news from the gaps : don't mind me : 2 halves of one half-bad review : bad news gapes

I just finished In the Dust of This Planet. My complaints are minor and he certainly did his homework but I have this irk in the back of my mind about it...I would have to actually know the guy to be able to answer my question though so I may as well shut up about it. Didn't put much effort into disguising his "found text" but c'est la vié. The magic circle riffing was excellent, but I'm dying to know when the boundary stops being acknowledged as somehow any more than arbitrary on some level. It's like a million people gathered around to check out the wall after it had been finally toppled, and instead of frolicking out into anywheresville and exploring the shit out of the interior galaxies, everyone is like "dude I've never seen the wall from this side" all glazed over. Narcissists. It seems he is cool with an initial sketching of the starting point of exploration and how it will look in some fashion to a person that had never experienced it and needed cultural reference points but others like The Xenofem Assemblage, Reza, Jonah, N Land, Nicola, Niall Scott, and Ben W for instance, are out actively engaging in unholy deep space voyages past sight of ground. I think he missed a good opportunity to delve deep into sickness and plague transmission instead of the sort of cursory bit. I'm complaining an awful lot for someone that actually liked it a great deal. THIS IS ME LIKING A THING.

Fine I'll not shut up about it. I contend, and one day intend to actually go prove (today will not be that day) that Thacker is just a great scholar of mysticism and not actually a mystic in his own right. He did all the math but it is still abstract, call me when you turn this textbook into a grimoire with an unpronounceable name.

News part 2 I started working at Saint Louis University this past week, as a research assistant in a bio lab dedicated to bees, the SHIT, SLU Hymenoptera Investigative Team....I frolick in gardens and jellyfish, mostly.

News at 3 Locrian's new album is amazing and I'll have a review of it up on Sludgelord in a few days. 

New 4s BMTS4 - Mors Mystica is out finally, my paper Mycelegium included though the straight up rockstar of that show was Daniel Colucciello Barber's 'The Autonomy of Death, Nothing Like This' - "There is no one that can ride negativity, because negativity is the radicality of no one. This is bad news only if one thinks one is supposed to be here, only if one thinks one has something to lose."

Niall Scott's 'On Darkness Itself (An obscure letter of divorce to Immanuel Kant, permitting all to be betrothed to the darkness' and Gary Shipley's 'The Tongue-Tied Mystic: AAAAAARRRGH Fuck Them, Fuck You!' are also fucking brilliant, the latter with an equally brilliant video that had better be made available soon or I will be very disappointed. Speaking of disappointing, goon Hunter Hunt-Hendrix once again shows how metal he is by fucking APOLOGIZING for being a bad metalhead. I feel like he betrays his lack of understanding of metal first by appropriating and then by apologising for his appropriation. GTFO, and do whatever you want but don't pretend like you win points for being relentlessly positive and thinking that supplication is the answer to a horde of slavering metalheads that just feel like maybe you should pretend to understand your roots before you think you even know HOW to rip the tree up. I wobble freely in my enjoyment. Someone trying to ape black metal shouldn't miss the stupidly obvious cultural move to appropriate freely and see apologetics as the sucker way. Only a fucking outsider would ever think THIS culture was separable from THIS music. I would say BM totally has rules, they're just not strictly musical rules and they are flexible to the degree they perform the magic successfully. The main metal rule, thusly, is know your roots. Look at metalcore/deathcore: ostensibly identical to its "true" counterparts (Swedish melodic death and brutal death metal), the reason they've never caught on with "insider" fans is because despite clear similarity, the musicians evolved to that style in completely novel, extra-metal fashion and in some meaningful way, APE the music instead of evolve past it or through it. No bloody roots=not technically metal/just meming the parts you like eviscerates your claim to a sort of authenticity. The worst kind of thief is one that thinks they are owed the thing they stole just because they can do a neat trick with it. Anyway, Black metal is beholden to the darkness. It simply doesn't work in the same way if you're trying to be positive about it, it is like squeezing a water balloon that is only half full, you just can't pop it without ridiculous contortions. Nihilism is actually the point, and the ideology becomes the sticking point nihilism exists to unstick. Have you, Triple H, given any consideration to the possibility that you attempted implementation of this philosophy and got a tremendous viscerally magickal backlash for it? Like water refraction or a smoky mirror reflecting another mirror, it looks like you've cracked it, but it's just a trick of the light... Black metal doesn't want supplication, it wants abjectionnnnnn (cue wolf howling and tremolo-picked guitar)....simply put, it isn't black anymore. Go fuck off with your ego.

nΩtes on the deliverance øf a new friEND : decelerator

I've been accused of taking things personally, "too serious" says the trickster!

but Death is my Dance, Death is my Game

tragic is my comedy

and with a grin and gallows humour I blow my trombones

haunting hunting trills on ribcage xylophones

a smiling skull sighing out a groaning moaning poem

to annihilate your dreams of Home.

Señor Coyote, I may not understand your dance (I'm not omniscient, even at my best)

but I understand the bee's dance

the tree's dance 

when the wind wilds the way

before a thunderstorm collapses the world and

sends you quivering cowering underneath my laughing leafing beard.

Your speed will be needed Little Brother, because

I am a fucking glacier

a bone-bleaching desert,

the deep ocean beyond sight of land

that ancient battlefield behind the tobacco farm out past the church

that glows godless spectral at 3am soul's midnight

as Valhalla spews forth ragged companies of all my

special sons and daughters

 I am

the deep down things of long-dead Gods and Outer Time

the swamping corpse of rivers dying

that hole in the world you can't define behind your eyes

labyrinthine wake-ing dreaming you can't divine and can't divide.

Señor Coyote, the raccoon has your magic,

and an opposable thumb,

and superior climbing ability,

and a willingness to sink to the sewer to survive,
My master lockpick when keys
are lost to lycanthropy

but if you seek to sneak me, searching, peeking for sneaking ankles to bite

the ash you'll taste in mouth is I, as We wheel and caw

contemplating murder.

Señor Coyote, I can feel your sneaking footsteps swift across my shoulders.

I hear you running over the ground down bones of a million of your brothers,

broken-backed by brighteyed wolves howling voids at starring skies,

by relentless Time, or stealth-perched panther's eyes.

come inside the crucible, the hurricane of Nature's Eye and learn to teach the I and I to Die.

jazzorcise me : wearing thin

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but I'm nothing if not....whatever the opposite of prolific is....

Somewhat recently, late spring....
Struggling with some topos theory concepts while simultaneously wondering why jazz/improvisation seems to be the common thread linking most of those I see talking about these concepts, I decide to take an afternoon experimental. At this stage I'm criminally underinformed and uneducated about nearly everything jazz is could be was or will be...a complete novice. After scrambling around youtube listening to scraps and seconds and scrapings from several records by names I knew as an outsider, Coltrane Davis Monk, but an album title caught my eye. I plug in Mingus' appropriately black metal-sounding "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" and plug myself into roughly 200 µg of LSD.

[[the initial wash, the peak, was detailed in the mother/mary bit a few posts back. an ego-dissolution that coincided *perfectly* with a thunderclap and a downpour. when the peak collapsed into the decay stage, i pressed play and lied back down, my problems with this strange musical math in a sober state very much on my mind.]]

Upon the first notes, my arm hair stood on end and I could feel the shape of every instrument individually squirrelling and rumbling around various points of my body. I've felt structure in music, plenty of times, I've even written about drugs and the shape of music, but always in a wondering, speculative fashion. Wondering how much was just in the head, always subjective etc. I've watched music happen visually on many drugs, but this was razor sharp definition compared to large blobs of sound coming out of other bands and musicians. This had definition in a such a way that it was difficult not to think it as a technical upgrade to the technology of music, definition in such a way that I could recognize the math involved, could recognize the accuracy of my perception. It became no struggle at all to understand why it is a challenging genre to try and take hold of out beyond the muzaks and the kenny g's...I could feel the waveform of every musical structure and flow as separate strands and strings and curves, and I could feel the movement between perception and recognition, the gaps as strongly as the sounds. I could see how multiple instruments interlocked and constructed scaffolding for other instruments; how the group swelled and breathed as a unit, a complex system of individual complex systems working toward a unified projection. I felt a hundred spidery fingers, one for every frequency, cascade and crawl around on my cortex. By focusing on a single instrument I could mute the feeling of every other sound, singling out each strand individually from the rest, singling out the pathways that particular strand of energy took through my brain. After playing in this feeling for a little while, I mentally backed off from this awed analysing, relaxed my thinking and simply listened to the morphing musicality as a whole.

I could feel it bending my thoughtwave toward it. The spidery fingers were massaging my mind, attempting to build speed toward nonlinearity, toward a concrescence that crescendos into an awareness that this band is operating seamlessly as a single brain focused on a thing. Or on nothing? That the topology of this album seemed structurally identical to the topology of a single brain pacing around a structure that it is trying to understand. A brain praying to a structure it is trying to understand? A brain preying on a structure it is trying to understand?

I'm hearing myself in this album.
I'm hearing my brain work upon this album.
My perception split perfectly in two.
I have a sort of default, standard hexagonal latticing framework(?) for multi-perception, I've noticed, that occurs when my perception is split into multiples during psych trials and spellcastings, but this was the first time I'd ever witnessed it simply doubling. Perfectly doubling. A single hexagonal cell of unified perception mirrored itself dimensionally, somehow from the inside out, involuting toroidally and I saw myself across the room pacing around the stereo, lost in thought. Pacing around the structure it is trying to understand. I saw myself, and somehow instinctively knew it was a faded copy of myself from slightly earlier in time, and my brain raced past my rational mechanism into the conclusion that I was watching my ghost, and that I had died.

As this emotion overwhelmed rationality with an elegant precision, I started crying. The crying came out like a bolt with a decidedly un-sorrowful feeling, however - the feeling of extraordinary comfort, followed by a surge of flaming bliss. The thought that held my mind in its jaws before had resembled "if only I had myself to talk to, I wouldn't be lonely" was scorched away by the flash and heat of "I ALWAYS have myself to talk to, how could I ever be lonely?" and a warm blanket closed over me as I watched my spectre dance around the room to this beautiful record.

I accepted being dead forever, and suddenly knew the truth, that the structure around which I pray/pace is a mirror image of my own Death.


"A psilocybin mushroom experience in which I had perceived memories laid out before me contained in a seemingly infinite array of mirrors, mirrors that also contained the seeds of future choices, suddenly made sense. A labyrinthine reflexivity, an asynchronous reflection of every possible self. Sitting alone in the middle of the night watching an old man drown in a mirror of his regrets, my vision went geomorphic and I began to weep. Self-reflection was enveloped by void-thoughts and shattered across a broken-mirrored wall. I saw my Death pirouetting in the reflective surface before I reflexively shook my head and snapped out of it in time for the credits to roll."  
Reflections on a Hyperprophet - J. Hypheresis