Bird Dance by Virna Haffer

As most of the Northwest knows Tacoma has been turning itself around of late. Check out the Spaceworks Tacoma installations around the Theater District and take a walk around oldtown to fully grasp this rejuvenation of the artistic community. Then make sure to swing by The Tacoma Art Museum’s stunning exhibit of Virna Haffer’s Photography, Photograms and Woodcuts entitled A Turbulent Lens: The Photographic Art of Virna Haffer to ponder its very long experimental artistic legacy. Born in 1899 and raised in the anarchist community of Home, Washington Haffer began her career as a photographer in the 1920′s, continuing to create a prolific, internationally acclaimed body of work in many varied forms until the early 1970′s.

 If you cannot make it the show (it ends November 6th) the Tacoma Public Library houses an image archive of her work…

This year, a small group of us made the trip to Austin to observe first hand how our psychedelic brethren do it up down south.

Photo by Clarita Hinojosa

Austin Psych Fest 4 was held at the Seaholm Power Plant, an old art deco landmark that has been retired from producing actual power since the 1950s. The inside of the space was completely transformed for the occasion, with two stages set up to accomodate the 50-some bands who made the trek to Texas for our psychedelic consideration.  (This year’s lineup was truly amazing…so many bands we were excited to see, all in one place!)  We arrived on Friday afternoon just in time to catch Seattle’s own Night Beats deliver an inspired set of rock and roll with the help of special guest Chris Catalena (of The Tunnels and The Ghost Songs).

The Night Beats at Austin Psych Fest 4. Photo by Emily Pothast.

The next day, we caught Night Beats again, this time giving a performance at the Do512 Lounge, a small performance space that hosted small televised shows for several of the Psych Fest Bands (including The Meek, The Black Ryder and The Diamond Center. It was a great chance to see some of these bands in such an intimate setting. We couldn’t stay for long, however, because the afternoon was full of some of the bands we were most excited to catch: Cloudland Canyon, PONTIAK, White Hills, Lumerians, Young Prisms and The Soft Moon all played the second stage on Saturday, before SPECTRUM took to the mainstage for an epic, slow-building performance.

PONTIAK at Austin Psych Fest 4. Photo by Emily Pothast.

White Hills at Austin Psych Fest 4. Photo by Emily Pothast.

Lumerians at Austin Psych Fest 4. Photo by Emily Pothast.

On Day 3, we investigated some of Austin’s more exciting off-site attractions, including the amazing record store End of an Ear and Switched on Austin, an analog synth specialty store featuring immaculate modulars and vintage Farfisas as far as the eye could see. Again, we didn’t have much time because the afternoon was full of more bands we were dying to see: Denver’s Tjutjuna and Minneapolis’s Daughters of the Sun were standouts on the second stage.  By the time Roky Erickson and festival organizers The Black Angels took to the main stage, their audience was completely saturated by the ear-splitting, soul-vibrating good vibes.

Switched On Music and Electronics, Austin's synth mecca.

Tjutjuna at Austin Psych Fest 4. (In Austin, bands can have beer on stage!) Photo by Emily Pothast.

Austin Psych Fest is a very special event. People were there to hang out and network as much as they were there to listen to (and play) music, and so in many ways, it seems like the fine folks at the Reverberation Appreciation Society have put together a spectacular alternative to SXSW for those most interested in music on the heady end of the spectrum. If I were to issue any criticism at all of this near-perfect event, it would be that the sound on the mainstage was a little thin compared to the second stage, which was like a full-body vibratory chamber. That and maybe the Pacific Northwest felt a tiny bit underrepresented. (Aside from Night Beats, were there any Northwest bands on the bill? Maybe it’s just their proximity to us, but I thought Eternal Tapestry felt conspicuously absent. Purple Rhinestone Eagle, Kinski, AFCGT and [ahem] Midday Veil would have also fit seamlessly into the lineup, and Master Musicians of Bukkake would have warped it, in a good way.)

Dan Brinner from Skully'z Recordz at Austin Psych Fest 4.

But Northwest psych fans may rest assured that our humble Portable Shrines Magic Sound Theatre Vol. I compilation was all over the fest, from the Night Beats’s merch table to the record booth provided by Skully’z Recordz from New Orleans. It will be exciting to see which psychedelic sounds bubble up from the Northwest underground in time for APF5.

For those of you who didn’t make it to Austin this year, we’ve got a couple of delectable local events in store this week featuring APF4 bands: Cloudland Canyon is playing on Monday, May 9 at the Comet (with Midday Veil, Magnog and Brain Fruit) and Daughters of the Sun are playing next Saturday, May 14 at the Josephine (with Ayahuasca Travellers, Magnog, and This Blinding Light). We’ve also been talking to some of the other APF4 bands who are planning to come up in late summer, more details soon.

(Cuz in Seattle, it’s Psych Fest all year loooooong!)

In Austin, they have this weird ball of light in the sky. They call it "The Sun."

Lots more photos after the jump.

]]> http://www.portableshrines.com/blog/2010/09/02/photos-from-escalator-fest-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.portableshrines.com/blog/2010/07/06/peaking-lights/ http://www.portableshrines.com/blog/2010/07/06/peaking-lights/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 06:52:36 +0000 admin http://www.portableshrines.com/blog/?p=2719

Peaking Lights are on tour but alas I will have to settle for this fascinating film as they are not traveling to my mizrable and goshforsaken burg. Perhaps you are a luckier sort. Check out the whole “Sound Builders” series though it’s pretty nice…

7/27/10 – The Crepe Place, Santa Cruz, CA w/ Pocahaunted + Mi Ami

7/28/10 – Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco, CA, w/ Pocahaunted + Mi Ami+ Late Young

7/29/10 – Muddy Water’s Cafe, Santa Barbara, CA w/ Pocahaunted + Mi Ami

7/30/10 – The Bootleg Theater, LA, w/ Pocahaunted + Mi Ami

8/2/10 – Echo Curio, LA w/Ged Gengras, Sun Araw, Metal Rouge, Robedoor

8/3/10 – Tin Can House, San Diego, CA – w/Metal Rouge

8/4/10 – Tempe, AZ w/Metal Rouge

8/5/10 – Albuquerque, NM w/Metal Rouge

8/6/10 – Denver, CO w/Metal Rouge

8/7/10 – Kansas City, MO w/Metal Rouge

8/8/10 – The Mill, Iowa City, IA w/Metal Rouge

8/9/10 – Minneapolis, MN w/Metal Rouge

8/10/10 – Madison, WI

If you were to think of our species as united cosmically as one being, which is something that most of our religions and prominent neuronauts have been telling us since the beginning of what we perceive as time – plotlines begin to emerge that don’t necessarily involve self destruction. In not listening to these viewpoints, we’ve separated ourselves from our own eternal nature and the essence of time. We’re kind of like an idiot savant that can program the shit out of a computer but couldn’t get a date if his life depended on it. Another way of putting it is that we’re becoming increasingly and dangerously unbalanced as an individual; a work-a-holic who’s career success has blinded him to the fact that his personal life is in shambles. This unbalance has produced some hilarious and mind blowingly horrific enchantments, but we need to diversify our science now more than ever. Pleasure rather than violence. Cooperation rather than competition. Self love rather than self hatred. Biology rather than synthetics. DMT rather than prozac.

“The dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley”

The above is a classic quote from the immortal Terence Mckenna, who now thanks to the wonders of the internet, can be beamed into your consciousness whenever’s convenient to help destabilize your reality. You should try it at work. The main reason I bring this up is because recently I’ve had a few fairly clear communications congeal their way into my realm via the hypnagogic sleep state, boldly questioning the way I perceive magick. The drift I got was that while I’ve been experimenting with stretching my imagination in a context that our culture has considered magick or shamanic – conceptualizing it in this way, in this day and age is beyond retarded. Okay, so actually the drift I got was that me thinking about it in this way was exceptionally hilarious to them (and in them I mean, my Holy Guardian Angel, collective Oversoul or whatever you want to call it).

Which is a good point, but I’ll admit it hurt a bit simultaneously. Walking the spiritual path is like waging a war on your own bullshit, which is a difficult war, and why most people avoid it like the plague. It’s fun to think about these things as being mystical or sorcerous, but we only create boundaries with these esoteric avenues of thought because we haven’t yet investigated them thoroughly as a culture. It’s my contention that this area of inquiry has been intentionally repressed, but I’m not going to get into that here because it tends to get complicated. The late Harvard professor John E. Mack (also now immortal via free internet lectures) – really focused on hammering home the point that in his estimation, the most important conclusion to be taken away from his years of research with supposed “alien abductees” is that we need to come up with new models and means to study and conceive of reality – a novel kind of scientific method that incorporates subjective states of consciousness as legitimate rather than imaginary.

As I’ve said many times before, with current information technology, we’re now at a point where we have an insane amount of data regarding those who achieve transpersonal states of consciousness. The primary question raised by this information is basically: if those who attain these states consistently come back with similar stories and themes, over and over and over again, doesn’t this represent a type of objective reality beyond what we’re trained to believe? How do we study this multiverse of consciousness in a way that’s beneficial to the whole of the planet and therefore us as a species?

It’s almost a moot point because this isn’t what we’re putting our resources into, but it’s not all bad.  Millitary spending’s going through the roof. Oh wait, that is pretty bad. It’s nearly doubled since 9/11 (cue the conspiracy theorists); which is especially heinous in the midst of the current class war. This shit is really happening. This is what we’re channeling our collective energies into as a species. A couple weeks back, Aubrey forwarded me a link to this documentary about weird and in my mind somewhat creepy technological advances in fields like robotics and neuroscience called Technocalypse, which I’d recommend to anyone. There’s an essence of beauty in the way we can now seemingly cull anything out of the realm of fantasy into reality, but man, why are we doing some of this odd crap?

In a book I read by one of the military’s pay-rolled psychic’s (it was either Lyn Buchanan or Joseph McMoneagle, I can’t honestly remember), the concept that the majority of our science actually comes from science fiction was discussed at length – the idea that ultimately the science fiction that young researchers grow up reading is what drives the avenues of creation they aspire to – power of suggestion plain and simple. Now, what I find unsettling about this, is that in a lot of the sci fi that’s succeeded in western culture, our creation of robots turns out being spectacularly disastrous to put it mildly. If I were to go out on a limb and theorize as to why, I’d say that our odd compulsion to create synthetic life in the images of beings from our world, represents as far away as we can get from what many refer to as: “source” or “god”. We’re attempting to create life void of spirit, which is just kind of a sketchy concept anyway you look at it. The true purpose to most of this technology will most certainly be to kill brown people and phase the human work force into obsolescence. My friend Ryk recently turned me on to the fact that militarized robotic dogs are now in the works. Militarized robot dogs – no shit! It’s not all doom and gloom though. Video games continue to be awesome, albeit largely more violent than I’d prefer. It’s easy to forget that the military did help create the internet. These advances always have repercussions that benefit humanity if almost by accident. In a way, I think the information technology we’ve only just begun to develop, gives us new ways to shape our interior world that could potentially have wide reaching transformative effects on our society if we were to manipulate them properly. Shortly after I started working a job where I stared at a computer all day, I began to find myself awake in the middle of the night, again in a hynagogic state, with consistent visitations from cybernetic light entities who seemed to be psychically rebuilding my life essence. Seriously strange, like updates being installed on a computer driving my consciousness to move faster and faster towards infinity. This continued for quite some time, and still happens on occasion. I had a dream once where I fell asleep at my desk and a hand reached out of my computer screen and inserted a disc deep into my forehead – which lead to pretty much the same sensation – reality accelerating into a detached informational oblivion.

The concept of a transhuman as laid out in the tehnocalypse feature is completely different than what I would conceive. These dorks are talking about wanting to download their consciousness onto a hard drive as a means to achieve immortality (which is really misguided when our souls are already eternal). I’d envision telepathic sex gods who could play the shit out of the drums and create new, exotic recreational drugs with a mere thought.

In Richard Metzger’s recent two part interview with Genesis P. Orridge (which you can take in here and here) the concept of transhumans being psychick pan sexual beings is thrown out there, which is oddly in tune with what you often read about say, grey aliens. In Genesis’ opinion, anything we can do to promote and experiment with the concept of species unity is of paramount importance. Things like genetic manipulation and eugenics are concepts he supports whole heartedly. Not a popular avenue of thought I know, but just for a minute think about how we liberally tinker with the genetic lines of other species who we deem as beneath us. I personally love watching dog shows, because they’re essentially a genetic trade conference. It gives me kind of an intergalactic feeling inside. It’s pretty arrogant to think that if there was an older, more highly evolved species than us in the universe (or even say, many), it or they wouldn’t be conducting similar experiments on our populace. Just food for thought. He also talks about how he and his late wife, Lady Jane, used to keep each other continually spaced on ketamine (who they refer to as “grandmother” if I’m remembering correctly) for days at a time – even waking up before one another and going all in with some sleep dosing. You should really listen to that if you have time.

Maybe I’ve just been geeking out on Caprica a bit much as of late, but all these things make me wonder if the prime quandary presented to us in creating weirdo synthetic killbots, is truly the very nature of our existence itself. The unfortunate thing about where science has gone is that we’re starting to get a lot of results, which is making us oh so very arrogant about the legitimacy of the philosophy getting these results – hence, we are even more prone to ignore basic limitations like the fact that we don’t even know what we are or why we’re here exactly. We’re starting to understand that our brains are bio computers programmable by chemical stimulation and exterior suggestion, but we refuse to ask the larger questions. Here’s a thought: we have souls, that’s what you science geeks always seem to be missing. We are ultimately, a means to channel psionic energy from the astral plane into a particularly awe inspiring and interwoven network of plotlines, as a means to expand reality. The potentiality is limitless.

If you were to think of our species as united cosmically as one being, which is something that most of our religions and prominent neuronauts have been telling us since the beginning of what we perceive as time – plotlines begin to emerge that don’t necessarily involve self destruction. In not listening to these viewpoints, we’ve separated ourselves from our own eternal nature and the essence of time. We’re kind of like an idiot savant that can program the shit out of a computer but couldn’t get a date if his life depended on it. Another way of putting it is that we’re becoming increasingly and dangerously unbalanced as an individual; a work-a-holic who’s career success has blinded him to the fact that his personal life is in shambles. This unbalance has produced some hilarious and mind blowingly horrific enchantments, but we need to diversify our science now more than ever. Pleasure rather than violence. Cooperation rather than competition. Self love rather than self hatred. Biology rather than synthetics. DMT rather than prozac. In thinking about the concept of transhumanism and contemplating my own version of it, in conjunction with questioning my own perception of magick as commanded by internal forces, I decided I’d start a new field of psychology for my self and anyone else who might actually be prone to listen. While I’ll always refer to my particular psychosis as chaos sorcery, this is merely a reference to the ancient traditions and philosophies that have influenced my worldview. I’m really an experimental psychologist, and since we’re just throwing the prefix trans on everything these days, let’s call my particular field of inquiry transdimensional psychology. This is the field that sees the brain as a bio computer that can be reprogrammed to accept its own multi-dimensional reality and contact those other worlds of imagination in which it currently exists largely unknowingly. The primary and most difficult step to achieving meaningful contact with these unknown worlds is to eliminate the doubt as to your own expansive nature by pursuing transpersonal states of consciousness. This is done to create a behaviorally transformative ontological shock. The thing that mystics, philosophers, magickians, sorcerers and the like have been trying to tell humanity for centuries now, is that while you can’t prove the reality of these matters by conventional scientific method (well, that’s actually debatable), you can prove them to yourself. In fact, you must. A transdimensional psychologist is one who seeks to manipulate what is known as the physical world with information and abilities gained by accessing dimensions of consciousness hitherto unknown, by any means necessary. Transdimensional psychology – you heard it here first.

This month we are excited to feature Moon Duo- a new project from Ripley of the Wooden Shjips.

The fine folks at Arthur recently posted a killer tune by Moon Duo- Check it.

Little Claw are one of Kim and Thurston’s fave bands (he just put out there 2nd album on Ecstatic Peace) and they leave a trail of fire in their wake wherever they go. Check out some of their new tunes HERE.

Little Claw in the light of day...

Brother Raven are a local Seattle duo who deserve your undivided attention. Their analog virtuosity will take you on an awesome voyage through the pineapple portal and into interstellar space. Dig up on that shit right HERE.

Thanks once again go to Adam Svenson for the interviewing. Take it away Adam-

The Slaves exist at a juncture of the past and the future. This Portland two-piece
conjure up a cough syrup collusion between sweet crooning AM radio vocals and hazy
keyboards and slow time signatures. There is a beauty and darkness in their sound
that reflects their love of 50′s pop and modern noise and Goth musical moves, and a
record of theirs would not be out of place in the 4AD catalogue or placed during
the end credits of a harrowing foreign film. Sit back and let your mind wash down
the twilight river pouring forth from the Slaves.

Who are The Slaves and where do you come from?

The Slaves are Birch Cooper and Barbara Kinzle and we’re both from the Northwest.
I (Birch) grew up in Alaska, until I moved to the “greater Portland area” (AKA
Forest Grove) where Barbara and I went to high school together. After that Barbara
went to Portland and I went to Olympia. I’ve lived in Portland now for about 2
years.

You used to be an improv / noise band before morphing into a more structured
format…is there still a element of improvisation when you record and play live?

Improvisation is an important part of our music. We do have structures to our
songs, but they are really reliant on the energy of the moment, which is the main
thing that I like about improvisation.

Was the progression from a free-form approach to song-based pretty natural?

Yeah, ever since “The Slaves” really came into being, we’ve mixed the two, and
that’s what has come most naturally to us. We really started structuring our music
when we had the idea to try and blend “drone” and “noise” with “50′s rock/pop”.

Do the songs come out of improvisations or is the structure there before recording
them?

Well, we don’t really think of recordings as the ultimate way for a song to exist,
we think of them as being equal to a live song. Our songs come out of
improvisation, and then we develop structures from that, but the songs tend to keep
on changing after we record them.

If someone described your sound using the words “Twin Peaks” and “4AD”, would you
walk away, shaking your head with disgust?

We definitely consider David Lynch an influence. Juliee Cruise and Angelo
Badalamenti, too. I think that this answer is going to bleed into the next
question.

How about “cough syrup” and “Suicide (the band)”?

We love Suicide and we love This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins. I’m not crazy about
the Suicide comparison, though, if only because I feel like the commonalities
between our music are the result of us deciding to mix certain elements that are
also mixed in Suicide, rather than trying to follow in Suicides footsteps. I do
think that it’s pretty honest to say that we are aware of those bands, though, and
we have been affected by them.
Song to the Siren was kind of a gateway for us. We first heard it in “Lost Highway”
and were blown away, enough so that we decided to cover it, and i think that the
song has had a lasting impact on our band. Also, Alan Vegas collaboration with
Pansonic and Bruce Springsteens cover of “Dream Baby Dream” are important ones.
I think a lot of our sound comes from Barbara’s child hood love of new age music,
in combination with all the other stuff. 50′s rock, surf rock (especially Beach
Boys), free noise, composed noise, goth, industrial music, drone music, black
metal, contemporary pop/hip hop, amazing pop, 90′s rap, Neil Young “Trans”.
After getting really into noise music, I got really into pop music. I was very
interested in extreme music, and I think that The Slaves have always strove for
the extreme qualities of pop music. The helplessness and the power…
Actually, I like the “cough syrup” comparison the best. When we play I often try
to imagine that we are moving incredibly fast and incredibly slow at the same time,
in kind of a frozen moment of speed. I’ve never actually tripped on cough syrup
though….

You have a self-released CD out…any new releases coming out soon?

We are just completing our new release called “Grey Angel”! We’re putting it out
ourselves on tape and CDR. We’re really excited about it.. it’s definitely the
best sounding recordings that I’ve ever done.

Would you consider your music psychedelic?

What a question! I think that all music is psychedelic on a basic level. But I
would say that we try to hone in on the deep dark parts of human experience, and
for me that is a very psychedelic space.