Mercury Moon Musicks
Moon Revel Eclipse Tour Road Journal 2
Just remembered… if you’re in the Portland area, come check out Moon Division and my Revel Rosz sets with dear friend Ash Plains at our old stomping grounds of the Waypost Dec. 2nd around 7:30pm to 11pm!
LIMINAL DIRT BATHS
Mary and I decided we would keep to ourselves in a consultation-of-rhythm— our first main show was that night and here we hadn’t played a lick since we left the Cascades. We learned right quick that too many days of aimless rabble-footin’ in-between shows was bad for muscle memory, and after spending the morning at the Taos City Hall flea market, we rehearsed in Logan’s backyard.
The flea market was a standard affair of southwestern ephemera and tourist-shlock-opium rife with the sort of trinkets my southwestern families littered around their desert abode. Mary and I are genuine suckers for the chase; we’re prospectors of crooked knick-knacks and haunted treasures, so it was a natural decision to see what the township offered. It was a good hull— we usurped an Epiphone acoustic electric guitar (for a fraction of its worth) that I quickly named “Cinnamon Girl” after the Neil Young number due to its red wood varnish.1 We’d later found that it was in the Caballero collection from Nashville (all too apropos), and it quickly became another tool in our adaptable desert arsenal as a means to rehearse or busk free from electricity, as we had only brought one acoustic on tour.
The other half of the musickal artifacts lie in a little Casiotone-esque toy keyboard, an Italian noisemaker (a fitting nickname for half Italian Ms. Mary Joon) and decided we would incorporate it into our set later that night. Mary has piano parts on a song of hers, a beautiful coda after a guitar-driven confessional, and she originally worked out piano accompaniment for my Dakota Slim tune, “Weightless,” which was, incidentally, written for her in 2017. I couldn’t shake the opportunity to squeeze it into this new Revel Rosz set as this was the first set of shows we would be sharing, together.2
MERCURY MADCAPS & MADHATTERS
We got to the Mercury House in time for a steady and non-hurried load-in. There is something ecstatically poisonous about feeling “rushed” and I surefire aim to always avoid the feeling whenever possible.3 When we arrived, the ol’ rickety internal show-gearbox began to to throttle— a welcome mode/shift for us crooked brain-wrinkle types that need, née deserve, quick answers and solutions in transposed and literal signal flow. Signal Flow, I discovered, is the perfect terminology that tethers my passions and corruptions— whether as a technical supervisor in the event industry, to the conduction of various works in many mediums—I am nothing more than a Signal Flow Conductor ad nauseum. This parries well with my analogies to metaphysics and art being distilled into psycho-acoustic or cold-war era electronic manual lexicons, (i.e. Feedback being the microphone hearing itself in an infinite loop, therefore the anxiety and crippling self-doubt that resonates is simply too much internal feedback and I can either aim to Lee Ranoldo commune with it, or move myself out of the equation.)
I was quickly met with the warm direction of the garage/gallery proprietor’s focused brow under thickrim glasses, and the age-old direct nonchalance that bears mark on every cool bean with quiet intensity. Our correspondences on Instagram were very concise and direct without much syntax to bear an idea on who was behind the typing. Originally, Logan had forwarded their info as a probable place, but when I first reached out they kindly noted that the days we asked for were booked. Weeks went by and they directly reached back out asking if we’d like to still play and an open date to perform the Mesa Artists gallery showing’s closing. We jumped at the chance. And then, combing the white-walled gapped ephemera of anarchic visual works under Dead Moon on the PA, we met the proprietor, MK.
Dead Moon was a sign, as if we needed any more, about the evening’s potential success. I’m quite superstitious, my only reactionary and non-intellectual trait that was surely molded by my mother’s superstition and my neuro-divergence. Earlier that day I remarked that Mary’s outfit, dark jean, boot, short jacket and cap reminded me of NW RockNRoll Queen Toodie Cole of Dead Moon, so when it came over the PA as we were unloading, Mary knew I’d be wide-eyed and comforted by the synchronicity!
MK (partly renaming), the Mercury House’s metaphysical silver-helmet-with-wings-atop-a-fiery-mop’d curate-conjurer, was a Laguna Beach, CA outcaster; a true punk (the ethos sans ubiquitous Nausea patch) among the atrophied wealthy and liberty-spiked upper-middle class misfits in fleeting teenage rebellions. A real one— (considering my anti-elitist elitist rules of authenticity, yes, I realize— A “customized life” beacon of intention, anyway. This was very evident within the organized chaos of the ramshackle Mercury House that she gifted Taos’ dirtcasters not fit for turquoise trim, O’keefe flower-vaginas and tundras of beige stucco.
I mention her Laguna Beachdom as another camaraderie; I time-dripped back to my teenage years drive-adjacent to Laguna Beach, those years being the tail of a comet on an encircled limbo and it’s meteor shower being everything since— Laguna Beach is absolutely foreign to the atmosphere of the Mesa, yet perfectly incubated to create such an antithetical beast. Adversity breeds passion, and quite a grip of folks who suffered through those liminal years in beach-nuclear humdrums are testaments to that. As a desert-Pisces-out-of-water in Southern California myself, I felt a unique kinship: achingly disparate and all-too-commiserated threads that sewed us right along to seeking anarchic lifestyles and communities in the muck of the gilded. We quickly dipped into the raditudes of shared outcaster experience— discussing Underdog Records, a rare punk & angular-weirdo vinyl store that serviced all us scowling ne’er-do-wells. And I was especially excited to regale of Tippy Canoe’s, a dark & dour vintage store that serviced all the south county penny-pinching witches and goofjobs.
I had a shimmer of the Hauntomancy workings — 17 year old me’s echoes of William Blake’s Tyger, Tyger-beating my awareness of these coiling tendrils, split and icky, warm and worrisome. Before this Haunt Manual magickal maneuver into the shards of self, I had happily compartmentalized nostalgia-bait sentiments. And now, in my birth state, in a nondescript gallery with a smittering of unique participants, I realize I have always been here— hundreds of ramshackle performances at venues-at-the-end-of-the-universe in off-beat terrain, and the focus familiarity of the accepting of off-kilter spit-take rugged jingle-jangle transcendence I have been allowed. It made too much damn sense that MK would run this venue, in this town, in this state, and it made too much damn sense that I would feel a semblance of whatever home feels like.
The turn out was as madcap and as jovial than anything I could have expected. During Mary’s set we saw folks in tattered dust riddled yarns, madmax jackets and angular haircuts swaying and dancing with elder Taos folk - folk permanently in that crust-punky cavalcade of travel worn but wide-grinned acid eaters and freakfolkers - a true be-in of outcasts of all desert sorts. I felt belonged amidst a sea of different.
Our sets were hurried but not by set-time allowance, by our nerves. The all-too-familiar energy invocation of being the loudest person in the room with a gaggle of folks looking on as I beat drums to Mary’s electrified songcraft was partly show-nerves’ uptempo BPM-ing, and not grabbing the right percussive instruments for the songs, thus a shaker turned into a hi-hat and a whole new energy emerged for “Mary’s Tango”!
I always think the worst after performing, and times that by a million when accompanying someone else’s set, and times that by a gigaton when it comes to my deep reverence to Mary’s musick. But to my amazement, Logan’s complete documentation of the set proved my inklings more nit-picks than wrongs, and Mary’s set went more than okay even with my flubs and odd instrumentation. Her songcraft allows for it to supercede minutiae missives, and I’ve always said to her that it’s impossible for her to play a bad show because she is untouchable when it comes to voice and guitar, albeit, I didn’t count my rugged drumming or baritone wags’ ability to gruff it! Alas, it proved that playing her “Tango” tune without the maraca, and for some odd reason choosing a brush for the high-hat, was an intuitive muck-up for a punchy rendition and her song wills out more than the instrumentation itself.
This was Mary’s first live show in years, and our decision to road-test our sets in front of a smitten of strangers in strange lands freed us from expectations. The allowance to Feng Shui performances due to vastly different rooms and sound systems while allowing for the objective of a song to not buckle under the dogma of its construction can not be taught and only comes from doing— and Mercury House became a brilliant manger for her musickal rebirth. It pains me it took us so long to take the leap because of my worry that I would muck up her vision, or wasn’t a good enough player, or adversely, would become authoritarian in authorship as I had been in past groups. But time is always on time and all struggles were necessary baited-breaths prior to the crowning of our public musick marriage.
After her set ended I ran outside to piss in the desert twilight, taking huge puffs of my e-cigarette, and grabbed another cooler-beer before returning on the drum throne, slung on Ectogasm (the guitar, not the band) and saluted Mary as we began to go again. I suppose I didn’t quite calculate that by backing up Mary for her full 40 minute set, and then leading my own with her on auxiliary percussion, vocals and guitar, I doomed us to double-the-amount of energy and stamina on top of everything else! So my quick break between set shifts allowed Mary a time to breathe and re-calibrate while I got to fill my lungs and spit with calming agents.
It had been exactly two year since I performed. Of course, my liminalstreams of improvised audiomancy with the Haunt Manual workings only lightly itched that scratch within the comfort of my Dimming Room— but physical, somatic performance can never be sublimated. Last October I played at Blue Moon in Seattle as Dakota Slim, just me, my baritone and a drum machine, performing proto-versions of a handful of the current set-list— and, synchronistically, it was with Bird of Paradise, who we’d be playing with again in San Diego in a few days time. But more on that next Road Journal.
During my set one of the Taos-Tykes, an elder piercing-clad wooly-beach-parka’d artist began to roll madly on the floor while a gang of Mesa artists chugged and cheered— further proving my musick is an LSD accentuator.4 I yelled on the microphone how “rolling on the floor to this music is the best compliment I have ever got!” They laughed and at one point the same overzealous patron yelled “Do you even surf?!”, after I spent Saguaro Star (see below) punching my whammy bar on my Mosrite-like baritone, to which I replied “I used to, but not in Seattle!” Which is true, I did used to surf, and as a matter-of-fact, I used to surf near MK’s hometown of Laguna Beach back in my lonely high-school years after my dad’s family high-tailed it to Colorado and I finished high-school alone. I like to think MK and I crossed paths, and by some weird synchronous outcast karma, our marches matched rhythms once again and led us to that very moment of my musick in her space with floor-rollers rug-dancing.
The Revel Rosz re-imagining of Dakota Slim’s “Cacus Crown” became “Saguaro Star,” a play on the “Sorror Star” Thelemic designation with a desert twist. It’s as if Revel Rosz wrote a similar song in a different dimension, some similarities but wholly a different atmosphere. A perfect hauntomantic metaphor for the practice itself!
I suppose the Revel Rosz set is akin to what I’ve always attempted to employ as Dakota Slim, yet that cursed name strattled me with technological muckups and nervous drinking at shows, but the geneology is the same: lowly drum machine glorified metronome beats, the tempo-tempered haunted 70s rhythm machine I named Hubert sputtering out classic Hammond organ like rhythms, a shoe-gazed doomer reverb’d baritone with Morricone tremolo bends, a burrow-browed-brim vexing vocals, and each foot accentuating analog drums. And I get the difference between Dakota Slim and Revel Rosz is a matter of graduation rather than complete separation. This is because Revel Rosz’s character is an aged one with smirking absurdism and confessional lyrics amidst a dark yet focused oeuvre that Slim only could muster album to album. This is Slim’s nega-version, an ulterior to his wide-weepy-eyed romanticism and sonic urges - Revel had been conjured to do a bidding under that eclipse in 2017, and he finally revealed the american song-structured musickal side to his writing and audiomancy experiments the day after the eclipse of 2023.
This nom-de-guerre that I retired for a few years time, out of desperation to seperate myself from its use in Spare Spells and my old relationship, gained confidence and ownership again in the liminal death rattle of Dakota Slim’s impending Zozobra demise, resurrected and barking made with kinetic proselytizing birthed by eclipses. A poetic rhyme-scheme dressed in song-garb and magickal jigging; time is no more a flat circle but grooves on a vinyl forever moving to the center on a rocky and rollicking Black Mesa— some skips, scratches and unintended stylus-arm realignments of course— but moving towards instead of away with no destination in sight.
I had that sickness again, like a withdrawal shaken into a fever; I yelped, I banged and clamored, it felt like a newborn shrieking at the atmosphere for the first time. I had missed this. I had missed the uniquely individual atmosphere that comes with performance, that comes with the afforded ability to tune absolutely everything around into and through operatic physical actions. The affordability to be the loudest and the most wild presence in a room. There is a release in it, good or bad, it’s a privilege that I had always shook down because of a crooked perfectionism! Not anymore. I am truly performing for the sole purpose of discovery— like an ordained exorcism every night to shake out the tired and gray shit of the day to find what’s inherent and absolute. I still don’t understand those words, inherent and absolute, but since this tour they have rattled my mind. There is some part of the semi-colon’d definition of both when it comes to performance, or Ecstaticism, the all enveloping sensory-charged howl of living.5
I decided to cut out my weirdo version of Tom Waits’ “Clap Hands” for the sake of time, which turned out to be a touched decision. The closer, Jitter, was a local dreaded, ragtime-desert-crust banjoist who declared himself a one-man-band (as was written on his suitcase he footdrumed with) who ended up playing many Tom Waits (and the veritable Devil Makes Three) covers to a roar of sing-alongs from the ramshackle crowd. I know that crust-punk string-band desert type, the one that gets 18 sheets to the wind and sings about the devil and drinking— that niche archetypal make and model, and I celebrate it. Jitter was a wonderful avatar for the night; sloppy yet dexterous, hiccup’d but sing-a-long’d— a wonderful palette cleanser after my cinematic psychedelic desert blues seriousness. Whether the crowd would’ve liked my rendition of Tom Waits, I’ll never know, but I’m glad there wasn’t toe-stepping by eliminating it from my set.
I felt a little funny having one-man-band’d my instrumentation before him but the advent of Mary’s accompaniment saves me from that label. I would find out later, that during the Moon Division set, it was him that drunkenly turned the lights off twice, supposedly trying to assist with mood lighting, and unintentionally created one of my favorite memories of the show. In that dark dream of what felt like eternity, a mode of intensity drew over me— I have conditioned myself for metaphysical focus during my many audiomancy sessions basked in near perfect dark, and felt the switch! However, when the lights came back I snapped back and giggled at the thought of my oh-so-serious nature that comes over me when it comes to musick, magick, and dark maneuvers.
I was happy to pray at Jitter’s altar for 20 minutes until the need for separation and vexation post performance crept back in. I needed to sneak outside and take in the desert stars in silence. I snuck out, past the “Where are you going?” intense gaze of Jitter’s girlfriend manning the door with a “Be right back” while telling myself I deserved a moment of quiet after both sets. My social-disfluencies in full swing now that I had no musick to hide behind. So I retreated to the dirt lot adjacent to the venue that dipped into the star-lit heavens and and gave a solemn toast to the beginning of not only the tour, but to Revel Rosz’s musickal reawakening and to Mary’s brilliant new chapter as song-writer and performer. I sat in acceptance of the onslaught of tricky nostalgia that await in Phoenix and Southern California on this tour. I sat in those post-show static vibrations and heard a resonance of in the distance. Was that the Taos hum? Did i unlock the hum previously unheard but heard tall tale of? What does that mean?
The Mercury House will always be a part of my altar-of-musick, replete with its too kind and devilishly funny Mesa patrons and artists and long talks about the dissolution of society and the apex of artistic freedom with them. A crew of new ghosts I’ll make sure to keep in contact with and hope musicians or artists that read this reach out and support or perform while Taos. It was if this was the art gallery at the end of the world, where the desert drops into space, the end-of-the-road in a limbo between civilization and the afterlife—and it was exactly where I had wanted to celebrate the birth of the first moon post-eclipse. “Do you hear that humming off in the distance?” “I can’t hear shit but banjo and sing-alongs,” Logan said as we caught up in the dark.
NEXT ROAD JOURNAL: San Diego Séances
∴ Part 3 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.
It must be said that Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is formative album of mine
Mary and my initial working of the tune via YouTube in 2018:
Rule 33 in the Book Of Rosz: “A giddy-up is okay, but a butterfingered scramble is poison!”
A common compliment as friends only seem to stumble into my cache of original material while dosed and bored.
Ecstaticism, a philosophy I just came up with right now and a word, or probable philosophy, I’m certain already exists with either similar or very different connotations! Alas, a metaphor for my personal vernacular and your readership’s deserved annoyance!