The following is my short foreword for Derek Hunter’s new Love Chaos Grimoire, The End of The World. I was honored to draft another foreword following his prior release, Love Chaos in Theory and Practice, and attempted to experiment with “foreword” format. Using a magnanimous concept record by Unwound, I found a narrative that hopefully introduces this unique Grimoire while exemplifying the confluence between great works of art and personal, spiritual practice.
For more context on Derek’s personal philosophy of LOVE CHAOS, please listen to our previous chats via PRAGMAGICK:
You can now purchase The End Of The World on Amazon via PRINT and KINDLE.
ADD THE USUAL …
2001’s Leaves Turn Inside You, the final album by the criminally underrated Unwound – a pacific northwest band who’s decade long testament to unbridled inventiveness and singular originality still drips from the gullets of vinyl weirdos and cassette connoisseurs – is a folkloric masterclass in ascension. This album found the tenured trio in a swell of unbridled experimentation – demolishing their discography and foundations – while singularly left alone to commit their final testament to tape.
After 10 years and dozens of genre bending releases, all the while still languishing in obscurity, they decided to nix the formula of an outside producer or traditional studio, and instead built a chapel to the trio’s collective consciousness from the ground up: a derelict and haunted house in remote Washington, repurposed and crafted into a custom chapel of sound.
You can hear the intent in every wash of soundwave, from the custom tunings and angular rhythms of the lush and haunting compositions themselves, the alien recording techniques and torrents of uncanny performances and the dissonant and ethereal pleas to the “other.” How could traditions be usurped so quickly and magnanimously without fear of alienation? Why does it feel so uncannily usual for them while never before had they been so utterly wayward?
You hear the ghosts, you hear the transcendence. And they knew it would be their last. For what more can be done when a decade of kinetic symbioses communes with their collective supra self? So they called it and walked away.
I look at magickal praxis this way. That years and years of exorcising and experimenting with the turmoils and triumphs of different magickal currents are documents in a discography of self – always searching for that communion of the supra self in a succinct album. The difference is that Unwound’s final opus was the trifecta of fervent, converging selves in a knell. You see, there is no knell for the singular search. This is why I shall never resolve my creative or metaphysical praxis in any finality – I have no competing trajectories but mine. There is no knell and Derek Hunter’s Love Chaos Grimoire isn’t his, either.
Instead, Derek takes this concept of the masterpiece, or opus, and reveals the importance of the minutiae and machinations – not the results, hell, not even the rituals to reach results. You’d be missing the point if you treated this grimoire as a manual in any other way other than revealing that every ingredient matters.
I can listen to Leaves Turn Inside You and hark back to my youth, specifically the revelations that songs are fantastic, sure, but the true magick is in the elementals. I would hasten to say that what lies in these pages is not just insight on a practitioner’s peculiars, but an artist’s uncompromising intention to bleed through every sinew. This is a culmination of Derek’s sinew of self, each strand magnified and studied. It’s quite the testament of what a truly original praxis can and should be.
A hilariously maddening aspect about the Greek Magical Papyri, or PGM, a source code of many currents of magical work, is a simple ingredient peppered throughout the spell recipes:
ADD THE USUAL
The PGM has been tubthumped by generations of practitioners, not unlike a celebrated album that continuously spins by budding musicians for generations to come. Yet, no matter how many translations or revelations that still churn from the grimoire, the “usual” is not explicitly stated. What is the “usual” touch deemed so obvious by the author(s) that they need not explain? How the fuck is any of this “usual?”
And that’s the trick. The usual is your spice, your vigor as practitioner and pilot. This is a book full of one beautifully thorough magician’s “usual.” Glean, steal, and abuse. You can never recreate Leaves Turn Inside You, or perform Derek Hunter’s personal praxis as he does, but you will see what it takes to commune with the supra… take and just add the usual.
-Keats Ross (July 2020)
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