Pagan Drum Machines Of Whittlesea - reified 12th April 2011
The third installment from Magick Concrète is a radical departure from the first two pieces. Taking recordings from this year's Straw Bear festival, we have deconstructed the sounds of Morris Dancing Side and the music accompanying the main March. What results is a stripped down piece of Pagan Techno.
Cult Of The Black Goddess - reified 1st February 2011
Cult Of The Black Goddess is composed from recordings taken at the mountain monastery of Montserrat, near Barcelona. There are two sound sources that have been manipulated through MISTY: the Boys' choir singing The Virolai, and the Christmas Day Mass (played backwards). The Virolai is the anthem of the Black Madonna, venerated at Montserrat. It begins with the words "April rose, dusky lady of the mountain chain". We are reifying this track on the Feast of Imbolc (1st February). Imbolc belongs to St. Brigid, one of the aspects of the Triple Goddess. Also known as Candlemas, the day has long been celebrated as The Feast of Purification of The Virgin.
The Black Madonna at Monsterrat is one of the oldest such statues in Europe and Montserrat itself has been imagined as the location of the Holy Grail in the Romantic vision of Goethe. Ean Begg's gazetteer The Cult Of The Black Virgin mythopoetically proposes a lineage with Egyptian Goddess Isis. This imaginal thread derives from Robert Graves' lesser known essay "Intimations Of The Black Goddess", written in 1963, a fascinating epilogue to his magnum opus, The White Goddess.
Do They Know It's Mithras? - reified 21st December 2010
Sunday 12th December saw the first act of Magick Concrète. Mark Pilkington and I took a 3 hour walk from Tottenham Court Road, through Crowley's Holborn beneath the pealing bells of St. Paul's, to the displaced remains of a Mithraeum at Walbrook. Along the way a number of field recordings were made. Mark then processed the recordings through his modular synthesiser set-up - MISTY. I have subsequently taken these recordings, to create a ceremonial structure, overlaying them with readings from a Mithraic Ritual. We are releasing the the resulting track "Do they know it's Mithras", as a free download. It is possibly the first ever occult charity record. Each download will accrue magical energy for worthy causes over the Christmas period. By downloading this song, you are pledging 13 minutes worth of pure oja. It's a radically different working of the "English Heretic" family favourite standard "Open The Mithraic Stargate".
