Catalytic Alembic
Heartbeat
Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville follows a grandmother and her obese dog on a journey to rescue her cyclist son from the captivity of the French-American mafia, helped by a trio of elderly women ex-vaudeville performers. Kidnapped via his exhaustion from the ongoing Tour de France, he’s forced into a construction of enslavement of the most industrial kind, where his bodily autonomy becomes a mere engine for machines. The son (named Champion) and the other two cyclists with him are shown as horses, long faces and loping, miserable expressions in their labor. In comparison, the life with his grandmother is shown in a kind of primitive harmony. The domestic sounds of her tinkering about their shared home form a rhythm that he operates by, dancing silently to the tune she plays for him. His role as the dancer and the importance of the grandmother as the musician is further reinforced by the fact of him early on attempting to play piano and finding no interest in it, instead desiring cycling (dancing) - which he indulges in rhythmic circles along the twinkling of his metal machine. The music ceases, to be replaced with discipline and in response his grandmother journeys in pursuit of the leviathan across the ocean, to the decadence of America. There, she is forced to learn poetry at a deeper level than the domestic - beyond the veil of the eternal (the sublime ocean) she enters this other realm, the dreamworld of desire. Her own playing, clumsy and crass, is interrupted by the sisters who use the same domestic instruments as her to produce music with far more complexity than hers - one that eventually leads the grandmother and the sisters on their way to finding Champion and breaking him out of his industrial enslavement, riding off into the nighttime wilderness together.
Faith of Mirror’s Edge moves through the world in much the same fashion. The first proper mission of the game follows her attempting to find her sister’s signal inside the corporate office of a populist mayoral candidate. The first half of the mission is like France for Champion and his grandmother, Faith runs forward on the rhythm of the domestic sounds around her, her own footsteps forming a foundational beat to the cars honking, machinery whirring, wind blowing, as the urban machinery ticks along at its usual tune. In the second half of the mission, Faith is then thrust into a world of danger, where her sister is set up for the assassination of the aforementioned politician, with Faith fleeing the scene as police converge. As Faith runs, the music of Solar Fields focuses the auditory landscape into a crystalline form, the sounds now directional, focused around her own forward momentum. In the same way as the grandmother’s journey, the basic drama is that of the low chaos of the world, a passage through the realm of infinity (in the film’s case the black ocean, in the game’s case a violence Kate describes as being sublime - “everything went black”) and then the world is able to form in a higher level - music is born. The rhythm of forward motion - that of the runner or the cyclist, or that of the soul forward through linear time - is yoked to higher and more developed complexities of vibration that carry it on towards freedom - both works end with the main characters riding off into the infinity of the night sky.
The music remains with Faith onwards, after her initiation. She begins to truly run through the rest of the game, with even the sections with pursuers having a tone-setting beat of rhythm undergirding her motion. This is a theme taken up by the composer of the game’s music, Solar Fields, in the rest of his work. Themes of motion, flight, life blooming fast and angular amidst empty landscapes of steel and rock. As a visual representation of Faith’s intuitive understanding of motion, we have the various cues that accentuate her sight. The gun of an enemy flashes in the proper timing to disarm him, the path forward is illuminated with a red overlay painting where she’s to run and jump next. Over the stone-white of the rest of the city, the rest of the solid, simple colors form the rest of it, the view of the music, of her motion. Faith is guided, along music and sight, all connecting both up and below via her motion. In a sense, she becomes botanical - the musical thrumming through her body as a vibration between Heaven and Earth, her body moving to its tune, her sight taking her along it. The music unifies her, body and soul, on a single way, a single vibe. The music is a dao upon which Faith flows through the world.
Music as a medium operates through the creation of a stream of unified time - a stream of time that all those captured in the locale of the audio output are yoked upon, moving within that vibration through time. It creates small pockets where all motion through time is reoriented towards its dao. This unified stream of time, motion captured along the vibe of the music - Makoto Kawabata remarks that his playing is like an antennae. The music simply appears, beamed down from the heavens, projected outwards from his instruments. The musician is between the flow, taking wide-band, cosmic information and narrowing it into a single stream, creating tributaries off the dao.
The practical application for this can be seen in the car stereo system - to put music into the self, extended via the motor vehicle. All motions of the self, along time and through the world, occur on the higher instructions of the music. Setting oneself along the music, one is set along that slice of the cosmic information in their brief passage through time. Walking down the street, working, driving, with headphones in, plugged into something higher - one traverses the world as Faith does. Music gives direction, runner-vision. In a way, music represents a dramatic limiting - white light is all colors, and our constant stare into white light is often blinding. Music is a prism, splitting it into a single color, the red that guides Faith through the world. Rather than be paraylzed by the inaction of comprehending totality, music limits the flow to a signal narrow range of signal, creates the space for choices to be made - choices of which wind to set course on, the beginning step in moving beyond the womb.
Humanity in this way is music - a human life, limited as it is within space and time, is nothing but a narrowing of the eternal into a single perspective, a single soul. Music is born through the same process as the human soul, where the infinite is narrowed onto the constraints of time and space. For a human being to be yoked along music, is to dance, always with a partner - the music, to create something akin to the self beyond the self - a peer within the narrowness of human experience.
Saint Stephen With a Rose
The first song of the Dead’s first album welcomes the listener into California - try on your wings and find out where it’s at, as its 1967 release points towards the premise of the decade that was just starting to hit the mind of the average listener. The early period of acid tests and merry pranksters was over, and now the music truly began - blues rock and jugband improvisations mutated into harder, more experimental psychedelic rock, do-wop harmonies and boy band songettes mutated into the studio-symphonies of Brian Wilson and Sgt. Pepper.
By the time of the end of the long 60s (most defining this as sometime between the Kennedy assassination and the end of the Vietnam war), the Dead had crystallized into something of their own. The structure of the traveling Dead, a roughly thirty-year long perpetual tour, the roaming carnival of locals drawn in and the tighter subculture who carried to the torch of the band as it rambled city-to-city. The music provided a backdrop for all that accompanied the most traditional aspects of that 1960s moment, the space of controlled hedonism, the music the jester-king of it all.
This function, of the music as the standard, the blazon of something deeper gave musicians like Garcia a responsibility beyond mere art. Like few other things, a empowered musician is not just one who makes art the way a painter or novelist would, but one who acts as a conduit. Garcia was the solar mass at the center of thousand currents that all became greater than their sum via transmission through his guitar - from early computing to the narcotics industry, all found their flows unified like disparate tributaries feeding a great river. This, not the adulation of critics or even artistic value, is the highest aim of music - the occult act of creating a social order, with the music acting as the globus cruciger, the solar center.
The Dead’s more occult aspects were spoken of directly in their early work - in many ways their most important works for the great extent it speaks directly of what they later became. While the literal text of their music after Live/Dead (with a few exceptions, mostly in the era around Blues for Allah and Wake of the Flood) became psychedelic re-transmissions of more classic American music, the larger context remains grounded of what they spoke of early on - Anthem of the Sun opens with a hymn to the Merry Pranksters, presaging the nomadic ethos of the band’s perpetual touring and its attendant social functions - even down to the blunt economic fact of being an important channel for the distribution of relatively unpopular and unprofitable narcotics such as LSD and Psilocybin. The second song cracks open like the dawn of the solar center that was the band amidst all the flows harmonized under their banner - “sun comes up blood red / wind yells upon a stone / all graceful instruments are known”.
On the other side of the culture from the Carnival, the media found itself at the helm of an ecstatic uprising of its own. The Beatles inspired a far more vertical uprising. While the Dead developed a solar-planet relationship with its following, its wandering across the nation a lodestar for the disparate forces arrayed around it, the Beatles were from the beginning, a product of vertical technologies, their televised appearances and later concerts, from the beginning highly planned enterprises put together by the powers that be of mass media.
This romance, between the Beatles and their fans through media, shows itself in the bloody-heart ring on Ringo’s finger in Help!. McKinney writes of it as the center of Beatlemania, as the focal point of the ravenous desire, grasping, tearing hands, the boys offered up as objects to the world by their promoters and managers. McKinney notes this in contrast, the Beatles becoming like gods in being offered to the ravenous crowd, some occult vibration awakening a hunger in the world and the boys offered up as the vessels for that hunger. At the center of it all, that bloody red ring, the beating heart of the music, of Beatlemania.
David Bowie underwent the same story in the personage of Ziggy Stardust. Here, the concept of the rockstar offered up as a sacrificial deity comes full circle - Michael Judge pointed out elegantly how Ziggy is directly channeling the arc of Orpheus in the two halves of his visage - the fantasy and the underbelly. Ziggy journeys through the heights of fantasy, that fantasy of vertical stardom which ultimately thrusts the star themselves upon the altar to be torn apart. The pair of albums ends like Orpheus’ journey. Ziggy roams ghostlike after being torn apart by the hunger of the audience, the grasping hands and teeth of their collective fantasy reducing the human to nothing.
With these two fandoms, there’s an important distinction to make between the artist as the sacrifice and the artist as the focal point. The Dead were conduits, even musically - their sound a unique mix of elements plucked from the ether that can be strictly moored in their time period, their early career marked by a transition from jug band to electric blues to studio experimentation to folksy “back to the earth” archetypal of the decade, and their later career taking from elements floating around them equally, space rock, progressive, blues, country, and etc, all fusing together in the syncretic sound of their live shows. Their fanbase too, an eclectic mix of things floating in the air that circulate through the band as a focal point. The Beatles or Ziggy were offerings, the music an induction into the cult of the sacrificed Orpheus. The music was not the point, but an excuse to deliver the Beatles, to transmit Beatlemania in a fungible and easily consumable fashion, a recorded dissemination of the cult’s vibration.
A Rolling Stone
In David Bowie’s Outside, Ramona A Stone deals in so-called “interest drugs” - an unnamed substance with effects enhancing the training of the pleasure-industrial complex detailed within the album. Baby Grace details in her tape being kept in isolation, allowed to interact with the world only through popular culture and those same drugs Ramona consistently gives her. The effects are described elsewhere, obliquely. The Minotaur, the man who murdered Baby Grace, describes being focused from outside, brought to limits of his experience by an exterior influence - “research has pierced all extremes of my sex / needlepoint light blinds the will to be next” as he’s driven into madness towards Baby Grace. In the next song, where Ramona describes her vocation in first person, there’s a delivery of the line “twitch and scream, it’ll end in chrome, night of the female good time drone” - a nod to the warping done by Ramona.
The identity of the drug, could be none of than that drug which came into being through a world of pleasure, through a world of ecstatic art-violence - 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine - MDMA. An Erowid writer describes the cycle of addiction the drug led her down, the shimmering, fleshoiled world it brought her into, in perfect sync with the music, with the rest of humanity. The drug is a drug of the flesh, a drug of connection with the flesh via music, a drug of the same kind of artistic ecstasy that much of Outside is concerned with - that repeated phrase of the Minotaur at the end of The Voyeur of Utter Destruction, the perfect description of its effects.
In Outside, there’s a separation between the drug’s high and its victim, in the murderer and victim - the Minotaur and Baby Grace, rolling and suicide tuesday respectively. The album focuses intently on the state of Baby Grace, descriptions of empty females, women sold like dolls by Algeria Touchshriek, created by Ramona.
For the males, for the Minotaur, the drug functions as “mind-filters”, enhancements of the world of flesh yoked unto music. Remarks have percolated in recent years of murders committed while under the influence of these MDMA, males hung up on the “mind filters”. In the music video for Murder On My Mind, YNW Melly recounts killings, recounts molly mixed with promenthazine while a snake wraps itself around his weakened body inside a prisoncell decorated in magical instruments, candle-adorned altars, writings on the wall, chickens hanging from strings.The song is unreliable, with the testimony contradicting itself, as if the murder floats away from Melly himself, “murder on my mind” more literal than expected - a spectre of violence, of murder, haunting the mind. Murder in the twenty-first century functions like this, flowing, like the snake coiled around Melly’s body, through the culture. Art-murder becomes a true trend as bodies stack up, sacrificied and monetized, songs with lyrics listing bodies, the Who I Smoke / When I See You A-side / B-side emerging as the most recent model for selling records.
Violence accelerates as music does, as narcotics and music form one in the same - the vibratory structuring of how souls interact with the world. It’s not that MDMA or Yungeen Ace caused these murders or that these murders caused these drugs, but that their existence is so wrapped up in each other that separation is futile. The drugs, the music, the act, are all a single event, a single ritual-environment of action. Their separation is like to separate “what is the essence of a building? - its windows, its bricks, its doors…”
LIke the shooters rolling during each drill, Alex DeLarge’s appreciation of Beethoven during his wild, pre-disciplined state was in tandem with his consumption of Milk Plus. Bowie remarks in an interview of “black noise” a theoretical sonic frequency that could bring down cities by being performed, on the same principle as the opera note shattering a wineglass. This Black Noise is the same that Pink inspires in The Wall, screaming through his rally as his hammer goons tear up the city in an orgy of rock n roll violence. Music here goes hand in hand with everything in its so called “dark side” - the violence, the crowds, the narcotics - all unified around the centerpoint of the music and the social event it stages. It’s through this that Bowie remarked as the Thin White Duke, that Hitler was the first rockstar - a decade-long staging of an entire country in a grander orgy than any concert-stampede could ever hope to. Hitler built his performance on Wagner, as DeLarge on Beethoven, as Pink on his own songs, etc, etc. The music here is not just sound or even art, but something grander - the music is a canvas, a backdrop that sets the stage for and underlies all of what is to come, provides the social and magical context for all that will occur upon it.
Travis Scott is, for his latest ritual sacrifice in the Astroworld Festival, possibly the purest implementation of these principles of rock n roll since they were unintentionally found with Altamont and Woodstock. The fans are taken to the orgy through a recreation of the gaping maw in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, where they’re packed into a venue far too small for the crowd size of fifty thousand people. On stage, Travis Scott performs beneath a visual display set up to create hypnotic visuals, where adornments around the fringe dance upon the edge of a large circular portal that extends behind the stage, in front of which Scott performs. While light shows, hypnotic visuals, and pyrotechnics go off, Travis Scott performs, cheering on death, as he encourages the overpacked crowd to increase their violence and chaos as almost a dozen people are killed in the spectacle.
I disagree with Trap Lore Ross that this concert was a disaster. Like Woodstock, like Altamont, and like the countless stories of violence that have bubbled beneath musico-narcotics spectacles such as this one, events like this are not an aberration, but a fulfilment. Altamont was, after all, the fantasy of Woodstock with a bloodier ending - the romance of a free concert, of an unleashed orgy around the central cult of the rock ‘n roll soundwaves, ended in just that - energies of the crowd unleashed, and the result was out of the hands of the organizers. We speak of events like these as though one can be separated from the other, but that’s not the case. One and the other are the same. Astroworld ‘21 is to Woodstock ‘69 what Hitler is to Wagner - the fantasy raised to the highest. The crowd becomes denser, the music’s hypnosis more intense, the violence so much greater.
Word On A Wing
The structure of the human body’s energy is a structure of time - energy is spent in ways particular to the mind controlling the body as well as the nature of the calories which underlie that energy. All of this is the foundation of time and space the body inhabits within the world. This forms a tripartite relationship, with the body’s structure, the structuring of the organism’s energy across time, and the body’s movements through space. Much has been written about the tradeoffs of carbohydrates, proteins, or lipids, but rarely has the fourth calorie been discussed in this context - ethanol.
Apes have been observed fermenting fruits in order to get a sort of pruno-type substance from them - it’s fair to say from this evidence that ethanol not only predates every other narcotic, but probably humanity as we know it. It’s curious then, that ethanol should replace the traditional calorie sources, as ethanol, as well as every narcotic after it, has the effect of structuring the human organism across space in ways beyond the typical structures of the human intellect making choices in tune with energy reserves. Ethanol and other narcotics structure the human organism as catalysts, inspiring altered formations of activity across time - from disoriented chaos to religious deliriums.
This is the “Song of Solomon”, where the prayer structures the flesh in the love of the unspoken husband. Altered formations beyond the animal are made to structure space and time towards ends perpendicular to the merely horizontal. Heaven descends upon Earth and gives it form, as Earth gives flesh to Heaven. This unity is spoken of directly in a Vatican document describing the liturgical use of music - the people, the clergy, and all, are united in a single ecstasy, participating on the same vibration, being raised by it towards Heaven. More potent than simple prayer, both in its effectiveness at influencing individuals but also in its social capacities, the body of the church is unified in the shape of Heaven when its participating in this single structure of shared music.
Music, in much the same way as a narcotic, functions by structuring human time through an exterior catalyst. There’s a certain irony to the music critic as a concept - the Fantanos of the world settling into their chair and putting on nice expensive headphones to listen to anything on a CD in the same mindset - whether that’s mindless repetitive dance music, thrashing noise, or a symphony. It’s this divorcing of music from context that illustrates what music is not - a pure artform, divorced from the nature of itself as a narcotic. Literature or painting is an artform, an object sovereign in the world, while music is something unto itself entirely - a narcotic-like vibration through the air that structures time and the experience across time of all those captured within its structuring of time.
It’s this which has led many to posit the concept that narcotics are behind the human creation of language, the catalyst which allowed information to be unmoored from its spatio-temporal resonance, recorded, stored, distributed - in perpendicular growth from the real. McKenna calls this “stoned ape” theory. The term I’ll use for this is catalysm - for both music and for narcotics as the new structuring of time. Like ethanol’s structuring of time beyond the usual confines of the other three calorie sources, music and narcotics structure human time in ways that catalyze psychic / spiritual changes beyond the typical confines of linear time and thought.
Garcia observed something very similar to this, remarking on the language of the saccharine kingdom, vegetables speaking to him in iambic petameter, italian and german accents, as he lapsed into his diabetic coma. Similarly, many have spoken of seeing things beyond comprehension, like language would be under the stoned ape hypothesis, in the machine elves and other such sights while on DMT. It’s this that led to the Lilly-Lovett attempts to form a bridge between humanity and dolphins. While the results were underwhelming, the theory was a symphony of catalysts - bonding together in lifestyle, sex, and narcotics to attempt to create an alembic where a breakthrough connection could be formed.
This is the space of catalysm - all vibrations are unified to construct time perpendicular to its typical progression. Narcotics and music are reproducible and fungible, arranged in different contexts and places to create these alembics. The orchestra plays on all bands of perception to wholly dominate the soundscape across a span of time in a given space, as the narcotic structures time working its way through the body. This alembic is the space of potential, the space of moving beyond, two and three dimensional movement beyond a one dimensional linearity.
Towards the middle of Eyes Wide Shut Doctor Hartford sneaks into a masquerade ball where he witnesses a ritual taking place. A hierophant cloaked in red directs a circle of women with a censer and staff while a crowd wearing black cloaks and commedia dell’arte masks watch. The ritual is one of the tenth tarot card, the Wheel. Four animals arranged on a rotating wheel go through the motions of the world, the cycles of the seasons, the transient, filthy things of the phenomenal. The masks make up this cosmology, a complete spectrum being caricatured in their outfits, from celestial bodies to varying social stations - the whole world arrayed before the circle, where the women orbit the master like planets around the red sun. The music playing is Jocelyn Pook’s Masked Ball, a song that on her album Floods comes after the apocalyptic progression of Oppenheimer > Blow the Wind / Pie Jesu. A reading from the Bhagavid Ghita says, piercing through the inverted mass - “to protect the righteous, to annihilate the wicked, and to reestablish the principles of dharma I appear on this earth, age after age”. The wheel of fortune re-asserts itself after apocalypse as the protagonist fully enters the dream. What he sees before him is the world, all pathways leading to this, to the centerpoint where the Wheel of Samsara is arrayed before him in complete glory. This all occurring at the apex of a journey into the heart of reality - his flesh rejects him and he’s sent out from the peachflesh toned walls of his bedroom to the blue velvet of the city night, wandering deeper and deeper until he gains entrance to this ceremony. There, horror beyond all horrors he sees the world. He sees the music at the enter of it all, the music of a dream - where all unconscious and platonic things are arrayed perfectly in their ebbing and flowing that makes up the text of history. This is the alembic, where Heaven and Earth are unified, the world of the dream, where the narcotic, the musical, creates a vibratory space and the wheel can be seen in all its glory and horror.
In response to this, Bowie remarks with defeat in the album Reality. The album, beginning with New Killer Star’s introduction to the plastic world of the 21st century, continues on with perpetual disillusionment and abandonment of the world. The current through is death-driven, finding an escape, finding a suicide method. At the end, in the two songs finishing the album, Reality and Bring Me the Disco King - breakthrough. The black iron prison is left behind and the real world is - everything. With horror and despair, the final song, after breaking through into Reality, sings “dance dance dance through the fire” and “you promised me the ending would be clear”, a consciousness of death, a consciousness of escaping the confines of the self and finding only the wheel of fortune. The album’s ending silence is a silence of despair and yet a silence that can open to beauty. One remembers Yuki’s song from The Hidden Fortress, of all the things transient and phenomenal burning before the fire. The Disco King dances across the world, across the wheel like Kali - the music did in fact work to bring the narrator out into reality - the disappointment was looking for some wonderland beyond and finding only what was there all along.
Both of these are journeys to the heart of catalysm. The structuring of vibrations varies dramatically based on what the given scenario is - the difference between death metal and bubblegum pop, between diphenhydramine and caffeine - but the fundamental nature is identical, in structuring time perpendicular to the typical. This catalysm makes up all the steps, all relative positions on the Wheel. When Bowie finds the Disco King, what he finds is music itself - the king of the wheel, the king of all unifications of Heaven and Earth.
Bibliography
The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet
Mirror’s Edge, DICE
The discography of Solar Fields
Kawabata Makoto profile, acidmotherstemple.com
Driving while listening to music
The Grateful Dead FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Jam Band in History, Tony Sclafini
Grateful Dead, The Grateful Dead
Anthem of the Sun, The Grateful Dead
Heads, Jesse Jarnow
Magic Circles, Devin McKinney
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, David Bowie
Aladdin Sane, David Bowie
Ziggy in America Orpheus in Hell, Michael S. Judge
1. Outside, David Bowie
Beautiful Drug Devastating Habituation, xoxo
Murder On My Mind, YNW Melly
Who I Smoke, Spinabenz - Whoppa Wit Da Choppa - Yungeen Ace - FastMoney Goon
When I See You Remix, JULIO FOOLIO
List of Dead Opps, JULIO FOOLIO
Jacksonville’s Deadly Gang War, Trap Lore Ross
A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick
Astroworld 21: Hell on Earth, Trap Lore Ross
David Bowie Explains What Black Noise Is, The Dick Cavett Show
Pink Floyd’s the Wall, Alan Parker
From Kether to Makluth, Michael S. Judge
Song of Solomon, King James Bible
Musicam Sacram, Second Vatican Ecumenical Council
Drunken monkeys: what animals tell us about our thirst for booze, Robert Sanders
Sacred Plants as Guides - New Dimensions of the Soul, Terrence McKenna
Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick
The Tarot of Marseilles
Floods, Jocelyn Pook
Reality, David Bowie
The Hidden Fortress, Akira Kurosawa