, always) make guesses as to how their sentence will end. I'm often hilariously or tragically wrong, but I like to think of it as lightning-round analysis. If only Symbolic practice made you better at things…and besides, a .300 average in baseball is hall-of-fame-worthy if your defenses are good.

I need more content for this page. Or to be more content with this page. You, dear reader, all both of you, should write something and i'll post it. maybe I'll also type up something that is currently only available on analog paper so as to provide more length. I seem to only be effective in small doses when confronted with a shiny screen.



meanwhile, in our hero's latest experiment...
mushrooms had seemed to grow out of me at one point. Terence McKenna mentioned a similar image so I searched and found this:

Bee-faced shaman, Tassili, Algeria 5,000 years old

Apparently, I wasn't the first.

i was vividly -in- the network, my corpse may have fed a small forest of mushrooms but their root system encompassed my Self as well as my body and I could sense /through/ the mushrooms' senses which felt extraordinarily wet and warm and brightly "colored" though i was certainly not using my eyes. time-lapse growth overflowed my boundaries and linked us into a world root and I could immediately feel everything and hear and see and maybe a half dozen other senses I couldn't hope to explain. time was revealed to be massive clusters of probability-related moments-repeating-eternallys and that all things were happening everywhere in every direction real and unreal forever. the frozen wave cracked and crashed over me, and my body was unceremoniously dumped in an alley waaayy out back of Cognition, many states from home. 

from an old dream journal: 

'Racing down a highway hill on a motorcycle, it ended by running straight into infinite ocean. At the last second the bike stopped but I flew off over the water, where I hovered not quite touching the surface, I slowly started spinning in a strange pattern and all the clouds compressed into one, and the world turned kaleidoscopic.

Woke up still feeling that inertia and nearly vomited.'

Because you can't stop me.

Recently I guest-posted on a Canadian metal blog with the intent of doing something slightly regular, a here-and-there-ish 'when something my style pops up for review' level contributor. One post and it became pretty clear they weren't really interested in my style, but just in filling space. I am posting this here because their editor eviscerated it in the name of style-guides and I like it better the other way. Fucker.




Rings of Saturn
Lugal Ki En
(Google it. Lazy bastard.)

[Full disclosure time: I don't like much death metal, and I like even less 'core. In fact, this album /on its surface/ is nearly the diametric opposite of my own personal tastes - which lean significantly toward the atmospheric, the bleak, the noisy, the raw, the droning. This opposition is precisely why I accepted this particular reviewing gig. Call it a means to escape my shell /a review for people that would never give this a chance on its own.

Because it is fucking GOOD.
Incredible even.

Death metal space-fury gone virally berserk. Be warned: the following has a lot of hyphens and copious use of words like fractal and spiraling. New concepts had to be invented, existing words had to be chopped up and blended to describe parts of this everything-but-chaotic album. I literally gave up on the thesaurus.com entry for "precise" and made something up at one point.]

digitalis in extremis

Rings of Saturn are inhuman post-digital precision, slick and clean even amidst the depths this style is clearly capable of plumbing. Self-described "aliencore" and absolutely drilling in its pointedness, this album is spectacularly tight and technical even when losing its mind entirely in the grind and the guttural. Right off the mark full destruction reigns, the opening track Senseless Massacre living up to its name and pulverizing from the first second before a beautiful melody flows seamlessly into the closest thing this song has to a hook. While this explosive leadoff symbolizes the blend of mercurial hyper-melody and impossibly massive sledgehammer rhythm to be found in abundance on the record, the second tune, Desolate Paradise ratchets up the intensity of both. Sparked by a spiraling lead break and elevated by perfect use of mood-bending near-ambience, demands of the listener to "wake from slumber" precede its going wildly off on a treble-happy shred excursion that drops into a breakdown that would leave the proudest hardcore kid in fear for his life.

Track 3, Lalassu Xul is an altogether different beast from the groove-laden doom I'm so used to. Bungle-esque carnivale-bounce frames the mechanistic and repetitive drillpress xeno-grind in an off kilter its-happy-music-if-you're-a-robotic-serial-killer kind of way. Following up that is Infused, one of the more humanoid bytes from this disc. A standout track, the cyborg blending of wicked thrashed out human guitarplay and galactic deathcrush virulence is top notch, near painful in its attempt to drive -through- the star rather than go around. After the short and appropriately-named interlude Fractal Intake, the midway point that is Natural Selection restarts the malevolence in a cauldron of pistoning meticulousness. Spiteful electronic spikes of twisting melody slicing through the jackhammer trigger-warning drums before Beckon calls the terraforming ships in to calculate and articulate how your planet will be destroyed, ending in a wonderfully lucid echo-driven final drive toward peace before Godless Times schizoanalytically (go look it up, I'll wait.) progresses from shrieking lockstep to doomed-to-drift breakdown to tech-splatter and beyond. An industrialized /solar/ intensification of death, grind, and deathcore tropes into a vicious exclamation of hybridization.

Unsympathetic Intellect is a peak moment, the first few seconds vividly portraying the wonderment that could come from the Eye or access point of a vast intelligence turning its gaze upon you before it begins to communicate /before it reminds you just how alien it can be/ before it ups the grind in unsettling/hectic/body hammer measure. Not to be outdone, Eviscerate flashes without segue between several modes of RoS' extraterrestrial stylistic choice, rapid-fire alterations and complications of their sound continue unabated as the instrumental The Heavens have Fallen shows a lush, almost comforting form. Maybe a reminder of technology's inherent promise hidden in ultimate wasteful destruction/a breath of resistance before the ferocious 12th and final track No Pity for a Coward (a Suicide Silence cover) brings ending in a violent, direct assault of laser-guided planet-glassing before our new overlords descend to greet us in star-wrecked climax.


The Alex Grey meets Voltron artwork sums up the tone of this release tremendously. There is no hope. The visitors do not come in peace. Surrender or face imminent annihilation.


(insert a video here!)

(I think the only thing that could ruin this album is finding out the sample at the end was used un-ironically.)

comprehensive pupal stage insurance

threading across snowfields/ threatening to overtake expression as the result of infinite dispersal/ i have eaten today and it is already spacing me//
from the most unlikely places/ the kingdom of heaven one day may start to unravel//
the virtues of plants/ the forces of magical conjurations/ invoking the symbolism of the sea in order to align himself/ but all unintelligible//
my modest contribution to this were broadcasts via my brain from a shaman of long ago/ in these sorcerous images/ these his purest incantations are marks to function/ marks of place/ marks of time//
keep going/ no progress to the inevitable release/ targets of light expansion/ meta-energetic and left-handed//
we sat in the fountain/ strangers/ careful to stay under the ledge//

(( watch this video: http://vimeo.com/75940226 ))

"they start to exist in you. in spite of you."

i shot an arrow into the air
and believed i hit the moon.
she ignored my command to "fall!"
and restlessly continued.

the unconscious now of eternity

/6 grams of mushrooms/

Face of my girlfriend solidified into a mountain, sun and moon cartoonishly sped around and seasons changed several times, leaving snowdrifts and piles of dead leaves upon her face before I rooted down into wet soil and became a plant. When I plugged into nearby roots it opened access to a world-network.

I dug down into the saturated earth. My words, which had already gone to gibberish, began devolving into spluttering and spurting. My mouth overflowed with mud and I realised I was a large frog, vomiting the mud.

Frog became dog, then coyote, then wolf, then several other animals and several other people, eventually it all whirled together, noisily melting into a staticked blur. Blur resolved into three spinning balls, the primary colours. They spun more rapidly and began to merge. When they became one spinning white orb, it coalesced into the tv screen in the bedroom. She was up changing movies, and asked what I wanted to watch. I said whatever, and she asked again. I repeated myself. This happened several times before I realised I was seeing successive nights of the same thing. Every time she asked, I smiled and said whatever. Hundreds of nights passed and I dissolved into the bed. I just faded out. It didn't hurt, it didn't feel wrong. I held on to her and disappeared.

I lied inside a jet engine.
I pried a little as to why, but it was too nice inside to leave. Volcanic projection, I slept inside a magma flow. Open wound of a celestial secret, blazing righteous like a white hot star. Several people and things had been subsumed into me, or I them. I asked them questions but I answered for them. They answered through me. After purification I was shown inside my mind.

All experiences /everywhere and everywhen and everyhow/ organized in a virtual infinite library. The prize for dying a final death was access to it, access to every experience. I danced through my living room as a young Persian girl, I listened to George Carlin narrate my demise. I stared out the window as the sun rose but I felt transparent, and I watched several weeks of post-mortem life in the apartment unfold, the way they reacted to my death.