Monday, February 23, 2015

The Doors - Horse Latitudes


I somehow missed out on this song until just a few months ago. This is incredible - pure soundscape madness and a poem by Morrison I actually like! Listen to this in the right state of mind, it might take you to some pretty strange places.

Eagulls Cover Stone Roses



Mr. Brown forwarded this to me a while ago but I've been so busy and admittedly pretty flighty in my down time as a result so I'm just getting around to this now. Eagulls are fantastic, and although I'm not the world's biggest Stone Roses fan I am a fan, particularly of this song. So it's a match made in heaven really.

Beneath the Panels #3: Nameless and the Tree of Life


Beneath the Panels #3 is up on Joup. It continues my attempt to interpret and catalogue the Occult underpinnings of Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham's new comic Nameless. For this third installment dealing with issue #1 we get into some serious Qabalah, Tarot and media-tampering. This one's a doozy and it prompted a bit of an 'episode' last night after I ate a quarter slice of a pizza made with THC oil, tripped pretty hard and met what my brain at the time chose to dress in an Enochian persona but was apparently a fairly dark aspect of my own psyche. Whewwww... glad that's over, and here's another reminder to myself NOT to eat pot.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Sunn 0))) + Ulver



This has been out for some time, and I've dabbled a bit with it before, however it was not until this morning that I really gave Terrestrials a good, solid listen. After uneasy dreams of London I found myself awake at a ridiculous hour - ridiculous when faced with the reality that Saturday is one of the only two days I have to sleep in - and in the hazy, marine-layered morning air I found this collaboration between Sunn 0))) and atmospheric black metal liaison Ulver the perfect soundtrack to quietly sipping a pot of strong, black coffee and re-reading key sections of Richard Kieckhefer's Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century while researching the next chapter of my Beneath the Panels: Nameless series.

"... the rites contained in this compendium illustrate strikingly the links between magical practice and orthodox liturgy. The analogy I will use is that of a tapestry whose dislay side implies a reverse side; so too, a society that ascribes a high degree of power to ritual and its users will invite the development of unofficial and transgressive ritual, related in form to its official counterpart, however sharply it may differ in its uses."

-Richard Kieckhefer, page 3 of the introduction.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Love My Way - Cruel Black Dove



I lost track of Cruel Black Dove somewhere around 2012 but was recently reminded to look them back up - GREAT band. Their cover of The Psychedelic Furs' Love My Way was the first track I heard from them and, of course, when a band does such a fantastic job covering an 80s song this iconic, well, they get my attention. The Full Powers E.P. is well worth the $5 or so if you can download it from here (the link appears a bit wonky) and you can find a bunch of free downloads- including this cover - here on the band's website.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Black Mirror


This is seriously one of the most riveting 48 minutes of drama I have ever seen. All six episodes of the British Black Mirror are fabulous, but this first one really smacks you across the nose and announces the fact that the creators are NOT messing around when it comes to extrapolating the dark side of the tech curve. Black Mirror does for technology today what The Twilight Zone did for Nuclear proliferation in the 50s and 60s.

Black Sabbath live 1970



My good friend John Bickness sent this to me recently. I think there was footage from this on a VHS I had back in the day, The Black Sabbath Story or something like that. War Pigs with the original lyrics, pre-fringe John "Ozzy" Osbourne.

Ruleth thou dost!!!

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Spring Trailer (Via Bloody Disgusting)



Romantic Lovecraftian Horror? I'm in.

Beneath the Panels #2: Nameless


Beginning with the second entry into this limited Beneath the Panels column I've begun in order to trace the Occult influences/ideas Grant Morrison has built into his new series Nameless I've moved the column over to Joup. The second installment which deals heavily with the Enochian undertones in this first issue just went up.

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Grant Morrison & Chris Burnham's Nameless: Beneath the Panels #1



As I said in this week's edition of Thee Comic Column over on Joup, I've read Nameless #1 twice so far. Between reads I began digging around on the internet for some of the concepts Grant Morrison builds into the code that underlies the story begun in the book, and as such I've started to piece together some of what I think may be the initial ideas at work beneath the panels, so to speak.

Nameless #1 begins with a narrated series of atrocities taking place across the globe. The paneling on these first couple of pages is unique and, I'm betting, charged with some degree of subliminal meaning. After drawing them out and pondering them as distinct images by their own right I'm left with one observation and one theory.


The images, especially the first and third, bear strong resemblances to letters from the Hebrew alphabet, which is steeped in occult science and often used in the creation of 'spells'. However, despite the resemblance, after consulting a Hebrew dictionary I found myself unable to draw any direct comparisons. Stumped I thought about this some more and eventually came to a different conclusion about the shapes:

They are part of an elaborate sigil. If you are unfamiliar with sigil Magick - a concept Morrison has talked quite at length - go here and take the author's crash course.

Okay, moving out of the design aspect and into some of the direct references Morrison makes in Nameless #1, the first glaring one is during the aforementioned narrated atrocities on the very first page, we get another sigil-like image and four words:


The image is later defined by one of the characters as "the door to the anti-verse, the Gate of Az". If you google Gate of Az the search engine makes the assumption that you're abbreviating Arizona. However, if you do not search the phrase as you enter it, allowing instead the engine to use its intuitive functions you get three things, the aforementioned Arizona result, followed to more likely possibilities:

Gate of Azeroth
Gate of Hell, Azerbaijan

Here I began with the latter result, as it was something I was unfamiliar with. In a nutshell, there is a deposit of natural gas in the country of Turkmenistan known as the "Gate of Hell".



Once you reach the end of the issue you find there is definitely a parallel to be drawn in terms of what we find out this image represents in actual, physical terms to the story in Nameless. However, that's not it. Let's go back to the other search result and explore that a bit, shall we?

At first glance I misread Azeroth as Azathoth*. That is not the case; Azeroth is a setting in the World of Warcraft game. I don't think that has anything to do with what we're dealing with here. However, because Grant Morrison is as much a utilizer of pop culture in his Magick as he is occult code, this may be the point. It is not too much of a jump to consider that WoW's Azeroth derived its name from Azathoth, a character from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu cycle. Morrison has utilized some of Lovecraft's lore before, and there is an entire area of Magickal practice that treats Lovecraft's mythos as something of an operating system for ritual. In his story The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath, Lovecraft describes him as the following:

[O]utside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes


I have always drawn an indirect comparison between Azathoth and Choronzon, a demon that traces its origins back to Elizabethian magician/scholars John Dee and Edward Kelley. Choronzon's entry in Watkin's Dictionary of Magic is as follows, and when juxtaposed with the definition for Azathoth above fully illustrates the reasons for my theory:

In Enochian magic, the demon of chaos and guardian of the Abyss. Aleister Crowley described Choronzon as "the first and deadliest of all the powers of evil". This point notwithstanding, Crowley invoked Choronzon while experimenting with the so-called 30 Aethyrs in a magical ritual on the top of an Algerian mountain in December 1909.

There is a great visual recreation of Crowley's ritual with Victor Neuburg in Alan Moore and JH Williams, III's Promethea, specifically issue #20, where the characters are on a multiple issue long trek through the spheres of the Kabbalhistic Tree of Life and fall through Daath, the abyss. Here they encounter Choronzon and are torn to pieces. Bringing this back around to Nameless #1, the Abyss - or Daath - could be the "anti-verse" discussed in the final pages, where we learn the harbinger of this Gate of Az is an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and thus inevitably going to destroy it, or rip it to pieces, the same way Choronzon or Azathoth obliterate those who encounter them in their respective mythological contexts.

Okay, I've barely even scratched the surface of this first issue but this is proving to be a much bigger project than I originally thought it would be. I'll continue with more decoding of Nameless #1 in a few days, in the meantime here are a few links for further study of the ideas I've discussed thus far:




...........
* Another possibility, although less likely, is Astaroth. A quick referral to The Goetia and you will find the following definition for Astaroth:

The twenty-ninth Spirit is Astaroth. He is a Mighty, Strong Duke, and appeareth in the Form of an hurtful Angel riding on an Infernal Beast like a Dragon, and carrying in his right hand a Viper. Thou must in no wise let him approach unto thee, lest he do thee damage by his Noisome Breath. Wherefore the Magician must hld the Magical Ring near his face, and that will defend him. He giveth true answers of things Past, Present and to Come, and can discover all Secrets. He will declare wittingly how the Spirits fell, if desired, and the reason of his own fall. He can make men wonderfully knowing in all Liberal Sciences. He ruleth 40 Legions of Spirits. His Seal is this, which wear thou as a Lamen before thee, or else he will not appear nor yet obey thee, etc.  






Sunday, February 1, 2015

Protomartyr - Full Performance on Seattle's KEXP - Includes NEW Song!



I am completely obsessed with this band right now. And I'm talking obsessed in a way I haven't been obsessed with any band in a while. Under Color of Official Right is an unbelievable record - HIGHEST possible recommendation to at least check it out.

The songs:

The first, second and forth songs are all from the record mentioned above, which came out last year and which I've posted here before. The third song is, as you'll hear singer Joe Casey tell it, a new song. Kudos to KEXP for pimping this band so hard.