The following is an excerpt of a piece originally published on HAUNT MANUAL concerning The Ape of Naples, An O.B.E., Excavation of a Famous Landmark’s Backrooms and the Hauntological Revelations That Tether it all…
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Above footage of the final days of the LLOYD CENTER filmed in its backrooms and basements on analog video set to the audiomancy of both Aspektor & Prospektre Hauntomancy Rites is all synchronous with the following chapter…
I had a transformative experience the other night. One that I’m certain is the wormsign of a new resonance afoot. And I’d like to quickly put it in writing…
Let me begin by saying that I’ve long enjoyed the works of COIL; I don’t feel the need to prove hipster bonafides here, and I only mean to mention because I have listened to, in full, The Ape of Naples, for decades now – always revisiting it within my return to COIL’s oeuvre that I unintentionally revolve yearly or so; I’ve been privy to their sonic seance long before the resonant relapse that frames the other night’s event. Honestly, the lore and the production of the Jhonn Balance (nay John / Geoffrey Rushton) posthumous release construkted by the then-survived Sleazy (Peter Christopherson) as the projekt’s swan-song testament was not entirely unknown to me prior to this ordeal, either, however, it was majorly opaque and patchworked in hushed lore in the nebulous Coil compartment of my brainstuff. I hadn’t dug too deep and managed to appreciate without the legend surrounding.
Nebulous as the lore may be within me, I still have so much to say about Coil, and I’m certain this won’t be the last of my written ponderances concerning their works. It was only a matter of time the long charged SEO “audiomancy” tag tethered to me would cross polinate with the progenerators of sound sorcery, especially in edible structures, that is the eponymous COIL outfit. The group has long been out and about and forward, above and beyond whichever frayed niche you may have found them through. Be it the technical ingenuity of Sleazy and his trail of ingenuity from the foundational outfit of “industrial” he forged in Throbbing Gristle, then psych-dead-rock exaltation of Psychic TV, to the open-wound alchemical shit-to-gold romantik magicks littered within Jhonn Balance’s devotional sermons that is COIL. Their perfect wisdom of all of the above forever lay in the snide humor found in their revelatory transmissions, the kind of smirking resonance and resolve humans cursed with knowledge are known to embue, and the never-ending gift that comes through aging parallel to their seminal works. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention their gutpunching and daring work as a vocal queer outfit amidst the horrorific era of the AIDS pandemic, as well, becoming sentinels of the sullen during such a harrowing era and surviving still. All this to quickly say their current is a beacon for many of the outsiders shuffling this earth from the 80s on, and to allow Coil into your life, in whichever way your distinct quirkyness found them, is a true gift that knows no end.
So there was inevitably a mad-cache of reasons to begin discussing Coil via my currents of ritualcraft, whether showcasing Balance’s manifesto as a beautiful courtship of WE THE HALLOWED’s early creation, their many meditations of sound sorcery and audiomancy writ large as parallel to my long storied DIM SESSIONS & Rites, or the resonance of occultnik authorship within artistik mediums full stop would all would have been fine ways to weave their work into the hauntomantik current here; I would never have intended this shifty soggy-eyed piece to begin my joint transmissions of their ouevre, yet here I AM.
Friday evening past I had the most heavy-eyed, saggy hearted de-jaw’d revelatory bittersweet cosmick innershivers I’ve had to musick (outside my own audiomantik sessions) soundtracking an out-of-body experience born from a caustic nap finally afforded after a day of travel and prior to an early departure the next morning. It was liminal upon liminal, caught home but for a few hours in between stressfull interstate winces, restless and swirling on my coveted mattress for just a few short winks. Upon retrospekt, the ingredients here are perfectly volitile for a psychick punch: somatickly roughshod, sleep slack’d, post-familial psychick heavies brought on from a raucuous Colorado trip to officiate my brother’s wedding, and the radiant sour my tired self bled knowing a hefty week of displaced and disjointed travel layahead. There I was, my bed and doggo finally afforded to me after such a sojourn, but a knowingly fleeting reward of some-sorta-comfort in the few hours I had at home. I was in a bad way, man, and my body gave out. I had to sleep, I couldn’t afford much, but I had no choice. My mind still racing to digest the heavies I just went through and would be going through still, but my body dead-to-rights from a ragged no-sleep blunderbust.
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As I often do, I nodded off in my casket-pose listening to playlists bric-abrac’d for such activities, attempting to hush the mind and allowing some usuals amongst the advent of youtube “continuous play” surprises. It was no surprise that Coil was apart of this list as they long have been dream-mates, found sauntering parallel in my nightgasms, probably co-author to some of my most wild vivid dreamscapes of my past dreamwalks I’m sure, so slightly coming-to at the end of APE OF NAPLES wasn’t shocking in any way. I had heard it before. Which is why hearing this musick I’ve long been privy to in that static disarray felt as though I awoke to its hidden ritual long laid dormant until unhexxed by hypnagogic liminality. Half awoken and paralyzed to a cinematic scape where the familiar album was re-introduced as alien and strange and as majestick as issuing a direct transmission dispatched from the hands of the gods straight to the lobes themselves. My eyes rolling and rustling, blinking to find pace, but fully aware of the joint crooked fingers of Dionysian purrs by-way-of Hekate Moon beamed guidance scraped their long nails across the gray brain wrinkles issuing a sort of arrested, breathing pleasure panic. I truly felt “touched” in the most obscene sense of the archaic southern label upon retrospect, “the boy is touched” god-fearing southern aunts used to say as an epithet ot mean developmentally challenged— literally meaning when their God picked me from the celestial litter he grabbed too hard, digging His thumb too hard into my fetal flesh’s fontanelle. “Poor child, God just loved him too much…” this is how I felt, literally touched, literally mishandled by whatever diestic majestik tendril tickled me post-nap as my flickering eyes soft-saw the dusk-lit bedroom. It was in that way then, I felt molested, arrested and catatonic while shadow deities dug and finessed. And the soundtrack was the entirety of APE of NAPLES’ final track “Going Up”.
I could sense a heteronym phantasm-of-self observation as these great celestial shadow fingers massaged my shaking hypnagogic nightspell, dripping in gaseous drops direct from the bedroom window and out-beyond ability to see whom its appenage attached to. But my second body felt practiced, rehearsed, choregraphed to stand idolly by and watching. My two halves, one distended and molested in the bed and the other shamed in the corner, fully dis-conjoin’d. This is nominal concerning out-of-body dalliances in the past where there was always a lift or an immediate phasing out of the room where the body lay, pulled away from the static somatick and only ever allowing so much as a glimpse to discern the separation of first and second bodies before the journey began. Never before has my second body remained in the room with no force, no vaccum forcing my entrance to a greater journey. This was the journey. I was to sit and watch, a ghost cuckold to my own shadow molestation (I snicker as I wrote that line because never before would I have thought spectral cuckoldry a thing but here we are.)
“Going Up” sonickally cemented the ordeal. Just as the unnervingly gorgeous French-laden falcetto began to grace the arrangement, a transcendent performance by vocalist François Testory, the theme begins to sinew through the woven, gorgeous vocal ribbons… Still of mind to investigate through the lyrics laid, I began to saunter through the ironic exaltation of shopping departments and…stores in shopping malls? The shadowfingers finding a muscle rhythm of massage and the chaos mellowed into acceptance, the matter-of-fact-ness of “of course this is happening,” afforded in dream logic. I hung on every syrrupy vocal sinew.
…people prefer the liminal spaces over the bustling, lived ones. They prefer the memory, the nostalgia, over the exercise needed to keep them alive. Everyone is signing their future away because the memory of the future is an easier place to visit.
HAUNT MANUAL
I suppose I never quite understood the lyrics until then, until now, as I allowed the melodies and quaking aesthetics intersperced with words like “haberdasheries” in broken english to pepper the sonic scaffolding. I always sorta inferred it was a song about the soul escaping the body and what it was leaving behind. Quick to find the purpose of the shadowfingers distended from the window and into my paralyzed mind I hurred the purpose: the Coil-humor of the refrain, the irony that all the gilded bullshit the majority of people obsess themselves with in this life. This had to be the shadow-transmission, to look at how hard and distraught my body aches from trying too hard to mend the capitalistic self with the metaphysical, right? I just wanted to solve the reason and conjoin.
“Going Up” seemed to drive home the fact that as soul departs, further tides of materialism and captilastic godfroms are left behind, left to whither in an antiquated mall like they’re psychic postcards from a “gilded age never lived”—an abundant past as guidestone, a false stasis revealed to be littered with innocuous things of no true consequence as we burn in the great beyond. It was then, as the nebulous shadow massaged my frontal cortex, that the lyrics began marrying my recent filming of the infamous Lloyd Center the very week it was closed for good, just a couple months ago, that a deeper purpose of the song and the psychick-fondling was probably intending.
I was able to film the innards and cavernous backrooms of the dust anointed and abandoned time capsuled basements of the Portland landmark just days before it was shuttered, The Lloyd Center was one of the few remaining emblems of hauntological nostalgia to natives, a reminder of simpler, poignant and abundant times everyone seems to hold in generational regard, yet allowed to decay until complete closure this year. No one accepting of the fact thats its languishing decaying foundation needed present involvement to persist, that for a time, it could have been an actual emblem of artistic and communal abundance rather than a ghost of one. Only when jt was announced that it would be closong for good did the majority of Portland nostalgiamancers come out of the woodwork to pay respects and spin long yarns about how important the commerce center was in their lives. Not to sidebar too much, but most of Portland would rather this greater shared hallmark a distant memory than to sustain it through the societal slump and blight post-pandemic Portland decayed into. For a time, it could have been monumental and actual; now its a lost future as an artistic and mom-n-pop gallery of small intentional spaces because most people couldn’t give a fuck until it was too late. Most people only care once its gone, drunk on the memory rather than actuality.
As I lay there hyper-inspecting the lyrics while asunder in an hypnagogic display, I caught myself excavating the very backrooms and cavernous belly of that famous Portland mall that finally met its end. In a sort of recursive way, the song encapsulated what I had been trying to converse concerning the symbolic shuttering of Lloyd Center in a greater harumph — The emblem of western abundance of the shopping mall now going the way of the DoDo, sure, but lets reclaim these brick and morter shops of nondescript coprorate outfits, not allowy them to transmorgify into data centers or minimalist condos, or commercial warehouses and dispatch centers where consumer fare can be delivered instead of acquired physically. We’re losing ground, space is deleting, literal earth is disappearing along with our ambulatory whimsy, as the zeitgeist of technocracy rids the need of using the human body at all! Because, why suffer the burden of going to a mall when the mall is at your fingertips? And in that turn, why show up to art when you can thumb through it? Why suffer the air and atmosphere you dont have complete control over the space and you can just bring the goods to your face?
Above is a new Somatick Magick tape talisman of a VHS tspe specifically live video remixed for each recepient on talismanik VHS tape. This one includes analog footage of the backrooms of LLOYD CENTER, a nominal Portland landmark, filmed in its final days before closing for good.
“Fine,” the lot of us said, more than willing to excise corporatized stores for more anarchic, mom’n’pop’shop installations in their stead, which is what happened to Lloyd Center, before the cancer wrought by forgoing ambulatory experiences for delivery items infected visitation as a whole and the once center forged in the memories of Portland natives became a ghosttown on its way to the inevitable shadow-corp owned monstrosity it will demolish the foundations for. So very fitting, then, I was able to capture on analog video the casms and crevices of the undead mall’s final gasps before officially closing this summer. And synchronous that this shadow corridor of Portland’s past is a reminder of the decay it all portends in the end illustrated here.
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“Going Up”— the saunter through the decayed caverns of yesteryear revealed another sour realization, its not just the death of brick and mortar shops modernity is content with, but the chrystalization of their rose-colored memory is preferred over its continued existence. The loss of earth, of approachable and walkable square footage at the altar of “convenience.” There’s a reason why Fisher’s Hauntology musings, the “Backrooms”, and liminal spaces are in the zeitgeist as of late, not only because of their cautionary tale of lost futures and recursive loops are cemented in the material constructs of cold, anti-aesthetics, but because people prefer the liminal spaces over the bustling, lived ones. They prefer the memory, the nostalgia, over the exercise needed to keep them alive. Everyone is signing their future away because the memory of the future is an easier place to visit.
I understood now, this is what we left. Not only all that care for the decayed nicieties on display, but the literal groundspace and land that they lay upon. All the burn and hustle to enjoy the spoils of things that inevitably spoil, even the spaces of which we once visited. And now, even more troublesome, that we engineer things for their memory, that an artist in ember is a far easier subject to co-sign than a living one. Maybe because we’re so tired of being disappointed. Maybe because everything ends up that way anyway so let’s cut to the chase? How do we stop the Conglomos buying up all the space so why try? For shame. Its all so harrowing knowing in the age of data centers, hackneyed and truncated information, and subscription services, the lot of the world would rather not get their heart broken so they would rather not love anything living.
Fascinating that I would later find out that the basis of the song is taken from a classic television theme in the UK. “Are You being Served?” Was a 70s british comedy that Jhonn and Sleazy no doubt grew up watching, and in their profound humor used the theme in a stunning act of hauntomantik transfiguration by revealing its lyrics concerning an elevator-pilor barking out each floor’s array of stores and salons broken by “Going Up”.
“Are you ready to go now?” Jhonn shames with the rhetorical question, one that he actually grails his last-ever performance of the song live, and that subconciously I found myself chanting in unison with the memory of its placement within the song, albeit the ghost of the chant not present on the recording. Burned into the brainstuff, his repetitive question haunted me still, but on the recording it’s apparent only once? My second body asking “Are you ready to go now?” as my hypnagogia continued.
Not sure, but I must have misremembered its presence on the recording during that hypnagogic session because upon further review I’ve only found it as I had remembered it on that very last performance in Dublin. And I’m not sure my concious patchwork of the song I had known would recall it, either, so I’m not above issuing it to a separate echo, a construkt of Balance singing it atop the hypnagogic communion. This is not the most fantastic element of the event, mind you, so in the spirit of ‘moving forward’ let’s just document it as it was experienced: a disembodied, separate consciousness relaying the phrase atop the recording; — a poignant induction for my then present need, and the ghost of Balance pointing flat out that all the drama, all the fits and madhouse revelry of a temporary life lived were spent within an unethical labrat scenario, making materium matter so so so much that once left in the lurch, as we all will, it all amounts to “stuff” and “rooms” anyway —just blocks of fake cheeese in a cage at the end of our procession, gilded emblems of empty status behind the glass windows peering into the bardos of want and desire, the rewards of our suffering that we can’t take with us “going up.”
And now, even more troublesome, that we engineer things for their memory, that an artist in ember is a far easier subject to co-sign than a living one. Maybe because we’re so tired of being disappointed. Maybe because everything ends up that way anyway so let’s cut to the chase? How do we stop the Conglomos buying up all the space so why try? For shame. Its all so harrowing knowing in the age of data centers, hackneyed and truncated information, and subscription services, the lot of the world would rather not get their heart broken so they would rather not love anything living…
HAUNT MANUAL
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