Saturday, June 30, 2007

The G-spot Episode 8


GSpot_header



This episode of the G Spot (#8) takes you on a borderline insane behind-the-scenes trip into the recording studio, to hear the various outtakes and other mishaps that occurred in the production of our first G Spot video ad. Welcome to our world. (Background music by Johann Ess and Aphex Twin, piano composition and performance by Nate Sampsel.)

Check it out now!

Friday, June 29, 2007

Reality Sandwich Interview

"Philadelphia-based writer James Curcio's novels resemble strange and intricate life stories, bubbles of fiction floating in the depths of the collective subconscious. Occasionally they rise to the surface and burst into the conscious mind, releasing dreamscapes where fantasy merges with the mundane. Demigods cavort with goth-punk teenagers. Ambivalent authority figures lord over underground networks. Pseudo-shamanic rituals and sex magick abound.

In his 2004 book “Join My Cult!”, Curcio tells of a group of disillusioned teenagers whose rites of passage include experiments with sex and drugs, dabblings in dark magick, and associations with a mysterious organization known as the “Mother Hive Brain Syndicate.” Described as an occult novel, the story takes place across simultaneous “reality grids,” wherein a single character can inhabit multiple identities.

When dealing with subjects like the occult, shamanism, and ritual magick, part of the process involves investigating hidden dimensions of reality that may prove difficult to depict with words. Curcio agrees, noting that “occult” translates to “hidden,” and such realms must be experienced personally to be truly understood. Here he talks about the paradox in expressing the ineffable, the downsides to guru-hood, and the potency of the archetypal world."

Read the interview here on Reality Sandwich.

p.s. a report is coming soon on the Gaian Mind summer festival. A truly mind-blowing experience for me.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Wizard Con

...Was fairly entertaining. As predicted, it's still a somewhat smaller convention, but I nevertheless met some people doing interesting things- was given quite a few free review copies for Alterati- and grabbed a bunch of graphic novels I've been meaning to get for a while. A hardbound copy of The Kindly Ones (Sandman), hardbound Promethea 5, the last 2 Invisibles, a book of interviews with Alan Moore where he goes fairly in-depth about his magical system, and many other things.

I woke up today with an appreciable hangover. The Hellcats Burlesque event at the Troc was partially to blame for that. Much to do this week.

For those of you going to the Gaian Mind Summer festival- I'll see you there.

Also keep your eyes open for an interview on Reality Sandwich soon, I think it was just passed over to the editors.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

subQtaneous: Some Still Despair In A Prozac Nation

Now available through Kunaki.

Other Mythos Media releases should be coming soon...

Modern Fusion

"When I hear the word “fusion” in the context of music, my first thought is of a flaccid synthesis of funk and jazz that boils away the best element of both.

However, fusion- the fusion of genres, of instrumentation, of compositional or ideological theory, is really the present and the future of music… and there are so many fusions of style and form out there that simply miss the public eye because people don’t understand what they’re listening to. Even literally the process of fusion inside a star involves two particles fusing together, creating something new. (And giving off a hell of a lot of energy in the process.)

True fusion isn’t a surface thing. It isn’t the half-assed blending of several aesthetic or social postures. It goes straight for its heart, and in merging that essence with another, something truly unique is born. It doesn’t matter that you can trace it’s lineage, or that all of the original forms are “borrowed.” There is a musical communication of culture and of experience. This is nothing new. It is how cultures spread and form: through art, through music, through myths and stories as groups of people encounter one another, and their existences co-mingle. No form of music is unique in its source: but what evolves out of it… Well, that’s another story. We are different from our parents and yet like them. The same is true of music as generations pass.

So what’s all this bullshit about genres having hearts? Am I talking sense or have I finally gone off the deep end? Let’s take Metal for instance- whether you’re talking about thrash metal, speed metal, death metal, or black metal- it is linear, it is aggressive and fast, like a machine built for war. If you took Bach, gave him modern equipment, and pumped him full of testosterone and super-drugs, you would get the quintessence of metal. It’s no mystery why the true home of Black Metal is in Scandinavia. It is grandiose, proud, and harsh. Black metal is Viking music. Other forms of metal have different cultural heritages, (Nordic, Germanic), but they all share that same machine-mentality: of the linear, of the powerful, of the precise and the efficient."

Full article and tracks from Cynic's album Focus.

Monday, June 11, 2007

The Esoteric Hip Hop Knowledge of The Black Dot

"Alterati editor-in-chief James tipped me off to a book he saw in a crazy book store tucked away in an obscure corner of Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market. Beside the Aleister Crowley and Eliphas Levi tomes and David Icke DVDs was a book about a magickal approach to hip hop. After some digging The Matrix of Hip Hop website and the Hip Hop Decoded: From its Ancient Origin to its Modern Day Matrix book was unearthed.

The author – Harlem based The Black Dot – outlays a trippy occult Hip Hop cosmology, probably best expressed in the video The Five Bloodlines of Hip Hop, where we learn how our ancestors (well, maybe not mine …) came to earth through five elemental gateways, how the Golden Age was destroyed by parasitic mutants, the transformation of the elemental archetypes of communication (Hieroglyphics, Drummer, Oracle, and Dancer into Graffiti, DJ, Emcee, and B-Boy), the unifying power of the etheric pineal gland, how the ancestral bloodlines were reactivated by hip hop in 1973, how the mutants tried to use gangster rap to thwart the reactivation and the hip hop zero point singularity of 2012 where the planet will vibrate to throbbing higher dimensional beats and rhymes."



Read the full Article on Alterati.

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