Late Summer 2024 Vøid Contemplations
Late Summer 2024 Vøid Contemplations
Updates on Basking in Gravity, Inter-Dimensional Music, and opting-out of Itunes
When fresh issues of this Vøid Contemplation Tactics newsletter are slow-coming, it’s usually a good sign that I’ve found my way into the IRL world, or a bad sign that I’ve turned inward to contemplate my own personal void. In the case of this slow 2024 summer, it’s been a bit of both. As a longtime reader of this newsletter told me the other night at a show in Indianapolis, “I read your blog sometimes and it’s good! But it can be a lot to digest all at once.” Which was a welcome reminder that a) this is a blog, and b) I don’t need to finish another 10k word essay about how I worked EMS a lifetime ago, lived at a Zen center, and dislike bluetooth, and how those well-worn subjects lead to the conclusion that Rastafarianism is a lot like Zen, in order to stay in touch with all of you. Sometimes I can just do a list of updates like this one here.
I. Basking in Gravity: Second Sundays at Healer
The return of our immersive psychedelic death yoga audiovisual art project to Healer at the beginning of August was a tremendous success, as suggested by the kinda unnerving expression on my face in this “family death metal yoga day” portrait. We’ll be back at 3631 E. Raymond Street in Indianapolis, IN on Sunday, September 8 from 12-2pm. And again on Sunday, October 13.
Basking in Gravity is the only project I’ve taken on that I can’t tear apart when I’m feeling low. I talk a lot about how it’s an art project, not a yoga class, and how it’s a collaborative experience rather than a one-person show. My criteria for evaluating the value of creative projects – making things is worthwhile regardless of how easily they’re commodified or how high they rank in social media metrics – apply to everyone else’s work but mine, so if there are other people involved I can’t talk trash. Big gratitude to everyone who came out to spend their Sunday afternoon doing slow yoga to the sound of cavernous death metal about ecstatic dismemberment while a bloody-looking wheel of lichen photographs turned in the background.
Subscribe – for free! – to this newsletter for updates, or keep an eye on Healer’s social media channels . . . which doesn’t cost money but as we all know logging in to online definitely isn’t “free” ha ha ha.
II. Basking in Gravity at Ypsilanti Freak Fest in October
Basking in Gravity hits the road again this October. More details forthcoming on other dates, but we’re 100% definitely gonna join our friends in Southeastern Michigan for the Ypsi Freak Fest on the first weekend in October. Ypsi Freak Fest 2023 was an absolute ball. It was wild to see three venues absolutely packed with all kinds of people – simultaneously sometimes! – who came out to see performances from all kinds of rowdy weirdo art/punk/hardcore/metal/shoegaze/etc bands that I’d never heard of.
If all goes according to plan, we’ll be Basking at Ziggy’s on Sunday, October 6 at noon. The Ypsi Freak Fest is organized by our friends at Wyrd Byrd (aka Word Bird aka Weird Beard), Ypsilanti’s top-ranking supplier of esoteric books, ‘zines, TTRPGS, vinyl, and adorable mushroom sculptures.
III. Opting Out of Itunes
Updates to the ID Music archives are always sporadic, but have been especially so this summer for a kind of boring reason. I’ve been trying to extricate my way-too-big digital music library from the Apple Music nee Itunes software ecosystem. Which is way harder than I thought it would be! But since Apple chose to brick Apple Music and any old versions of Itunes on older MacBooks – like my perfectly fine 2017 Macbook Pro – I didn’t really have much choice.
This is partially my fault for deciding to stake my claim in such a liminal space: I’m not a vinyl guy, and I’m not a streaming music guy. I don’t care about owning physical media, but I don’t want to take advantage of the convenient new system where we pay Swedish defense industry executives and drone warfare investors for a license that allows us to listen to the music we used to purchase from musicians. I don’t want a tube amp nor do I want a Sonos: I want an Ipod from 2009. As far as I can tell, there’s not even many people on Reddit yelling about this problem, which considering there are entire subreddits devoted to office chairs and fans – both places where I’ve spent a weirdly significant amount of time – is a good sign that I’m kinda on my own here.
So began a months-long journey to try and figure out how to play music on my laptop, which ended with buying a license for Swinsian, a music application whose name I have a hard time remembering, but which successfully replicates the look and feel of classic Itunes.
So far Swinsian is great. It’s confusing! But it seems like there’s maybe only one developer running the show, and they’ll respond after a couple days if you email them with questions nicely. It’s still confusing, because they’re (obviously) a programmer so they sent me “lines of code” to input into the computer in ways that I don’t understand in order to customize Swinsian’s functions. But it’s still a comfort to know I paid $30 [edit: actually only $24.95!] to a real person for a program they made specifically for people like me, and that person is not trying to get any more money from me. It’s as close to a total inversion of the deeply alienating Apple experience I can imagine. If your annoyingly-specific audio player preferences are like mine and this sounds appealing to you, you can download a free trial of Swinsian: The Advanced Music Player for Mac® at swinsian.com.
IV. Inter-Dimensional Music: Impure Flowing + Fresh Jammering
ID MUSIC 20240419: Impure Flow
stream | download
For this week's practice, it's the return of IMPURE FLOW, our intermittent immersion into blackened ambient music and kosmische sludge. As usual, listen for Lama Rod Owens in the background and in between, with thoughts on how sitting with dark, difficult emotions can help us to cultivate kindness and compassion. The fact that everyone suffers means we're all in the same boat, my friends.
We'll also hear new sounds from Corrupted, old sounds from Corrupted as interpreted by Oryx, plus Spectral Voice’s riff on savasana, massively percussive indigenous death metal from Tzompantli, Bardo Pond’s heady metal, and the death metal band with the best death metal band name we’ve heard in a long time: Funeral Leech. Our practice begins, and eventually comes to an end, with prairie spells from water is the sun, a member of the Timber Rattle extended universe.
artist – work
water is the sun - bird and savior, sacred illness (edit)
Spectral Voice - Be Cadaver
Tzompantli - Tlayohualli
Funeral Leech - The Tower
Bardo Pond - Conjunctio
Corrupted - Mushikeras (edit)
Oryx - Dios Injusto (Corrupted cover)
water is the sun - bird and savior, sacred illness (edit)
ID MUSIC 20240726: Fresh Jammers
stream | download
For this session, it’s an hour of updated transmissions from old favorites and new discoveries encountered while following overgrown bandcamp clickpaths from “Durban Ambient” to “Mbira Trance” and “Tribal Texas.” That means yet another new project from psychedelic ritual trance mainstay Shackleton and psychedelic noise mainstays Yellow Swans returning with an unexpected Roky Erickson cover.
For our Tribal Texas selection, we’ve got deconstructed corrido psychedelia from nudo, an elusive duo (?) making sounds about “the high stakes of living and working and making your life on the 3.7 million mile wide sacrificial altar they call america.” Stella Chiweshe delivers the aforementioned mbira trance by opening our session with 20 minutes of sublime tones plucked on the mbira dzavadzimu, “a traditional instrument of the Shona people of Zimbabwe.”
Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with deep meditations from Durban-based ambient artist mlondiwethu.
artist – work
mlondiwethu - for what occurs at the depth of experience
Stella Chiweshe - Karigamombe
Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance - Spring Will Return
Jay Duncan - Balsam Drum
SANAM - 94
Yellow Swans - OOP II (Side A)
nudo - de aqui ya no salgo
mlondiwethu - for what occurs at the depth of experience
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I showed my teenaged nephew my banged up 2009 2nd generation Nano the other day, which still works fine, even though a screen of dirty clear plastic tape has replaced the original glass. He looked at it like I'd showed him a Mayan codex.
"This was back when Apple used to make things that work", I granpa'd to him...
I've got Impure Flow cued up for later this evening, but the tracklist has me ready and open. I was thinking of Corrupted the other day but ended up listening to Coffins. Freak Fest sounds great.