Operation Mind Fuck #173

Operation Mind Fuck #173
RE-Created June 13, 2013

This is a new Poem in the TIMEFIX series. (My attempts at PKD, before reading his works.) If you’re lucky enough to still have the scars, you hero… dig out your goggles, get some tape or string or something, and strap ’em on. 

Note: My life is the disclaimer. My successes, other’s failures, some folk want/need to be turned up, some folks want/need to be turned way down. Pretty complex architecture on the want/need border for most of us these days. 

While I’ll be held accountable to the tune of offering preflight support through this poem, and possible banter upon return, I must point out that this is a Mind Fuck and if you elect to hit play you, whatever your motives, you are willfully entering into realms I have absolutely no influence in.

Put frankly, if it gets deep, no one is going to be able to wade out and get your ass because your coordinates will be dictated by the timing of your breath, the speed of your internet connection, the varied neurological distance between your decision to hit the link and your hand. I would also suggest influence from the location of the sun and moon, your level of hydration and mood or emotional/energetic state. 

So, all that to say, there’s a great deal going on that will influence whether this is a blissed-out industrial angelic choir or demonic dystopian cacophony. I try not to judge though, maybe today is the day I need a demonic cacophony to see what I need to see. I don’t like to lead, but my personal Mind Fuck sweet-spot, where I gain the most in the way of insight, is the quite tangible dance between the two. 

Archival: 

This is a RE-Creation of the ritualized experiments I performed on myself with cassette decks and cd player ‘boom boxes’, a handful of buzzing TV’s and a hand-crafted freestanding Dreamachine. I smile, a little tongue in cheek, when I share that many of these experiments were played out in an underground ‘bunker’, an unfinished sauna in what could be considered an abandoned suburban Bloomfield garage. The people who lived there seem ghosts to me now, the depression so deep, we never cut the grass or went into the garage. My rig is probably still there, rust and mold. I’ll never forget how the room used to fill with water and/or fire.

These are not and will always be ‘new’ ideas. I have no idea where the line can be drawn between my influences and my original expressions. I still intuit that my influences practiced and held the same perspective. This round of experiments was deeply influenced by my exposure to William S. Burroughs, Bryon Gysin and their ilk, through vengefully purchasing an LP by an unknown to me band called Throbbing Gristle. As much as I oft deplore that my entrance is through consumption, therein lies the birth of my personal culture war. While it surpassed it’s vitriolic intention, I didn’t care for the LP musically. I was in the midst of a fall from new wave into punk and, shudder, goth, and quite frankly the noise that came out of my speakers freaked me out quite a bit. Yet somehow it resonated with me, it only took my OCD mind a short amount of time to connect to their influences which included many of the folk I was researching in an attempt at the self-guided mental surgery that this poem documents. I know in some realms it still exists, so forgive the nostalgia, but I used a very different means of gathering information back in the day that required leg work. I’d sell plasma to raise the funds to get a rare book shipped from overseas, all the while praying that it wasn’t shite. I’d get rides out to U of M without means of getting home so that I could spend days in their half-floor stacks, pouring through books attempting to make a map of the stuff the Surrealists were channeling. 

The RE-Created Experiment:

Sit down comfortably, breathe mindfully, put on your headset and/or turn it up a bit,- open these three links, one each time you exhale, sit back, close your eyes and keep breathing mindfully. thanks for playing and good luck. You’re getting one small piece of pretty massively detailed system that I designed for self-guided mental surgery. 

Zos Kia / Coil Here to Here (Double-Headed Secret), Transparent, 1984

Boyd Rice and Frank Tovey, Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing, 1984

Chris and Cosey, Haunted Heroes, Techno Primitiv, 1985

©EschatonLife