Engram Eclipse Ellipses
Engram Eclipse Ellipses
Moon ∴ Revel's Eclipse Tour Journal: Part I
Disappearer
The art of disappearing is an art I’ve grown quite good at— whether rooster-chested or yellow-bellied, I’ve gotten too accustomed to moving on. This realization echoed and reverberated around my calcified brain as we prepared to leave. “We’ll be back in two weeks,” I kept reminding myself, “Don’t be brash, there is a home to come back to.” I’ve lived with myself long enough to know that a home was a foreign component, and never-returning was an all too familiar resolve. But things are different now— and this will be the first time a musickal tour didn’t end up in me not returning to where I came from, usually existing in a roughshod and depersonalized somewhere new. “The subtle art of a boomerang kid,” a snarky term other musicians that returned to their adult lives after tour and a jealous gab at that— “From artful dodger to boomerang kid,” I smirked, surprised at the revelation I am now one.
The still-ramshackled-yet-careful-coursed Moon Revel tour couldn’t have come at a better time— the autumnal swing in full chime, our occupational gaskets had just blown at wits’ end, and the focus on escapism framed our free time within rehearsal and performance. The liminal rite before tour; as many ducks as you can get to stand-hut and the burning dreams of unknown scapes that keep you awake, is a terribly favorite time of mine… and one I had almost forgotten!
We haven’t performed live really (I had one solo show last year) since the covid-casm, separately or together. And we haven’t toured in over a decade in our respective “careers” (I hate that term when it comes to song-writing, performing and record-making!). So what better way than a baptism by fire: a short tour down through Idaho way to Salt Lake, New Mexico, Arizona, and ending in San Diego & Long Beach.
The route is a perfect snapshot of my wayward trajectory, and I suppose I wasn’t ready for my childhood haunts and the familial harrows a-bloomin’— nor the mental acuity needed to undertake such a mad-dash— and I suppose I didn’t care. I made a pact to look only feet ahead and enjoy myself, with some allowance in sauntering in the possibility of a new state (physically and mentally) to haunt. Or hell, maybe even an old one… either way, The Prospectre haunted on.
I worked out an ~8 song set. Mary and I would back eachother’s 30-40min sets via vocals, percussion and guitar. I would sit in front of a ramshackle drum-set (the haunted sceptre-spectre the Prospectre ritual exalted) that I fashioned with a 70’s ryhthm machine, a small modern Korg drum machine, a 4 channel mic-mixer for both our vocals & electronic drums. I would recharge my long dormant magickal moniker, Revelator Rosz, (shortened to Revel Rosz as a means to prefix the title) and forego the heteronym-baggage that followed Dakota Slim. I was excited that some Haunts wouldn't know who was there, and univited guests could heed the call to wreak revenge on Dakota Slim if they saw that name in the local paper! Or so I half-mused, no one cares that much and it was nice to shed the ghost of Slim and charge with the Revelator…
My set usually had me drumming with my feet and circling my hands around Ectogasm (my Electric Baritone) while fiddling with drum machines, and for Mary, I either fully drummed or accompanied on guitar. It was a clever set-up, built to solve a no PA problem (should any performance space not have one) and the set-up time took twice as fast for two full acts. Both pragmatic and dastardly complicated for my lonesome. What’s new!
I am quite proud of this little battle-station, and made sure to record full rehearsal sets of mine playing different track-listings and even covers (which I never do) to help train myself to adapt to set-time allowances. I posted a couple full sets via Patreon— largely understanding my personal need for song-specific chaos to flesh out the gallops. I made an oath to have fun and tether the atmosphere in bursts of audiomantic improvisations, and I didn’t want to overtly calculate. These songs would be made whole by the desert by creating the sinew ontop song-bones and lyrics as I went.
For Mary’s Moon Division set, we almost took a sharp direction the other way— since her were very much written in full, recorded and lyric heavy, we went a bit traditional with the performance aspect. My favorite part about us together were that our sets allowed for both ends of the spectrum: a measured, craft based performance, or an experimental improv-within-song holler and I believe we found that hauntomantic third-mind in between.
My madcap cover of Tom Waits’ “Clap Hands,” from that perennially influential maxim that is Rain Dogs, perfectly encapsulates the crooked and angular creep of excitement, and my lyrical whisper a perfect analogy for the hypnotic self-speak I used to commune with that pre-tour energy…
The Artful Dodger Sings Backwards
As we hightailed out of the cement cascades we were almost immediately faced with road annoyances. Southeast of Seattle, on our pass down through Idaho to our first stop of Salt Lake we were met with traffic horrors. We spent over 3 hours in touch-n-go on a 2 lane highway due to an accident and planned demolition. I infinitely found the idea of plan demolition appropriate and hilarious considering we left when we could, only having planned to leave that day. But we did not sweat the annoyance, we were already dolloped in the whirlwind of leaving and even though we didn’t get far we knew we were gone. Mary and I talked at length about the immediate relief that not even the horrors of traffic could sully— a prime practice for the long bouts of dreary ahead— we were ready to allow the lesser Gods of travel trick their tricks.
Already a day behind schedule, we decided to treat the evening as a guided tour of southeastern Washington, and after succumbing to the death of prior plans, we would find a place to rest our heads, and leave absurdly early to make up our track to Salt Lake. After a quick browse at what the dim town offered, we found a static Tour Bus within a beautifully Lynchian vista!
I hightailed it 8-9 hours straight behind the wheel at 4am to make a private show at Mary's sister's house in Salt Lake City. We burned through interviews with Swans and Angels of Light honcho, Michael Gira, and audio chapters of Mark Lanegan’s harrowing-yet-sublime Sing Backwards & Weep. I listened deeply and let my road-mind jagged-walk among the decaying cascades to both men and their trans-continental characters churning through their own personal artistic prisms and (sometimes literal) prisons. Although both men are absolutely disparate entities molded from opposite ends of this continent and eras, I have found both men personify an archetype of an artist I consider touched. Writing this now I am giggling that I separated myself from that archetype— the only archetype being a heavy heart of metaphysically minded cave-dwelling, however that personifies and from where exactly I still have no idea.
I feel shards of myself through Lanegan’s sordid tales or Gira’s contradictory musings. I often side-eyed to Mary to she if she was handling the graphic drug imagery through Lanegan’s rogue words. I realized I was looking at her to tell her I was having a hard time with it! User-recall is heavy work, and I have long trained my brain to recoil concerning needle work. As a matter of fact, the last time a needle self-immolated I had drawn a sigil to never do it again and that sigil burns still. I pushed through when the memory-junk subsided and meditated on what wisdom sounds like, especially concerning the regaling of horrorshow happenings in one’s life, and concluded it sounds like the smirking Marlboro-teeth and withdrawal-coughs, tales rife with the aching fathom of past mistakes, soaked through rhythmic tongues into a somber absolute. It sounds like Mark Lanegan, and through Lanegan I discovered what sort-of gut-muster it takes to tell your perspective, cigarette burns and all, and what charm and experience it takes to spill it.
We got to Salt Lake, road soaked and weary, and me certainly in no head-space for the small-talk of distant family. The private show was really just a small house-in, so we decided to forego the mad-dash necessary to whip up our abnormally intricate instrumentation. Especially after such a long day behind the wheel. However, I now know that even when a poor performance is probable, I would almost always rather hide behind a mic and my baritone guitar, drowned in foot-drums and beat-machines, yelping into the void rather than give my current-stasis-elevator-pitch to any and all handshake recipient.
We also decided to take the next day to enjoy autumnal Utah and get back on the road to Logan's, in Taos, Friday the 13th. I spent it like an old ghost in an empty house while Mary went hiking with her sister. I found myself stuck in the anticipation of the travel ahead, and the haste of letting go what we left. And lo, I must’ve brought the PNW all the way with us in more ways than one.
This first leg was always meant to be a trial by fire, boat-leg-setting, boot-strap-strapping crawl and it certainly was. It was hard to shake the Seattle drudge, and having our first constellation’s star filled with family was equally warming and uneasy. I can not express how kind and brutally wonderful Mary’s sisters are, and it is always great to catch up with them. But I also began to withdraw into a severed-self, both present and elsewhere, grinning and vacant. I was ready to haunt on.
Ov Thee Eclipse
We got to Logan's late on Friday the 13th. He got himself a precious adobe-styled bungalow on the outskirts of Taos in Arroyo Seco. It's a one bedroom ramshackle dish of everything southwestern and Estados Locos del Masculino - sort of tough guero- or Hemingway-does-Mexico sort of affair… and I love it. Awash with furs and guns, obtuse lumbered walls, stucco moldings and woodworking marvels from the ancient age, it has become quite a favorite little haunted abode of mine.
We slept in the living room underneath Art Bell's Ghost to Ghost because with New Mexico comes an unwavering itch of childhood resonance. I recall long-trips with my father to my birth-state, discussing about the soul as driver of the human automobile, while Art Bell quipped to callers in the background. A hauntomantic artifact, Art Bell, for me and lot of little weirdos, I’m sure. This trip taught me that I may be a a glutton for memory punishment. Alas, when in New Mexico, do as I did when a kid.
Mary and I had to switch from floor to couch quite a number of times because my bones decided to tense up after the long driving bouts. That, coupled with the god-shaming altitude-change that decided to do it's dirty work on the holiest of days this trip, I was under the moon-weather the 14th, thee damned eclipse day. I exalted the eclipse so much so that it became this cosmic-engine that was needed to generate a new chapter, and to miss it due to the somatic— to fail its meditations and ritual-ization, was to fail necessary new era’s launch.
I was feeling a whole sweat of nasty business in the morning; not being able to think straight nor garner the gumption to correct any confidence. I yawned in dizzy fits in the back of Logan’s pickup as we traveled to his property to watch the early morning eclipse. I was lost in the whomp-whomp thoughts that altitude, travel, and an unwavering sense of importance I put on this damn moon shadow could only cook.
As we cut through the wild shrub-dunes of largely undeveloped land and pulled into Logan’s property, we saw a coyote cross our path among the dirt. Largely unworried about the truck and used to Logan’s presence, it met my wonky eyes with acceptance. Logan's land, aptly titled Dirt Hawk Ranch (Logan’s a falconer and a dirty boy, as it were), about an hour's drive, next to the Carson National Forest, with 40 minutes to spare. Once we set foot deep in Logan’s uninhabited property, out there in the wilds of northern Taos county, I was gifted an otherworldly wellness to do my work. The air there is a baptism if the height don’t get ya.1
We took that time to hear and waltz around Logan's brilliant futurecast— and his welcomed come-to from a long hard road from Oregon, Colorado and storied relationship-dirge. As the air lifted me up well enough to bright-eye the ends of the shrub and juniper riddled property, I was made whole by the thought of my best friend arriving at his purpose. “To arrive is to be delivered,” I exclaimed.
My probable trajectory and the multitudes of multiverses to choose from that lay before me dimmed enough to find pride in Logan and his deliverance. I stopped meditating on the acres Logan is gifting us to monetize on the property, or how or what to do with it, and the emphasis I put on that wonder to divine under the eclipse. I left my own futurecast suspended in the sun’s corona, and as the moon loomed I soaked in the fuzzies I found for my dear friend. I am one of the few who understands just how much he deserves the peace that is only provided to those with purpose. Sure, I’d like that peace, too, but more importantly I’d like to enjoy the saunter towards it. It’s like wishing for a wishing well without a wish, and I’d like to earn that wish. And I just wanted to bask in Dirt Hawk Ranch among the ancient lava-rocks, and the idea that comeuppance can be good.
On the hood of Logan's truck I took out one of my magickal sketch books, bound with blood and ink, and readied my travel-worn Marseille tarot deck for a mid-eclipse reading in front of my little bone idol of Santisima Muerte. This bone idol sits at the center of my home altar, and has traveled with me everywhere since 2015. She’s been here before, last year in fact, when I visited Logan and we traversed the corners of Taos lots and available land he was motivated in purchasing and conserving. And here we were again, on that dirt; a homecoming of her ancestral aura and his futurecast. I thought how lucky this property was it found Logan amongst the harrows of capitalistic tundras and corporate nucklefucks usurping so much around us; a conservationist and animal-tongued proprietor that gleefully pointed out each animal track and emphasized how they would continue to roam free here and into the Carson National Forest.
The reading, the deck & the idol were my major components of the last eclipse ritual in August 2017, and it felt a perfect metaphor for the Prospectre Ritual ‘s resonance: to utilize the ThreeSeen (∴) of that working, and a focus on the ThirdScene of the hitherto unknown made from old; to will a healthy trajectory towards new and purposeful.2
As the world went gray-scale in a preternatural silence under the eclipse, I thought about that peace, that peace of making decisions of things to work towards, and not just being adaptable with reactions as I had been. I had thought about Mary and my deep conversation on the road from Utah to New Mexico where we came clean about our wants, desires, missives, etc. And how we need to make us a priority, and to truly define a futurecast with us moving forward. I didn't will anything but the road to figuring all the above out. I willed the ability to find. I willed the ability to begin.
I utilized my DISOLVER, ECO, RESONAR reading with a REVELATOR charge card and an overall ritual card…
DISOLVER: Temperance
ECO: The Hanged Man
RESONAR: Death
REVELATOR: 4 of Pentacles
RITUAL CARD: The Emperor
I’m logging these for further inspection upon our return.3
I can say that it is singing well for change and the cosmic shroud-shed that an eclipse breezes with it. Albeit, unlike August 2017’s totality in ruination for building anew, this one is only needed for a slight decimation! I’d much like to keep a lot of things I built this time around…
My illness returned as soon as we left the property, but I was ready to surrender post eclipse. Almost as if the psychical resonance became not unlike motion sickness aboard a small boat. I was still vibrating with the gray-scale hum of the eclipse, but felt relief within it knowing full well the only way out was through. Luckily, Logan gave me his tile-cool room to sift through the dark midday. I’m sure it was the altitude more than anything hexxing, as living sea-level for so long really sullies your aptitude for altitude. But lucky Logan was equipped with ginko extract, and I had my whistle of it. After a heavy dose of that oily goop I began to get my desert boat-legs, and soon enough all I felt was the deep waves of gray-scale pride I had for the eclipse and its generative and joy-filled echoes, rather than it’s probable reckoning resonance.
TERRIBLE TRUSTFUNDERS AND BEAUTIFUL MESABLUNDERS
The night of the eclipse we fashioned ourselves in old behaviors, namely that of a drinks-on-the-town sort of aimless tourism that Americans are wont to do. We met some of Logan’s new friends, from howling Mesa strife-lifers to the sort of yuppie Americana trustfunders that forever lay locked in a dark part of my heart. Of course, I was more akin to the Mesa kids, largely native artists that could live with little (i.e. shitting in buckets, and tire fires in winter) an inherent kinship! Moreso than the Trustafarian scummers drunk on craft beer and righteousness. Boy-howdy, do they irk me so!
One trustfunder sticks in my mind in particular, an overconfident Aryan-faced woman adorned in gringo-overpriced posh “native” fabrics. She barks in my mind because she took every opportunity to proclaim she was hard at work on her “conservation” thesis whilst living in a Santa Fe mcmansion— a hilariously ironic concept considering she was the living avatar of gentrification. Logan gave me some backstory about how she lives instagrams herself killing chickens in “ethical” manners— the only natural farming she’s doing is cloutfarming— nothing ethical about admonishing native cultures and filming sacrificial chicken rituals. She took any available moment to admonish Logan and I about our scruffy and impoverished upbringing whenever we talked about how long we knew one another. Whether it was tales of hunting or wilderness survival (we met teaching the latter), she proved right quick she didn’t know damn-hell about struggle. A perfect archetype for the goofy-righteous nature-influencer!
Sage (a name I gave her) was hanging on the arm of some Dylan wannabe (that town sure is full of ‘em!) and when it came up that Mary and I were playing a show the next day I was so damn relieved to know that the Dylan-wannabe was too, albeit in a posh part of town at some wedding destination venue! When we said we were playing for the Mesa artists at the art-space, Mercury Lounge, it gave me such pleasure watching their stuffy noses recoil in judgement. “They have shows other than metal?” I was over-the-moon that our paths wouldn’t cross again.
We ended the night at what my Louisiana native buddy, Logan, called a “cowboy” bar. Mary and I have long learned that Logan’s labels and associations are skewed, and hell, any desert dweller could be considered a cowboy to him! Really, the bar was a small neighborhood drink-hole that serviced more of the baseball cap-wearin’ and leather-skinned types than say shit-kickers or ten-gallon types. Mary and I laughed recalling how Logan termed it a Cowboy bar, and it literally just being a small desert town’s local dive that was hosting a high-school reunion where half of the guest list’s names ended with Rael— jammin’ Journey and .38 Special— far from the gun-totin’ horsey-ridin’ folk that I grew up with and considered cowboys.
I quit drinking liquor all-together over a year ago, but something about the arid desert, Sage and Mr. Tambourine Man, the atmosphere’s swarm of childhood nostalgia spelunking got me moving on to gin. Gin helped quell my social awkwardness enough to pass judgement and/or get gabby with Logan’s new crew— and we ended the night not unlike Logan and I used to in Portland— half-drunk, blaring Mark Lanegan’s “Bubblegum” and causing a sort of ruckous that would be illegal in most states. Here, in the desert, it was par for the course. “Would you put on that long white gown, And burn like there's no more tomorrows?” crooned Lanegan as we laughed and bounced against the distant horizon.
All of this was some sort of ritual bath, I now see— a liminal rite with an eclipse as an altar. The next day would be our proper first show on the tour. All too fitting that the moon would ride us to a house of Mercury, the house of mad-dash, as the Moon ∴ Revel Tour ignited the next night at the Mercury House, in Taos, NM…
NEXT CHAPTER: Mercury Moon Musicks
∴ Part 2 of the Moon Revel Eclipse Tour Journal
I wanted to extend my gratitude to all those that purchased a Moon Revel E.P., my patreon subscribers, and to Lya, Azure & Jonicide for supporting our spotfund! There are so many people to thank individually - and I aim to! You will have fun things in the post…post-haste. You all helped sully the woes that came with last-minute financial burdens, road-hiccups and veterinary costs and we couldn’t be more grateful for your support.
Also— our media & magick collective, We The Hallowed, collaborated with the Green Mushroom Project (led by Luxa Strata of the Lux Occult podcast) to release a submission based digital mixtape this Halloween. I also helped randomize the 39 tracks utilizing each song title’s ALW gematria by creating a cut-up poem of phrases and words with the same ALW value.
Dirt Hawk Ranch Beginnings; “Deserter Psalms” a Keats & Logan Liminalstream last year:
https://www.youtube.com/live/kTnVp4Q4krI?si=spq2iPMv_XeBWRpH
The entire exorcism of Haunt Manual is a ThreeSeen: To experiment and create with all my favorite artistic mediums (Disolver), to have all mediums birth consistently (Eco), and to collect the workings in compendiums when the organism reaches the macro of the Resonar. The ThirdScene, or the third pathway of the ThreeSeen, is the mutation of seemingling contradictory ends and choosing neither either or of the disparate ends, but a third way… (∴)
The reading and the D E R method as a whole deserves it’s own chapter, which I will release after these tour meditations!