In this series, Revel Rosz, documents the metaphysical means of which he created his latest DAKOTA SLIM album, “CACTUS CROWN”
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To read the introduction to this series CLICK HERE
My preferred metaphysical method would fall under what I’d generalize as “Audiomancy,” or simply, sound magicks. My specific technique I called “DIMS” as they have become my preferred channel for dimming this somatic reality, whether that means a journey through the inner, psychic corridors of the subconscious, or the ability to act as a literal trans-dimensional wayfarer. These musical methods of magick were utilized to conjure and enhance my latest album, CACTUS CROWN.
“THE NIGHT THIEF”
or How I Learned to Stop Dillydallying and Cast Cosmic Bombs
The day of the eclipse, August 21st 2017, began with me intensely organizing a sobering helping of revelations. These reveals were recently rewarded through my mostly-solitary two day sabbatical prior in the Oregon wilderness. I utilized the three day excursion to vex the psychical and philosophical self-hexes I had accrued over a tumultuous few years. Through fevered meditations, I toiled with the unbearable truths I’ve long avoided until finally I was able to fathom the facets of my life that specifically swelled with stagnation; the elementals of modern life that turned my inner rhythms into muted hums were now throbbing sores.
Out in the muggy woods, I found myself submerged in the dopamine-depleted realities that are inherent in ex-drug addicts during the existential come-down, you know, the gravity resulted from those initial highs of adjusting to newly found, clean living. I was now witness to those truly insidious, hollow habits that were the true culprits behind any misstep, the ones really behind the ill wills, be they a foray into drug abuse or a refusal to wear sunblock under the mid-August sun, the self-sabotagers. Finally, these crooked little bastards were now blindingly apparent, sanitized by the sun but harrowing all the same. I remembered how easy it was back when the drugs were to blame; to look upon those times with a bittersweet resolve was further evidence of a corrupted sense of self.
I was able to survive solely off the rudimentary victories awarded to the aimless with low expectations. When my purpose seemed askew, my spiritual drive and relationships began down a dark trajectory. The ouroboros of thought and blame I cloaked my brain in the months, no years, leading up to that scorched Oregon forest were enough and… listen, I’m being a bit dramatic, I get it. It’s hard to qualify emotions and desperation without the rough and tumble of major events, but that’s just it. Nothing exceedingly negative occurred, somatically. The gestation of my inner turmoils is but an unnecessary prologue to where this story begins. For the record, I’ve been in worse spots, literally, figuratively, psychically, emotionally… the reason this time was so harrowing was because I had finally attained the traits necessary for a purposeful life but was in the swells of surely, somber living. My In-actions had brought me there, and I was grateful for doing so, but I had nothing in reserve to carry on with life as it was.
I was in a cold coexistence – both with myself and within a long since soured relationship. Of course, the wallows of economic ineptitude whilst breaching my thirties and the frustration and futility of societal expectations added to the numb. And that’s just it. My entire life my heart was a fist, and anger fueled my resilience, but I had reached an apathy akin to why I detoured into drug use those many years ago, except more terrifying now because it was natural. I saw no end to this given the mechanisms I had in my armory. It was if I had become fully realized, my literal wit’s end, everything learned had been exorcised… so short-story-long and then short again, I was under that totality of the Leo eclipse casting cosmic bombs, utilizing all my magicks, babbling, drooling, burning, shouting, contorting… all out of desperation. The first time I had ever employed magick out of desperation.
No more dicking about, pontificating on the intellectualism or on magick’s rudimentary ties to self-help psychology. Fuck that, I’m going full freak. That’s what led me to the August eclipse, in the middle of the the Oregon forest, sullied and severed from the world, and ready to cast my exit strategy from the confines of learned guilt and disappointment. Ready for healthy change no matter how it manifested. That or never return. Demons, do your worst. I’m through messin’ around.
Famously, I was adamantly against using magicks out of desperation as I believed that, no matter the devotion or diverse practice, metaphysical methods are best suited for maintenance and/or the construction of a preferred trajectory rather than as a “hail-mary” or “situation abortion.” As a matter of fact, my main magickal resolve was that most metaphysical employed means were simply forms of psychological conditioning, and using methods out of desperation would add a heavy psychic burden to a healthy habit. Honestly, even the paranormality that riddled the DIMS I had ascribed to the bewilderment of maybe witnessing “the collective unconscious” – but usually I just brushed them off as subconscious spelunking.
However, it was during a DIM when I envisioned the significance of this monumental eclipse, months prior to the mob fervor that drowned Oregon leading up to it, let alone before I had knowledge of it. I’m all too human regarding the patience and discipline required within the confines of high ritual. I now understand that the unseen circuitry that tethers us to the machinations of this material world are touchy (understatement of the century?) and take a certain surgical finesse to traverse. But prior to this revelation, my shoot-from-the-hip shit-kicking self enjoyed throwing a little shock here and there, and admittedly, sometimes this cavalier style was mistaken for a bombastic disregard. The fateful DIM would be the apex of this attitude. This is because that fateful February night in 2017, my DIMS would lead me to the outer-fringes of “soothsaying.”
As I sat in The Dimming Room that winter night, in the preternatural dark (as I am wont to do)- the air was particularly horrid and heavy with moisture. I could hear the electricity cackling like static flies throughout the room, emanating from the buzz of my guitar amp. I was experimenting with utilizing full rhythms in sequence, looped to no end, to induce what I thought could be more symmetrical Dims. I believed that utilizing a full measure of a quantized rhythm I had recorded on my Marantz cassette machine, looped in a continuous pattern (albeit an odd time signature) might induce more digestible visions or experiences when Dimmed. A sort of mental anchor with the mathematics of music. For too long I was wading through the arrhythmic poly-rhythms, trying to crack a sequential code as if to unlock the desired trance. That method would yield rare results and mostly led to me banging on like drunk primate in a closet for hours on in. I thought, “No, let’s cut the middle man, find another sequence within a sequence already: I’ll still strum, chant or percuss, but I’ll do it with a sonic anchor of rhythm and meter.” Lordy, lordy. You know what comes next.
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After my preliminary banishing ritual, offerings to the unseen and other adapted facets within my hodge-podged opening ceremony, I became immersed in that black, heavy heat, growling guttural sounds over the electric drone of my baritone to the pots and pans looped on tape. After a long while, the hidden architecture of the Noirs began to flicker about (as they are wont to do). As I stared deep in to the black, I could hear the blue and red of the LED lights on my audio equipment rattle and rattle underneath the duck tape I had covered them with. Almost as if the colors were shaking to spill out with bursts of energy. That’s when the electricity within my body began to pop, as if it was about to bolt with the black in Jacob’s Ladder bursts. The baritone drones of my guitar began to feel… their warmth tones now viscous of my cheeks. The booms and clangs of tape recorded pots and pans seemed to shock the room into low flashes of purple blossoms. “Here we go,” I thought, as those purple blossoms became fixed into the scene, filling out a vivid setting with their drips and creeps of illumination. I began to feel the moisture in the air surge into dust, as if the electricity was vaporizing the atmosphere with every tone or tussle. Then, those drips and creeps stopped, and began to recoil, outlining the contours of the living room on the other side of the wall. I was seeing through walls.
My living room, like a live-feed through the Dimming Room’s wall, was bright, yet somehow still artificial. My eyes now allowed to focus without disrupting the vision landed on the altar that lay upon my foot organ on the opposite wall of the room. The candles on the altar were lit and the ephemera flickered under a moonglow, but how? Outside the living room window the moon was impossibly full and brilliantly close, but this window’s only view is of the extremely close building next door. Now it was as if I was staring at the surface of the moon from an observation deck miles away.
The altar’s candelabra began to drip with fire, creating dark micro villages that evolved out of the nooks and crannies of my altar’s ephemera- somewhat into that of a mircroverse; a mini-village of the damned now lay atop the living room organ. The moon began to dip black with static, as if ethereal ants were swarming the moon to engulf it, causing the black to seep through the window. The static swarm began to infect the living room, covering all unnecessary vantage points and leaving only a view of the micro-villiage. The micro-universe, which began to resemble a southwestern ghost-town ablaze from my vantage point far back in the dark desert, miles away.
My center candelabra began to transform into the image of a woman, robed and hooded like the Virgin Mary, calmly cradling a child and rocking from side to side. I couldn’t quite make her details out, but inherently I knew to conclude she wasn’t the Virgin Mary. She was beautiful with a dark complexion but radiating with domain over that small world. That’s when the moon finally became shadowed by the psychic swarm, now revealing that it was never fire erupting from the micro-village but radiant orange lights emanating from behind the half-constructed frontier-style township. Just then, it felt as if their was a hidden festival creating the radiance and I could hear the minor-scale squeal of some mystical trumpet or sax from afar atop the pitter-patter of an unseen crowd. The music sounded so familiar, but I couldn’t make out what the voices were saying… or even what the robed women in white was muttering to me… “What was she saying?!” It was driving me mad, “Wait, no it’s definitely a single saxophone… and I have heard this before…what is it?!”
The next thing I know I’m lying on the cool kitchen floor, feedback from my guitar filling the house and my dog confused as to how a closet could give birth to a sweaty human being.
That night I combed through my collection of saxophone music. No dice. It wasn’t until I was taking a meditative walk when my music shuffled to the tune… I was astounded to find the squeal of that same ominous saxophone melody in the intro to a collection of 1960’s Ethiopian jazz only by happenstance – I was showing the volumes of music to a friend when when SHAZAM.
IT WAS A CALL TO ARMS. I tried to recreate that DIM to the actual track, but I needed it to loop. So, I sequenced the intro to the same pitter-patter percussion I had sooth-heard it with. Instead of dipping into the preternatural void, I instead was gifted with an undeniable melody from my baritone electric; an unmistakeable bass line. As I Dimmed with the loop of the Ethiopian sax, the ramshackle percussion and the sinew-like baritone, I began to envision an inner-power. A death march to the dark that encompassed me. I was coyote, combing the night-soaked terrain of a slumbering earth. Weaving between shadows and moon glow. Dripping with the kill and content with the midnight hums. I felt at home. Finally, free of the sullen mess my somatic self was plagued with. Even though this DIM felt to be more of a subconscious dreamscape, an internal metaphor for want and for purpose, it revealed the mission quite clearly. I must cast all my muster to feel this way when awake. It was time to finally push my magick’s to the fold and it was revealed through this bass line. The melody would become the proto-sigil to CACTUS CROWN’s hyper sigil. The melody that birthed, well, everything.
Not long after that fateful DIM my old friend invited me to caravan to the Oregon wilderness for a 3 day sabbatical revolving around the looming eclipse. Naturally, I leaped at the chance as it was no to nail the synchronicity of my DIM and the impending eclipse. Also, through further inspection, realized that the woman resembled the barrio bruja in my Southwestern childhood, the dark visage of Santisima Muerte, the (unrecognized by the church) patron saint of the outsider and her looming presence within the gang culture of my neighborhood growing up. I consulted my own Bruja, an unabashed voodoo witch and local lothario, we’ll call Julio, who told me that when Santa Muerte visits you in a dream, let alone a fantastic vision, that you should heed the call and suss out her want to engage. It all fell in line. My desperation blistering for change and the moon ready and able to diving my life into what was and what should be, poised and illuminated among the crooked green pines. I decided I would keep to myself for most of the trip, and use the time to meditate on the many facets that needed rectifying. By the evening of the first night, I was mad with a brutal honesty – my tent littered with scribbled confessionals. Where would I begin?! Aha, I thought, let’s craft the procedure and then focus on the main feature, shall we?
Like a bright-eyed idiot with a loaded gun in the middle of a banshee farm, I resolved any guilt I had for not being up to snuff with all the procedural pish-posh required for the work. Sure, rookie mistake, but I was desperate and succumbing to my inherent pragmatism of conforming the work to fit your needs and materials. I figured I’d cover some bases by including a disclaimer in my conjurations: call it a clause within the contract with the unseen, one that says, “forgive me for any disrespect, mispronounced word, or lack of grace…I’m only human and that further proves why I’m here.” That should round that out, besides, the unseen movers might just be subconscious constructs that inherently know I meant know disrespect… right? Unless they’re pure personifications of a foreign consciousnesses, to which I’m just asshole. But the ends justify the means, and I must relinquish my prevailing fears of brevity, class and stoicism when seeking and for good or for ill, conjure a new countenance by any means necessary. Sorry, ancient Persian witch-diety AZ for my lack of Aramaic, or Solomonic demon Glasya-Labolas (glassya-labooolas, glasssya-eh), no time to stand on ceremony in this, well, ceremony. I kid, I kid, I would never call on Solomonic entities of the Lesser Key with the Hoodoo, Mexican folk magic and chaos magic’s I’m about to unleash! As I giggle snort and push my glasses up to my eyes.
I drafted the ceremonial testament and equations I would soon ignite under the eclipse. My unshakeable, crooked Chaote beginnings (for good or bad) would inform my utilization of every metaphysical element I had ever danced with, no matter their specific devotion, together in an white boy woo-woo gumbo. Finding the magnetic spot, deep in the dripping greenery, perfectly fashion with a stump to use as the altar top. I systemically arranged the altar to finally accept and acknowledge my childhood bruja and folk hero, the patron saint of the outsider, Santisima Muerte, initiating the first of a nine day novena and honor her life-long whispers, I SEE YOU. Finally through the brutal insults and psychic fisticuffs having me as the only camping companion would entail (To my friends and family, I now totally see that I can be one bullheaded sumbitch and I apologize.) Anyhow, free from the corrupted self one constructs to combat the permeating and all-encompassing disassociation lurking behind us. And now nestled within the terror and torment of my unadulterated self. One to collaborate and survive in this shared, industrialized somatic reality. by the solemn three day solitude of the crisp Oregon wilderness
To say the results whether intended or not, are jarring and sometimes make merriment of our psychic thresholds. To say that certain magical practices have the ability to obliterate would be a hilarious understatement, and I say hilarious as I wince from experience. You see, always the fire starter and troublemaker, I often resolved to keep those titles away from the blame of outsiders as much as possible, meaning I did just fine surfing the seismic shifts I throw myself, subconsciously or somatically. But last August’s eclipse allowed for an undeniable astrological level-up for some astronomical absolution. Now, as I’m no stranger to beating my the ever-loving piss out of my ego every damn full moon, it brilliantly illuminated a way out from the knee deep muck and mire I sure was fucking mired in. I wrestled with the aforementioned disrespect of seeking ethereal guidance in desperation, and perhaps my perennial nascence regarding the potentialities of the ecliptic conjurations ascribed to the smallest misstep or ill conceived intention wasn’t as scary as writhing in the wake of a life unfulfilled. So, in the immortal words of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, “Fuck it dude, life’s a risk.”
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