Arthur Magazine, America’s tireless beacon of intelligence, psychedelia and provocation (i.e. everything America needs right now), is in financial need. The irrepressible editor Jay Babcock has maxed all his credit cards, and the many people giving their time to the periodical (whose noted contributors include Erik Davis, Thurston Moore and Douglas Rushkoff), are asking for a hand in getting over a hump in their efforts to sustain this vital venture.

In his plea email, Jay said:

If we don’t obtain at least $20k by July 1, ARTHUR is done. Our long-term prospects are good if we are fortunate enough to make it through this rough patch.

Not long to go. It looks like they’re doing well so far, but every penny helps, as they say. If you’ve some spare cash and want to support some truly worthy media, head over and help right now.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your [summer]. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

1. Nine Inch Nails are hardly a summer band. And Ghosts I-IV is hardly an album of songs (it’s a collection of 36 texture- and shape-driven instrumentals). But it’s been making sense in the recent murky nights. It’s hard to single a track out, since the decision to number rather than name them—presumably to leave the shapes sculpted by the music itself in sharper relief—makes the process seem a little daft. Still, the pensive ambience of ‘13 Ghosts II’ really gets me.
2. The Brian Jonestown Massacre were imprinted deeply on me during the hazy days of spring last year, and ‘Donovan Said’ (from the dreamy Their Satanic Majesties Second Request) now leaps into my playlist as soon as the sun starts to brightly burn.
3. Saul Williams‘ recent gig at the Scala was breath-taking, a mutant mini-carnival of 21st century funkadelia, industrial beats and quicksilver political-cosmic rap. The sinuous slow-build of ‘WTF!’, from the excellent Niggy Tardust album, remains a favourite.
4. Urthona’s sprawling, amorphous pagan noise anthem ‘Sun And Moon So Heavy’. Damn, it’s good.
5. I missed Ride during their heyday, even though I was bang in the middle of that scene, taking more drugs than lecture notes at Reading University. They seemed flimsy next to my then-favourite British psychedelic merchants, Primal Scream and Spiritualized. Listening now to ‘Leave Them All Behind’, the majestic 8-minute opener to their LP Going Blank Again, I can only say I probably didn’t give them a fair chance.
6. Hitting London yesterday after a blazingly gnostic wander around Avebury, I needed some finely appropriate music as I walked along the streets, something languorous like the evening warmth of the streets, something that related back somehow to the day’s elemental revelations, but something with an urban energy, too, to attune me back to the city. The perfect track turned out to be ‘Water No Get Enemy’ by Fela Kuti.
7. Quite often recently I’ve gone through to the kitchen after some routine computer wrangling to make food, and the shadows of the leaves outside are dancing silently. The small, ramshackle garden is partly shaded, partly warmed by the sun. I open the door to the garden and try and pick some music that perfectly complements this graceful lull. As often as not, it’s ‘Open The Light’ by Boards of Canada.

I can’t be bothered to tag anyone, and I just nearly lost all of this post… So without further ado, I’m off to listen to rather than write about music!

The talk will be a slideshow-based presentation going over my research centred around Ilkley Moor and the goddess Verbeia (see ‘The Goddess in Wharfedale’). As well as being a visually rich bout of research, and hence eminently suited to this kind of talk, I’m also hoping to highlight even further the involvement of my personal experience in the investigation. Partly to deconstruct the process, to reveal some of the goings-on “behind the scenes”, but also to highlight how irreducible this kind of gnostic research often is. The promise and peril of hitting seams of genuine, befuddling mystery, however obscure. With nice pictures.

Anyway, it’s a way off for now, but pencil 24/9 in and hopefully see you there. The Moot With No Name is at The Devereux pub near Temple tube station, London, starting around 7.03pm. They’ve got Rupert Sheldrake on 11th June, could be interesting.

Dale Pendell’s highly-lauded trilogy of works on plant allies escaped me for far too long, and it’s great fun catching up. I’ve just posted my review of the first book, Phamako/Poeia, and I’m well into Pharmako/Dynamis. Pharmako/Gnosis beckons on the other side of this weighty middle tome. I’ll see how the other two books go, I might house mini-reviews in my library rather than doing full reviews; I’ve tried to capture my feel for the whole trilogy in this first review.

The new “proper” Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, sounds great so far, and is a free CD-quality download. But Reznor’s previous outing, Ghosts I–IV, has been grabbing my attention more. Thirty-six tracks, averaging 2-3 minutes in length, form what Reznor calls a “soundtrack for daydreams”. Like Eno’s More Music For Films crunched through a beatbox and various electric and acoustic guitars, it occasionally rocks out with NIN’s customary grind; generally it’s pensive and deeply intriguing.

“I Refute It Thus” by Urthona, with its three epic tracks and freeform guitar washes, is the other end of the spectrum. It emerges from the home studio of none other than Neil Mortimer (whose eco-minded Kennet Print are responsible for the printing of the glorious covers of our publications). Released by Dreamflesh allies Head Heritage, it’s no surprise that it comes resplendent with megalithic majesty and gritty poetics that conjure the crystalline brightness of uncut nature, via the heavily distorted technologies of free-noise rock. It more than lives up to the blurb that talks of “Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Arc noise collage mangled with a low generation audience recording of My Bloody Valentine at their most mental”. The final 21-minute jaw-dropper, ‘Sun And Moon So Heavy’ rages with a shimmering beauty that makes you forget all musical comparisons and sink into an embracing ocean of feedback, peppered with delicate trilling notes and omninous arcing groans. This is the best kind of cosmic noise, evoking the heath and the gaping skies of day and night alike.

Image by KATEIMI

After a period of finding computers and the web terminally dull (a strange state of mind which some would label “sanity”), I’ve been enjoying tinkering with WordPress. Specifically, I discovered a great plugin: Rob Miller’s Now Reading. It’s basically what I had in mind to write when I started writing plugins. You enter an ISBN, the plugin grabs book data and an image from Amazon, and logs it in the database. You can use it just to keep a “currently reading” bit in your sidebar, or to build a full-scale online library—with little reviews and ratings. Which is what I’ve done.

Of course the books I’ve entered in that I’ve already read (1) are not already reviewed in the Reviews section (I think for now I’ll keep my lengthy reviews in here), and (2) are particular faves. I’ll try to keep track of remotely interesting stuff I read from now on in the Library, and hopefully find time to give each one a mini-review as well as a rating.

Oh, if any take your fancy, and you happen to be buying them through Amazon anyway, do follow the “Buy from Amazon” link on the book page in the Library. I’ll get a tiny pittance from the sale. And of course, always buy independently published books direct where possible…

You can call this healing, you can call it transformation—there are all sorts of names. But let’s stay with the word “love” because it is so amazing to realize that love is working toward clarification, becoming clarified like a broth, like a butter, because what happens is transparency. And when we try to “clear things up,” go over the past to see it better, or put ourselves through confessions—all that is part of love becoming clarified. We are working at transparency. Impossible dark spots of the interior person get lit up, the shadow, the ugliest man, all the shames and embarrassments regarding the concealed personal tied-up self—well, there they are. “Good morning! How are you! Nice to see you!” They’re aren’t gone away or healed or integrated. [...] There they are, but they have become transparent, for a moment at least, like rubies and emeralds. The leopard can’t change his spots, but the spots can be gems. I am trying to say that your shadow is your virtue, and that is what love is mostly about. And that’s what remains—if anything has to remain—after a person’s dead. His faults, his unbearable qualities, or hers, become clarified, and you remember them as virtues. They stand out sharp and clear, like essences. It’s amazing how the very thing you couldn’t bear in your mother or father, in your wife or husband—they die, and then the rubies show right in the shadow…

I’m slightly concerned that the bomb-makers seem to be following me. I arrived in the UK last year in the middle of the 7/7 bombings, and discovered that some of the bombs may have been manufactured near my old home in the Hyde Park area of Leeds. Now it turns out one of the properties raided last night was very close to my last home, on Forest Road in Walthamstow. Anti-terror squad take note: next time I move, keep a close eye on the Clifton area of Bristol.

Well, it would have been highly peculiar to find bomb factories in Clifton, a bastion of wealthy Englishness. Still, Westbury-on-Trym, the home of the recently arrested 19 year-old “charged with terrorist offences relating to explosive substances”, is a mere three miles away.

I don’t think this has half as much of the “isn’t that weird” synchronistic frisson as I thought it might. I’m kind of getting used to it…

Dreamflesh Journal cover artist Amodali is building momentum with her visionary music. She’ll be showcasing tracks from her forthcoming release Incarnadine on the 11th & 12th of May in Leipzig in Germany as part of the WGT Festival. On the 11th she’s the headline act at The Pagan Village; the 12th sees here sharing the bill at the Kuppelhalle with Psychic TV, Voxus Imp and Barditus.

Checking in on Genesis P-Orridge’s site, I came across this recent interview with him—worth checking out as an in-depth intro if you’re not familiar with him, or a reminder of his fascinating career.

It happened back in February, but I’ve only just heard: Christopher Hyatt, occultist and psychotherapist, author of numerous books on magic and brain/body change, and prolific publisher, has died.

I always found New Falcon’s output a slightly mixed bag, but among its catalogue there were many utterly essential works by Robert Anton Wilson, Phil Hine’s definitive chaos magic manuals, and a long list of other gems from modern Western occultism. Hyatt’s own Undoing Yourself helped give me some of the most revelatory months of my life.

More generally, his great contribution was his energetic appetite for synthesizing the therapeutic work of people like Wilhelm Reich (which he learned from Golden Dawn luminary Israel Regardie) with the full spectrum of psychedelia and sorcery that Western culture generated in the latter part of the 20th century. Without being too arsey about it (he inherited a good line in healthy cynicism from Nietzsche and others), he seemed to me to be re-synthesizing the divergent threads that sprang from the archaic craft of shamanism.

The occult and healing, because of their common ancestry, have always been connected, but modern esotericism often forgot the fact. Things have changed a lot in this regard over the past couple of decades or so; in part, this is thanks to Hyatt’s single-minded will to have more fun and pleasure by any means necessary—and to help others do likewise.