“One example I used with people to try and make them update their conception of magick is- you get the old-fashioned or everybody’s archetypical view of it, which is a guy in robes with a wand saying sort of Latin incantations and so on. But the modern magician uses a Polaroid camera and a cassette recorder, like this. Because you use what’s the appropriate tool to the time you live in. So in the medieval ages that was appropriate, because it fitted the culture, with a very strong religious cult. But now that’s not appropriate. A computer, a cassette recorder, and a Polaroid is what’s appropriate; and a video camera now. Because you’re dealing with what’s powerful, and what works, and what manipulates what happens. That’s what it’s about. And you apply your will to what’s already available to make things happen…”
- Genesis P-Orridge, 1981
I first read the above quote many years ago when I picked up the RE/Search reissue of issues #4-5, which dealt with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Throbbing Gristle. You could say that the above quote had a big impact on me, and to this day I still feel that it is perhaps one of the most important magical statements of the last thirty years or so (it appears that Disinfo magician Richard Metzger feels the same way: Consider his introduction to Disinformation: The Interviews, in which he recalls that same quote having a huge impact on him… Hell, he describes it as a “cinematic” moment in his life). My own magical belief system incorporates many notions of technology into it: A child of the 80’s, I was weaned on computers and Nintendo and I’m very comfortable with machinery and tech talk and video game jargon (which is of course part of the language of the youth of today), though how I’ve come to incorporate it into my system isn’t really what I want to talk about right now. I want to talk about exorcism, your ideas regarding it, and how it can be applied in a modern context. To this end I’ll begin by sharing a technique of mine called “Techno-Exorcism” that takes the idea of exorcism and readjusts it into the present via modern day technology (that is, computers, MP3 technology, CD burning, and other electronic tools many of us use and are familiar with).
Techno-Exorcism
“Consider violence as entertainment. Mass slaughter for idealism’s sake. Look at what goes on in the name of religion and the consumer society. Relish the cacophony of the neurosis, fantasy and psychosis that guides materialist sensationalist culture to an uncertain end. Picking through society’s dirty underwear, we discover its real habits.”
-Peter J. Carroll, Liber Null
Not too long ago, I forget which thread, I briefly stated that I was working with “demons” by creating music and burning it to CD, in an attempt to “trap” them. At the time, this was just a vague idea and not very well thought out, but since then I’ve fleshed out the system a bit to this current state, which I will proceed to elucidate.
I’ll try not to repeat myself but a quick recap is in order. As you know many months ago I had a thread on here about working with one’s dark side (in my case, thoughts of a misogynistic nature and violent sexual fantasies of bondage and sadistic torture) and the best way of dealing with it. Originally I thought that masturbating over such fantasies (albeit in a ritualized context) was a good way to “feed the beast”, but I came to realize that that just seemed to power the “demons” even more (I am not, however, paranoid to the point where I’ll declare that by masturbating over such “unclean” thoughts I was creating monsters in the astral plane). Writing them down seemed to help a bit, but the results still were not totally satisfying. Eventually I came about the notion that perhaps a self-induced exorcism was just what the metaphysical doctor ordered, and this could be achieved via setting my inner torment to music of my own creation. Power Electronics seemed to be a good working model, so I decided to go about using that genre as my magical “system”, my tools being nothing more then my computer, an amp, a microphone, some effect boxes, and my very own voice. I decided on exorcism because, being raised Catholic (though I don’t identify with that religion any more) I was always as a child very afraid of being possessed by demons. It was a terrifying idea to me, and it appears that things that leave a strong emotional impact on your psyche at a young age stay with you for most of your life. Because of the powerful imprint the notion still had on me, I decided it would be a good technique for dealing with the problem at hand.
The origin point of my notion of Techno-Exorcism, the seed of inspiration, was actually a Poppy Z. Brite short story that appeared in her third collection of short stories, The Devil You Know. The name of the story is “Pansu”, and it is set in a small Korean restaurant in L.A.’s Koreantown. In the story, the restaurant owner’s wife is possessed by a literal demon, and to save her, the owner decides to feed the demon, using a ritual that traditionally is officiated by a Korean healer called a pansu. What the man does is he offers the demon food, which the demon eats. When the demon is thirsty, he offers it a drink. As the demon enters the bottle and drinks the liquid the owner grabs the bottle and caps it shut, sealing the demon inside. Later on he has two patrons toss the bottle (with the demon still trapped inside) into a pit of cement, where it sinks out of sight. Looking back at this story many months after reading it and comparing it to my power electronics experiments, I had the brainstorm that perhaps I could trick my “own” demons into a CD, trapping them in the grooves of the disk.
The recording sessions for this experiment were of a fairly intense nature, though the means and tools were fairly ordinary. Each “song” represented a particular vivid violent sexual fantasy I was hung up on. First I would record the music into the computer, miking it directly from the amp I had set up, recording mostly static or feedback, the essential sonic ingredients necessary to set up the requisite Sado-Noise Mandala. I would then record the vocals over the created audio Gothtronic torturescape, vocals that consisted of mostly primal screaming of a primordial tint and rants detailing the most perverse, grotesque acts I could think of. The “demons” in this way exited the prison of my head via the soundwaves produced by my vocal chords and, slithering into the mike, made their way into their computer, compressed and crushed down into tangible digital WAVE tracks. It is important to keep in mind the Qabalistic notion that the throat (from which sound originates) is often related to Daath, which of course is the entrance to the so-called “World of Shells”, the Abyss, the Nightside of Eden, and so on. Perhaps it was fitting, then, that my “demons” manifested in this world via that particular entry-point.
I can’t begin to underline how important this visual aspect is. When a “demon” is in your head, you can’t really see “it”, as it is nothing more then an obsession, an abstract thought, a concept you can’t really understand. All obsessions are trapped inside the “circuitry” of your brain. However, by the Techno-Exorcist method, an interest switch takes place, as the “demons” exit the circuitry of your biological computer (your brain) into the labyrinth-maze of an electronic computer, a third party which has no real connection to your inner self (if this concept seems difficult to grasp consider The Exorcist film in which Father Karras lures Satan out of Linda Blair’s body, into his own, where it becomes trapped inside him rather then her). The difference now is that the “demons” are outside yourself and can thus be viewed in an objective, impersonal manner. Now they are no longer nebulous concepts: You can actually see them, right there, on your computer screen, and you can see that the “demons” that have been obsessing you so are, in another context, just data, spiky black lines indicating the presence of encoded Wave information, able to be manipulated as you choose: You can delete it, distort it, cut and paste it, quantize it, whatever you wish. By coming to the surface, by being exposed, they ceased to be “invisible” and thus became something I could see, manipulate, and, if I so chose, dominate. It appeared that the tables had been turned on my mental tormentors, as now, like the victims of the Cult of the Unwritten Book’s Pale Police whose soul ended up becoming trapped in the maze of his/her own thumbprint, they were trapped in the internal maze of my computer’s hard drive. By giving the “demons” a basis of manifestation, I had lured them into an “entrapment center” (to use Peter Carroll’s terminology on this subject).
All this, of course, ties in with the notion that once we can see something in the light of day, it ceases to scare us. You can compare this, I suppose, to William S. Burroughs' disgust regarding the burning of the sacred Mayan magical books (as expressed in his “idea book”, The Job). To quote Burroughs, “Bishop Landa was so appalled by what he saw that his own reactive mind dictated this vandalous act (Burroughs is here referring to the burning of the Mayan secret books). Like his modern counterparts who scream for censorship and book burning he did not take account of the fact that any threat clearly seen and confronted loses force”. It could be argued therefore that ignoring certain “dark” aspects of one’s character (what Jung called “The Shadow” only makes it stronger. But using this method, one’s “demons” are brought kicking and (literally) screaming into the light of day, and squashed and refigured into a new context. Inside our heads, “demons” are larger then life because the mind itself can contain entire universes. But when dragged into the dayside, they lose power through being reduced into a smaller setting (the limited database of the computer as opposed to the nearly limitless database of your very own mind). Once they’re inside the computer, you can have your way with them. A mountain is nothing more then many, many pebbles: Chip away at it enough and soon it will be reduced to nothing. Likewise, “demons” inside our heads, which at first seem so daunting and scary to work with, can eventually be broken down via ritualistic means and self-analysis that borders on the forensic.
In my case when the songs were complete I finished the process by turning the “music” into an MP3 format (further reducing them into a smaller and smaller format, as MP3 files take up way less hard disk space then digital WAV data), and “burned” them on to a CD, the end product. Listening to the final product I felt neither guilt nor shame nor disgust but a curious mirth. It wasn’t something scary or taboo shattering or confrontational at all: I just sounded like some geek who lived with his parents and who wasn’t getting any who had listened to way too many Whitehouse records and, as a result, tried his hand at making his own noise music and ended up with a pale imitation of the real thing. An interesting transynthesis had occurred, as what had once been all these dark, scary thoughts in my head had now become a mockery, some lame-o screeching about slicing up women and what not over lazy, half-assed noise…. To be quite blunt, it put the word “phony” in “cacophony”. They usually say that the best banishment is laughter, after all. To quote Grant Morrison, “make people laugh at what terrifies them”. In any event, the CD could now be viewed as a type of digital grimiore, each song representing a demon that could be evoked by placing it into a CD player, the song’s title being the name of the demon. One supposes that positive sonic grimiores could also be construed in this manner, albeit in a more positive, loving context.
If you wonder why I keep putting quotation marks around the word “demon”, it is simply because when I say that word I’m referring to Phil Hine’s concept of what a demon is, that is, “obsessional complexes” that haunt us and, if we do not tackle them, grow until they come to have power over us. It’s simply human nature to attach symbolism to the abstract concepts. I am not referring to literal demons, of course, though for this kind of working it can be very helpful to (temporarily) perceive them in such a manner.
It is perhaps needless to say that one does not necessarily have to work with power electronics to do this type of exorcism, as any music genre you have an affinity to would suffice. However, considering the violent nature of the fantasies in question and the violent nature of the music of power electronics in general (to say nothing of the violent lyrical content: the emphasis on bondage and domination could be seen as an example of what Bertiaux refers to as Plutonian elementals) made it a natural choice. Plus, the whole alchemical nature of the genre appealed to me: Turning shit into gold. A lot of people on here reject power electronics as silly, but like anything else it can be utilized as a useful system for magical working. Perhaps it doesn’t hurt one to, every now and then, trawl through “society’s dirty underwear”. I’ve invoked Sotos’ malodorous name many a time on this board but I really do think that he’s a great modern example of the “Black Brother”, a magician who shuts himself away from the world and denies love, the universe, whatever. The true fall of man. Some people see his writings and rantings as pornography, but I choose to see them as qliphoptic grimiores for a new Aeon.
Interesting observation: Recently I’ve been re-reading a lot of the occult books I first read when I first started exploring magick awhile ago, hoping to receive new insight and maybe understand things that, back then, I couldn’t understand because I was still a noob and just couldn’t grasp the concepts. In particular Peter J. Carroll’s stuff took on a whole new light. You know, in Liber Null & Psychonaut there’s an article on the topic of exorcism and Carroll says that traditionally a crystal is used to trap the demon, usually quartz (later research confirmed that quartz is a common crystal used in workings of this type). I did a bit of research into what type of crystals are used inside computers and to my pleasant surprise I discovered that quartz is used in computers (mainly to help run the computer’s timing mechanisms, obviously a crucial function). Perhaps using a computer as a magical tool to trap a demon is not so far removed from the traditional New Age paradigm?
I suppose that one could take this idea and, should they feel the need, add elements to it to make it seem more “magical”. For example, the blank CD you burn the song(s) on to could have drawn on the front an image of Ganesha, who of course is the Binder of Demons (or, if you have one of those programs that let you design CD labels, you could simply nab a picture of Ganesh off the web, place it on the label, and affix it to the CD). This isn’t necessary, of course, but helps one to get in the proper mind frame for the operation.
Conclusions: Since the termination of the Techno-Exorcism sessions I no longer desire to make power electronics music… It’s lost the taboo allure it once held on me. Likewise, careful observation of my masturbation sessions have seen a comparatively low level of violent S&M fantasies, which also seem to have lost their dark glamour, to some extent. Inspired by Grant Morrison’s idea of turning qliphoptic shit into “poetry” via “The Filth”, I’ve taken my knowledge of extreme noise music and my connections with the serial killer fanboy subculture and channeling it into what I hope will be my first professional novel: A serial killer thriller set in the Power Electronics underworld, which, as far as I know, hasn’t been attempted yet. I should like to add here that dealing with one group of “demons” has uncovered a whole nest of new ones that need to be dealt with, that go even further into the subconscious then the previous one. The good fight continues… |
Curiously, I've heard people refer to Merzbow's albums as "transcendent" a word I've also seen applied to Whitehouse's live shows as of recent. I see no essential difference between pure noise with hysterical screamed vocals compared to an orchestra singing hymns... Both have the power to lift the listener to another state (as all good music aspires to). Many people I've found have rejected the transgressive but I've found that buried inside it past the filth are keys to unlocking buried aspects of yourself lost through the tides of time in the reptilian section of your brain. Society teaches us to abhor these things but I disagree with that notion, though the taboos are often so strong one can't help but feel sensations of guilt and loss of innocence as a mental reflex (very often during such workings and explorations I couldn't help but feel like Quimper, which helped me appreciate his character a little more). 