#sun ra and rimbaud

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Hellhounds on His Trail: E L U C I D's REVELATOR

I speak what I see.

—Saul Williams, “Elohim (1972)” (1998)

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and systematic derangement of all the senses.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Letters of the Seer” (1871)

Every technological change begins with a spiritual revelation.

—Nathaniel Mackey (2016)

1.  LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE

The same motherfucker got us living in his hell. 

—Chuck D, Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” (1988)

I must forewarn you even now: what I intend to speak about, and in which I shall get myself entangled for reasons more serious than my incompetence, they are, I believe, without solution or exit. Two years ago, ELUCID promised that I Told Bessie could be significantly darker: “Trust me, it could be way more apocalyptic.” REVELATOR fulfills that promise. I Told Bessie introduced ELUCID as an anti-mystic mystic; on REVELATOR, we find him between the forge and the flame. He speaks from filthy tongue of god and griot, offering a <brand> of spiritual healing in the same <vein> as Dälek’s “Spiritual Healing” [for brand read “fire,” “cauterize,” “marked ownership”; for vein read “cold,” “spike,” “artery”]. At turns, his speech sounds of languages diverse, horrible dialects, accents of anger, words of agony, and voices high and hoarse. On ITB, ELUCID had just arrived in Heaven, trespassed its gates, yet stubbornly refused to sit down, to repose. On REVELATOR, he’s at Hell’s wrought-iron threshold, absolutely ruptured.

ELUCID emerges as a transgressive and dark magus speaking the omniversal language of Sun Ra. The first words spoken on REVELATOR, evidently ad-libbed, recall both Fritz Lang’s expressionistic Tower of Babel and Mister X’s psychitecture: “Metropolis…inverse overlord skyscape…” Another filmic nod would be to PTA’s There Will Be Blood (2017), where the climactic and classical rage of Daniel Plainview is unleashed as he screams: I am the Third Revelation! Plainview is, as his name intimates, an unbeliever, and he masterfully coerces preacher Eli Sunday into stating he’s a false prophet and that God is a superstition. 

See, the First Revelation was in the Old Testament (Show me your commaaaandments, as ELUCID drones on “Barbarians”); the Second Revelation was Jesus sermonizing that new shit; why mightn’t it be that the Holy Spirit was preparing another? ELUCID delivers the Third Revelation; he is the Seer, the Revelator—entering through a hatch [re: portal] of Houston horrorcore and disharmonic hard bop. REVELATOR is his unexpurgated rendition of K-Rino’s Stories from the Black Book (1993). The mutant blues of ITB have turned to hypnotik hip-noize—serrated, jaggy, shrapKnel-shattered, caltrop-piercéd. We witness, firsthand, the doom gospel he has previously preached about in practice, in praxis, in the demoniac rhythms and the patterns. Ganksta N-I-P’s “Reporter From Hell” (1993) amalgamated with Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873).

2.  NOISOME THE EARTH IS

“Here in this hymn-deaf hell,” Rimbaud reports back, but in ELUCID’s hell all we hear are hymns—shrieks, semiwept, semisung. “A black wail is a killer,” Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Jo Stewart, and Yolanda Wisher write in “4 Telling” (2021), a posse-cut poem. Production of “a satanic symphony,” Rimbaud says. Sounding like EPMD in the pulpit, Rimbaud claims “[t]heology is serious business: hell is absolutely down below.” He describes moonlight when the clock strikes twelve, “the hour when the devil waits at the belfry.” Go get a late pass, in other words, as PE presses on “Countdown to Armageddon” (1988) and ELUCID reiterates on “MBTTS” (2016). “Watch me tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned,” Rimbaud writes, appealing to the Devil, “...I will unveil every mystery.” 

ELUCID unveils histories of mysteries during his descent. On record, he shares what he sees. He sees Rimbaud in Hell. He sees Kanye and JPEGMafia in hell, Ye with BURZUM in Gothic script emblazoned across his chest. He sees Rubble Kings with SS skulls and sigs sewn onto Flyin’ Cut Sleeves denim. He sees Black Benjie’s assassin in Hell. He sees Richard Hell in hell holding White Noise Supremacists to account for how they treated Ivan Julian (“Mutants can learn to hate each other and have prejudices too,” the latter told Lester Bangs). He says peace to SKECH185 and sees him “playing devil’s advocate with Steve Albini’s Black friend.” Finally, he sees the cerberus in hell—the “monster cruel and uncouth,” according to Dante (c. 1321)—the 3-headed anti-crowd dog. He sees its three gullets, red eyes, and unctuous beard and black and belly large. He sees the wretched reprobates. He sees muzzles filth-begrimed. He sees hellhounds here, there, and everywhere.

3.  ROUND US BARK THE MAD AND HUNGRY DOGS

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death—

—Shakespeare, Richard III, 4.4.49-50 (c. 1592-1594)

“Hands off,” ELUCID commands on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” the opening salvo on REVELATOR [salvo, a discharge of weaponry; yet also salivate: dog’s drool, secretion, spittle, spit the verse]. “It’s just happening,” he shouts—it’s happening to us; we are subjects of history, its malevolent thrum. “I can feel it ’fore you say it,” and I’ve no reason to doubt him. But allow me to litanize anyway.

In Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (2018), Bénédicte Boisseron writes that the dog, the canis familiaris, is “an unwilling participant in the history of social injustice,” a casualty to a depraved Pavlovian conditioning. She cites an “association between canine aggression and black civil disobedience,” reflecting a “prism in which race and dogs insidiously intersect in tales of violence.” She refers to these as cyno-racial (dog-black) representations.

Bloodhounds—aptly-named barking, beastly embodiments of biopower—were “imported from Cuba or Germany” during slavery and “trained to pursue escaping slaves in both the Caribbean and the American South,” Boisseron writes. Dogs were designed to “become ferocious only when in contact with blacks.” The Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (1838) provides insight into this odious operation:

A negro is directed to go into the woods and secure himself upon a tree. When sufficient time has elapsed for doing this, the hound is put upon his track. The blacks are compelled to worry them until they make them their implacable enemies; and it is common to meet with dogs which will take no notice of whites, though entire strangers, but will suffer no blacks.

The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849), meanwhile, offers a suspenseful, first-person account:

We had been wandering about through the cane brakes, bushes, and briers, for several days, when we heard the yelping of blood hounds, a great way off, but they seemed to come nearer and nearer to us. We thought after awhile that they must be on our track; we listened attentively at the approach. We knew it was no use for us to undertake to escape from them, and as they drew nigh, we heard the voice of a man hissing on the dogs.… The shrill yelling of the savage blood hounds as they drew nigh made the woods echo.

The training, of course, isn’t only about ghoulish intimidation; the hunt would often climax with violence. “When the slave runs away,” Boisseron explains, “the master needs to symbolically reassert his domination through a ritualized act of flesh cutting.” [FANG BITE!] Frederick Douglass spoke of such savagery: “Sometimes in hunting negroes…the slaves are torn to pieces.” Mutilation of runaway slaves, Boisseron claims, enacted “a rhetoric of edibility.” Derrida called it carno-phallogocentrism, linking the slavehunter’s virility and carnivorism, savoring “deeper shades of carnage,” as ELUCID says on “ZIGZAGZIG.” It has never relented. In the wake of Michael Brown’s murder in 2014, the DOJ issued a report that detailed “puncture wounds” left in children by the Ferguson K-9 unit. The victims of these “bite incident[s]” were always Black. 

ELUCID also speaks of how victims “force-feed a war machine” on “ZIGZAGZIG”—regions and relics swallowed whole, irrevocably. In their plateau “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” (1980), Deleuze and Guattari write: “You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog.” Somewhere on a desolate Yonkers street corner, DMX sleeps with a pack of strays, lying in wait.

4.

Police forces…have used dogs to break up rioting mobs…. The dogs’ snapping teeth, swift movements and indifference to the crowds’ menacing threats have made mob control a routine procedure for the forces which have the dogs.

—“A Progress Report of the Assembly Interim Committee on Governmental Efficiency and Economy on Using Dogs in Police Work, California” (1960)

If a dog is biting a black man, the black man should kill the dog, whether the dog is a police dog or a hound dog or any kind of dog… [T]hat black man should kill that dog or any two-legged dog who sicks the dog on him.

—Malcolm X (1963)

In a contemptible case of cultural exchange, two German shepherds trained by a Nazi stormtrooper were used by police in Jackson, Mississippi to attack crowds in support of the Tougaloo Nine—Black students attempting to access books from a whites-only public library. That was in 1961. [TRUST NONE!] Two years later, Bull Connor utilized dogs to disperse protestors in Birmingham, notoriously documented by Charles Moore and Bill Hudson. Hudson’s photograph of fifteen-year-old Walter Gadsden in the mongrel maw of law enforcement fills textbook pages to this day, while Moore’s photo would be aestheticized and reproduced in Andy Warhol’s Race Riots series in 1964. “Police dogs is one of the accepted practices in police riot work,” a swinish Alabama sheriff said in ’63. Not much has changed. When people demonstrated outside the White House gates after the death of George Floyd, an orange fascist—who ELUCID begrudgingly won two long-standing bets on—threatened them with “vicious dogs.”

“Dogs were once perceived as dangerous due to rabies,” Boisseron writes, “but today the black man is the one responsible for making the big dog look ‘un-kind.’” A.G. rapped about the dogs with the rabies on 1992’s “Runaway Slave,” looking backward to understand his present, but by the ’90s, the ever-evil LAPD was calling Black people “dog biscuits.” An officer in a St. Louis suburb faced suspension after posting to Facebook that Ferguson protestors “should have been put down like a rabid dog the first night.” The aggression of the dogs, Boisseron points out, has “metonymically shifted from zoonotic to a racial context.” In essence, society shouldn’t fear the dogs—society should fear a Black planet populated by Black men. [FEAR ALL!]

The messaging has frequently been mixed—deliberately muddied (mutted, we might say) to defy understanding—racism skewing absurdist. In “A Dark Brown Dog” (1901), Stephen Crane used a “little dark-brown dog…an unimportant dog, with no value” with a “short rope…dragging from his neck” for allegorical purposes. [SHORT LEASH!] A child drags the dog “toward a grim unknown,” the child’s intolerant family. The dog is by its very nature powerless, “too much of a dog to try to look to be a martyr or to plot revenge.” Eventually, the drunk father beats the dog with a coffee pot and tosses him out of a fifth-floor window, falling dead in the alley below. Crane’s well-meaning story speaks to mystery writer Stanley Ellin’s comparison of the “solicitous white intellectual” and the “arrant racist,” the former of which “sentimentalized Black lives” and “patted them on the head as one would a pet spaniel.” To retreat to such romanticizing, Ellin says, fulfills the “function of the stereotype, and it matters very little whether the stereotype is that of vicious hound or pet poodle.”

As a child of the ’80s, ELUCID was exposed to the same surfeit of televised copaganda as the rest of us. McGruff the Crime Dog colonized our commercial breaks, asking us to join the feeding frenzy against drug dealers and burglars (Take a bite out of crime!). Meanwhile, Harlem World’s Herb McGruff provided counterprogramming and warned us of the real “Dangerzone.” “The idea of dogs attacking black people has become a haunting and unresolved image in the collective memory,” Boisseron writes, or, in ELUCID’s words: Eating everyone eventually. THE WORLD IS DOG!

5.

On SEERSHIP! (2020), a project ELUCID labeled a “work of spirit”—a work of glitch-hop and runt pulses and ill-bent illbient—we hear a blare of noise at roughly the one-minute mark. That calamitous blare is sublimated into the soundfury that sets off “THE WORLD IS DOG.” ELUCID’s bogeyman-down production, in collaboration with Jon Nellen’s urgent drumming and Luke Stewart’s grave-groove bass theories, provide for the sonics of a slave escape, equal parts panic and empowerment. “The dissonance is real,” ELUCID raps on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” “—I be feeling woozy,” and that’s the vibration here. In Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1865), Harriet Beecher Stowe describes how the vengeful and unforgiving escaped slave Dred defends a runaway from a hellhound:

…a party of negro-hunters, with dogs and guns, had chased this man, who, on this day, had unfortunately ventured out of his concealment. He succeeded in outrunning all but one dog, which sprang up, and, fastening his fangs in his throat, laid him prostrate within a few paces of his retreat. Dred came up in time to kill the dog…

“THE WORLD IS DOG” is pulsing and gnashing, a sequence of switchbacks and untoggled kill switches, a hyper-aural freak-out, to borrow some phrases from ELUCID’s New York Times blurb for Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction.” We should’ve anticipated the arrival of “THE WORLD IS DOG,” should’ve been listening to the panting precursor curses. Be it the gold chain punk asphyxiation of Soul Glo opening for ELUCID at the ITB release show at Mercury Lounge in 2022; the absurd matter we heard from his Shapednoise feature in 2023, wherein he “backhoed the graves”; or his appearance on Kofi Flexxx’s “Show Me” a few months later (I show you what it look like…)—the signs were all there. When word got out that ELUCID was spinning Miles Davis’s “Rated X” (1974), we should’ve known it was over, cataclysmically. 

If “Rated X” is the model, then ELUCID has set out to attain “music’s most elusive grail,” as Gary Giddins calls it in Visions of Jazz (1998): “the promise…of an open-ended form that defies harmonic conventions and regulation eight- and twelve-bar phrases in favor of a flexible but contained form.” An anonymous internet blogger called “Rated X” a “demented church service where the organist has become possessed by an evil spirit and worshippers have fallen into a trance.” ELUCID puts the incendiary fuse in fusion—dark energy acceleration | emergent fervor, fire & brimstone | Tony Williams Lifetime-type EMERGENCIES [ecphoneme—bang—ecphoneme—bang…]. This is rap-fusion—uncontrived, channel alive. 

6.

“Fire for fire, wade in the water,” ELUCID raps on “YOTTABYTE,” singing the same sorrow song of a century-plus before. “Wade in the Water” (Roud 5439) was a spiritual that reminded the runaway slaves to use streams and rivers to throw the hellhounds off the scent. “If you hear the dogs,” Harriet Tubman said, “keep going.” If “THE WORLD IS DOG” begins in a dreaded delirium, it ends [DEVOLVE!] in radical resistance.

The faded amateur photograph that graces the cover of I Told Bessie shows a man fending off a German shepherd; or, feasibly, the man is elevating the dog—healing it, calming it, exorcizing its engrained demons. Admittedly, it’s a crazy mixed-up world, a doggy dogg [dog-eat-dog] world, and the dog can occupy valences of both killer and companion. Everyone is dehumanized in the slave hunt, in the crowd dispersal. The hunters and the cops are the actual beasts (“That’s the sound of da beast,” KRS howls; “the murderous, cowardly pack,” Claude McKay snaps); the hunted resort to instinct, fearing for their lives, amygdala swelling with signals.  

In Martin Delaney’s serialized novel Blake; or, the Huts of America (1859-1862), protagonist Henry Holland, a.k.a. Blacus, a.k.a. Blake, wields a “well-aimed weapon” and “slew each ferocious beast as it approached him, leaving them weltering in their own blood instead of feasting on his.” Delaney doesn’t only draw scenes of retributive slaughter; his characters also speak of how “da black folks charm de dogs.” Threats neutralized. Power harnessed. The Yorkshire Terrier on the cover of Swans’ The Seer (2012) bares Michael Gira’s chompers—he’s merged with the pup. Hip-hop auto-interpellated dog into dawg (s/o to Althusser).

7.

As we learn from “Amager,” ØKSE’s song featuring billy woods, dogs only violate at the behest of men. woods relates a narrative of detainment at Trondheim Airport. The purportedly “colorblind drug dog” exudes innocence (“flopped on the floor, head on his paws”), though its mere presence smacks of discipline and punishment. As the Norwegian customs agent “palm[s] [woods’] clean drawers,” woods sardonically reflects, “I been a nigga too long.” He “know[s] the dance” and “know[s] the damn song,” resentful of this choreography of incurable racism that has been all too common and recurring throughout his life. He understands what’s happening epistemologically (“I know they hoping… I know I’m clean…”), but he also knows “those clammy hands going from the crack of [his] ass to the weight of [his] balls” are suggestive of castration, and when you’re crossing borders, what, what, say what, say what, anything can happen. As they go through the rigamarole of “mak[ing] calls, x-ray[ing] the empty suitcase, / [And] going back through [his] pockets,” woods stews with “impotent rage,” the aforementioned emasculation working its spell. He doesn’t begrudge the animal laboring under the aegis of the Tolletaten, though: I pet the dog as I leave. Scathed but saved. He charmed de dog.

8.

After dealing with so many strays I had learned one thing: be patient.  

—E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX (2003) 

Perhaps no figure better illustrates the subjugation and subversion of the hellhound than DMX. In the lead up to the millennium, Dark Man X embodied the dog of vengeance; he exemplified the undoing of the dog’s quasi-innate hatred of Blackness. In ELUCID’s words, he emerged as a “whole new nigga” with “skin [untorn], eyes [ungouged], hair [unshorn].” DMX’s arrival in 1998 felt like centuries in the making. He waged a vendetta in the name of every runaway slave and Civil Rights demonstrator. He’d slept on the streets and shared the concrete with his dogs, strays like himself:

Stray dogs are normally scared of people; they’re scarred by whatever neglect or abuse put them out on the street. Or if they’re lost, they’re depressed because they can’t find their way home. But that morning I decided that no matter how long it took, I was going to get that dog to come over to me. I was going to convince him to trust me and make him mine…. I started looking all over for strays that I could catch and train for myself…

DMX charmed de dogs and the rest of us in the process. He stayed shitty, cruddy, trading the cartoonish bow-wows we’d become accustomed to (via Snoop) for fierce grrrs and arfs, elevating rap’s onomatopoeics. With “Get At Me Dog,” he turned a familiar B.T. Express funk sample feral. In the video, the most achromatic Hype Williams ever managed, X holds possession of the Tunnel crowd, on a stage but of the people. His only bling: a stainless steel choke chain that collars his neck. The black-and-white video disorients with strobe effect and negative exposure—pitch blacks suddenly transform into flashing whites. Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen look on from the periphery of the crowd like, well, out-of-place bitches. The video captures the raw power of DMX, his stygian intensity, reminiscent of Tadayuki Naitoh’s 1971 photograph of Miles Davis. Like X, Davis harnesses his rancor and exhibits his self-possession.

The success of DMX’s subversion of the dog trope likely apexed with his Woodstock ’99 performance. Before a majority white crowd of hyperthermic slavehunter descendants, DMX rocked what Thomas Hobbs calls “blood-red dungarees.” X “growls viscerally” and “convulses” across the stage in a manner “akin to a Bad Brains gig in a sweaty punk basement.” DMX—like Dred and Blacus before him, like ELUCID to come—subdues the monstrous, cowardly pack, and has them eating Milkbones out of his hand by the end of the 45-minute set. 

9.

The first thing we feel on REVELATOR is a snarling, ravenous “fang bite” and the exhale of “dog breath.” We search for alternatives: the RZArector’s fangs on 6 Feet Deep (1994) maybe, a presence that Kodwo Eshun argues is akin to a head “filled with revelations that impeach the daylight.” We might think of the parallel universe of “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” (1928) where “dogs all have rubber teeth,” but REVELATOR doesn’t offer up that heavenscape—only a hellscape where teeth tear rabidly, rapidly. The “dog fangs [which dig] into black flesh,” Boisseron writes, are “deeply ingrained in popular culture.” We’d prefer the hip-hop context for “biting,” like when Rakim invokes “biting and borrowing” on “Follow the Leader,” where “brothers tried and others died to get the formula.” We’re on a “short leash” here, but Chuck D speaks of how he “cut the leash” on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and how prison bars “got [him] thinking like an animal,” and so I think we should act accordingly, tactfully, and lick our wounds.

ELUCID strafes us with 2-syllable units, iambs or IEDs, right from the start: 

Fang bite Dog breath Short leash Pit fight

We’ve not felt shelling like this since the opening words of DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998): 

One-two One-two Come through Run through Gun who? Oh, you don’t know what the gun do?

We’re propelled and pummeled by a Dark Enlightenment acceleration; unquestionably, we’re on our heels. ELUCID activates a sequence of 3-syllable units—anapests—as we descend into Hell:

From this height At this speed Downhill Careening

Later, the 2- and 3-syllable units alternate: “Shit that binds, / Spit out, / Ribs came spared.” Such blunt syllabics occur elsewhere on the album as well. “YOTTABYTE,” for instance, introduces a more dactylic, grounded pattern: “Hard science, / Scum gutter.” These are billboard throw-ups in Mister X’s Radiant City. They’re terse skull snaps like when Michael Gira sings, “Space cunt, / Brainwash” on “The Apostate.”

“I’m not psychic, but I’m reading,” ELUCID clamor-raps. The rapper has repeatedly denied the spiritual and supernatural in favor of tangible work, learning, reading. He much rather attend a demo or browse a bookstore than show his face at a séance or a church service. “The more I thought, the less I prayed,” he raps on “BAD POLLEN.” In this regard, he’s a dialectical materialist, much to the dismay of so many nimrod New Age seekers. ELUCID is not your self-help savior. Appropriating occult symbology in song is not inscribing sigils on the navel of a newborn. More likely he’s standing in solidarity with the child laborers pulling opal from the ochre mines of Madagascar. “Black Jesus hated bill collectors—I do the same,” he raps on “IN THE SHADOW OF IF.” 

In The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), Rudolph Fisher’s Harlem murder mystery, the titular conjure-man, one N’Gana Frimbo, is the closest forebear to ELUCID, a practitioner of the aesthetics of alchemy but one who knifes through the nonsense:

There are those that claim the power to read men’s lives in crystal spheres. That is utter nonsense. I claim the power to read men’s lives in their faces…. Every experience, every thought, leaves its mark. Past and present are written there clearly…. My crystal sphere, therefore, is your face.

“I receive it, then I weigh it,” ELUCID explains. He’s no Knownot but he also knows that he knows nothing, in a Socratic sense (one day it’ll all make sense, trust me [TRUST NONE, FEAR ALL]). He’s a member of a tribe on a quest, receptive of vibes and stuff, asking questions like: What? Can I kick it? Does it live or die? Who gon’ tell me why? Who goes there? Who dare disturb the hive? He remains unflappable, constant, “still inside,” channeling his “honey child” while killa bees are on the swarm angling for the fatal sting.

Our “small world” is razed; it “devolve[s]” as hell is raised—it’s not that tricky. The dog’s got “jaws that grind” and “teeth that tear”; Dante tells us Cerberus “displayed his tusks” and “rends the spirits, flays, and quarters” his enemies. “Where’s a pit, there’s a plague,” ELUCID says, demonstrating syntactically that life is parallelism to Hell but we must maintain. Boisseron discusses the “hysteria around pit bulls” rooted in an “overblown fear of rabies,” and we watched a “plague” of reckless media representation caricature Michael Vick as the very animals he electrocuted. “Pit bulls have been historically used in America as a weapon of stigmatization against blacks,” Boisseron explains, and so every Black man takes up residence in the Bad Newz Kennel when the public deems it convenient, whether they would ever dare to hold the jumper cables or not. If the stigma doesn’t catch up to you, the sickness will. ELUCID’s “pit” evokes morgue trucks reversing up to the trenches in the potter’s field. Careful where you step, or else risk experiencing “a quick trip to glory if you slip.” Pitfalls on every corner, beneath the buildings of every block. Like DMX said on “Get At Me Dog,” If you don’t know by now, then you slippin’.

“Be not afraid,” ELUCID advises, bending Biblical. It is I. It is I. It is I. If we can keep up, he’ll usher us out of the ravaged world. If not, “don’t know, don’t care—get out my way!” ELUCID’s “in the garden,” his own private Gethsemane, agonizing and “pouring for everyone whole came before [him]” and didn’t survive the onslaught. He pours out a little liquor, and like Pac who had his “back against the brick wall, trapped in a circle, / Boxing with them suckers till [his] knuckles turn[ed] purple,” ELUCID is intoxicated by his own dogged determination. Pac was simply rewriting McKay, who likewise found himself “pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Glorious as it sounds, ELUCID’s exhausted—as we all are—by song’s end: voided. All he can put together are fragmented, clipped, incomplete idiomatic and figurative expressions: “razor walking”; “bridge to nowhere fast.” Still, he bites back. Like DMX, he’s “eating everyone eventually,” indiscriminately, re-establishing the order of “the world [that] is dog.” He, too, is dog. Sic ’em, and get sick wid’ it.

10.  TEKNOHELL

Today the plagues of Revelation are…the disastrous results of…the irrational use of technology.

—Pablo Richard, Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on The Book of Revelation (1995)

“Police dogs were often framed as technology,” writes Tyler Wall, a scholar of racialized state violence. He cites a Baltimore K-9 officer who claimed “[t]he dog is the most potent, versatile weapon ever invented…. You can’t shoot around corners, but dogs can go anywhere you direct them—like guided missiles.” These comments anticipated the NYPD’s rollout of actual automated, data-gathering robot dogs, of course. But “CCTV” and “YOTTABYTE” escort us into an arena of Ballardian extreme metaphors and emergent technologies—a teknohell—where “Spot bots” prowl every city block.

“CCTV,” co-produced by ELUCID and August Fanon, screeches like a dial-up modem gone diabolical—a discordant din of panic chords. They’ve programmed drum patterns around the sound of the CCTV shorting out—the dread comes in sine waves: megahertz hurts | multiplexing and motion-detecting | low-frame rate. The cameras are everywhere we look, but ELUCID splits the veil and the surveillance. The mandala is a panopticon, a C-band satellite dish for bodies to rot upon. Impaled by feedhorns. Parabolically resting in peace. In “a moment of clarity,” ELUCID fucks the noise and begs, “Don’t be mad at me.” I ain’t mad at cha. Who could begrudge the corner boy who cracks the lens of a varifocal security camera with a rock in the courtyard of the low-rises (they call it “the Pit” on The Wire)?

The ill communications that ELUCID was channeling on Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips continue to nauseate him. A year prior to that release, ELUCID told Gary Suarez that he was working to “dismantle what isn’t serving and then download and update with what does now.” For the man who “feel[s] a way about proving [his] identity to robots,” he can also acknowledge damage has already been done, which is evident in his diction. On SEERSHIP!, he despaired: “Every device I own knows my latitude.” On “NY Blanks,” he warned: “computers are listening.” In Jacques Derrida’s “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy” (1983), he describes a Tetsuo-like man/machine [MAchiNe] who loses clarity between the sender and the receiver of electronic messaging:

And there is no certainty that man is the exchange [le central] of these telephone lines or the terminal of this endless computer. No longer is one very sure who loans his voice and his tone to the other in the Apocalypse; no longer is one very sure who addresses what to whom. But by a catastrophic overturning here more necessary than ever, one can just as well think this: as soon as one no longer knows who speaks or who writes, the text becomes apocalyptic.

In this sense, REVELATOR is, at turns, an apocalyptic text. Much of ELUCID’s work has been. The cover of SEERSHIP! features a P1 phosphor font choice, as if it’s destined for a monochrome monitor. One might come to believe ELUCID writes in matrices of terminal green.

11.

In Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies, N’Gana Frimbo is questioned by Dr. Archer:

“You actually are something of a seer, aren’t you?” “Not at all…. I filled in the gaps, that is all. I have done more with less. It is my livelihood.” “But—how? The accuracy of detail—”

“Even if it were as curious as you suggest, it should occasion no great wonder. It would be a simple matter of transforming energy, nothing more. So-called mental telepathy, even, is no mystery, so considered. Surely the human organism cannot create anything more than itself; but it has created the radio-broadcasting set and receiving set. Must there not be within the organism, then, some counterpart of these? I assure you, doctor, that this complex mechanism which we call the living body contains its broadcasting set and its receiving set, and signals sent out in the form of invisible, inaudible, radiant energy may be picked up and converted into sight and sound by a human receiving set properly tuned in.”

ELUCID showcases his broadcasting set and his receiving set, but his carries the outlaw spirit of an illegal cable box or the pirate radio signal from the short-lived Dread Broadcasting Corporation out of West London in the 1980s. ELUCID as DJ Lepke in limbo.

12.

The title “VOICE 2 SKULL” evokes a note to self, a Nextel push-to-talk, or a voice-to-text: ELUCID as fully automated, as a cybernetic MC. But the human essence—the flesh, blood, and bone—is still there: “I get up before everyone and lose my mind first— / For even just an hour, I work in sound and feeling—sometimes fury, / Asking the whys and hows when lies turn to vows.” That is, he grinds; his work ethic, the grating of gears. He starts his day, travels where he will, but always “free roaming” and “pinging stupid” as a “transcontinental satellite receiver freaking forth.” On “XOLO,” as tek, he “reach[es] inside—only to [his] elbow, / [And] pull[s] it back out like [he] was rewound.” Like a VHS tape, or Betamax. Functioning as some new plastic idea. We’re all wired and wasting away with “mirror[s] in pockets” as we busy ourselves “looking hard in the camera.” Not squinting to make sense, merely modeling a manufactured exterior. 

13.

Digital overlords don’t need free promo…

—ELUCID, ØKSE’s “Skopje”

The teknohell is ever-present on REVELATOR—you can’t escape its server rack bracket clutches. “Defrag the files,” ELUCID raps on “BAD POLLEN,” attempting to counter what Nathaniel Mackey calls a technology of decay. RFIDs, modems, CCTVs, pagers—all this tech isn’t anachronistic; it’s timeless—e-waste salvaged or scavenged—but ELUCID evolves, keeps it moving [...like a moving target], even if that means “bloody fingers on the keypad,” which we heard of on Valley of Grace. His own magnetic fields fuck up electronics; he lives in the “chaos hour shadow play” mentioned on “THE WORLD IS DOG.” “The situation’s unreal,” as Chuck D says on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal,” Harold Pinter responds. Ultimately, ELUCID is “wholly unimpressed by your social media metrics,” at least according to “MBTTS.” He offers up “brick and mortar rhyme for distorted time” and “offline [is where] [his] core thrives.” He knows what’s what: these gadgets and gizmos are “soon to be rendered useless: and then what?,” as he inquired on Small Bills’ “Even Without You.” Merchandise is Brand New Second Hand as you sit in an ergonomic swivel chair before Roots Manuva’s radiation-emitting dusty microwave. ELUCID searches for a truth beyond the motherboard.

14.

I tell you this in truth; this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there…the end of history…the death of God, the end of religions…the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West…the end of the end, the end of ends, that the end has always already begun, that we must still distinguish between closure and end…. it is also the end of metalanguage on the subject of eschatological language…

—Derrida

…so let me shut the fuck up.

—Editor’s note [me]

Tell me a lie, tell me a truth becomes ELUCID’s Max Headroom mantra for “CCTV,” minus the sputtering, the glitching. We like to think that the “truth [will] find you where you at—it’s fine, it’s fair,” he raps on “RFID,” but, more often than not, revealing the truth requires trying. Your responsibility, Toni Cade Bambara insists, is to “try to tell the truth,” and “[t]hat ain’t easy.” It’s tough to summon the strength when we “have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works.” The machinery of lies and disinformation come fine-tuned with a gleaming chrome finish. As for truth, we’re numb to its virtue; neutered by negative thoughts and clouded past experiences. But if we can pursue truth, prove it, and impress it upon our enemies, according to Bambara, “it releases the Spirit.”

The “cattle prod [will] shock you back some reality,” ELUCID raps. But truth can seem a hackneyed notion in the wrong hands. In Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” (1965), Jesse, an abusive cop who takes sadistic pleasure in cattle prodding Civil Rights protestors, is charged with bringing the singing of jailed demonstrators to an end. He targets the “ringleader” of the group: “I put the prod to him and he jerked some more and he kind of screamed—but he didn’t have much voice left.” The protestor refuses to call for the others to stop singing, either out of defiance or debilitation from the beating he’s suffered, so Jesse’s frustration grows: “...the prod hit his testicles, but the scream did not come, only a kind of rattle and a moan.” Revisionist history can’t absolve the truth of that barbarity.

In one final [ex]plosive shout before “CCTV” transitions, ELUCID says, “Steal me your blues.” A call for reappropriation of what has already been plundered on a mass scale. The blues are never blameless. ELUCID collects blues and deranges ’em—traditional | twelve-bar | crowbarred | prison blues—deep cobalt with sapphiric crazing. REVELATOR most obviously invokes Blind Willie Johnson’s version of “John the Revelator” (1930), what with his scum gutter growl of Who’s that writin’? Jeff Place called Johnson a “guitar evangelist,” a man who was blinded by lye in his eyes at seven [the means of his marring and age should not go unnoticed], a reenactment, perhaps, of John the Revelator’s being dunked into the boiling oil cauldron—not nearly the “musky oils” ELUCID spoke of on “Obama Incense.” The teknohell is home to a Victor Talking Machine, no doubt, and the 78 RPM shellac record of Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937) spins centripetal. RJ’s bottleneck slide screams phoenix as he sings, I got to keep movin’. For protection from the dogs—zig, zag, zig.

August Fanon and ELUCID sacrifice the frenetic for a straightforward refrain to conclude “CCTV,” something to mesmerize with layered vocals, subliminal messages not so sub- that they’re unmanageable. Take freedom: ELUCID wants you to hear the message, the charge. “All power to oppressed people” isn’t just a slogan for him; for others, as we know, it undeniably is. He asks for a “red light on the virtue signal for the come-latelys”; or, as PremRock says on ShrapKnel’s “Human Form”: “Closeted moderates post black squares then act scared of actual progress.” On “NY Blanks,” ELUCID “refuse[d] to kneel and pray for hashtag another slain name, / On the dashcam frame of sight.” Technology pervades every moment of life and language—from sonogram to dashcam and the SMS notifications of each and all else in-between.

15.

Child Actor’s production on “YOTTABYTE” traps us inside the machine with hex bolts knocked loose and rattling around. Again, technology works its way into everything. “Stints and priors, / Sweat labor, / August sun,” ELUCID raps, seemingly on a chain gang—the teknohell is a maximum security prison: biometrics | video analytics | signal-jamming | duress alarms. Data storage facilities bursting at the seams. 

“Terabyte, gigabyte, niggas bite,” ELUCID spit on “Bitter Cassava,” adding with a whiff of cybersexuality, “I heard ass taste better in the summertime.” Do androids dream of having a romp with the provocatively named Deckard? Do Nexus-6 replicants have rape fantasies? “Came out the pussy and wrote a classic,” ELUCID says on “YOTTABYTE,” and I’m left wondering what Jodorowsky’s love machine from Holy Mountain (1973) might have to do with this. Cold and sterile tech-infused corporeality | conjugal visits with slinky cyborgs | proto-pornbots.

“SKP” presents as more sound poem than song—its patterns erratic, and therefore erotic—unpredictable with vocals pitched down and up arbitrarily. Andrew Broder provides a mellowed pulse backdrop, tunneling toward something visceral, and not the gear boxes and springs, the sensors and metal tubes, that make up a robot’s innards. ELUCID has previously proclaimed he was “a dyke in a past life,” a Sister Outsider standing alongside Audre Lorde: “Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos.” “SKP”—Some Kind of Power—draws inspiration from Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1984), which reframes eroticism, removes it from the teknohell. 

I know you know the codes, ELUCID says. His lover has the key—they each possess a copy. And the key is crucial, at the crux of the relation; listen to what woods says on “INSTANT TRANSFER”: “It’s all skeleton keys on the keyring I keep, / Keys I never seen before for places I never even been, / Luxury cars—I key ’em and go to sleep.” Keys, keys, keys, as Angela Carter writes in “The Bloody Chamber” (1979)—to china cabinets and safes and every other secret place. The narrator’s husband, though, forbids his young wife from using one key in particular. Not the key to his heart, as she presumes (“skeleton key to ya heart,” ELUCID echoes on “CCTV”), but “the key to [his] enfer.” He teases and tantalizes her and throws all the keys into her lap as “the cold metal chill[s] [her] thighs through [her] thin muslin frock.” Something’s not quite right; “we was down singing off-key: how?” ELUCID says on “XOLO.” The key might crack the code | stroking and fondling | heavy petting | as artificial intelligence records the taps and timbre of your keystrokes, stealing sensitive passwords—a sensate focus therapy for anonymous internet users. Probably best to keep the key under the mat.

“The erotic is a considered source of power and information within our lives,” Lorde writes. ELUCID answers: “Knowing is enough—deepest core informing all.” The erotic, Lorde notes, “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation.” “From here forth,” ELUCID says, “you spit, you scream, you burn my tongue too raw—be soft.” Erotic, Lorde explains, is from the Greek eros, “born of Chaos, and personifying power and harmony.” Harm may precede harmony; pain prior to reaching “beyond the posture and the program.”

“Call me out my name,” ELUCID commands, “I’ll be the one you cum for.” Even if he brushes against the sophomoric at times (“Baby, please pop that pussy for breakfast” would be one such example from the archives), ELUCID’s sex raps swerve sophisticated. Lorde says the erotic is often “confused with its opposite, the pornographic,” which would demonstrate sensation without feeling. When ELUCID says “call me out my name” to his lover, he’s exploring “how acutely and fully [they] can feel in the doing.” Lorde explains, “[A]s we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up…being satisfied with suffering and self-negation…with the numbness.”

The technological bent to “SKP” climaxes with connectivity (¿Tu Tienes WiFi?)—a mutual dependance—“power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.” In 2020, ELUCID told Tim Fish about how a trip to South Africa inspired Valley of Grace (2017): “...my wife was there, she was still my girlfriend then, and she was working at a law center, working towards protecting sex workers…. So being there, she’s at work for at least 8 hours a day, and I’m in the flat just hanging out….” At the end of “SKP,” ELUCID declares “in a union made now, tomorrow anything…,” and we feel the phantom phrase “…is possible” in the absence that follows.

“There are many kinds of power,” Audre Lorde tells us, “used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise.” 2Pac, for instance, never achieved ELUCID’s level of erotic power in song. On “How Do U Want It?” (1996), Pac was forward with his proposal, seeking consent (“Tell me is it cool to fuck? / Did you think I come to talk? / Am I fool or what?”), but copped to his preference for pornographic perversions, the “positions on the floor” he invokes: “Ironic, ’cause I’m somewhat psychotic.” Lick before you bite, ELUCID raps on “BAD POLLEN,” his own nod to the erotic/psychotic dichotomy. But it’s more tempered than Pac’s imprudence. He seems to taunt Pac’s shortcomings on “YOTTABYTE”:

Wiggle with the lights on, Ripple off thrust, Ooh, it’s just us, Yes, I need it how I want it, Feel like Southern California with my belly full…

Not to say ELUCID’s erotic power is purely PG-13; it’s not. On “BAD POLLEN,” he “wake[s] up and thrust[s] inside [his] missus, / Two fistfuls of hair, [his] face buried.” Flashes of a possessive desire, an “I Wanna Be Your Dog” energy: So messed up—I want you here…in my room…I want you here. But even when ELUCID goes raunchy, it’s organic matter, raw materials—mud and bone and verdant muck—not nuts and bolts and a nexus of cables. His trysts always involve talking out the mud, crashing through the walls…, scorch, [and] stimuli response.

16.

I might work with the wires wet if we talking ’bout power…

—“INSTANT TRANSFER”

With SKECH185’s analog(ue) tape dispenser on loan (also note the Basinskian “disintegration tapes” mentioned on “IKEBANA”), ELUCID patches and splices the first bars of “INSTANT TRANSFER” in a terse trimeter:

Five side, keep the tape warm, Wrapped rays weighing way more, Racks raid how we wage war, Slack walk to a main course.

The alliterative and consonantal groupings (“wrapped rays”; “racks raid”; “weighing way”; “we wage war”; “slack walk”; “keep the tape”) and slant rhymes present an inconsistency that models a human touch—the warmth of the analog tape undermining digital media and the instantaneous [gratification and otherwise] operations of an ATM withdrawal, just as we see the plastic bank card repeatedly guided into the multi-function maw by a human hand in the “INSTANT TRANSFER” video.

Nostalgia is no retreat from the teknohell. Even on a memory song like “HUSHPUPPIES,” the hum of Integrated Tech Solutions interferes when ELUCID recalls the “static sizzle with the grease in stereo”—frying fish and the kitchen TV set in concert with one another. “HUSHPUPPIES” feels like a loose adaptation of Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues” (1928), a fond recollection of fish as sustenance. Both ELUCID and Thomas begin with an urgency; Thomas “went up on the hill about twelve o’clock,” and ELUCID speaks in a tongue-twisted, nursery rhyme: “Must find fried fish—it’s Friday.”

REVELATOR has us fearing for the worst: fish fried in sulfuric waters, gilled vertebrates pulled from the River Styx—but it’s not that. “HUSHPUPPIES” feels down-home, a brief view of before, of Bessie-time, of salve and saviors and stove-top safe haven. “Put on your skillet,” Henry Thomas sings, “Mama gonna cook ’em with the shortenin’ bread.” “HUSHPUPPIES” works as a child-vision folk song, much like the “choking on a church mint” episode of “Guy R. Brewer.” ELUCID is an artist composing twenty-first century folk ditties, intent on inclusion in the Roud Index. I’m wary of the “sugar water, lemon sugar, water lemon” lyric sequence, though—the words transmit, mutate, like a gain-of-function in the kitchen sink. I feel he’s trapped speaking with “the language of the on-again/off-again future, and it is digital,” as Laurie Anderson once said.

17.  PEOPLE TEND TO THINK THAT A PAGER’S FOUL

In 1991, Q-Tip asked us if we knew the importance of a skypager. The responsibility fell to Phife Dawg to explain it in full:

The “S” in skypage really stands for sex, ………………………………………………….. At times I miss the pager so you don’t get vex, Having bad days like a voodoo hex, Conceptually, a pager is so complex that I be standing on the verge, ready to flex.

ELUCID portals us to that very ’90s dimension to pick up on Phife’s “-ex” rhyme scheme.

Skypage text, alphanumeric, Blind days—rain taste metallic, Dark roads lined with tall pine, Fire tongue in the annex.

Where Phife’s explication was elementary with its backronyming and monosyllabic rhymes, its simile and succinct storytelling, ELUCID’s post-millennial penchant for broken language and Holocene imagery elevates the archaic device of the skypager to the status of fetish item. One can see the huddled assemblage of survivors circled around the faint LCD glow on the annex floor, the acid rain falling through the collapsed roof.

18.

“14.4” drags us through the mass hysterics of Y2K mania with Saint Abdullah and The Lasso layering assorted ambient jazz touches to the Tron grid. ELUCID and SKECH185 fuck with the trellis modulation, raising a “Napster ’99” download speed from the titular 14.4kbps. They float over dial tones: “I dial in; you dial it down,” ELUCID says as he receives the signal from Armand Hammer’s “Landlines.” He’s charged with a “couple hundred-thousand watts,” so “do hold the line.” ELUCID and SKECH rap with “revolutionary millennial movements,” in the words of Eugene D. Genovese, “born in social catastrophe or in the fear of impending catastrophe.” Still, though, in the West African tradition, “time is cyclical and eternal; the religious tradition cannot then therefore readily provide for an apocalypse.” Fear all? Maybe it’s more fear none than we first thought.

I sometimes configure ELUCID as Aaron Dilloway (of Wolf Eyes, and—for our purposes here at present—their 2006 limited-release Dog Jaw) with a contact mic—full-contact stage presence | kilowatts killing | bringing the pain in a really real way. He wades in distortion, awash in both antiquated and active teknology (“*69—hit redial,” he remarks on “XOLO”). Hell is populated with tek—yottabytes of it like motes in sunlight, refracting his digipoetics. He announces proudly, “Afrika Islam loop in the key of my Lord,” which is a permanent—nearly park jamming—register for him to operate within. He dials in to Zulu Beats on WHBI 105.9 in New Jeruzalem and cracks codes for the afterfuture.

19.  THE HAINTS OF HAM RADIO

Never polemical, ELUCID makes aslant references to oppressive histories, dating back antediluvian. One second he’s “in ya sundown town holding [his] dick dolo,” and the next he’s bouncing to bear witness to an “illegal chokehold.” He time travels from crabgrass frontiers to a sidewalk slab on Staten Island. He may be “too old to comfortably rock logos,” but he’s in-the-ever-know [and the ever-now] of former lives—he embodies Gift of Gab running from Feds in his red Pro-Keds, and he hits the racks of Saks Fifth Avenue with the Lo Lifes. Nowadays, though, he’s Naomi Klein’s No Logo incarnate. In another nanosec, he’s a po-mo narcocorrido singer reading “the note like Chalino, except it’s off the SIM card.” He’s hopping through traversable wormholes of genealogical blues “from Ham to Cush to Nimrod.” Settle our assassin’s eyes on Ham, hm?

In A Season in Hell, Rimbaud “set out in search of the true kingdom of the children of Ham.” Wyatt Mason argues that part of Rimbaud’s legend can be attributed to the rumors of him as “the scoundrel who sold slaves in Africa.” Though it’s accurate that Rimbaud was free roaming, sub-Saharan, his vagabondage through the Horn of Africa might not have included slave-trading—that point is disputed by his biographers. In The Rebel (1951), Camus called Rimbaud a “bourgeois trader” of percussion rifles and Ethiopian coffee, but made no mention of slaves. In 1994, China Achebe stated that “[w]hen Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry” because poetry and slave trading “cannot be bedfellows.” When he wasn’t tagging up the Luxor Temple on a lark in Egypt or running guns across the border into Shewa land, Rimbaud’s travelogue was interlarded with diagnoses of typhoid, synovitis, and osteosarcoma—his right leg eventually lopped off. Perhaps we can ascribe his disease-ridden body to A Season in Hell’s most profane moments, such as when he writes, “I’m an animal, a nxggxr. But I can be saved. You’re all fake nxggxrs…”

The so-called “curse of Ham,” a blasphemy on Black people courtesy of Christian whites, has long contaminated the discourse—a shibboleth adorning the flowstones and helictites of the teknohell. “According to the scriptural defense of slavery,” Eugene D. Genovese writes in Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), “...the enslavement of the blacks by the whites fulfilled the biblical curse of Ham.” But Genovese’s research indicates “the slaves did not view their predicament as punishment for the collective sin of black people. No amount of white propaganda could bring them to accept such an idea.” When ELUCID talks of “hammers hang[ing] on loop” on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” or “hammers out the Hummer” on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” I construe this cargo pants weaponry, this pakinamac in the back of the Ac’ (or Hummer), as a means of countering white propaganda, comparable to Treach’s chainsaw or Havoc’s scythe. Throughout REVELATOR, we find ELUCID going ham—hard as a motherfucker—but ELUCID’s too humble for any Tisci gilded throne. Instead, think of him as John Henry driving steel through the carpal tunnels of sinners and thieves. He sings a Scaramangan screed as he works, something gleaned from Seven Eyes, Seven Horns (1998): “Alphabetic hammer, magnetic grammar.”

ELUCID advances with “apocalyptic movement,” which Derrida defines as “the gesture of denuding or of affording sight,” a gesture which is sometimes “more guilty or more dangerous,” such as when Noah gets krunk in his tent and “Ham sees his father’s genitals.” ELUCID sees through the myths, the slander; instead, he exposes us to a soundtrack of staticky swells as he ascends out of the teknohell. I imagine the noise is a replication of what Joyce’s radio in Finnegans Wake (1939) sounds like. Here’s that signal recounted superlatively:

tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modem as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute…equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle shack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegotumy marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.

In Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun (1998) | [“MBTTS,” ahem], he writes that “Long-distance telecom systems intensifies sensations of imminent Revelation.” Oh, indeed.

20.  POST-INDUSTRIAL DOOM GOSPEL FOR THE GODLESS

On “Old Magic,” ELUCID announced himself as the “revelator, armed and dangerous,” so nothing he does on this album should come as a surprise. This lot of doom gospel spells shatters expectations, though. “I’ve been revelatin’” is what he told us on “Smile Lines,” and he’s yet to cease or even slow. The Book of the Seven Seals bulges, busting its binding and bending back its raised bands. REVELATOR, lyrics transcribed and beats notated in neumes, passes as ELUCID’s Book of Revelation.

I see it all, Michael Gira throat-sings. I see it all I see it all I see it all I see it all I see it all… over the sunn oh godspeed charnelhouse chanting and gunmetal grind of SWANS’ “The Seer” (2012). ELUCID is all-seeing as well—omniscient shit. It wasn’t always this way. On “Blame the Devil” from Save Yourself, ELUCID admitted that “revelation had [him] spooked.” In his preface to The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), George Bernard Shaw describes the Book as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict which was absurdly admitted to the canon under the title of Revelation,” which only adds to the terror for an ’80s child who grew up with crushed crack vials underfoot.

On “Blame the Devil,” ELUCID saw the “seven eyes, seven crows” and “was lost.” “Now I’m found,” he would continue, “End of days—amazing time, / Everybody’s got a word—mine just happens to rhyme.” No longer cowering in church corners, surrounded by the congregants of what he has called a “death cult,” ELUCID’s Revelation remix has a liberation theology reverb. Pablo Richard’s Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on The Book of Revelation (1995) places the curious record in the context of revolutionary power:

Revelation arises in a time of persecution—and particularly amid situations of chaos, exclusion, and ongoing oppression…. Revelation transmits a spirituality of resistance and offers guidance for organizing an alternative world…. Revelation is wrath and punishment for the oppressors, but good news (gospel) for those excluded and oppressed by the empire of the beast…. Revelation teaches us to imagine the present and final eschatology with a sense of joy and hope…. The book of Revelation is helping to create a new historical and liberating language.

21.

In The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire (1990), scriptural scholar Leonard L. Thompson points to the difficulties of understanding the “symbolic, metaphoric, even bizarre language of the seer.” John the Revelator confessed to being “in the spirit” when he composed the book, what Eugene D. Genovese might call “religious frenzy” in another context. Thompson receives the Book of Revelation as a nesting language, one in which “highly symbolic language” nests into “ever-larger contexts—ultimately into a cosmic vision that includes the whole social order, the totality of nature, and suprahuman divinities that invade but transcend both society and nature.” I think it wise to receive ELUCID’s lyrics in a similar manner. Lucien Goldmann might call it Towards a Sociology of the Rap Album. “The seer tends to develop his material concentrically into ever-widening rings,” Thompson contends. ELUCID reps such a structure in his verses, in his songs, even lending his own phraseology to the process, be it those “shimmer rims spinning loopy” on “VOICE 2 SKULL” or the “orbitings” we hear about on “IKEBANA.” ELUCID will “leave the meter running” only to “trigger doomsday.” He sips “Ethiopian coffee” and seconds later “space junk” floats by. We’re hipped to the particular and the panoramic. Scaramanga was similarly skilled. Samuel Diamond writes of how “Seven Eyes, Seven Horns” is “as much a meditation on symbology, semiotics, and brand identity as it is an erudite MC’s spin on a passage from the Book of Revelation.” Or, as Scaramanga Shallah himself says on the song, “What a script…” [as in, whew].

22.  MYSTIC STYLEZ

All a mystery…

—“THE WORLD IS DOG”

…nothing could have been more impressive than this cool, deliberate deep voice, stating a mystic paradox in terms of level reason.

—Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)

To bring it back to that damnéd Derrida essay once again [back is the incredible], MC Deconstruction redefines “apocalypse” as revelation: “Apokaluptō, I disclose, I uncover, I unveil, I reveal the thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the sex or whatever might be hidden, a secret thing, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that is neither shown nor said…” This revelation “not only affords seeing but also affords hearing/understanding.”

We’ve prior seen ELUCID as mystagogue—a mystik journeyman, a Walkman invader—he whose function is to initiate us into the mystery. As Guru was above the clouds, the mystagogue positions himself, according to Derrida, “above the crowd [which] he manipulates through…a crypted language,” but, despite what some dum-dums [to borrow a term from diggity Das EFX] may argue, ELUCID is not beyond understanding. We must strive to understand misunderstanding; we must endeavor forevermore to miss understanding. Those who throw fits and fail to accept these norms—I have to presume—have not been listening to hip-hop very long or well. “Words mean things but don’t have to,” ELUCID declared with Derridean flair on “Split Tongue.” “[I]f anything has outlived its usefulness it is ‘coherent’ metaphor, one with explicit contours,” writes E. M. Cioran in The Trouble with Being Born (1973). “It is against such metaphor that poetry has unceasingly rebelled, to the point where a dead poetry is a poetry afflicted with coherence.” “I’m okay with not understanding,” ELUCID said on Small Bills’ “Here Be Dragons,” “—I’m okay in the dark.” Dark Man X knows all directions.

Listening to ELUCID’s music, you enter a delirium, which Derrida refers to as a Verstimmung—“a social disorder and a derangement, an out-of-tune-ness…. The tone leaps and rises when the voice of the oracle takes you aside, speaks to you in private code, and whispers secrets to you.” On “IKEBANA,” ELUCID cops to “talking out [his] head, a fever set in.” Like Rimbaud in Obock, shivering, with his knee gauzed over, not a poetic thought to be found.

23.  SOUND & CEREMENT

Sound has a grammar to it—believe me—that will cause that thing that you call bending to open up in a way you won’t believe it.

—Ornette Coleman (2005)

…I just bend the rhyme…

—“Sir Benni Miles” (2021)

ELUCID, more than any other active MC, embodies a compositional approach that conflates poetics and musicality in a manner that doesn’t favor or diminish either—symbiotically rendered, synchronistically flexed: the orphic bend. In an epistolary novel by Nathaniel Mackey, Orphic Bend denotes a fictional album title of a fictional band. ELUCID asks on “RFID”: “Why play if I can’t bend the rules?” To forbid ELUCID these ludic junctures would be ludacris, a loss of not only file data but of finely wired rap filigree. ELUCID stays bent in both senses—his sentence inclinations, his word inebriations—bent like Miles Davis’s mouthpiece; dead bent like DOOM’s swilling death-drive to fund these experiments. These are “games I win at—mark me,” ELUCID gloats, but he also invites us to “share this reality.” If we’re willing, he’ll leave none of us behind; he won’t orphan us.

“We’re all eventually orphans,” Mackey has said. Elsewhere (namely, “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol [1987]), he kindles, he forges, the meaning of orphan and Orphic, “an orphan being anyone denied kinship, social sustenance, anyone who suffers, to use Orlando Patterson’s phrase, ‘social death.’” Mackey continues:

Song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal, where in back of “orphan” one hears echoes of “orphic,” a music which turns on abandonment, absence, loss. Think of the black spiritual “Motherless Child.” Music is wounded kinship’s last resort…. Music is prod and precedent for a recognition that the linguistic realm is also the realm of the orphan…. This recognition troubles, complicates and contends with the unequivocal referentiality taken for granted in ordinary language…. Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan.

ELUCID has previously instructed us on “the difference between loneliness and being lonely,” referencing like a hand reaching out—to Gwendolyn Brooks, who feels the “under buzz” of loneliness. But ELUCID’s bent is in the direction of populating his cathedral with the motherless children of his bastard style.

24.  INSIDE REPEATING NUMBERS

To stave off the dogs, the teknohell, and the unknown opps, ELUCID makes endless calculations but with an imprecise science. One can imagine the setting for such calculations resembling N’Gana Frimbo’s consultation room, what with “obliquely downcast light” and “lateral walls…adorned with innumerable strange and awful shapes.” Those strange and awful shapes—like glyphs carved onto dusty clay tablets—included “gruesome black masks with hollow orbits, some smooth and bald, some horned and bearded; small misshapen statuettes of near-human creatures, resembling embryos dried and blackened in the sun…forbidding designs.” The conjure-man’s mantelpiece showcases a “murderous-looking club, resting diagonally.” The club is actually “the lower half of a human femur, [with] one extremity bulging into wicked-looking condyles, the other…covered with a silver knob representing a human skull.” ELUCID holds the club like a stylus, dealing in tally marks and totalities until the skull smudges out an answer.

Numbers are concrete, seemingly. “Numbers don’t lie, but they damn sure don’t tell stories either,” ELUCID rapped on “NY Blanks,” skeptical of statistics. On “IKEBANA,” he starts with “3800 out the credits.” I ain’t count it, he admits, “but it’s sweat labor.” He narrows the narrative with estimates: “ten or something”; “on time, but off-key”; “almost, almost over…so close…almost over….” These are “complicated chemicals” that only work to deepen what Rimbaud called “numerical visions.” Do the math. On “YOTTABYTE,” it’s “dead money [and] thirteen guineas for a pickaninny piano.” On “BAD POLLEN,” he “brought a trunkful of tiny violins to the bloodletting.” ELUCID can “play one on each finger for every seven bodies.” These aren’t exact measurements or accurate costs. As he says on “INSTANT TRANSFER,” he’s “counting up in the dark” (in Frimbo’s consultation room, right?). Persevering and perseverating on “14.4”: “System error, / Less than zero, / Humanity pending.” Sounding like he needs to get his affairs in order.

The numbers game inevitably leads to money—nasty business like toxic assets and credit derivatives—and money is time; time, money. “Can’t clock the kills,” ELUCID says on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” echoing Master Ace in ’90 (“Can’t Stop the Bumrush”) and Jay-Z in ’96 (“Can’t Knock the Hustle”)—earning miles while on the clock as a touring musician, tallying transatlantic and domestic flights. But is there ever a time when he’s not “waiting on money, thinking of murder,” as he raps on “BAD POLLEN”? Does the hustle, the bumrush, the killing ever cease? Or is it an interminable loop of episodes mimicking bell hooks’ oft-quoted (by all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons) opening sentence from “Killing Rage: Militant Resistance” (1995)? “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder,” hooks wrote. “I’m at the age they start to count my nights out,” ELUCID raps on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” because death or revolution seems “a black power nap away” (“IKEBANA”). “Time wore us out,” according to ELUCID, speaking in the past tense as if the deal has already gone down, the jig is up, the end is here. The “24-hour drones” he mentions on “14.4” survey the damage. Too easy to get greedy and selfish at the end (“Give me a minute…give me five…”), shuffling off this mortal coil as “we wait—who knows the hours?”

25.

“IKEBANA,” despite the time-and-numbers crunch, sketches a scene of restorative habits, a survival guide for the godless. It falls short of He-is-risen optimism (Orpheus is the figurehead here, not Jesus), but we’re headed from hell to the heliosphere. ELUCID wishes the world “good morning” with “oatmeal” and “Ethiopian coffee.” He’s calculating to find peace. He feels that “everybody knew” but him—crying it out; they must know the secret to peace. Miscalculations leave him envious. Everyone laughing at his ignorance, at “all [his] comings and goings”—the state-of-the-art GPS tracking of the teknohell. RFIDs on the heels of his feet triggering field detectors.

The solution is a sometimes-turn inward: Being alive, I must look up. If the Ethiopian coffee doesn’t cut it, he’ll order an “everything bagel with the tofu scallion” or “vacuum the whip” (as he does on “VOICE 2 SKULL”). We’ve heard of his domestic resolve before. On woods’ “As the Crow Flies,” ELUCID was “cleaning up [his] kitchen, / Emptying the fridge, bleaching counters, [and] sweeping corners.” By placing his “silverware in order,” he rebuilds the rubbled world. Peace is plucked from panic elsewhere, as on “YOTTABYTE” where he’s “squatting in a Barcelona hotel room playing Wu-Tang Forever,” observing the world rather than his phone, nourishing himself through sights rather than storing up the cache and cookies of his frequently visited sites.

After many calculations, the epiphany points toward what he details on “BAD POLLEN”: “I squeeze my children’s hand and walk harder against the wind,” the same wind that rustles the dead roadside bracken, as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road (2006). ELUCID turns to his children, his family. woods, it should be stated, does the same, as noted on “Niggardly (Blocked Call)”: “I walk ’em to school, then the park, / Hold they little hands when we cross the street.” A small step to cross the street is far simpler than crossing the Rubicon.

“IKEBANA” is another ELUCID and Jon Nellen production, and Gabriel’s muted horn is buried in the mix of the song’s bridge, a distant and dour reveille as ELUCID sings softly. As he bemoans everybody knowing what he doesn’t, Nellen’s percussion pulls us to where ELUCID wants to be: looking up. Being alive, he’s looking up out of hell. We hear his will to struggle, to survive, and to exist, but we also hear our will to “look up,” or research meaning, reflected—manufacturing it if we have to—as in, “You must learn” (life being nothing more than a boogie down production). Improve ourselves through awareness of others, of our loved ones especially, of our situation within all the scattered “scorching space junk, x’s and orbitings.” You must change your life, in Rilke’s words.

26.  MAN THREATENS LANDLORD

Kill your landlord, no doubt…

—“Roaches Don’t Fly” (2021)

“SLUM OF A DISREGARD” celebrates thirty years of skullduggery since The Coup’s “Kill My Landlord” (1993), but underhanded housing policies—what ELUCID calls “comforts of material conditions core-rotted”—are nothing new. Look at Langston Hughes’ “Ballad of the Landlord” (1940):

Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak. Don’t you ’member I told you about it Way last week?

Last week is “way last week” because any leak sooner than soon, quicker than quick, becomes an inundation, a deluge, and the subsequent damage, mold spores, and stench overwhelms. Hughes’ subject alludes to withholding rental payment until the landlord “fix[es] the house up new,” but the landlord threatens back with “eviction orders.” The threat is communicated through the tenant’s account, through a series of questions—a dialogue masquerading as a monologue for the first five stanzas of the poem. The landlord is absent, a ghostly presence only there to extract profit. When the tenant turns to intimidation (“If I land my fist on you…”), we suddenly hear the landlord’s voice summoning police and precipitating an ugly and familiar scene:

Copper’s whistle! Patrol bell! Arrest. Precinct Station. Iron cell. Headlines in press…

For his threat of violence (which the landlord exaggerates as an attempt to “overturn the land”), the tenant receives a sentence of “90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL.” But for his neglect and threat of dispossession, the slumlord suffers nothing.

“The house is built on deceit,” Boots Riley raps on “Kill My Landlord,” acquired through primitive accumulation and the successive decades of sniping and stealing, compressing a courseload of Proudhon property is theft readings into a solitary verse. ELUCID’s landlord—nay, slumlord—is on a “Tel Aviv holiday” when the crisis hits. While the landlord uses ELUCID’s monthly rental payments to feed IDF soldiers [...my taxes pay police brutality settlements, billy woods shouts back], ELUCID struggles to get him on the phone. When he does, he finds the slumlord’s “sincerity was threadbare” and “urgency been missing.” ELUCID “smile[s] like watermelon slice,” a simile which upends the slumlord’s own race-based neglect through subversion. ELUCID will grin and bear it (for the time being), but he won’t let it go without signaling to the slumlord—or himself at least—that he’s privy to the power dynamics which undergird the exchange. In doing so, ELUCID enacts a stratagem used by poets before him. “We sliced the watermelon into smiles,” Terrance Hayes writes for fourteen consecutive lines in one of his sonnets from American Sonnets from My Past and Future Assassins (2018). In Langston Hughes’ “125th Street,” the poet doesn’t allow racist stereotypes to overshadow Black joy:

Face like a slice of melon grin that wide.

Hayes, Hughes, and ELUCID invoke historical [mis]representations by combining the smiling, subservient Tom caricature with the conniving, watermelon-thieving Coon to deliver a knowing wink to the reader/listener. In a promo video for REVELATOR, images of James H. White’s Watermelon Contest (1896) flash across the screen—an Edison film under Brakhage-like production techniques.

The longer ELUCID stays on the line with his slumlord, the sharper the sting. Mahmoud Darwish once asked, “Why did you lean on a dagger to look at me?”—and ELUCID listens long-distance to the slumlord “turn the dagger slow” with every second that passes. This is an abrasive exchange—ELUCID’s complaints and his characterization of the slumlord’s speech effectively evoked through consonance: “Too late to make it right, / Tongue-tied talk, / Make noose quick.” The slumlord stumbles over his words, speaks offensively, and we’re reminded to “believe what people say they are and do.”

Like “Ballad of the Landlord,” the conversational lines within “SLUM OF A DISREGARD” are one-sided. We hear ELUCID, in father-mode, pressing: “If this happens all the time, what’s the plan?” The slumlord’s excuses are elided, for his words are meaningless drivel. “Both my boys have my eyes,” ELUCID coldly explains, “—don’t force my hand.” His hand, like the tenant’s fist in Hughes’ poem, communicates to us that stakes is high. “Don’t force my hand,” he pleads, but Darwish writes that “we are forced to return to the inhospitable myths / where we have no place.” On “Between the Lines” (2001), Slug rapped: “If I see you as a threat to my seedling or my sibling, / I’ll die to pull the plug on your machine.” This kind of escalation really isn’t escalation at all—it is meeting the violence of the slumlord, a violence aimed directly at the face of children. “Black mold, / Black lung, / Black child,” ELUCID chants, delineating the equation. He receives “no callback” and his fury rises. An international call culminating in a rat’s nest of cords and wires—a switchboard in a landfill.

“Abuse of power comes as no surprise” isn’t just a Jenny Holzer holdover, it’s ELUCID seeing and stating that which has become so tiresomely obvious. We would have to delude ourselves to see something other than what stands before us. “I am not a prophet claiming revelation, or that my abyss reaches heaven,” Darwish writes in “Mural” (2003), “By the full power of my language I am the stranger.” We’re no stranger to oppressive language, language that oppresses. On October 9, 2023, Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” A year later, nearly to the day, ELUCID tells a truth to counter that lie: My landlord is a Zionist.

27.  FRESH AS FUCK ON STOLEN LAND

With his home in disrepair, ELUCID looks elsewhere to ease the tension of his rent-strife. “IN THE SHADOW OF IF” documents a search for refuge. He seeks to construct alternate realities and “alt timelines” where he’s making “[his] own breaking news” and “Lucy shit[s] diamonds” instead of habitating the sky with them, her kaleidoscope eyes gouged out. But you would need kaleidoscopic vision, of sorts, to manifest such a place. Though ELUCID has copped to “nam[ing] a thing or two into reality” on “SKP,” “IN THE SHADOW OF IF” postulates an added if—if he wasn’t “born in the year of this country’s last recorded lynching,” maybe he’d be better off. But as he says on “Microdose,” the question—and the reality—is “who stopped recording?”

Fleeing the city, ELUCID heads upstate and beyond—somewhere coastal that he can walk “barefoot in the sand.” We discover him “stepping over dead fish in a bucket hat.” This is the downbeat of deep ecology. “Salt and sulfur,” he raps, and he “can’t tell where the wind blows.” Gusts die down and Hell reemerges (as if it ever left) | guts tighten. “I’m on that Black leisure for the increase,” he says, calling in a reservation at The Black Dog while reclined on his beachchair on Martha’s Vineyard’s Inkwell. ELUCID uses his ink well. But this all seems a reverie, an abstraction, as he challenges us to “pick a coordinate / [And] show [him] where localized perceived violence didn’t come with receipts, / White sheets.” Klan presence pervades any and all vacay getaways. You might not see the hoods and horses up north, but you will see “too many flags—one too many flags.” He’s not gonna front, “seeing all those flags outside the city make[s] [him] nervous.” These are ELUCID’s dead flag blues. They represent “physically violent reminders.” Natasha Tretheway writes that flags “inscribe both a figurative and literal white supremacy onto the physical landscape and the psyche landscape of the American imagination.” Go back to “The Blackout” (1998) where Jadakiss warned that those “rednecks up in the mountains’ll try to slay you.” ELUCID ends up feeling like he’s “been cursed to concrete,” cordoned off by external forces, told to stay in the city, which makes him wonder how he’ll keep from going under. 

“The devil is a lie,” he exclaims, realizing “we are the ecology.” The mob made the devilry, manufactured it out of gurgling hate, and unfortunately “a moment to pause never goes on sale,” so peace can’t be purchased. ELUCID told us he was a “green book reader” on Armand Hammer’s “Stole,” navigating the netherworld of where no Black man, woman, or child is welcome. Time is warped; he angles through a simultaneity of oppressive timelines—“twenty years behind and ahead.” The “Black futures” he sought to build on “Stole” start to feel unattainable. Instead, he finds himself gripping “black steel in the hour of submission in search of a place to land… / …in search of a place where our blood don’t precede us.” Fact is, they built it on Indian graves. The land is composed of blood-soaked soil—runaway slaves torn to shreds, lynchings, and extrajudicial killings. On the original “Black Steel,” Chuck says, “Here is a land that never gave a damn.” ELUCID wants “purple rain” and “wild greens,” a lush and fertile vista where’ing the flowers grow and the price of avocados is free. “Search[ing] for a place to land”—forty acres won’t do. Can a reparations calculator really tell the cost of dispossession and plunder?

28.  WHO’S THE SUN SEEKING?

Xoloitzcuintli guides ELUCID into Hell, but ELUCID guides us out of Hell, penning a travelogue in miniature—traffic patterns and images of languid BK denizens. Virgil-level guidework, as Mos Def once said, “from the tree-lined blocks to the tenements,” so you don’t get vicked. On “No Grand Agenda,” ELUCID spoke of his “daydream on city buses, / Brooklyn pushing [his] button,” and on “XOLO,” we appear to receive the full panorama once the sound of sulfuric screeches and barking dogs in the distance fades:

Staring at the sun— a corner florist fell asleep with his mouth open on St Felix,  downhill on Dekalb, Green light succession, Stop-and-go, rubbernecking, Swerve, change directions,  Head in a smoke cloud…

He squints through the sunlight so that “he won’t burn” his retinas. Not to worry—he comes protected. REVELATOR’s cover image (photograph’d courtesy of A. Richter) shows ELUCID in shades. We can map the antecedents—be it Miles Davis’s shield sunglasses, Porsche 5620s with the frame screws (precursor to Kool Moe Dee’s steez); be it Sun Ra’s Courrèges Eskimo slit glasses that he rocked on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969; be it Afrika Bambaataa’s future-geometry set of shades. ELUCID’s might as well be a Makrolon face-shield, as he’s protected from the welder’s flash of Hell’s ultraviolet flames. On “CCTV,” he fends off the “sunshine and teargas,” the “flash bang” of dispersal orders, the anti-crowd dog’s growl and howl, the Brooklyn confetti of uprising. He does so just as the Irish travailed through the Troubles, as depicted with punkish punctuation in Ciaran Carson’s “Belfast Confetti” (1989)—with shrapnel (the titular “confetti”) in motion like movable type. ELUCID’s text goes explosive in the same ways as Carson’s: “Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type.” ELUCID’s sunglasses allow him to “see now”—all the “details” with “color-cut clarity.”

Elevating out of Hell requires him to forge his own way, an avenue that becomes familiar: “I’m acclimated, black upon a path, / I made it outta clay.” Rakim crafted in the same Creator-cum-MC way on “Follow the Leader”: “Planets as small as balls of clay.” Get the fuck back, ELUCID orders, Stay the fuck down. Run for your life; duck down—his alarum’s a Rude Awakening. When ELUCID summons N.O.R.E.’s “theoretical niggas on the run eating,” the tempo starts to increase, steadily. Fire kindles and ELUCID says what we already feel: “The house is burning here…yeaaaah.” 

In William Melvin Kelly’s A Different Drummer (1962), Tucker Caliban is a slave descendant who, after serving the Willson family for generations, has had enough. He shoots dead his livestock, salts his land, and sets his house aflame in an act of defiance. The Lasso’s tempo-shift tracks with Kelly’s description of the inferno:

Orange flame climbed the white curtains in the center section of the house, moved on slowly to the other windows like someone inspecting the house to buy it, burst through the roof with the sound of paper tearing, and lit the faces of the men, the sides of the wagons, and the faces of the Negroes…. Sparks curled up and then died, dissolving against dark blue sky…. [T]he rubble of the destroyed home looked like a huge city seen at night from a great distance.

Tucker’s family leaves the town of Sutton and the other Black residents soon follow, baffling the white residents who watch the procession of “suitcases or empty-hand[s]” headed for the state border. As a crowd watches Tucker blast bullets into his horse and cow, witnessing the “sticky blood r[u]n down” their fur,” as they watch him ax “the twisted tree” on the Willson Plantation, “on which his great-grandfather and grandfather had been slaves and then workers,” they think he’s gone mad. Enlightened Harry Leland refutes this, though. “It’s his land. He can do anything he wants to it,” he tells his young son.

29.  P.L.O. STYLE

You may burn my poems and books You may feed your dog on my flesh…

—Samih al-Qasim, “Enemy of the Sun” (1968)

ELUCID dropped a zim zala bim on Armand Hammer’s “Solarium,” but—in recognition that magic can’t be the only survival method—he now promotes a zigzagzig. DJ Haram provides the sound design—a metallic gnashing, a chittering of rebar stakes, and a bass that throbs, muted and distorted, like eustachian tubes swollen from proximity explosions. On “Old Magic,” ELUCID offered a “double portion of protection,” but even charms and conjurings aren’t always enough. Under “war clouds” and a “cruel sky,” his “niggas survive like a moving target.” Zig. Zag. Zig. With the Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding of the last letter in the Supreme Alphabet—the zed, the end. Another bend of the body—an Orphic bend toward protest. The thousands upon thousands of Gazan orphans crying out to be heard.

For years, dead prez’s M-1 has argued that the struggle for Black liberation and the struggle for Palestinian liberation were “the same struggle.” “We have always been an international cadre,” he has said, “We have to see ourselves as a movement without borders.” Teknology allows deaths far and wide to be televised, rewound, reproduced on a “watch again” | replay | “share” exploitation loop. “I didn’t watch the video,” ELUCID says—and who can say which video? We wade through yottabytes of video footage like tonnes of debris. The video could be of grieving mothers in Khan Younis carrying the corpses of children, or it could be of Philando Castile bleeding out in the passenger seat of his Oldsmobile 88. ELUCID willed himself to not watch the video—to not tune into the Black death | Palestinian death broadcast—because he already “remembered in [his] body,” in his bones in which the trauma sings, in the code genetically imprinted.

The specter of Palestine pervades REVELATOR. Listeners are more likely to scan ELUCID as “abstract rap” than “conscious rap” or “political rap,” but that’s only because ELUCID’s art is so innately revolutionary and activist, lacking the sharp edges and defined features of more contrived artists. The abstraction is that the unacclimated will perceive ELUCID as a mystic on the mic rather than a rebel. He can be both; he can defy categorization; he can perform more powerfully than any single genre tag or pigeonhole could signal.

The history of solidarity reaches back to the 1970s with communiqués shared between the Black Panther Party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Method Man’s P.L.O. Style would never…). Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael) dreamt of “having coffee with [his] wife in South Africa” and “having mint tea in Palestine.” Liberatory lucid dreaming. We collectively hope—and work—for better futures, for the dogs of Abu Ghraib and the hounds of the Great Dismal Swamp pace the same Hell. “I shall not compromise,” Samih al-Qasim writes, “And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist.” al-Qasim’s poems were discovered in George Jackson’s San Quentin cell after his death. “Enemy of the Sun” would even be misattributed to Jackson because he had transcribed the poem by hand.

ELUCID finds the energy, the caloric boost, in “locust and wild honey”—embracing this ascetic appetite of John the Baptist. He changes out his alpenflage cargo pants for a camel’s hair robe and leather belt about his waist (getting down with the animal pelts). He shelters in a “deeper shade of carnage,” turned from a whiter shade of pale, and “stare[s] into the fire,” scrying, divining answers from the glowing embers. On “14.4,” he said he “live[s] between two mirrors,” spitting catoptromancy raps wearing the “bulletproof Girbaud” from “YOTTABYTE,” backpocket containing a bulletproof wallet. Layers of protection. It’s the only way to “fix up sharp,” as he says on “IKEBANA” with dizzee rascality. Dressed to impress, he’s a “stiff-lip maroon.” In Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1973), we learn that “in Surinam, as in Haiti, Jamaica, and elsewhere, warriors underwent complex rites and wore amulets intended to make them bulletproof…. [I]t was their gods and obeahs that spelled the ultimate difference between victory and defeat.” You already know ELUCID’s been spellling. And because the world always has been and continues to be dog, Cujo, Stephen King’s rabid St. Bernard, can be traced to Cudjoe, the Jamaican maroon leader. “A fearless rebel [who] boasted numerous bloody victories against the British,” Boisseron writes.

When ELUCID sees the “heads of state laughing” on “ZIGZAGZIG,” he knows they’re “liars” and that “hate has a logic.” They laugh “an idiot’s unbearable laughter,” to quote Rimbaud, still sweating through his Hell szn. But so are we all, grappling with the fact that “there’s no conscience, no authority.” ELUCID “live[s] to tell the story, / …to sing the song”—witness to atrocities, articulator of awfulness. When he can, he hammers out a warning. But he’s always on alert for imminent attacks which strike “without a warning.” Despite our teknological advances, we’re still a primitive society—our world still reduces to rubble, routinely. MPR500 precision-guided missiles fall from the sky and a Palestinian child stashes snacks in an abandoned IDF ammunition box. We search for survivors by hand—“Stony ground, metal poke out rubble, / Body twist angles akimbo, / Covered heads huddled”—hoping and praying for signs of life—head aching like rebar through skull, an inglorious Phineas Gage. 

On “Revelation Narrative” from Horse Latitude (2017), we hear the voice of a young child calling out: I want mama. How prescient. But the past tells the present, the future. 1948 | 1967 | 1987 | 2000 | 2008 | 2023 | & every increment in-between. ELUCID calls “from river to sea in lieu of peace, absence of truth.” He finds the gutless heads of state “guilty as charged.” They’re “monster[s] out the darkest abyss,” and—like dogs, like hellhounds—they exhibit a “gnashing of teeth.”

The death toll tolls for thee. John Donne felt the weight of every dun: “Each man’s death diminishes me, / For I am involved in mankind.” ELUCID makes the same pitch, even to those deaf to reason. His mathematics don’t need to be supreme; the most basic arithmetic tells a truth:

Who can still ignore the score? One more—to what end? Man-made horror beyond comprehension.

30.  I WOULDN’T TRUST IT IF THE POET DOUBT

After Revelation come a Genesis…

—Small Bills, “Falling Up” (2020)

No variety of literary originality is still possible unless we torture, unless we pulverize langage.

—E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973)

ELUCID pulverizes language. The lyrics on REVELATOR read like Bible page cut-ups, like Gysin and Burroughs put the scissors to ’em, like garbled Ghostface transcriptions. Narrative gets negated—not to confound, but to complicate communication. In doing so, ELUCID mirrors our shattered contemporary speech patterns, only it's art not the garbage glibness that the Geto Boys apprised us of in ’89—talkin’ loud but ain’t saying nothing. His Orphic bend and cadence flexing leave us levitating, lost in what Rimbaud calls a “hallucination of words.” More from Rimbaud:

I regulated the shape and movement of every consonant, and, based on an inner scansion, flattered myself with the belief I had invented a poetic language, that, one day or another, would be understood by everyone, and that I alone would translate…. Worn-out poetical fashions played a healthy part in my alchemy of the word.

On “VOICE 2 SKULL,” ELUCID cops to “complicating noun combinations over drumbreaks.” He felt the existing “language insufficient—chess pieces to the checkerboard.” His new language includes words for the living and “words for the departed” (“ZIGZAGZIG”), as if a seraph touched a burning coal to his lips. His diction ushers in cosmic agonies. His voice is “the strange instrument of death,” loaned from the conjure-man Frimbo. Listening to REVELATOR, I see the colors, geometry, and nonlinear wanderings of Wadada Leo Smith’s scoring of improvisation, his Ankhrasmation language articulated into words.

31.

In 1965, Amiri Baraka ended his liner notes to The New Wave in Jazz on this hushed note: “New Black Music is this: find the self and kill it.” Nathaniel Mackey has interpreted Baraka’s statement in the following way:

...in the course of improvising and getting to the point where you can play free music, you have to find yourself. You have to find out what your sound is. It may be something innate, but you have to practice and find what it is, where it is, and how to get it out, and how to translate it through a horn or a piano or a bass—whatever—which you likely call “technology.” How do you technologize yourself? How do you utilize that technology to render something that may be unspeakable, or there before not spoken—and maybe unrenderable? How do you get out a version that at least approximates that self and, at the same time, registers your refusal to be satisfied that you have properly and authoritatively, or with some finality, articulated that self?... In some ways, you have to be prepared to lose that self, or even to be an instrument of losing it, which is to say, to be killing it.

By this measure, ELUCID has found out what his sound is. On REVELATOR, he’s getting it out, violently. He’s translating it through his trauma mic—that is his chosen teknology. He has killed the self, and—to speak in the terminology of today—he keeps killing it.

“This ELUCID for whoever’s asking,” he once said on Armand Hammer’s “Resin,” and he’s forever been “staring at the sun” (“XOLO”). Often overlooked is the irony (or anti-irony, depending) of the MC’s name. Elucidate—to “throw light upon,” to “render intelligible,” perspicuity for the patron saints of post-rap. These ideas are at odds: How can he complicate and clarify? Make the equation make sense [ELUCID = light = “sun”]. “[W]e know that every apocalyptic eschatology is promised in the name of light, of seeing and vision,” Derrida writes, “and of a light of light, of a light brighter than all the lights it makes possible.” John the Revelator’s apocalypse is “lit by the light of El, of Elohim,” he adds. [T]he glory of Elohim illuminates it [21:23]. It’s as if ELUCID is “applauded by sunrays,” as Saul Williams says on “Elohim (1972).” Gnaw on this while you head-nod:

 ...what imposes itself as the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique and truth, but for a truth that at the same time keeps within itself some apocalyptic desire, this time as desire for clarity and revelation, in order to demystify or, if you prefer, to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse itself…

ELUCID takes on the apocalyptic tone, and whoever takes on the apocalyptic tone comes to signify to, if not tell, you something. What? The truth, of course, and to signify to you that it reveals the truth to you.

Images:

A close-up of “the Envious,” Anonymous, The Last Judgment, (ca. 12th century), Gold and glass mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello | A hand-colored woodcut of a 19th-century illustration shows an escaped slave trying to elude slave hunters and their dog. (North Wind Picture Archives/AP) | Gilbert Shelton, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Unknown issue (detail) | Bill Hudson, “Parker High School student Walter Gadsden being attacked by dogs in Birmingham, Alabama,” The New York Times (May 4, 1963) | McGruff the Crime Dog PSA, “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” 1984 (screenshot) | Robert Cohen, “Ferguson police officers during a protest in August 2014” (Associated Press) | DMX, “Get At Me Dog” music video, dir. Hype Williams, 1998 (screenshot) | Tadayuki Naitoh, “Miles Davis” (1971) | Jacob Riis, “The Trench in Potter’s Field on Hart Island, New York,” (ca. 1890) | Barry Williams / Getty Images, “Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD officers look at a robotic device from Boston Dynamics” (2023) | The Wire theme song, dir. David Simon, 2002 (screenshot) | Dread Broadcasting Corporation flyer (ca. 1981-83) | Unknown photograph of computer desk (c. 1999) | Stephen King, Cujo, first edition cover, 1981 (detail) | Joan E. Biren, “Portrait of writer Audre Lorde at work at her desk, surrounded by papers, books, and posters” (1981) | Image of ham radio (Lehigh Special Collections) | Self-portrait of Arthur Rimbaud in Harar, Ethiopia (1883) | Scaramanga, Seven Eyes, Seven Horns, interior cover art, Sun Large Music (1998) | Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-man Dies, first edition, Covici-Friede Publishers (1932) | Illustration in Abel C. Thomas’s Gospel of Slavery, 1864 (detail) | Gordon Nye, “New York City Rent Strike” in the Yiddish newspaper Di Varhayt (1907) | Afrika Bambaataa (unknown) | Sun Ra, photograph for Rolling Stone (1969) | REVELATOR album cover, Alexander Richter (2024) | Richard Ansdell, “The Hunted Slaves” (1862) | “Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton outside an unnamed Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon,” Unknown photographer (1980) | Wadada Leo Smith, “Kosmic Music” (2008) | A close-up of “the Envious,” Anonymous, The Last Judgment, (ca. 12th century), Gold and glass mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello

[confield]

PSA

If you're into any of the following bands/artists: Autechre, Ryoji Ikeda, Pan Sonic, alva noto, Bernard Parmegiani, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, TODAY IS THE DAY, Peter Rehberg, Merzbow, Oval, Yasunao Tone, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Hecker, Unwound, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, John Cage, Muslimgauze, Jan Jelinek, Anthony Braxton, Farmers Manual, Daphne Oram, Mira Calix, Einstürzende Neubauten, Eric Dolphy, Karleinz Stockhausen, Maryanne Amacher, Edgar Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, Laurel Halo, Fennesz, General Magic, Gescom, Ramleh, Prurient, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Pauline Oliveros, William Basinski, Luc Ferrari, Matthew Shipp, City of Caterpillar, Kouhei Matsunaga, Sensational, Mike Ink, Coil, Nobukazu Takemura, Halim El-Dabh, Martin Tetrault, Tod Dockstader, Matana Roberts, Chicago Underground Quartet, Microstoria, Vladislav Delay, Sonny Sharrock, Beatrice Dillon, SND, Mark Fell, Mika Vainio, Robin Rimbaud, Darkthrone, Christoph de Babalon, Toshimaru Nakamura, Steve Roden, Lithops, Nisennenmondai, Tackhead, Aaron Dilloway, Henry Flynt, Foehn, Yamantaka Eye, Portraits of Past, Pg99, Maxwell Sterling, Slint, Big Black, Russell Haswell, Sébastien Roux, Loraine James, Surgeon, Terrence Dixon, Underground Resistance, Dopplereffekt, Plastikman, Wolfgang Voigt, Robert Hood, Cecil Taylor, Matmos, Kangding Ray, Hijokaidan, Babyfather, Team Doyobi, Paul Lansky, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Soul Oddity, Kid606, Hugh Le Caine, Actress, Klein, Sven-Åke Johansson, Porter Ricks, Luciano Berio, The Third Eye Foundation, Grischa Lichtenberger, Replikants, Genocide Organ, Joji Yuasa, The Jesus Lizard, African Head Charge, Drive Like Jehu, Peter Brotzmann, Sonic Youth, Jawbox, Chino Amobi, Luke Vibert, James Ferraro, Florian Hecker, Tim Hecker, Eyehategod, Gorgoroth, Basic Channel, Maurizio, Steve Reich, Mouse on Mars, Burial, The Future Sound of London, Dean Blunt, Susumu Yokota, Skream, Benga, Farben, Polvo, Keiji Haino, The Black Dog, LFO, The Bug, SOPHIE, Global Communication, B12, Jlin, Stereolab, Pole, Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Juan Atkins, Wormrot, Oli XL, Napalm Death, Orchid, Bitch Magnet, Codeine, Microstoria, Moss Icon, Frank Bretschneider, Joey Beltram, Jeromes Dream, A Guy Called Gerald or DJ Manny

I am looking for a sugar baby to spoil with a $5000 weekly allowance. DM me if you are interested.

[hokeoutsider]

“Sun Ra and Rimbaud”     Hoke...Ebay Outsider-Art Auction...Oct 15-22... Acrylic Painting on Wood...

https://www.ebay.com/sch/metrolux6/m.html?item=264901074601&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2562

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Tomás Nochteff (Mueran Humanos)

Mueran Humanos, an Argentinian duo now based in Berlin, mixes post-punk, industrial-inflected synth explorations, garage rock and psychedelia. Carmen Burguess and Tomás Nochteff share vocal duties and play a very basic line-up of instruments: bass, synths, drum machines and samplers. In his review for Dusted, Andrew Forell called their latest, Hospital Lullabies, “a thrilling concoction of electronic, industrial, bass-driven body music fueled by the transgressive spirit of a DAF or a Psychic TV.” Here, Tomás presents his list of visionary music.

A list of visionary music

What is a visionary? Visions can come in dreams, in journeys to other worlds, in hallucinations. They can be the product of will, of a derangement of the senses, or they can come uninvited to save you or to haunt you and destroy your mental balance, even your life. It can be heavenly, or hellish, but to be authentic visions they have to be otherworldly. And to be visions rather than just imagination, they must have an element of truth. Not literal truth, like “that wall is green,” but a different kind of truth, the one that´s expressed in symbols, in metaphors, in omens and obsessions. In “Heaven and Hell,” Aldous Huxley analyzed the visions of people under the influence of psychedelic drugs, the visions of mystics and the visions of schizophrenics. He found fundamental parallels and concluded that they must have been visiting the same places. These people are not merely hallucinating, but they are perceiving another reality, visiting a different world, or maybe they are perceiving the world as it really is. And he quotes Jung on this: “schizophrenics and mystics are on the same ocean, but schizophrenics are drowning and mystics are swimming.” A visionary could be a mix of all these archetypes. Like Philip K Dick: was he on drugs? Yes. Was he mad? Yes. Was he seeking enlightenment? Yes. Had his visions an element of truth? No doubt about it. Were his visions revelations? To some extent, yes.

On our last album, Hospital Lullabies, the songs deal with all these different experiences on the journey to another world and on the invasion from another world into everyday life, with its horror and its beauty, the agony and the ecstasy. And how one copes, or doesn´t, with it.

So to celebrate it, I made a list of music that I do consider visionary. There’s madmen, there’s mystics and there’s psychonauts, all possible combinations of the three archetypes and everything in between.

Pharoah Sanders—“The Creator has a Masterplan” (Impulse)

I don´t know much about cosmic jazz, or any jazz for that matter, but what I know is that this record is pure bliss. “Harvest Time,” on Pharoah is another masterpiece. Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry are also incredible. This is music of the spheres; it has the touch of God.

Rudimentary Peni—CacophonyI (Outer Himalayan Records)

One of the few perfect punk bands ever, for lots of reasons. The bass lines are extraordinary, for example. But they belong here because of schizophrenic member Nick Blinko: incredible artist & novelist, obsessed with Catholicism and the supernatural horror. A guy who stopped his medication to force himself into a psychotic crisis just to write an album. Hero. Martyr.

Nico— “Janitor of Lunacy” (Cherry Red Records)

For me, Nico was the best and more underrated of all Velvets (and we love Velvet Underground as much as anyone). Also, the production from John Cale on her records is probably his best work too, or at least among his best. I feel that she is not appreciated enough. Iggy said that meeting her changed him. I suspect that´s true for all her famous friends: Bowie, Lou Reed, John Cale, Leonard Cohen, etc. They were all larger-than-life characters. And we know there is an element of self-built mythology on all that, a bit of acting. There is nothing wrong with that; rock and roll at its best is a complete artform and we must appreciate this self-built mythology as part of their craft. But with Nico you don´t get that feeling. She seemed that she didn´t care about her image, she was born Nico and I suspect that in that sense she inspired them all to no end. She was the genuine article. One of our main loves in music. Essential with a capital E.

Coil—“I Don’t Want To Be The One”

Jhonn Balance wanted to be a magician, and he died trying. I think he succeed in building a shamanic body of work with the help of the great late Sleazy and a myriad of brilliant contributors. Coil´s music at its best it´s like a plasma between worlds, or a very, very good psychedelic drug. My most beloved electronic/industrial/post-industrial project ever and one of our main influences. This performance is superb.

Lungfish — Feral Hymns

I´m not interested in DC post hardcore per se, and I don´t have any tattoos. I shouldn´t care about Lungfish the way I do, but they knock me out every single time. Daniel Higgs is a seer. I don´t know what he is talking about, but at the same time, my gut knows exactly what he is talking about. He speaks in images, like Tarot, like the religious painters, like Rimbaud and San Juan de la Cruz. His delivery is supreme. Raw and fragile, yet powerful and precise. Over circular, repetitive, minimal structures of music that have a haunting, arresting effect. Hypnotic, magical, devotional music. Either you get it, or you don´t. I can´t explain it. That´s the beauty of it, I suppose. And the truly mark of the visionary artist.

Ghedalia Tazartes—“Une Éclipse Totale De Soleil Part 2”

Ghedalia for me represents the pure, untouched, sui generis artist. Applying the techniques of musique concrete to the ancient folk music of the Sephardic Jews with a raw energy that usually you can only find in punk, or blues. I see in him an archetype, the Fool card in the Tarot. The madman that opens the gates of heaven and hell, gives himself to these supreme energies and survives only because of his perfect innocence.

OM—“Sinai (live at Sonic City)”

Maybe the greatest rock band of the last 20 years. Here with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe to maximum effect.

Charlemagne Palestine—Live in Holland 1998

Like Ghedalia, Charlemagne Palestine is a Jewish artist that works in the avant garde field but subverts it with the tradition of his folk music instead of sticking to the cold, cerebral, rational program of academia. He has his own world. Watch this and you will understand what I am talking about.

Virgin Prunes—Excerpts from Sons Find Devils/“Walls of Jericho”

There is a VHS tape called Sons Find Devils, comprised of live shows and short experimental films (some of them made by Balance, from Coil). I had it as a teenager and watched it countless times. Sadly, it is not complete on YouTube or elsewhere but here are some small extracts. With their heretic mix of Irish Catholic imagery, Irish Paganism, Bataille, performance art and post punk, the Virgin Prunes made a unique and extraordinary body of work. A testament of its importance is that Gavin Friday was guest singer of two bands in this list: The Fall and Coil. And Mr. Scott Walker himself invited him to sing on a play. Maybe the historians ignore them, but Mark E. Smith, Scott Walker and Coil knew where it’s at, didn´t they? Their record If I die I die is a masterpiece. Produced by Colin Newman from Wire, no less, if you need more validation.

Boredoms—Vision Creation Newsun

I like some of the more comical, early work of Boredoms, but with Super AE and this one they got me. They got serious and spiritual, channeling Alice Coltrane, tribal drumming, kraut rock and noise into a glorious, euphoric sound. Maybe they are not visionaries, but their music can produce visions. I saw them around 2005 (on acid) with the three drummers line up, still in this phase. I remember thinking “this is what cavemen had in mind when they invented music.” I actually saw it, with my eyes closed. Early humans. In caves. Inventing music. God bless LSD.

Aphrodite´s Child — 666

The one record I bought for the cover only, it cost me 50 cents, best deal of my life. A concept album about the apocalypse. Easy contender for the best psychedelic rock album of all time. Pet Sounds? Get outta here. An absolute masterpiece.

Tim Buckley—Starsailor

Tim Buckley is a mystery. He died too young. How he went from his L.A. folk rock first album to the absolute unique sound of Starsailor and Lorca is impossible to understand and a miracle of music. All six records in between are masterpieces. He was possessed by genius and has the most beautiful voice. I don´t know much about him, but his music put me out there.

Sun Ra—Night Music 1989

Watch this. Space is The Place, indeed.

Pescado Rabioso—Artaud

This guy, Luis Alberto Spinetta, is considered by many to be the most important rock musician in my country. So being an arrogant teenage punk, or whatever, of course that alone was enough to reject him altogether without even thinking. But a couple of years ago I was blown away by a book of poems he published in 1978. Incredibly beautiful, unique and sophisticated poetry. I recently started, too late, to listen to his music. This is one of his most famous and revered records. It´s dedicated to, and inspired by Antonin Artaud, who tried and failed to reach the mystic enlightenment, generating a body of work in the process which is a testament to his spiritual ambition, his radical rejection of the material world and his pain. Spinetta understood this, he said the record was trying to find an answer to Artaud, a way out of it, a way out of the pain. It´s psychedelic music of the highest order. The lyrics are incredible but you can enjoy it even without understanding them.

Dead Can Dance—Dyonisios

I kept forgetting this band exists. This new album is great. I listened to it non-stop during last Winter/Spring. It´s the perfect time because the record is about Dyonisios, so as a soundtrack for the rebirth of Nature it´s perfect. Probably their best work in years. Sublime.

The Fall—“Garden” (Live at the Hacienda, Manchester, UK, 1984)

No list of visionary rock and roll would be complete without Mark E. Smith. Famously he said, “I used to be a psychic but I drank my way out of it.” Indeed, there was a time, between 1978-1990, when he was possessed by something, injecting realism with mysticism, mixing high and low planes, exposing the supernatural forces that hides in the cracks of everyday life. He never talks about hell neither heaven, but rather the way they mix and manifest here on Earth. You’ve got countless of bands using occult/mystic imagery, and you know it´s nice but it´s just a game. You’ve got thousands of bands referencing Burroughs and the cut-up technique, but no one can write as Burroughs did. MES did it. MES wasn´t playing. He was a realist of the augmented reality, he told it like it is, in his fragmented, hallucinatory, unpretentious, visionary prose poetry.

There is a lot in his lyrics that can be read in a mystic, occult way. He left a lot of clues for the ones that can read them. His texts are kaleidoscopic, and they reflect what´s in your mind, really. I think he will be recognized with time as the great experimental writer that he actually was rather than merely an angry Mancunian punk. He had more in common with someone like Iain Sinclair than with any other rock musician. One of my favorite web sites is The Annotated Fall, where fans analyze his lyrics in depth. Pay a visit if you can, I can´t recommended it enough. In many ways, he was too intelligent for rock and roll, and that´s why he was misunderstood, but he didn´t care, he believed in constant work, never explain, never apologize. The Fall took all the best things in rock and roll: Can, Velvet Underground, punk, Captain Beefheart, and pushed it to the next level. Our favorite rock group ever.

Huun Hur Tu — “Prayer”

I tried to stick to Western, modern music but I can´t help including this.

[benjaminfdh]

Saxophones and telephones

7.2.20

Today I started reading ‘Ocean of Sound’ by David Toop. Its incredibly interesting and easy to read, and full of great artists and tracks I wouldn't have found otherwise.

I made a small list of a few he mentioned and listened to them this evening - Sun Ra, Edgard Varèse, and Robin Rimbaud.

I listened to ‘Space is the Place’ by Sun Ra first. Not my usual thing, and I initially found it slightly abrasive, but once it had been on for a while I sort of tuned out a little bit and it became more like background music. The repeated vocals lost any semblance of real meaning and just became additional textures. I may try the rest of the album at a later date, but I’d have to be in the right mood.

Varèse was pleasant enough to listen to, but I found it slightly dull. I enjoyed certain moments, but unfortunately overall it was just wasn't really my thing.

Rimbaud, however, was incredibly interesting. I’ve never really heard anything like it, the combination of telephone sounds, spoken word and electronic sounds and drums is like nothing else. I really enjoyed listening to the ‘Mass Observation’ EP and intend to listen to more soon.

[raddinosaurzombie]

Aleister Crowley (& the Aeon of Horus)

by Michael Tsarion

I have been accused of being a ‘black magician.’ No more foolish statement was ever made about me. I despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practice it - Aleister Crowley (The Sunday Dispatch, 1933)

The twentieth card of the Tarot’s Major Arcana - Judgment or The Aeon - corresponds with Aries, the sign which opens the solar zodiac. Astrologically, Aries is associated with new birth and masculine creative energy. The planet-archetypes assigned to The Aeon are the Sun and Pluto. In astrological parlance the card’s meaning is analogous to Pluto in Aries or a conjunction between Mars, Sun and Pluto. Conventionally, Pluto is associated with the sign of Scorpio. However, psychologically it connotes the "Shadow" and corresponds with gods such as Thanatos, Hades and Shiva. It is associated with the so-called underworld journey and spiritual resurrection.

Historically, the discovery of the planet Pluto coincided with major upheavals and new paradigms of thought and communication. After its discovery, in 1930, the atom was split, the Great Depression occurred in America, Adolf Hitler rose to power in Europe, and World War II broke out. The planet-archetype certainly represents painful catharsis and difficult psychological transformation; new life emerging from the ashes of the old and outworn.

In the Rider-Waite deck we see three naked figures rising from graves with arms outstretched in the shape of Latin word Lux, meaning “light.” Above them is Archangel Gabriel with his trumpet.

The Rider-Waite version

The design intentionally represents the supernal triangle on the Kabalistic Tree of Life, that is, the three highest Sephiroth known as Kether, Chokmah and Binah.

The youth in the center represents the sphere of Tiphareth, esoterically associated with Horus. Although Horus is traditionally considered a solar deity, he is - in his aspect of avenger - closely associated with Pluto. He was the rival and conqueror of Set, his father's evil brother and arch-enemy. He is the prototype for mythological avengers Hercules, St. George, St. Michael, and so on.

The Aeon’s imagery also relates to the precessional movement of the sun, moon and planets through the zodiac. This cycle of 25,920 years is referred to as the Great or Platonic Year. The Aeon pictorializes an important mythographic event in the celestial revolution - the resurrection of sun god Ra-Hoor-Khuit, Harpocrates or Horus the Younger.

In the Gnostic tradition Horus is Io (pronounced Aho). In the Thoth deck we see him with forefinger pressed to his lips. This pose indicates the Hermetic mysteries of which he is keeper. The letters I and O connote the Phi ratio or geometric harmony of the universe.

Crowley's Thoth Tarot version

The esoteric letter of The Aeon is shin (pronounced shayeen), closely related to the English word shine. Although the previous card depicts the physical sun, The Aeon connotes the heart or spirit of the phenomenal sun which, though not visible to the senses, is discerned once subtle modes of insight and understanding awaken. The Aeon represents the unseen light or power behind the world of matter. It represents the energy behind perceivable, quantifiable bioenergy; the numinous Implicate or enfolded power emanating from the center of every atom, cell, corpuscle, emotion and idea.

Dr. George W. Crile, of the Cleveland Laboratories...announced that he had discovered at the heart of every living organism a tiny nucleus of energy, all aglow, with temperatures ranging from 3000 to 6000 degrees of heat, which he called "radiogens" or "hot points" precisely akin to the radiant energy of solar matter. He affirmed that a tiny particle of the sun's power and radiance was lodged within the heart of every organic unit! - Alvin Boyd Kuhn (The Great Myth of the Sun Gods)

...our individual consciousnesses could be derived from a higher...consciousness through an interface created in the brain by endogenous light. It is hypothesized that photons emitted from cells in the brain are guided to the surfaces of the brain's fluid-filled ventricular spaces, where they interact with cilia lining those ventricles and are guided by the timed beating of the cilia so that the photons form interference patterns within the ventricular spaces, creating an interface through which a tiny portion of the "light of God" is able to animate the corpus. Some of the necessary mechanisms such as light emissions from cells are known; others are hypothetical - Karl Simanonok PhD (The Divine Light of Consciousness)

The "light" seen emanating from the card represents the spiritual intelligence or Universal Order which is negentropic in nature and not created by human beings. Indeed, humans are themselves emanations and embodiments of this Order or Logos. Coming into conscious attunement with the Logos constitutes a truly holy act, and is the goal of the Magnum Opus or Great Work. Arriving at this state of attunement requires mental, emotional and physical purification. It entails a quietening of the chatter of the Left Brain (ego-consciousness).

To emphasize the idiosyncratic qualities of Arcanum 20, occultist Aleister Crowley, of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis, decided to change its imagery and title. To comprehend why his changes are significant and why he wanted the Arcanum to stand out, we have to know something about his life, times, circle and occult ideas.

.

No matter to what depth I plumb, I always end with my wings beating steadily toward the sun - AC

Edward Alexander Aleister Crowley was born under the sign of Libra on October 12 1875, the year the Theosophical Society was founded. Born to a family of fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren, he attended Cambridge University and read his first "occult" tract The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary by Karl von Eckharthausen at age twenty two. On November 18 1898, he was initiated into Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult fraternity founded in England by Dr. Wynn Westcott, William Robert Woodman and Samuel Liddell (also known as MacGregor Mathers). The Order’s members included A. E. Waite, Dion Fortune, Arthur Conan Doyle and W. B. Yeats. Crowley studied Tarot and Hermeticism assiduously under Mathers and mystic Alan Bennett. After studying Book T  by Mathers, he realized he had a destiny with the Tarot or Grimoire of Thoth.

Both Mathers and Crowley knew that prior to the advent of their Hermetic Order, Tarot interpretation and usage were exoteric and mundane. Mathers was perplexed that he was chosen to restore the esoteric secrets of the seventy eight Arcana. With characteristic hubris he wrote of the matter:

Do you imagine that where such men as Court de Gebelin, Etteila, Christian and Levi failed in their endeavor to discover the Tarot attributions that I would be able of my own power and intelligence alone to lift the veil which has baffled them?

Crowley clearly knew the time had come for a restoration of Tarot, the authentic “Emerald Tablets of Hermes” or “Book of Life.” He wrote that he had:

...deplored the absence of any authentic Text on Tarot. The medieval packs are hopelessly corrupt or otherwise far from presenting the Ancient Truth of the Book in a coherent system or shape of lucid beauty - (Preface: The Book of Thoth)

The result of his education during his time with the Golden Dawn was his Thoth Deck. The cards were painted by Golden Dawn member and Freemason Lady Frieda Harris. She worked with Crowley to formulate their deck’s appearance and occult properties. Through her persuasion, Crowley invested five years of concentrated work honing his esoteric knowledge of magic, divination and symbolism.

She devoted her genius to the Work...with inexhaustible patience...often painting the same card as many as eight times...May the passionate "love under will" which she has stored in this Treasury of Truth and Beauty flow forth from the Splendour and Strength of her work to enlighten the world; may this Tarot serve as a chart for the bold seamen of the New Aeon, to guide them across the Great Sea of Understanding to the City of the Pyramids - Aleister Crowley (on Lady Harris)

Crowley with Lady Frieda Harris, the artist

who painted the enigmatic Thoth Deck.

Their vision finally came into being, and competent critics and adepts agree that along with the Rider-Waite deck, Crowley's Thoth Tarot is one of the most precious endowments to humanity.

Each card is, in a sense, a living being and its relation with its neighbors are what one might call diplomatic. It is for the student to build these living stones into his living temple - A. C. (The Book of Thoth)

Although he was born in the late Victorian Age, there was little that was "Old World" about the bohemian gentleman perpetually slandered as "mad, bad and dangerous to know." As his unofficial biographers are only too keen to remind us, Victorian society considered Crowley something of an enfant terrible. However, it is reprehensible that they should have ridiculed him as much as they did and for as long. After all, was he not a child of the same histrionic age that produced Swinburne, Shelley, Rimbaud and Baudelaire? And through previous centuries had he no equivalents? From the Classical Period through the Medieval, to the Renaissance and beyond, we find iconoclasts, transgressives, libertines and heretics now remembered as paragons of wisdom. As Crowley knew, he was secure in the tradition of savants such as Socrates, Plotinus, Erasmus, Bohme, Bruno, Apollonius, Valentinus, Christian Rosencrantz, Blavatsky and Steiner, etc. He is also in the tradition of academic philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger, with his work being distinctly more accessible.

Alas, due to disinformation disseminated by gutter journalists, we find Crowley’s name indexed not with the enlighteners and geniuses but with scoundrels and sociopaths. To read the many vitriolic diatribes against him and labels he was given - Anti-Christ, King of Depravity, Cannibal at Large, Wickedest Man in the World, Man We'd Like to Hang, Great Beast, etc - one may be excused for thinking him related to Vlad the Impaler or Jack the Ripper. He has been labeled everything from England's most perfidious seducer, to the Devil's own high priest. Fortunately his detractors are mostly forgotten and today his admirers provide more enlightening commentary on his reputation and significance:

All the little mystics have reason to be terrified of him and his "exposures" of their camouflages. These groups, quite numerous and socially powerful...are mainly responsible...for the legend that he is a devil-worshiper and a practitioner of "black magic" - Israel Regardie (secretary to Crowley)

It is our opinion that to defend Crowley within the Christian-Judaic system not only does him a disservice but makes us weak slaves of the past. We believe that those who judge and defend Crowley within this system are attempting to remove his influence or demonstrate that he had no influence at all - Christopher Hyatt (Head of the New Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn)

Crowley is most emphatically a part of the spiritual history of this century, and as such it behooves us to reckon with him both sensibly and sensitively - Lawrence Sutin (Do What Thou Wilt)

Crowley emphasized that in any age man’s most pressing need is total freedom of thought, action and belief. The term he employed to describe total emancipation was "Will" (from the Greek Thelema). He noted that in esoteric numerology the Greek words for "Love" and "Will" have the same sum. For occultists this means the words express the same principle. In a similar vein as his predecessor William Blake, Crowley proclaimed that freedom, on all levels, was attainable once we dispense with external authority. For Blake and Crowley, man’s will is subverted early in life by authoritarian parents and peers. Minds and hearts are dominated by the will of mothers, fathers, relatives, school teachers, friends, priests and politicians.

The spirit within is also violated when we prostitute ourselves by overly relying on external guidance, asking each and every stranger for answers, direction and support. For Crowley, Blake, and other true mystics, on our spiritual journey the advice and experiences of other people are relatively meaningless.

In other words, men do not think with their own minds or feel with their own hearts. On the contrary, their consciousness is colonized. The process of consciousness-control occurs gradually over generations and less gradually during the years of a single lifetime. The conditioned, acculturated man, more often than not becomes an oppressor of those who fall under his power. Indeed, most humans accept the “mind-forged manacles” imposed on them, and many quickly move to impose them on others. What is often referred to as "community" and "family," amounts to little more than enslavement to the will of others.

Crowley believed that during the twentieth century men would finally get a real chance to cast off their chains and overthrow the corrupt institutions that imposed their will on humanity. Like a caring father he dedicated his time and energy to the creation of the manifestos of freedom to guide the New Aeon's unchained but unguided children. Of these works the Thoth Tarot is his supreme accomplishment. This is especially so given that it employs images rather than words.

Although Crowley was certainly anti-Christian, he was not anti-Christ. Jesus as rebel and hero appealed to his own heroic character. Like many scholars Crowley simply recognized that religious organizations and paradigms do not prevail forever in pristine form, particularly if they fail to evolve and morph as man himself does. Through the ages the institutions of Christianity had become impossibly dogmatic, paternal and antihuman. Therefore they need to be replaced by sane modern ideologies for modern times. Those who see in Crowley nothing but a blustering iconoclast do well to remember that his penchant for deconstruction was balanced with a ability to conceive brilliant solutions to the problems bred by fundamentalist doctrines:

Crowley desired nothing less than the creation of a full-fledged successor religion - complete with a guiding Logos that would endure for millennia, as had the teachings of Jesus - Lawrence Sutin

The turning point in Crowley's life occurred in 1904, while he was in his twenties. He received, by way of his wife, channeled instructions concerning his role on the planet. After an initial series of visions, the Crowleys returned to their home in Bolskine, Scotland, where he entered into direct communion with a praetor-human intelligence. This incorporeal agency transmitted prophetic visions about the coming age in which humans struggled to free themselves from the psychological and spiritual chains imposed by religious and political institutions of previous ages. As a result of his strange mystical experience, and while in trance, Crowley penned the strange and infamous tome Liber Al vel Legis or Book of the Law. Although it has been denounced and ridiculed, many regard the book as a sacred testament of the coming age.

The imagery of Arcanum 20 (in the Thoth Tarot) is based on the essence of what Crowley received from his guide. Following in the footsteps of Christian mystic Joachim of Fiore, he wrote of how history had a trinitarian structure. Specifically, there are three great epochs corresponding to three periods of the so-called "Platonic Cycle" of 25,920 years. (This cycle is traditionally divided into twelve divisions making the famous signs of the zodiac.) The first epoch, which Crowley named the Aeon of Isis, was a period of Matriarchies which allegedly terminated around 255 BC. During this age societies were predominately eccentric, egalitarian and pantheistic. The superseding period was the Aeon of Osiris; an age of Patriarchal communities which maintained dominion until approximately 1900 AD. The present Aeon of Horus is, therefore, the period of the sovereign individual, the Son or Child of Creation; and as with any period of birth, the age has seen several traumatic events. Like Blake, Tennyson and Nietzsche before him, Crowley predicted the world wars and tribulations he believed were unfortunately necessary for the true Spirit of Freedom to rise from the ashes of corrupt, outworn old world systems. As Christopher Hyatt puts it, the Aeon of Osiris was “an age of terrible darkness, of deplorable ignorance, and of abominable superstition.”

In each age, say Theosophists and Thelemites, the spirit of Horus the Liberator returns. Once every 2,160 years the archetype manifests to destroy the "dark Satanic mills." In other words, the spirit of Horus is the Spirit of Rebellion that takes birth in certain iconoclastic men and women, who as society’s artists, poets, musicians, writers, and activists, actively push for reform and justice. The Spirit of Rebellion shakes traditional paradigms and brings radical change to individuals and countries. It also brings change to religious ideas and beliefs. According to occultist Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones), the archetype of Horus ”is within each of us as the true urge of our Being.”

In Horus, Isis and Osiris in the Q. B. L., Frater Achad wrote on the purpose of the New Aeon and coming of Horus:

Thus at his Coming in 1904, he found the Race in a state of definite retrogression. "Civilization" met him as he advanced in triumph, and millions fell, without understanding what was happening. He still drives ahead in His Chariot, and millions more will feel his force and fire, until the Race recognizes that it must about-face, and cheer the Conquering Hero on. Then we shall have peace and rejoicing, and the Stern Warrior will seem as the Gentlest Child.

In Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley wrote of the turbulent birth of the coming Aeon:

There is a Magical Operation of maximum importance: the initiation of a New Aeon. When it becomes necessary to utter a Word, the whole planet will be drenched in blood. Before man is ready to accept the Law of Thelema, the Great War must be fought. This Bloody Sacrifice is the critical point of the World-Ceremony of the Proclamation of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, the Lord of the Aeon.

When men attune with the Plutonic power of Horus the Liberator, and inherit the freedom dreamt of, they do not become debauched and immoral. On the contrary, as Crowley emphasized, they require greater discipline and order. It is not an easy task to both obey and command one's Will. This attunement with one's True Will, this communion, is true Holy Work, requiring no churches or chapels, no oppressive hierarchies and moral codes. The standards of a malignant oppressive society inevitably condition human beings to become self-evasive and repressive. This form of cruelty against oneself was central to Crowley's insights into the human psyche and condition, and his revisioning of humanity. The unrepressed man alone is truly free. Only he has the ability and the right to free others.

When a person represses certain of his thoughts, feelings, or memories, he does so because he regards them as threatening to him in some way. When, specifically, a person represses certain of his emotions or desires, he does so because he regards them as wrong, as unworthy of him, or inappropriate, or immoral, or unrealistic, or indicative of some irrationality on his part—and as dangerous, because of the actions to which they might impel him - Nathaniel Branden (The Psychology of Self-Esteem)

The Willful man avoids repression and dissociation because he is strong enough not to censor his thoughts and emotions, especially those which might cause him emotional pain or moral unease. He refuses to censor himself, and allows his thoughts and feelings to express themselves completely. This is the true definition of freedom as Crowley, Blake, and other sages meant it.

The trouble comes from society which often shapes one's personality in aberrant ways The unrepressed Willful individual doesn't allow this to continue. He avoids being negatively influenced and won't follow society's lead. He is, therefore, bound to be cast as a rebel by his fellows and his society. Nevertheless, his existence is not overcast by the inner shame and anxiety that plagues those who contravene natural and human law to get ahead in the malignant society made in their image. The spiritual man’s goals are not achieved by way of other humans. Others are not used and abused on the Siddhartha Road. What others think, say and do doesn't have a lot of impact for a man on the mystical path. The mystic isn't interested in being accompanied on his journey by sickly repressed types living their lives in denial, denial of denial and perpetual anxiety, relying on brief, sordid, ultimately brief unsatisfactory escapes from it.

Furthermore, Crowley understood that the greatest violence that exists is committed by a man toward his own being. External manifestations of violence and injustice are merely symptoms of self-sadism. To end the cycle of dysfunction, the adept become hygienic emotionally, mentally and morally. Although he may not conform to rules and regulations imposed by states, governments or peers, he is not without ethics and conscience. The adept is not a drop-out, malingerer, anarchist or felon. On the contrary, he has the courage to make his own rules and live by them without the promise of rewards from an infantile society. He wants nothing from his fellows, not their approval or their disapproval. He is, as Ayn Rand advised, a man free from men.

In the magickal tradition, Horus is the Magus presiding over the process of psychic sanitization. He presides over the marriage of Heaven and Hell, the nucleation of psychic and physical energy. He is what the adept becomes when his personal will is attuned to the cosmic Will, Animus or Logos.

Every man and woman is a star...that is to say, every human being is intrinsically an independent individual with his own proper character and proper motion - A. C. (Magick in Theory and Practice)

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Crowley's polemics reached their peak when he penned the slogan of the New Aeon - “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” This misunderstood and flagrantly misrepresented adage - bandied by hippies, anarchists, neo-pagans and pop icons - has nothing to do with political revolt and sexual license. It was not meant as a slogan for reactionaries bent on secular revolution, but for Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve dedicated to cleansing the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual doors of perception.

Crowley appropriated the term from the great fifteenth century monk and humanist Francois Rabelais. But, crucially, Rabelais coined the term because in his estimation man does not need to submit to imposed rules and regulations for the simple reason that he is born good. All he requires is the freedom to act according to his true nature, without impositions and restrictions. Crowley was in accord with this doctrine, and did not believe that man was little more than a civilized beast. Like William Blake, Rabelais and Crowley both understood that man is repressed and warped by imposed draconian rules and prohibitions. Of course, we see from this how spurious and scurrilous are the critiques levied against Crowley in this regard. How they fall dead when we see that his view of man's underlying nature was wholesome, noble and heroic.

"Do What Thou Wilt" does not mean "do what you please" though this degree of emancipation is implied...we can no longer say a priori that any course of action is "wrong." Every man and woman has an absolute right to do his or her own true will - A. C. (Secret Conference)

"Do What Thou Wilt"...is the apotheosis of Freedom; but it is also the strictest possible bond - A. C.

Francois Rabelais (1483-1553) was one of Crowley's foremost influences. He coined the controversial term "Do What Thou Wilt," which means nothing more than "Obey Thyself," the edict of ancient Stoics and latter day sages such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Following the will of any other person or agency is irrational and foolish, and will never lead to enlightenment.

Yes, attunement with the Guardian Angel or Higher Self does indeed involve the strongest possible bond. Detractors rightly understand that Crowley was critical of impositions upon the Self from external tyrannies - government, school teachers, priests, parents, and so on. However, he was aware that punitive instruction from authorities is obsessively relied upon by the majority of the world’s men and women who go from one day to the next devoid of inner strength and fortitude. The hedonic, episodic person constantly seeks for someone’s feet to kiss and someone to give him enlightenment. He is constantly searching for someone or something to enslave him, and lives in a state of perpetual neurotic anxiety when his sado-masochistic desires go unfulfilled. Unlike the adept, the morally inferior man waits for the stimuli of the world to turn him on. He is simply incapable of bringing meaning from within himself. He neither commands nor obeys his True Will.

Whoever cannot find a temple in his heart, the same can never find his heart in any temple - Mikhail Naimy

The motto “Do What Thou Wilt” implies attunement between the Microprosopus and Macroprosopus, or in plain language the ego and Imperial Self; which cannot be achieved until the pseudo-self undergoes deconstruction. This deconstruction cannot occur until man separates himself from collective factors responsible for creating and perpetuating the pseudo-self. This separation cannot occur until man has developed sufficient psychic strength - or Will - to break free and devise his own path, one he must walk alone.

Aloneness is usually wanting until a man's character is deepened by suffering, which is less likely in a conformist society that suppresses legitimate expressions of emotion and dissuades individuals from addressing the darker sides of life. Therefore, instead of attunement with the Imperial Self we have immersion in the Collective. As Crowley knew, the so-called “I” is not necessarily identical with the Imperial Self. The “self” or “I” of a spiritually inferior man is merely a pastiche of everyone’s attitudes and beliefs, the product of a pathogenic society. To such a creature the ideas of independence, aloneness and psychic sovereignty are contemplated with dread, and men who embody these states are despised and ridiculed on sight.

Whatever your sexual predilections may be, you are free, by the Law of Thelema, to be the star you are, to go your own way rejoicing. It is not indicated here in this text, though it is elsewhere implied, that only one symptom warns that you have mistaken your True Will, and that is, if you should imagine that in pursuing your way you interfere with that of another star. It may, therefore, be considered improper, as a general rule, for your sexual gratification to destroy, deform, or displease any other star. Mutual consent to the act is the condition thereof - A. C. (The Law Is For All)

“Do What Thou Wilt” sounds reprehensible only to those conditioned by the dogma of the bygone patriarchal Aeon of Osiris, and those who wish to enslave the hearts and minds of humans by externally imposed, socially-endorsed standards and values. For such as these, Crowley will always be a veritable “Anti-Christ.” Certainly he was mischievous, irreverent, audacious and self-absorbed. Certainly he was capable of ridicule and hyperbole. Nevertheless, he was certainly of superior character, insight and intention to recent think-tank-funded "people's champions" and media celebs who encourage psychic regression and enslavement with chic pop-culture platitudes such as "turn on, tune in, drop out!" His message is an anathema to the hippy and "New-Ager" as much as it is to the buttoned-down Evangelist and Wall Street slicker.

...Crowley was a prophet of the New Aeon of Horus which in essence reverses all the old systems and ways of Christian-Judaic thinking - Christopher Hyatt

Aleister Crowley was an eminent Magician of many talents, dedicated to establishing on earth the Law of Thelema, so that all men and women might be free to do their own true wills in accordance with their own true natures. He was not...the most evil man in the world, devoted to the vile practices of Black Magic. He was, on the contrary, a devotee of love and will who sought to enlighten humanity - ibid

We see then, that we can never affect anything outside ourselves save only as it is also within us. Whatever I do to another, I also do to myself. If I kill a man, I destroy my own life at the same time...Every vibration awakens all others of its particular pitch - A. C. (Magick in Theory and Practice)

Pamela Coleman Smith, the designer and painter of the

Rider-Waite deck. She died in poverty and obscurity.

As Frater Achad emphasized, during the Aeon of Horus men learn the principles for the "right rulership" the themselves. What most bandwagon apostles of "Crowleyanity" forget is that true freedom ultimately involves considerable personal responsibility. No masters above, certainly, but no slaves below. This is why Crowley was not advocating a dionysian "Hippydom." That is not what his Aeon was about.

To attune with the Natural Order and bring one’s being to harmony requires discipline and rectitude. Crowley himself was certainly capable of immense self-control and mental concentration. Among his many accomplishments, he was an expert mathematician and yogi. He was a master of Patanjali, Pranayama and other yogas which he studied in the Orient for many years.

The state of attunement - referred to as arete, meaning Virtue or Justice, by ancient Athenian philosophers, and Thelema or Will by later occultists - is actualized when no single capacity of consciousness - intellect, emotion, sensation or intuition - develops while others remain arrested or repressed. When one psychic hemisphere inflates and dominates consciousness, it automatically occludes and represses the tendencies of other hemispheres, causing mental and moral disequilibrium. The imbalanced individual is bound to imbalance the world in which he lives and acts. As far as Crowley was concerned, religious fundamentalists and practitioners of conventional science are, for the most part, chronically imbalanced and toxic. Long before the time of R. D. Laing, Erich Fromm, Arno Gruen, and other social critics, Crowley warned about the insanity of normality and taught that psychically deranged people are products of a deranged society bent on preventing them from attaining psychological hygiene and harmony.

The end of all is the power to live according to your own nature, without danger that one part may develop to the detriment of the whole - A. C. (The Equinox Vol III, Nu 10)

In simple language, this means that attunement with the True Will allows us to attain a state of being in which we are able to objectively and dispassionately grasp and argue the opposite point of view to that which we hold and favor. We do not need a Devil's Advocate, because we are profoundly aware of every counter-argument and counter-position to those we cherish and adhere to, an ability only a handful of people on earth possess or desire to inculcate. In this state we are embodiments of the Magickal Will, and are attitudinally androgynous. We are Philosopher Kings.

Justice or Adjustment is the eleventh card of the Major Arcana. It represents the Magical Will, or in simple terms the cultivation of the ability to embody the opposing view to one's own favored beliefs, opinions and arguments. It represents the Aperion of pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander, as well as the Taoist sage who "fulfills his will without action, and utters his word without speech." (

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The adept who attunes with the Magickal Will (Higher Self) becomes the Eudaimon of the Athenian philosophers. He becomes the supremely happy man. He is his own servant and master, needing no gods or religions, panaceas or bromides, rewards or salvation. He has lived fully and completely in the now and not restricted or repressed his vital energy by excessive masochism, altruism and guilt, or the complexes and syndromes which his repressed, dissociated, conformist fellows fall prey to.

To deny the Law of Thelema is a restriction in oneself, affirming conflict in the Universe as necessary. It is a blasphemy against the Self, assuming that its Will is not a necessary (and therefore noble) part of the Whole - A. C.

Anyone who is forced from his own course, either through not understanding himself, or through external imposition, comes into conflict with the order of the Universe, and suffers accordingly - A. C. (Magick in Theory and Practice)

The attuned man needs no gods of religion because as Virgil was to Dante, his Imperial Self (True Will) is a constant guardian and instructor.

...The True Will must be consciously grasped by the Mind, and this Work is akin to that called the attainment of the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel - A. C. (Heart of the Master)

In the knowledge and conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel, the adept is possessed of all he can possibly need. To consult any other is to insult one's Angel - A. C. (Magick in Theory and Practice)

The single supreme ritual is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. It is the raising of the complete mass in a vertical straight line. Any deviation from this line tends to become black magic. Any other operation is black magic - ibid

Mystical Alchemy is a personal science, a sublime and effective system of Self-Initiation. Only you, as a single individual, can calculate and follow your way up the Great Mountain of Hermetic Attainment...All essential guidance is within you, in the inmost centre of your heart where your own Holy Guardian Angel, or Inner Self, resides. To depend upon any other thing than your own Holy Guardian Angel to accomplish the Great Work is to insult your Angel who is with you to instruct and guide you. All essential wisdom by which to achieve the Great Work is to be ascertained only within you; nowhere else will you find the Truth - David Cherubim (The Order of the Thelemic Golden Dawn)

Another of Crowley's antinomian phrases was “Love Under Will.” This motto has also caused consternation among the orthodox who believe it exalts bestial proclivities. However, they forget that whatever stands beneath a thing holds it up. Crowley's Love is not a subservient quality. Rather, it undergirds and supports an adept's Will. To be attuned to one’s Will first entails the development of Self-Love.

To Crowley, and Blake before him, it was obvious that the doctrines of Judeo-Christianity breed guilt, shame and self-hate, and must therefore be utterly rejected. Both men understood that Western and Eastern religious doctrines foster and depend on masochism. The average Christian is paranoid, intolerant, forbidding and oppressive toward those around him because he is suspicious, anxious and repressive toward himself. Indeed, he is expertly taught to be so. Although he superficially believes he loves Jesus and God, he is completely unaware of the psychic violence he commits to himself on an hourly basis.

The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as we hold a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath toward you burns like fire - John Edwards (New England Preacher)

As innocent as children seem to us, if they are out of Christ, they are not so in God’s sight, but are young vipers and are infinitely more hateful than vipers and are in a most miserable condition - ibid

When my heart is cold and I cannot pray as I should I scourge myself with the thought of the impiety and ingratitude of my enemies, the Pope and his accomplices and vermin…so that my heart swells with righteousness and hatred and I can say with warmth and vehemence: “Holy be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done!” And the hotter I grow the more ardent do my prayers become - Martin Luther

Meanwhile my sins were being multiplied, and my concubine being torn from my side as a hindrance to my marriage, my heart which clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding…To Thee be praise, glory to Thee, Fountain of Mercies. I was becoming more miserable and Thou nearer - St. Augustine

Self-Love - which must not be confused with narcissism - cannot be awakened until its opposite is vanquished. However, self-hate cannot be overcome until it is first correctly observed, which is impossible while we remain distracted by the nonsense of the world. It is impossible to see oneself truly while seeking guidance from the misguided and approval from those as empty and toxic as oneself.

A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master - Carl Jung (Approaching the Unconscious)

Furthermore, Self-Love is impossible to experience while we crave "love" from people spiritually and emotionally paralyzed by their own subconscious self-hate. It will never blossom within the man who lowers his self-value in order to be approved of and admired. To place a single human being above oneself is to commit an act of violence toward the Imperial Self. As Crowley stated, it is a slap in the face of one's Guardian Angel, a crime that arrests the healthy development of individuals and civilizations.

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Aleister Crowley may or may not have been the high priest of a New Aeon. In any case we cannot doubt that our world would be the poorer without his contributions to the magickal canon. His Thoth Tarot stands out as one of the most marvelous creations of any master at any time in history. In fact, it may take decades before its geometrical, numerical, symbolic, sabean and theosophical secrets are fathomed.

According to Crowley the divination arts are:

A language fitted to describe certain classes of phenomena and to express certain classes of ideas which escape regular phraseology - A. C. (Liber 777)

On the connections between the Tarot and Kabala, he wrote:

It is beyond doubt a deliberate attempt to represent, in pictorial form, the doctrines of the Qabalah - (Book of Thoth)

Crowley was a man of science who chose to work with magicians and magic. But he was also a magician who knew more about physical and abstract science than the reprobates genuflecting before the altar of Positivism. His findings anticipated those of later Quantum Theorists who still struggle to accept what he considered obvious:

We use instruments of science to inform us of the nature of the various objects which we wish to study but our observations never reveal the thing as it is in itself. They only enable us to compare unfamiliar with familiar expressions - A. C. (Liber 777)

The question of Magick is a question of discovering and employing hitherto unknown forces in nature - A. C. (Magick in Theory and Practice)

The universe is a projection of ourselves, an image as unreal as that of our faces in a mirror, yet, like that face, the necessary form of expression thereof, not to be altered save as we alter ourselves - ibid

Just as his commitment to the physical and psychic freedom of man anticipated Freud, Jung, Gruen, Laing and Reich, and others, so, along with Godel, Schrodinger, Bohr, Rutherford and Heisenberg, Crowley knew mathematical certainty was nonexistent. He knew reason was incapable of cracking the secrets of existence.

It will soon be admitted on all hands that the study of the nature of things in themselves is a work for which the human reason is incompetent - A. C. (Liber 777)

Men will then be lead to the development of a faculty, superior to reason, whose apprehension is independent of the hieroglyphic representations of which reason so vainly makes use - ibid

The cultivation of this higher or deeper, purer sensibility requires the direction of the Magical Will. It requires great sensitivity so the counsel of one's Guardian Angel (or Daemon) is heard and obeyed correctly.

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Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one's condition. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action - A. C. (Magick in Theory and Practice)

The message of Arcanum 20 is the message of Horus - the Imperial Self. He asks “Will you bid me enter? Will you embrace me beneath the ancient stars and lie with me in the secret place? Will you hearken to my Voice when I declare myself to be the Sword to sever your bonds, the Sphinx to dissolve your questions, the Lion to defend against the adversary? Know that I am your Self-Love returned...here at last...to lay my lips upon yours, for your fear has been loved by me, your loneliness and sorrow also. Let us go forth together and bury them gently in the heart of Hathor the Earth, for they serve us no longer. Together we slay the evil Set, and likewise slay the Father who, through his folly, gave his rival birth. For when the mirror of understanding is still you will see that, age after age, one has begotten the other in the dark womb of their separateness. So my Will declares that those who cannot live together must perish together. My Sword vanquishes both and frees the kingdom...

...Egypt is united, the Scales at rest. I silence the storms which deafened you to my Holy Word and Will. In that Silence is our beginning and end. And when the time of the Sword is past, we shall bring forth the Cup of healing and rejoicing. For behold, we are Horus! We are Pan!...Let us drink, dance and play!”

Thou who art I, beyond all I am

Who hast no nature, and no name

Who art, when all but thou are gone

Thou, centre and secret of the Sun

Thou, hidden spring of all things known

And unknown, Thou aloof, alone,

Thou, the true fire within the reed

Brooding and breeding, source and seed

Of life, love, liberty, and light

Thou beyond speech and beyond sight

Thee I invoke, my faint fresh fire

Kindling as mine intents aspire

Thee I invoke, abiding one,

Thee, centre, and secret of the Sun

And that most holy mystery

Of which the vehicle am I

Appear, most awful and most mild

As it is lawful, in thy child