Hi, my band Sign of the Crow has a new album and website...

http://signofthecrowmusic.com/

                     Mandy - A Gnostic Allegory and The Most Metal Movie Ever Made

When I die
Bury me deep
Lay two speakers at my feet
Wrap some headphones
Around my head
And rock and roll me
When I'm dead


     Panos Cosmatos’ new film Mandy opens in black, giving way to the deep verdant hues of the primordial forest. A synth spins in resonance and the first strains of Starless by King Crimson wafts in on waves of Mellotron and Fripper-tronic Guitar Fuzz as emerald and amber light filters thru the branches. Red fells trees and goes about his logging work with an easy grace.

Sundown dazzling day 
Gold through my eyes 
But my eyes turned within
Only see Starless and bible black 

     All seems bucolic but yeah, those lyrics tell me this is probably not going to end well. In English class they called that “foreshadowing”.

     Mandy is a film which can be viewed on multiple levels, I am going to unpack at least two, as a Mythological Gnostic Allegory and as the cannabis and fantasy-novel fueled daydream of the titular Mandy. I have specific details from the film I am going to throw out to prove this second thesis but will drop them in the second half of the article with a nice “there be spoilers ahead” warning for those of you who are not familiar.

     For the first half hour or so we are treated to some of the most beautiful images I have seen on film, a 1983 Pacific Northwest paradise called the Shadow Mountains, near a Crystal Lake. (Oh, shit! more foreshadowing, that was the name of the lake in Friday the 13th!!!) Here is where I feel Johann Johannson’s soundtrack really shines as Panos plays with dancing and strobing light effects toshow us the heavenly Pleroma these lovers have made for themselves, a veritable eye in the storm as Reagan’s Satanic Panic rages around them. They share, they allow each other space, they are tender with each other. (Just as Jeremiah asks Mandy later in the film; “be kind, like me.”)

     Through this idyll we see Red start to get little glimpses though that all is not well in the garden, there may be a serpent or two approaching, a rough beast may be slouching their way. When he looks in his rear view mirror on the drive home from his logging job the trees seem to be towering hooded malevolent figures in hot pursuit. When he sees the fantasy paintings Mandy has created he is taken aback, perhaps worrying an artist of this caliber is not made for this world and won’t be around long. Red, after waking from a bad dream expresses this growing worry and suggests that maybe they should move but Mandy quickly shuts him down, “this is like our little home…” and it breaks the heart the way she says home like she has never had one. Mandy is a sensitive soul in a cruel world, traumatized by the Patriarchy (her father and the starlings!) and here we can begin our dive into the Gnostic allegory, with a little background first.


-Gnosticism was and is an unfixed and unfinished thing, encompassing a multiplicity of views and sects and ontological frameworks which grew alongside and thru the early centuries of Christianity and which incorporates many controversial ideas. One of these is to flip the traditional narrative of Genesis so that the Creator God (s) or Elohim (you know, the old Rule-maker. The let-us-not let- man get too big for his britches asshole type) is the oppressing force of the thug-like Archons and switching the Snake into the role of messenger of Sophia (Goddess if Wisdom- fallen into and trapped in matter). Later in the movie we encounter the Horn of Abraxas which is another Gnostic deity or character and though it is hard to pin down a definitive definition of the God Abraxas or Abraxis we could say he is the Demiurge, The God below God who thinks he’s the only God, the unplanned progeny of The Goddess of Wisdom Sophia or Barbelo (or Babalon of the Holy Spirit) who believes himself to be the one true god because he is blind to his parentage and thinks he created the world he finds himself in.

     The Demiurge is considered by some to be represented by the God of the Old Testament (Jehovah). In our little allegory this role will be played by Jeremiah Sand, an ex-folk musician and full time mind-controller / cult leader. As one of his devoted followers tells Mandy as she is being drugged and slapped around; “it’s all just his dream…”


     This is hippie solipsism taken to a sociopathic level, the universe revolves around me, everything I see is mine, the white man entitled…

Whatever happened to the hippie dream?

This idea is something further explored in Panos’ first film; Beyond the Black
Rainbow...

...where we are witness to the last days of “Arboria”. A New Age Theme Park/Psionic Laboratory extraordinaire. The founder of Arboria is now a feeble minded addict, kept drugged and distracted watching old VHS Promo tapes of Arboria’s illustrious beginning by his right hand man, another Jeremiah Sand type who tripped one too many trips and now has been possessed by something nameless from some dark dimension.

     He keeps the founder’s daughter; a telekinetic moonchild, trapped in some kind of psychic power dampening pyramid prison (Prison/ Prism/ Rainbow)…

     Here we have another Gnostic idea; the rape of Eve or the imprisoning of the Female Wisdom Principle or Holy Spirirt by the “Rulers” (Archons/Powers/ Principalities). The same Corporate Thugs who wanted to make sure Adam and Eve didn’t get to that other tree and get their old monkey brains jacked up enough to be a threat.


     So we have our Players: Mandy, Red and Jeremiah, our classic love triangle (pyramid).

Jeremiah Sand –

     Jeremiah Sand stages his first meeting with Mandy like some time type of nightmare version of the Last Supper, robed in glory, arms raised in benediction in the middle of the assembly like he is the big J man.

     Mandy has been put under the influence (psychedelics and some kind of insect sting to bring on the effects more quickly) so as to be all the more impressed. Classic Charles Manson move.

      Is Jeremiah a symbol of the demiurge? Well, does he think he is God himself? Check. Does he represent the Patriarchy as it oppresses the sacred feminine? Well, he disrobes and throws his patriarchal phallic symbol right in Mandy’s face so that’s a double check! When he talks about meeting God he mentions God’s hot loving light and right there you have some Solar/Masculine symbolism. And he is in possession of a “Horn of Abraxas” (horn, that’s phallic) as mentioned before which he uses to call up his servitors or “Gnarly Psychos”. He himself never gets his hands dirty and he plays his followers off against each other psychologically to get the results he wants. You know, your basic CEO.

Full disclosure; I grew up in a Jesus Hippie Cult. Subtract the LSD and the gnarly psychos and you basically have my upbringing. My parents had their own Jeremiah Sand who put them through the same off-balancing, mind control techniques.

Let’s contrast him with Red:

Red -- I am thinking ex-military… Nam vet? Some Shadowy Op?

     His friend in the old trailer out in the woods is wearing a military jacket- holding Red’s crossbow “Reaper”. Where was that used previously? One of Mandy’s illustrations is of the classic Woman and Lion (Babalon and the Beast) And we see Red wearing a Tiger t-shirt, further hinted at in the scene where The Chemist sets his caged tiger free. Red is the beast kept in balance by the love of woman – but once she is gone the beast is unleashed! (Little spoiler – The last shot of the movie after the credits is Mandy’s drawing desk whichhas an unfinished illutration of Red with the tiger as an overlay, like it is his spirit animal…

"The power of love came into me, and I became fierce like a lion, then tender like the evening star."

- Rumi, The Book of Love



Red - Pierced in the side by the blade from the "abyssal layer", like the Lance of
Longinus that pierced Christ. The Chemist calls Red a; “Jovan Warrior sent from the eye of the storm” who exudes a cosmic darkness. Well, fuck man, his wife just got abducted by a biker gang of gnarly psychos whose presence filled the air with static and disturbed the magnetic fields in their home. Mandy chooses Jupiter as her favorite planet because it is in a state of constant flux or storm. Red chooses Saturn (aged, taciturn, dark, heavy) but then switches his allegiance to Galactus; the eater of worlds and this is what he has become by the end. The eater of Jeremiah’s world which is the Children of the New Dawn cult. In Red, Jeremiah confronts an actual example of what he thought he was; a being become more than human, ridden by a God, an occult engine, a mystical machine; powered and driven by a burning void at his center, a Golem hell-bent on an unholy mission, his wrathful purpose written on his soul.

"Such a Prayer builds a bridge over death…"


     By the end of the film Red has become one with his god, he is inseparable from his Goddess Mandy. The cult has called up Abraxas and forged their own beast just as Red forged his axe of destruction and Mandy augured the coming of the Reaper.

     There is a Gnostic tradition in which Christ is seen as being on a secret mission to “jailbreak” the Goddess, but there is nothing I have found yet about a vengeful Christ seeking to destroy those Archons. But this is Mandy’s dream, we are just living in it.

     After the run in with the cult and Mandy’s death Red, shattered, enters their home and comes upon a commercial playing on television for Cheddar Goblin Mac and Cheese.

     He’s not in Kansas anymore, folks. Red has entered the Goblin Universe, a phrase used to denote the Trickster aspect of all Paranormal Phenomenon. He is now dancing with the devil and all bets are off.

Spoiler Alert – Final Section Begins – Exegesis - My Theory


-Mandy is an artist and a dreamer. She is lost in her own inner worlds. She is Pixie-led. We see this in the beginning of the film when Red gets home and startles her. She creates worlds and lives in them, somewhat like Jeremiah the demiurge; but as the wisdom of the divine feminine she is not creating out of ego and pride but is also connected to the earth and is magical, bewitching. She arises out of the water like a nymph or a dryad; elemental, potent and haunting. We know from her starling story she had a bad relationship with her father, the cruel demiurge of her world. She is damaged but still vital. She walks in the dewy cool early morning of the forest like a faun, a creature of the primordial earth, bathing in the images rising from her soul, smoking her pipe and exhaling her visions onto the canvas…

"The souls of all phenomena unite to comprise a world of sensuous images, and it is only as unmediated images that the essences appear to the pathic soul who receives their meaning-content." 

Ludwig Klages

     Mandy spins herself a reverie of a dark warlock just like the one she has been reading about in her fantasy novel, Seeker of the Serpent’s Eye by Lenora Tor:

     The warlock in Mandy’s story is an Acid-Christ with his own backwoods Family and the serpent’s eye he seeks is Mandy herself.

     The next scene after the Fantasy begins swirls in with smoke and fog and Mandy walking in the forest. Fog and smoke are a traditional symbol for the characters travelling into an imaginative past of other dimensions. The cult drives by and Jeremiah sets his Manson Lamps on Mandy and decides he has to have her, he feels "naked without her". Mandy has "called out" to him and he has listened.

Tragic events follow.

     From here on we are in Mandy’s inner world and the action corresponds: when the cult member makes small talk with her in the grocery store she is still reading the same page of the novel, because she has not continued reading, she is lost in daydreaming. When she is killed her body jumps in the bag like the starlings. After her superhuman lover avenges he rides off into an brutal expanse under an alien sky with multiple moons and sun; he is in the world of her fantasy novels.

     In the scenes just prior to this ending Red is seen wearing the 44 shirt and so is Mandy. As he gazes at her in the passenger seat and smiles his rictus smile they both wear the same shirt.

     This is why we have the tiger spirit animal illustration at the end which is Mandy’s “earthing” of this extraordinary vision into an artistic object. Mandy has conjured up a mythology and a mythology is something that never actually happened but is true forever. Whether this particular tale of tragedy and revenge actually happened doesn’t matter as this story is true forever.

"Such a Prayer builds a bridge over death…
When the outer world grows cold, this star still shines.

There is nothing that can separate man from his own God, if man can only turn his gaze away from the fiery spectacle of Abraxas." 

Carl Jung

Stranger Things Soundtrack Review

Analogue Dialogue

This soundtrack album unpacks a slick vintage synth picnic, a moveable feast of 80's style sci fi score offerings from tense pulsing bass runs to pieces beamed in from the beautiful but sickly hazy wooze universe of Boards of Canada or early Ambient Eno.  

Seriously, there are like 18 plus tracks on here, definitely worth the money. I have purchased a few e.p.s from S U R V I V E; this is the guys who made this album's "Synthwave" band. I don't call it synthwave, I didn't call it witch-house or dark-wave back then. These are the progeny of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Harmonia, Bruce Haack and all the unsung greats who knew drum machines and keyboards could be used for much more than moving your booty. I don't call this kind of music anything, I just say; "turn it up, to Eleven! that's my jam!"  

The pieces here are minimalist, like little frozen sound paintings and all have that quality I look for in synth music which is really capturing an emotional state, like freezing consciousness in a pattern, like emotion affecting and making patterns in water.

Flesh-Portal/ Interface

The show itself was a lot of fun though the story gets bogged down a little towards the end. The weekend it premiered I had just been reading a bunch of this series on Reddit known variously as 9M9H9E9 or Interface but it is basically about Government experiences involving flesh-portals to other dimensions and the LSD-addled children who are able to go thru and come back but do so changed; psy powers, glimpses of unknown realms and higher beings... hmm, sounds a lot like Stranger Things?

Tapping In

 But that brings us to what this series did so well which was to Tap In. Tap in to what those images of seventies and eighties sci fi do to us, those images from the movie-dreams of our youth. Tapping in to what these sounds do to us, the soundtrack of Hope, of the Promising Future, now turned mournful and nostalgic, echoing around our skulls like empty chatter. Cosmic love to cosmic fear. The Gnostic Realization.

I am listening to this album now as I read William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive, which has it's own synchro-mystic connections to these stories or flesh-portals and "interfacing".

Highlights:

The Upside Down - pulses flash and beat around octave pitches while a bass drum tiptoes up behind you

Stranger Things (Main Theme) - Amazing, has more heat and movement in it's one minute plus running time than most whole songs. 

Kids - That sad but sweet Emotive-Synth like early OMD or Yaz.

Friendship - small but sweet and soothing, like a little audio pot de creme!

...

I could gush on and on but instead how about you get this album for yourself? Stop youtubing and spotifying and start supporting artists?

Red and Black Attack

Welcome to the Dark New Age/ Sound Defense

Sitting With All the Cosmic/New Age Music to find the BEST... So you don't have to:

Ray Lynch - Deep Breakfast

It's Memorial Day Monday, waking up late after a heavy night. Waking up to a Bowl of Maybe not the most nutritious breakfast in the world;

starts with a song called Celestial Soda Pop; hey, what do you have to do today? That cover is unfortunate but the music is gorgeous, not too cheesy, lots of space and well-formed melodies and deep warm synth-strings. Reminds me a little of the second side of Brian Eno's Before and After Silence, that same stillness and quasi-classical synth work...

In Space No One Knows what You had for Breakfast!

New album way out experimental lo fi cosmic rock from my band Sign of the Crow:

https://mystery-saint.bandcamp.com/album/cosmic-mass

My band Sign of the Crow has a new album of lo fi sci fi cosmic desert rock!    https://mystery-saint.bandcamp.com/album/psy-spy-saucerhttps://

14 for 14: 2014's Best Albums Round Up

14 for 14 

2014 Albums I have Loved

Lust for Youth: International 

-like the broke down, lo fi and heart sick younger brother of Howard Jones, fading Duracell's in his Casio but melodic tricks up his synth--wizard sleeves, dusty beats and ghostly traces of Robert Smith style dream-guitar

Electric Wizard: Time to Die

-heavy, scrungey and half-speed yes but also dense and psycheadelic and almost shoegazer-like at times. Put it on in a darkened room and turn up those headphones and unleash the Satanic Panic!

FKA Twigs: LP1

-this girl is channeling the Goddess, just watch her dance in her video's. Like floating in audio honey laced with absinthe

Broadcast: Tender Buttons

-this one came out a while back but I had sort of a re-alignment with the Broadcast this year. All of a sudden I just can't get enough of this album. I love the Kraftwerk style primitive drum machines and the minimalism and all of Trish's vocals and lyrics overall

Peaking Lights: Cosmic Logic

-this is like the perfect summer soundtrack; naive mystic vocals, playful synths, amazing bouncing bass lines and multiple layers of rhythms. 

Black Bananas: Electric Brick Wall

-if Peaking Lights is like Sesame Street then Black Bananas is the Electric Company. Slightly weirder and more likely to have someone stoned involved behind the scenes. Sort of hit or miss but when it hits it is amazingly almost sickeningly fun and catchy. Plus, Jennifer's vocals and lyrics are always fun to me

Heat: Hunter Complex

-there's a real melancholy feeling to the synths on this album, like California at the end of summer

Kim Deal: Solo Tracks (Walking with a Killer, Are You Mine, The Root, Range on Castle)

-finally fulfilled a life-long dream this year of seeing the Breeders in concert. Kim played her new song Walking with a Killer and I was moved ladies and gentlemen, Kim is the Real Deal...

The Knife: Shaking the Habitual (2013)

-this one was actually 2013 but I have to admit it is a difficult one to get into. The way the album is sequenced is very demanding on your time and attention. If you are in the right mood though it can be very transporting

Paul McCartney: McCartney II (re-issue)

-reissue of an album from 1980, Paul McCartney got himself a whole mess of bud and some drum machines and synths and made this album at his farm in Scotland. It's amazing! So ahead of it's time. It's like you think you have discovered a new sound and lo and behold The Beatles were already there before you...

Pye Corner Audio: The Black Mist e.p./ Singles

-soundtrack to the dystopian film noire London to Los Angeles, that David Cronenberg algorythm. The darker more urban and less pastoral side of the Ghost Box sound

Sinoia Caves: Beyond the Black Rainbow

-amazing movie that touches on themes from Lovecraft, Crowley, Kubrick. A strange sci fi/horror fever dream. The soundtrack is amazing. It has nods to John Carpenter style score work but it also has plenty of melodic and rhythmic invention. It definitely works as it's own statement as opposed to being just a soundtrack

I am the Center: New Age Collection

-This is independent ambient style music from the 70's, 80's. For when Brian Eno just doesn't do it anymore...

Bardo Pond: Looking for Another Place/ Peace on Venus

-Bardo Pond are doing something pretty unique right now. It's like lo fi shoegaze meets new age music, or like acid-fried dream pop. Guitars that burn like lava through sheets of echoing flute, you can't even call these jam's, they are more like Apocalypse's....

Was Stanley Kubrick a Gnostic? Thoughts on Room 237 and The Shining.

Thoughts on Room 237 and The Shining.

Stanley Kubrick created a movie designed to "shine" a gnostic and enlightening illumination on us. Without getting into spoilers let's just say the documentary Room 327 draws our attention to crucial details in the film The Shining that reveals a deep commentary on the horror hidden in the soul of modern man. The horrific genocide of the American Indian, the bloodthirsty corruption and competition of the gold rush and America's "Manifest Destiny", the horror of the Holocaust, the horror of child sexual and physical abuse... ( I can hear Marlon in Apocalypse Now: the horror, the horror)

The Devil is US kids; America is built on blood and as Chaucer says; "The blood will out" We are bloodthirsty rats in a cage my friends, forced into competition with each other to the death and Stanley Kubrick saw it all and unflinchingly threw it back in our faces.

I have always loved The Shining, it creates such a subtle but by the end powerful sense of horror that no other film has ever really had the same cumulative psychic effect on me that I can think of.

The moviegoers next to me, a hip L.A. couple who probably just wanted a place to make out and come down after their week of soul-crushing ass kissing work were tittering and making snorts of derision throughout the entire documentary. I understand; it's easier to laugh at these ideas and those who present them than to face the reality of what Stanley was getting at. To be sure there are also some crazy ideas in the film and I am not convinced at all that Stanley aided in the faking of the moon landing footage, that is just too much conspiracy to even comprehend.

It all shows though what a monumental work of art this film and all Stanley's films are (maybe excluding Barry Lyndon which puts me to sleep). You just can't help but think cinema has dried up and died in modern times when you see the depths of work and subtle detail and research which have gone into making The Shining the poetic psychological masterpiece it is. It's an Occult Masterwork strong enough to support a million meme's and points of gnostic illuminating light.

Blood sacrifice and deviant sex pop up all over the movie...  Are we talking about the supposed "Illuminati" or hidden upper echelons of society and what goes on behind their closed doors, a theme Stanley seems to have returned to in Eyes Wide Shut?  Are we talking about Archontic or Biblical "Watcher" type beings who have kept us enslaved and fooled us by posing as Gods and feeding off of negative sexual violent emotional energy? Are we talking about an aspect of ourselves that we keep denied like Jung's "Shadow"?

This is what makes Great Art; layers upon layers...

See the movie and suspend your disbelief long enough to grasp some of what Stanley was hinting at, the only thing you can lose is your mind, and there is all the Gnosis in the world to gain... as the man said; "the truth will set you free..." Oh and of course I saw the movie at 2:30 and sat in seat 23!!!!!!!

"we're all dead, just not yet buried..." Nicholaj DeMattos Frisvold

Four or five years ago all you would have heard the Mystery-Saint listening to was older music, Miles Davis's Dark Magus years, Exhuma, Dr. John, Can, Brian Eno and Klaus Schulze but a sea change has come dear readers; there is a lot of amazing new music out there. Artists are taking the control offered by modern technology to create ever more challenging and dare I say it "psychedelic" sounds.

the mystery-saint just put up a new end of year collection of songs on bandcamp. Free download! Don't say I didn't give you anything for Xmas!

http://mystery-saint.bandcamp.com/

featuring amazing painting by Arrow (Paul Alexandre)

Cosmic Communion

Cosmic Communion    song in honor of Hallow's Eve... when the spirits seek communion

Mystery-Saint Goes Thru the Looking Glass with Alice C.

Last night I bought another Alice Coltrane album. One of the online reviewers of it called it a piece of crap made by somone living off their famous husband's name. The album is actually amazing so either the opinion held by that reviewer about Alice is so strong it has stopped them from really being able to HEAR that album or their sense of taste is off and they actually think their ears would prefer that Katy Perry style canned sexy robot music everyone is making now. SYNTH POP IS DEAD!

 I have noticed this phenomenon before; the inability to hear Cosmic Music and believe you me, Alice's is Cosmic Music. It contains dissonance and polyrythmic elements and it resolves between tension and release, it beautifully reflects what Heraclitus called the Hidden Harmony, which as we know is always better than the obvious.If listeners are still putting Alice in a kind of Yoko Ono box now (and I love Yoko Ono) imagine what it was like for her in the male-dominated jazz world right after her insanely talented husband had passed away...

Review: The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis or how the Mystery-Saint learned to stop worring and Surf the Flux

The story of Genesis. It's a classic. Drilled into our heads from birth, either in Sunday School or through popular culture: Eve and her "evil" apple never fall far from our Tree. Those of us studying "Gnosticism" and the "Occult" have heard rumors about a differing interpretation to the story, like how maybe the serpent wasn't really the villain and it has nothing to do with woman being the weaker or more depraved sex. How mayhaps that same serpent was trying to enlighten our first couple. ( More on that later)

       When I heard about this book I got really intrigued. I have had the impression for a while that what we are dealing with in the Bible are allegorical lessons about the evolution of human consciousness.

         A non-theistic approach to the creation story in the Bible, which is what the author uncovers for us through a kabbalistic exegesis, is something sorely needed in this day and age in which we see so much strife between people's because of "belief". Muslims, Christians, Jews, even Atheists have reified their beliefs and turned their Gods into something like a war banner to wave above the fray. Something to hide behind and fight for and use to create more seperation between people.

"Concepts are always limited... even concepts of God... the only way out of this is to be immersed in openness without being held to any concept of reality or unreality."

Kind of like Austin Osman Spare's "Need Not Be, Does Not Matter"? Ah, but like William Burroughs said; (and I am paraphrasing) The Shits always have the need to have to be "Right" right? Like if there is a bearded guy up in the clouds kicking ass and taking names, we want to make sure to get in good with him, get on the good list so we can get into that special after hours club with all the virgins and the streets of gold. And I know YOU aren't going to be in that club because I didn't see YOU in MY CHURCH and you don't look or sound like ME and MY FRIENDS.

"Placing faith in division leads to a shattered world."

"When phenomenal space is engaged with a stance of existential combat"... we get a klippoth.

so ...

"Spiritual purification is the stripping away of these concealments" ... or klippoth.

"Klippoth become free as the mind relaxes into spacious love of the Shechinah... a devotion to wholeness beyond  conventional extremes."

Aristotle was wrong, it's not a dead world, we kill it by reifying it and forcing it into the narrow channels of our belief until finally, the Shechinah's flow into our life dries up. After all the Shechinah can only rest in a joyful, open heart. A heart with the "Faith that beauty is in itself sublime"

Mystery Saint versus The New Occult Rock Part 1 (Cosmic Fear) ELECTRIC WIZARD

It being 4/20 it's a perfect day to talk about ELECTRIC WIZARD. After all, they have an album called DOPETHRONE and lyrics like "Saturnine in my mind, got to find a way to be free. Saturnine in my mind, blow another hit of weed." ELECTRIC WIZARD; the acid fried hippie chaingang of Golems breathed into life by Charles Manson in a basement and raised on a diet of Black Sabbath, greasy chips, rubber tire hash and those little white cross pills all-night truck drivers take. I don't think they care what I think and I heard their next album is going to be called LEGALIZE DRUGS AND MURDER so you know what side they are on. The Night Side.


Time to light a jazz cigarette (you know what that's about!) and drink some coffee, get the mind ready for the music, it's going to be dark and trippy. If EARTH is the Apollonian; quiet, contemplative, cerebral and in repose side of the Occult Rock equation then ELECTRIC WIZARD is the Dionysian; wild and ecstatic side, the dark score for dancing off into the forbidden places.

Hymn to the Gnostic Godess (The Ash Tree)

(DISCLAIMER- This is a new and loose translation of Roy Bowers "The Ash Tree", if you like it thank Roy if you don't you can blame me...)

I am what you think I am

I am what you think you are

I am myself as I am and you as you are

And will be in times to come

I am the all and more of that with less

I am without form

I am without force

Yet form and force I am

I am the lover and the Beloved

I am the beast and his mate

I am the whole and the part

I am compassion healing pain

I am a diamond cutting stone hearts

I am a mirror gone dark

I am the well without water

From which all must drink

I am words of love that never speak

I am pain and tears and sorrow and grief

The rack, the noose, the gun, the stake

The hunter and the hunted

Filthy Synth

New songs from the mystery-saint: http://soundcloud.com/mystery-saint/sets/filthy-synth

Embedded with consciousness enhancing mood altering binaural beats and positive vibes!

freeeee music!

Mystery Saint versus The New Occult Rock Part 1 (Cosmic Fear) EARTH

A magickal influence can be seen more and more in the world of pop culture and media and art. Mad Men shows us how poetry (the magick of Thoth) can influence people to spend money (time) for things they don't need. We are inundated with Television shows and Films about the fauna of the territory of magick; vampires, shape-shifters, demons, angels, gods, aliens, zombies, maybe even ourselves from the future. It's been going on in the world of rock for a while too. When you call an album Angels of Darkness/Demons of Light and title it's first track Sigil of Brass (a sigil is a stylized symbol used to contact a spirit) you're definitely speaking the language of magick. The aforementioned album is by a band called EARTH, helmed by guitar virtuoso Dylan Carlson, known in some circles to have been a close friend of Kurt Cobain, some say actually present when Kurt purchased his last shotgun...

Mystery Saint meets the Marassa

Mystery Saint Magical Diary Post 12_7_10

Have had a number of TWIN synchronicities lately which combined with my new passion for maya Deren led me to think I should reach out to the Marassa of the Loa
(I've also seen it spelt Lwa)...

Not that I know anything about Voodoo
(I've also seen it spelt Voudon)

So after the latest twin synchronicity at Yoga in the Runyon Canyon I decided to take all that Namaste energy and send it to the Marassa

I set up a simple altar on a wood table
Old but clean white cotton tablecloth
Appropriate Twin ritual decorations
Offering of food and water

The drumming came easily
The spaces in between beats; the shadow choir
Pape Legba limped in with charming asides

Here is where it started to get weird, I got off my chair from in front of the table/altar and playfully got down prostrate before the altar
No thoughts in my mind and a prickly heat
The veve seemed to draw itself really (and I mean I am not good at drawing)
The motions I took to draw it seemed purposeful and instinctual

I got up and danced backwards twice around the veve
scared myself a little

Here is where it got weird again, dancing, body was writhing happily on the wood floor in front of this veve drawing
once I began to calm, I reached down and took some of the sweat from my body and wiped it across the veve wiping it out and then I wiped some of the stain from the veve on my face

Got up and danced for a while to Exuma, I don't know the name of the track but it
is just drums and percussion instruments
Again I scared myself a little

Powerful

Thanks for inspiration to the Waters of Return by Louis Martinie
And thanks to Exuma

the mystery saint and eno in a small craft on a milk sea

Eno the Stranger in a Strange Land-
returned
in a small craft on a milk sea
to bring us new sound paintings to grok in exchange for water. Will you share water? May you never thirst!

Eno's packaging is tasteful as always: moody-sea-scape exterior
hologrammatic-rainbow-strip interior

I scan the composition titles and notice the Taoist "Complex Heaven" and "Lesser Heaven" We here on Earth live in the square world of the Lesser Heaven, we're just a bit off, removed from the circular paradise of Heaven...

Some of the other song titles are sciency, what a nerd Brian Eno is...
"Late Anthropocene"? I want to ROCK, not do HOMEWORK

Eno; The-Long-Mover, The-Windy-Man

The Man from Mars who Moves things with his Mind!

I look at the packaging again

Outside is the Abysmal/Water
Inside is the Clinging/Fire

Each snowflake's individuality shows WATER to be ALIVE and
imprintable by CONSCIOUSNESS

The Clinging/Fire burns inside the cells of water
Burning towards INDIVIDUALITY

spirit consuming matter consuming spirit

passing it back and forth

the hologrammatic universe fornicates at the cellular level constantly
else nothing would be at all

Now for the music

Emeralds and Lime-

Eno the Wise Laughing Boy
I'd like to think he grows each composition like a flower
He's an Audio-Horticulturalist
allowing the cosmos and the chaos and the movements of Heaven
to create his designs and not his clever mind
This track eases in slowly: soothing piano chords, gentle rythmic waves
a dry martini

Complex Heaven-

The Rustic scrape of strings on bone
Grey scratchy guitars and synthesizer-foam

Small Craft on a Milk Sea-

The melody rides precariously on an ominous low undertone
Ask not for whom the TIDE comes
It COMES for THEE

Flint March-

Sharpened knives out
The WIND picks up
The FOG clears and we are in Miles-Davis-PANGEA
Goaded and driven by the rythm of fractalated ghost hands
slapping grey envelope-skins

Horse-

A Black Beast with Fiery Eyes
I am the only one
can ride that Horse yonder
The ghost drums are back and they brought buzzing-hi-hat BEES in TOW
The BEES swarm over the paths of ULTRA-VIOLET light
I hear some rowdy electric guitars and I am glad
Eno invited the rowdy electric guitars back to the PARTY
Idiot Energy

2 Forms of Anger-

The drums have been run through a million rusty pipes
Robots bang on BUCKETS while a
UFO lands on my LAWN
A razor guitar noodles around and makes with a chord
WOW Bob WOW!!!!!
Someone flails at the guitar and then chokes it off
A last effluvium glides through the air

Bone Jump-

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts after the Shit Goes Down?
Los Angeles Apocalypse-Bunker Music
The last DJ with the last creaky 8-bit and Keyboard
a bouncy-echo guitar comes in as
Dario Argento kerboards
Cover my exit

Dust Shuffle-

Pixelated snare and
Strangled Piano
Like being chased by coat hangers over
Hard-wood floors

Paleolithic-

Bedrock Guitar slabs
Radio static morphing into E string drone
The guitar speaks in tongues
a new language with no consonants and
Infinite Vowel Glossolalia
The Strangled Piano sneaks back into the room
Or is DRAGGED

Slow Ice Old Moon-

Sounds like the Yi Jing
Like a Paper-Fire
An Organ-Snowstorm
An Ash-Blizzard
White-Out
Drowning in the Milk Sea

Lesser Heaven-

Need not Be; Does Not Matter
Love is the Law
Bells wrung into infinite HARMONY
Ma Gu Xian Shu
Ma Gu Xian Shu
Ma Gu Xian Shu

Calcium Needles-

Broken Bones
Pinned in Place
Bruce Lee in the Iron Lung
SUSPENDED

Emerald and Stone-

Mineral piano trickles down to the ocean
Weary deposits

Written, forgotten-

The drummer strokes his cymbal stand
The old guitar player coaxes a few more weary notes from the strings
His fingers flash a mudra

Late Anthropocene-

seashell scales from octave to octave
the waves break soft on the
edge of the milk sea
once more
infinite SUSTAIN
infinite TRANSFORMATION

A great journey, beginning-middle-end
well done thou good and faithful servant

Mystery Saint Vs. U2 Part 1 (The last shall be first) "From Zoo TV to Zooropa"

Zooropa's glorious promise of the new Man, in sever shades, as confident and cunning in Science as Poetry, Better by Design. U2 have been there and they know.

U2 is fresh off it's triumph of having resurrected Berlin, tossing off their rough treatment at the hands of America and the bitch called the Blues, that Angel of Harlem. The Rattle and Hum has given way to a Computer Screen Glow. The inheritance of Europe's Doom.

There were Nazi prophecies in the Bible and Nostradamus and Helene Blavatsky.

Side One begins with ...

Zooropa- ambient opening with piano chords, The Edge comes in with a guitar sound that bounces and skips like a digital stone across a neon pond

Horoscope to Spectrescope

Drug Addicts and Poets- Business Men and Button Pushers

Zooropa- All Strife's Quelled! Entertainment, Shopping, Food!

Zooropa- Don't Fight, Just Shop!

Zooropa- But Hitler's Personal Clairvoyant was an Eastern European Jew!

Zooropa- America, Just Stay OUT of It!

Zooropa- Now Hitler travels in UFO's through the center of the Hollow Earth. He was known to have many doubles.

Zooropa- Coming back from the far side of the moon

Zooropa- Television and Flying Saucers. We sent a Rocket into Space!

Zooropa- End of the World Gospel (Further elaborated in Closing Theme; Johnny's Cash's "The Wanderer"

Zooropa- It's that time of Day (When people don't go Outside anymore...)

Babyface- Neon brush and bass-pedal soft-core

Numb- Touring Musician retreats into Valium and Computer Game inspired Coma and then tries to mumble his way out of a Paper Bag

Bono does Drag Queen Falsetto

Bono does Drag Queen Falsetto

Lemon

Bono does Drag Queen Falsetto

Lemon (Continued)
In the future most people have tried a Lemon once or twice, the citric acid burn on the tongue a fond memory. Flora and fauna have been driven from Mother Earth and the Human Race drags it's knuckles and curses.

Stay-

Just the bang and the clatter as an angel hits the ground