This is the new shit

I am awash in a sea of media. My only fear is that at some point I will exhaust media which is conceptually new to me, left to sift among the imitators of what I read, view, and hear. My senses have no conceptual framework for that which has not been produced. Even nature seems incomplete without an author but the impossibility of God assures that there remains a blind howling senselessness to that which has not been transmitted to me consciously. I accept this position as receptor, black hole of meaning-making among seas of minds. Here's what I've been pulling into my mind like a vast information eating kraken.

OM- Pilgrimage- This album is Om's latest, who are the former rhythm section of legendary stoner metal band Sleep. Each of their albums to date has been a reduction and simplification of the formula elaborated by Sleep's Dopesmoker, itself a reductive and singular album. The feel of this music is ascetic, evoking a religious singularity. Rather than being the unviewable, the religious ecstasy of Om is brought to the fore, the music like wearing special sunglasses that allow you to see what's in the Ark of the Covenant. The album opens and closes with a meditative undistorted processional, a leadup to the ecstatic, gnostic power of the distorted ritual at the albums center. It sets a mood evocative of holy men ascending a mountain for a direct communion with God. After 'Pilgrimage', the opener, a rhythmic delay-pedal part kicks in, which seems to be the unveiling of some brilliantly strange object of worship. And then the bass drops as the cymbals and drums clatter powerfully, like the ripping open to the doors of some ecstatic eastern heaven, and the formula Om has refined so well comes to the fore. Hypnotic, irresistable, the singular power of bass and drums locked into a groove so deep they are one compels the listener to a sense of sending, of a spiritual journey. Al Cisneros' vocals chant and intone gnostic prophetic knowledge and the sense of satisfaction in heaviness is complete. The song fades out, and another powerful riff comes in, atonally reminding the listener that the truth is only rhythm. The drums come in and lock in to a song which obliterates the feeling of 'songness' to the point where the music is background for the feeling it evokes, union. In nodding my head, I become part of the same rhythm of which Cisneros and Hakius are merely conduits, priests of a heavy reverberation at the center of the galaxy. The album closes with a reprise of Pilgrimage, the procession back down the mountain, and we are left to meditate on the powerful religious wisdom we've just recieved. So as you can see, I like it. Highly recommended, especially if you like to get stoned, but the cosmic reverberations can be felt any time, as with any truly great heavy album.

William Burroughs- Junky- I haven't finished with it yet, but looking forward to the wilder works of Burroughs this seems prosaic. It's a book about junk, yes, and being a deadbeat, a no-good, a yegg, but what makes it real is its prosaicness. It's not romantic about dope, nor is it a cautionary tale, it's written as I assume only a junky can do, in the total matter of factness of addiction- a certain economy and pragmatism is needed to really be addicted. He writes of dope as a business venture, a fact as natural as keeping warm in winter or eating. It's certainly not nothing to him, but the times when dope is available are fine and when it's not its bad. What could be more simple? One needs it and if one is truly a junky, it's just another natural body need to be regulated. Not a lot here in my opinion, but it's commendable for that. Burroughs goes into the real paranoid metaphysics of dope later but in this book he's laying out the pure economy and physiology of it, which is worth something.

Jean Baudrillard- America- Now this! This is why I feel compelled to write this post in such a masturbatory style- Baudrillard is a master of obfuscating intellectual superiority, and why not? His style here is wild and uncontrolled abstraction of the American character into what he believes it to be- explodedly unpragmatic, excessive, and simulatory. For Baudrillard, the soul of America is in the desert, and the simple and elemental terms of that desolation define the endless struggle in America away from such straightforward landscapes and thoughtscapes. America does not know its soul is the desert, does not embrace this. America is obsessed with creating itself without attempting to see if anything was there already. I can't do it justice but it certainly makes me want to write.

Anyway, all three pieces of media come recommended, the Burroughs a little less so, but I am an absolute fiend for media when I get a good slug of it at once. Don't let your meat loaf!