inhale inhale you're the victim

I’ve only told a few people about this time in my life. A brief segue between smoking weed and
graduating to hard drugs in high school found me sitting in a basement with a few friends, fellow
burnouts, stoners...what had appeared in the dimness to be a paper bag assumed to contain strong
drink made its way around the rotation but when it was handed to me it felt empty. I peered inside
and the intense smell of gasoline assaulted my face, fumes rising from a soaked wad of paper towels
at the bottom.

“Uhhh…”

“Just put your face in and breathe in and out really deeply dude, you’ll get pretty wasted.”

A lot of harder drug users will sort of sink to whatever level is available to them in terms of intoxicants
in order to keep normality at bay, and I was to prove no different. Our main weed guy was busted
several days earlier and we were as dry as a bone. Being 15 with no income does not make it
easy to acquire alcohol. We had yet to become aware of the thriving crystal meth scene lurking
behind every curtain in our town (though that would come hard and fast later). A group of older kids a
year earlier had taught my friends how to huff paint from a breadbag, and they reveled in the ease
with which they could get profoundly stoned using things commonly found in any garage. I looked
at the bag for a second and in retrospect it is my experience that at that moment of truth for anyone
that goes with such a chemical approach there is an extremely short list of thoughts that go through
one’s mind, and they’re all terrible, empty, lonely, lost thoughts. One hit from the bag is enough to
diagnose someone with depression, anxiety, trauma.

Anyway.

What kind of story would this be if I’d said no thanks and that was that? Of course I was eager
to feel anything that was not my normal feelings or to feel nothing, to feel literally any deviation
at all. Breathe deep, molecules begin to buzz, time ceases to exist. Who knows how much was
actually inhaled that night, considering the trip lasts around 10 minutes but we were tripping all
night and into the next day without sleep. Blink once and it is 8 pm, blink again and it is 6:45 pm,
blink again and it’s noon the next day, erratically time travelling. Full blown apocalyptic end-times
hallucinations, gods, angels, and speaking in tongues. Multiple high speed oscillations between
life and death that I wouldn’t recognize as “ego death” until psychedelics years later. Elves, aliens,
insects, alien elvish insects. Ghosts and demons. Ultradimensional conversations with mutating
starling-swarms of disembodied voices. Complete dissociation while my body was still active and
interacting with the world. Extremely negative interactions.

One of the friends dragged us outside at some point, and told us a story about finding a
crate of actual dynamite near an abandoned railroad line that was a half mile from the
house when he was like 9. In my fried state I believed he’d told us he had the dynamite
right then and was going to blow up the house, me, the school, I was growing more and more
paranoid and frantic that it would be up to me to prevent a terrorist attack. It was later related
to me that out of nowhere I began attacking one of the others and yelling disconnected
gibberish, fought my way upstairs where the parents were sleeping while yelling about a bomb,
let both dogs out of the house into the woods and tried to start the adults’ car (it was a manual
transmission so luckily I couldn’t)....somehow none of this woke anyone, and around 2 that
morning a friend brough us some weed and I calmed down a little, though everything was
mostly blur and glitch. The next morning we left (driving, with milk jug full of gas to huff in the
car) and it had snowed a little. We took a curve too fast and swerved into the other lane badly
and then fishtailed almost off the road, right as a cop car went by….it had its lights flashing,
was going very fast the other way and did not stop for us….another mile up the road and the
driver blew through a stop sign and nearly hit a small child, screeching to a halt so close to him
that we couldn’t see him over the hood. The kid was sitting with his legs a foot underneath the
car, eyeballs an inch from the bumper. Driver tells the kid to never speak a word of this or we’ll
run him over for real next time and picks him up and plants him on the sidewalk and we drove off…..

Of course this did not put me off further experiences with inhalants, and the experiences got far
weirder and more stressful. Was probably huffing gas, paint, or ether once or twice a week for
maybe 6 months, and continued to occasionally use computer duster for another 6 months as we’d
convinced ourselves it was cleaner, whether or not that is the case...I began to think about how to
express some of the stranger chemical experiences recently after a discussion about putting
together a book about bad trips. I’ve had more than my fair share, and a lot of them involve
drugs that aren’t anywhere near psychedelics, unknown research chems, chems that are typically
incredible harmful to humans and not intended to be anywhere near our insides...I guess I feel it
necessary to record these experiences and experiments for several as-yet-unknown reasons.

Posterity? :D

Thought what better place to store these particular ramblings than here, where no one reads?

Sustain//Decay : A Circular Scaffold

An Unstable Release Date for an Unstable Text: June 19th 

https://voidfrontpress.org/portfolio/sustaindecay/

An Introduction by Owen Coggins and James Harris

//Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.........

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........

Ngngngngngngngngngngngngngn.........    //

Charlie Blake, Dronoclasm //  

//I draw circles and sacred boundaries about me; fewer and fewer climb with me up higher and higher mountains—I am building a mountain chain out of ever-holier mountains //

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra //

//And what defines the scale of the ultimate symbolic mountain is its inaccessibility to ordinary human approaches. [...] The door to the invisible must be visible //

René Daumal, Mount Analogue //

//Before time… before even the gods… there was only…//

Bong, “The Dreams of Mana-Yood-Sushai” //  

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

...Drone is the beginning and was before the beginning // Drone was the Nothing // Nothing Droned // The droning of Nothing was the Nothing from which Drone is self-created...

...Om // the first sound, the cause of the universe, itself a drone // an empty signifier swells to overfull // evolves, fragments, ramifies into a constellation of meaning the way a solid droning tone may begin to wobble, vibrate, oscillate // mutating, expanding, infecting // spreading, branching, self-intersecting, self-interweaving, self-absorbing, self-annihilating, becoming different through manifesting the same // “The empty set is the set with nothing in it. The number 1 is the set with only the empty set in it. And so on…”

...the End of Drone, already contained within the drone, is the End of Everything // Drone is the End which outlasts itself...

...from near-silent single tone pure ambient minimalism to crushing oceanic hyper-amplified metallic maximalism // from trance-like repetition of sameness to explicit experimentation with the radical question of what it can mean for a sound to be different from or the same as another sound // drone rotates or fades or spirals away from linear historical/genealogical genre conventions toward a meta-foundational sonic arsenal // drone is capable of infecting all genres as it is itself composed of ontologically primary techniques for sound generation and modulation, realized in extreme extension toward outer- or inner-most depths, boundaries, limits, frontiers, horizons // different variants of drone select different techniques to maximalize or minimalise, whether hijacking and mutating source material or inaugurating original tonal topologies // all genres (all life, all differentiation) can be imagined as mere clusters of patterns of iterations of momentary deviations from the drone...

...elements, both sonic and metaphorical, of drone exist in natural and artificial worlds, in geometries of plant and water, architecture, even space, underground, mind // the Universe breathes - the physical expands and contracts // the Socius hums incessantly in communal conversation // the ceaseless oscillatory dynamics of the Brain silently howl...

// For we know that all creation keeps on groaning together //

St. Paul, Romans 8:18-22 //

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

...this book is a call to approach composition and attentive listening as ritual practice // to approach drone music as a training ground for the attention, for cognitive endurance, for a weird absorption from which hidden transformations might flower // to approach the melodic and rhythmic movement toward and away from central harmonic figures, the manipulation of the “tension between background and foreground” as ritually patterned upon the mystics’ tuning of the tension between subject and object, between inner and outer worlds // listening to the spark of impenetrable darkness, in contemplation of the shadow paradoxes of language, mysticism and death...

...the spectral spectacle of drone’s all-devouring taste mirrors the range of this book // intensive studies of emptiness, inaccessibility, and eternity // death, death of god, death of death // forest, mountain // Infection, parasite, swarm: disparate mind in shattered multiplicity // sine waves between ascetic austerity and wild excess, at either pole confessing the violence of the sacrifice, of the sacred // insane or becalmed transformations of perception, infinitesimal time-slices and isoluminant eidolons // all contained within the elastic-walled labyrinth of this new spacetime, our non-terminating Cymatic Church...

...drone casts paradoxes into perception // sounds heard as light, metaphorical and alchemical, offer the transmutative properties of mystical shimmer //Wolfe// in ‘resonance subordinated to redundancy’ //Freeman// spatial sense is transformed, illusioned, bewitched, the drone ‘echoing off an invisible realm’ //Wolfe// drone foregrounds the difference and connection between sound and hearing //Kang// ‘the possibility of stasis and the sprawling occupation of its power’ //Drone Box// levitation //Csihar// ‘It escapes itself in a perspectival “experience” of time not tethered to the specific form of the human subject, to be integrated into an exceeding and not-necessarily human - an alien or machinic-transcendent subjectivity’ //Caron// drone is excess and/or asceticism //MOUTH// honey and tar //Strickland/////

...drone invokes antinomies and contortions in language too, which, ‘alienated, orbits around a central absence’ //Coggins// words dancing in rituals of forgotten purpose around the chalk circle which it is not forbidden but rather impossible to enter // in the language spat from drone’s black centrifuge, there is again and again repetition and repetition and yet transcendence of sameness // the intuition of the death of intuition //Shakespeare// the absolute emptiness of emptiness //Absentology// drone is ambient, atmosphere, a hum behind the world, but it is also metal… that pagan resonant interval //Drone Box// riffs beyond riffs, metal about metal, a meditative treatment of heavy metal’s symbolic codes so radical it may not be recognised as such //Coggins// this Möbius strip, this snake which eats itself yet is still nourished, yet is still consumed, this convulsion, infects and is infected, is the infection // is the ashy pest // ‘is legion, yet imperceptible, neither faith nor reason can fathom their presence or the principles that pertain to them except through their manifestation in distress, agony and death throes’ //MOUTH/////

...drone is death and drone is immortality, which is death // endless life is 'an increasingly pestilential drone', a background before which our deaths become relief //Shipley// it all starts with the signal path //Newstead// we 'send a signal and let it die' //Hissen// the signal, channel, noise all at once introducing 'a silent mode of communication that is directed towards nothing other, the No-Other, which is death' //Absentology// silent but communicative, towards death yet from death, expression through mortal silence // the gift of the skull of a fox //Legard// 'Everything that is dead quivers' //Cascone// 'not rhythm at all but merely a near endless ripple of vibration stretched across expanses of time...' //Norman/////

...drone ruins // is found in ruins // decays, sustains // witnesses decay // drone is 'eternity's future burden' //Shipley// that term, burden, bourdon, an archaic term for drone, the memory of the word ruined by time // monoliths, pyramids, stone circles, temples //Csihar// ‘the subject sinks into the labyrinth of the ear...' //Freeman/////

...drone is the life which grows through the ruins, testifies to ruin, is agent of ruin // creeper // root // undergrowth, overgrown // to the palace of birds, to a shallow garden //Legard// a 'monstrous aspect' of Nature ‘seeks to annihilate everything individual' //Shakespeare// a 'whole forest is heard in each sound...' //Cascone/////

...drone is the absolute // it is 'the infinitely dense form of silence, the recollection without object' //Absentology// the sound of ‘a god pulling gravity’s strings...’ //Norman/////

...drone is finally a portal //Cascone// a mountain, liquefied // the listener 'must conceptually climb untold numbers of unholy mountains to see the surface again’ //Harris// the pieces included here departing from each other and returning, requiring a re-reading of an earlier segment, a tumbler falls into place, the lockpicking continues, repeat ad infinitum, ad nauseam // an incessant, droning, revolving system of holy mountains // each climb faltering, failing, exhausting, “coming up against an insuperable object”, rotating into a new mountain with its own failures // each failure driving a new mountain range, each new range innovating its own apparatus for climbing from out of the experience or the text, for climbing out of experience or out of text, for climbing out of climbing itself // Written in the textual body of the climber, the history or memory or output of the climber, each climb demands tools from the other climbs, each apparatus applied to old mountains makes new challenges makes new failures, growth comes to be measured in cycles of failure, “progress” measured only by the uninitiated // for Wittgenstein, language was a ladder to be climbed up, and then discarded // for Daumal, the base of the mountain must be accessible while the summit inaccessible (as outlined in a book which stops, mid-sentence, unfinished at his death) // this book too, then, is one to be climbed out of // drone sound at the end of sound // ‘record needle gently click-flapping’ //Norman// ‘Listen to all at once if possible. Join’ //Hissen/////

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

//For what is God but the index that pointed to the failure of all signs?//

Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable //

//For what is drone but the unending echo of generational potential?//

Aliza Shvarts, “Troubled Air” //

Sustain/Decay: abstraction ex nihilo

Some more weirdness from the Sustain/Decay submissions pile.....I have no idea why I can't seem to edit the last post...you're just going to have to use your magnifying glass, I guess....




To Seek Nothing Is Bliss


No one desires the void.- Cynthia Way (Joanna Demers).

To be impartial means to look on suffering as no different from nirvana, because the nature of both is emptiness.- Bodhidharma. 



We seek to speak of drone and emptiness. We seek to see drone as an expression of cosmic pessimism and apocalyptic nihilism. We seek to see it positioned as absolute nothingness and as void. We seek to listen to drone as a portal into the dark void. It is this void that renders us insubstantial nothings ourselves. Marcus Boon, Eugene Thacker and Joanna Demers position drone in relation to the human dissolved and swallowed whole. We seek to see through the horror of emptiness into the emptiness of emptiness. With specific reference to Sunn O)))’s Kannon and the drone compositions of Keiji Hanno, we seek to speak of drone as the audial essence of emptiness. In doing so we will focus on Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamika philosophy and the teachings of Zen Masters. This will allow us to speak of nothingness and void as sunyata and of attentive listening as a practice in proximity to zazen. It will let us point to a nonduality exceeding our terror of insubstantiality. This will prepare us for the claim that drone is a skillful means on the way to satori (enlightenment), the dissolution of ego and suffering. Finally. This will allow us to speculate that drone is the audial emptiness of emptiness itself. We seek to speak of nothing. We seek to speak nothing. We seek nothing.




_



Shibboleth’s Drone

Shibboleth’s drone has limited value as long as it is opposed to discovery. It is the secret kernel at the heart of a droning secretion, whose means are also its ends. Even the demystification of Shibboleth’s drone only serves to further mystify it, though it has nothing to hide. It is secreted from top-secret underground spy stations; forever extending over the horizon; a dark projection of subterranean architectural power. The things-aren’t-quite-what-they-seem Lynchian diffusion of Shibboleth’s creeping insinuations permeate the radio-waves, spilling everything yet evading discovery; a secret eminence of secret immanence.

The conductors of Shibboleth that concern us in this essay are the shortwave radio spectrum, Numbers Stations, the Duga over-the-horizon radar system, and their corresponding skywave propagations1 and skip zones2. The shortwave radio spectrum is the perfect method of anonymous secretion of the droning, invisible rays of Shibboleth. Unclaimed conductors such as Number Stations and the Duga have become sources for much speculation, giving rise to theories such as Soviet mind control and weather experiments. These clandestine stations broadcast Shibboleth, a rebel force constantly rallying clandestine operatives for unknown dark ends. The content of these stations is encrypted, and their purpose remains a mystery. The underlying feature which binds these conductors is the extreme length of time that the drone of Shibboleth is broadcasted. This is no furtive missive. It matters little what Shibboleth’s goal is. To intercept it is to become part of it. The clandestine operators of drone are no less secretive than what they are in a position to disclose. The content is the user and the medium is the message.

Shibboleth is a kind of puzzle waiting to be solved, but it must be delivered. The drone of Shibboleth, the galactic power and scope of its transmission, is necessitated by the complexity of its encryption. Numbers Stations, for instance, send enciphered messages using the crypto-system of the one-time pad.3 The extremely powerful (and virtually indecipherable), over-the-horizon secret of the Duga was first transmitted from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in July 1976, and it was detected worldwide (though it initially went unclaimed, and triangulation was required to pinpoint its source). Random, shortwave radio blasts from the Duga4 appeared without warning, sounding like a sharp, repetitive tapping noise. These random, extremely powerful bursts of Shibboleth disrupted radio broadcasts all over the world.5 But just as abruptly as they appeared,, the signals became less frequent before disappearing altogether. The reasons for the shutdown of the Duga systems have not been made public. The way in which Shibboleth imposes itself and spreads is just as important as the secret it seeks to secrete. The spreading of Shibboleth is itself shrouded in secrecy, but it is always sneaking, inserting, or introduce itself into the public domain. We intend to demonstrate how Shibboleth has gone from something defined, localized, and belonging to the past, to an a priori general form of a nonlocalizable something that has happened; from a Shibboleth defined as a hysterical childhood content to an eminently virile paranoid form.6

1 In radio communication, skywave or skip refers to the propagation of radio waves reflected or refracted back toward Earth from the ionosphere, an electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere.
2 A skip zone, also called a silent zone or zone of silence, is a region where a radio transmission can not be received. The zone is located between regions both closer and farther from the transmitter where reception is possible.
3 One-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be deciphered if used properly. The crypto- system uses two identical sets of random numbers printed on numbered sheets known as pads (the "pad" part of the name comes from early implementations where the key material was distributed as a pad of paper, so that the top sheet could be easily torn off and destroyed after use); one pad is kept by the sender and the other is kept by the recipient. The original message is mathematically added to one of the random numbers on the pad. The random number used is pre-determined by the sender and recipient so that both are in sync. After Shibboleth has been secreted the random number is discarded, leaving zero possibility of decryption.
4 Duga was a Soviet over-the-horizon (OTH) radar system used as part of the Soviet ABM (anti-ballistic missile) early-warning network.
5 David L. Wilson (Summer 1985). "The ‘Russian’ Woodpecker... A Closer Look". Monitoring Times. “Also known as the "woodpecker" or "pulsar," this device has drawn much interest by the interference that it generates.” Wilson provides a detailed analysis of the Duga’s encryption of Shibboleth.
6 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.



-

Sublime Backwash: Drone as Puncturing of the Weird Threshold

This essay will explore forms of drone music as mediums which best share the philosophy of The Weird, as originally articulated by writers such as Arthur Machen (1863-1947), Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) and H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Fascinated with the numinous, practitioners of The Weird depict the unimaginable, interrogate the unthinkable and desire the unknowable. For Machen – Welsh visionary and mystic – a hidden mystery lies at the heart of everyday life and common objects: “the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty beneath the crust of the common, trivial things; hidden and yet burning”.[i] As Andrea Franzoni argues, the central message of Machen’s work is that it is “through the arts that the modern man can still be exposed to ecstasy, can avoid the otherwise unavoidable fall into chaos and live on the threshold between our world and the ‘world of the spirit’”.[ii] In a similar manner, China Miéville has asserted that The Weird “punctures the supposed membrane separating off the sublime”, allowing “swillage of that awe and horror ‘from beyond’ back into the everyday” – a “radicalized sublime backwash”.[iii]

I have argued elsewhere that extreme metal in its numerous forms is the sonic medium that best expresses and captures the aesthetics and philosophies of The Weird.[iv] This essay will develop these ideas, focusing on drone metal as a fundamentally estranging musical mode well suited to capturing sensations of Weird horror and existential dread. I discuss drone metal as (pseudo) spiritual practice that acts as vehicle to transport the listener through the “threshold between our world” and the “world of the spirit”[v], following Owen Coggins’ assertion that “drone metal listening is reported in terms of imaginative temporal, spatial and bodily ‘elsewheres’”.[vi] Drone metal also offers impressions of sounds from the Weird space beyond.

Drone is Machen’s “link between terror and ecstasy, that leads to the abyss”.[vii]

---

[i] Arthur Machen, The London Adventure; or The Art of Wandering (Newport: Three Imposters, 1924; 2014), 64.

[ii] Andrea Franzoni, ‘Mysterium tremendum: Terror and ecstasy in the works of Arthur Machen’, Disputatio Philosophica, 16.1 (2015): 159-168.

[iii] China Miéville, ‘Weird Fiction’, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, Bould, Mark, et al, eds. (Oxon: Routledge, 2009). 510-517.

[iv] Joseph Norman, ‘“Sounds Which Filled Me with an Indefinable Dread”: The Cthulhu Mythopoeia of H. P. Lovecraft in “Extreme” Metal’, in New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft, David Simmons, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

[v] Op cit., Franzoni, 168.

[vi] Owen Coggins, ‘Drone Metal Mysticism’, unpublished PhD thesis, The Open University, 2015.

[vii] Op cit., Franzoni, 163.

_

Re-establishing Language as a Sound System: Deceleration and Drone

This essay considers the drone by re-establishing its connection with language as a sound system; the drone will be conceptualized as the instrumental equivalent for the extension of a voiced consonant, vowel or noise beyond the limit of a human breath and tending towards stasis through its deceleration.  Deceleration contributes the sense of affirmative negation present in drone and its sonic predecessor, doom.  If the drone can be considered akin to the arresting of a basic unit of language in the moment of its articulation, a sound paused to resound before it can encroach on or include other units, deceleration reveals difference to be located within the drone itself.  Musical works featuring drones or drone-like elements, recent work by Sunn O))), “So, Black Is Myself” by Keiji Haino and “Bass Pulse In Open Air” by Eleh, will be analysed in order to establish a micro-metonymic structure audible inside the drone which establishes a dialectical ‘switching’ between a sense of repletion and a sense of lack for the listening ear.  Sonic ‘heaviness’ (Sunn O)))) produces a deceleration heading towards negative inertia; in Haino, noise is used as a method of destroying temporality.  Recognising Alain Badiou’s (2007) assertion that the binary features of negation, subtraction and destruction, enable a revolutionary overhaul that is both political and creative/ artistic, we argue for the value of deceleration as a third and complementary feature.   

_

Drone Production as a Hieroeidetic Process

In 2004 Arthur Versluis suggested that esoteric art is ‘hieroeidetic’, in that its contemplation encourages the audience to orientate their perceptions toward an imaginative field 'midway between the mundane and the transcendent’. Although discussions around esoteric art often focus on the final art-object, it is the creative process - the sense of channeling higher powers, or the imaginative unfolding of symbolism - that is of prime importance for many artists we may traditionally consider esoteric, such as painter Cecil Collins and poet, agriculturist and painter AE (George William Russell). However, these processes, and their importance to the production of art that may be deemed hieroeidetic, have only recently begun to be acknowledged by academics in musical fields. To contribute to this discourse, this paper will explore the importance of 'inner-sense cultivation’ (Noll, Luhrmann, Asprem & Taves) in the production of drone-influenced works deemed to possess hieroeidetic properties. 

While some precedents exist in, for example, the music and mythos of prog-rock band Gong (who encouraged their listeners to commune by meditating to the music at the full moon), or the visionary approaches of Coil’s Jhonn Balance, two particular artists are suggested for this study. Firstly, the American composer Kim Cascone, who has recently toured Dark Stations - a drone composition ‘for meditating audience’ – alongside workshops on ‘inner ear cultivation’ for artists. Furthermore, Cascone’s recent paper on Transcendigital Imagination can almost be read as a manifesto for hieroeideticacy in a digitally-mediated creative process. Secondly, the author seeks to approach his own portfolio of work from an etic perspective: this includes many works of ‘rural’ drone whose influences were ascribed to imaginative encounters with the genius loci. This relationship with place was further developed as part of an open-ended production technique incorporating successive iterations of improvisation, editing and imaginatively-engaged listening with the intention of presenting not only a record of experience, but and invitation for sympathetic listeners to also engage imaginatively with the sources of the music. Through an auto-ethnographic process, a framework developed from cognitive science of religion (CSR) approaches will be proposed toward an exploration of the roles of ‘special’ experiences (those deemed religious, mystical or esoteric), inner-sense cultivation and quasi-ritual path-goal processes (Taves) in the production of hieroeidetic sound works.