Between May of 2005 and April of 2007. Those were the dark days. The lost years. Post-collegiate, pre-Los Angeles nothingness. I lived at home. For the first year-plus, I only worked two or three days a week. Between December of 2006 and April of 2007 I had a telecommuting job, and I worked even less. At night I’d hang out with the same three or four kids: Hornet Montana, Z, and Ken. We’d drink and play music or venture out into the world to eat or loiter. We didn’t go to bars or socialize with others too often. For the most part it was a routine. Stay in and smoke pot or drink Dogfish Head or bottles of red wine and make weird music to include in Hornet’s podcast until the wee hours of the morning.
We got in the habit of heading out to bastions of consumerism to make field recordings of all the hustle and bustle. Whether it was a big open food court, a home appliance store, a pool hall or a diner, I’d wear my in-ear binaural microphones and capture the world around us in true stereo. Then Hornet would manipulate it and process the shit out of it and turn it into useable audio for a podcast.
One time we were hanging out at Pottery Barn — because they had espresso machines where you could make your own, and that made it more appealing than Starbucks — and a guy stopped us to start a conversation. I don’t remember if he knew someone in the group, but very quickly the topic of conversation shifted from generalities to Native American religious ceremonies. This guy, who looked like your regular suburban New Jersey white collar dad, was a member of a Native American religious order. A few times a year, they had permission from the city of New York to hold ceremonies in one of the parks. At these ceremonies, people would gather inside a large tipi, where there would be fires burning to keep everybody warm, live music, and massive amounts of peyote.
According to this guy, it was all on the up-and-up with the city. A huge group of people could get together for the purposes of celebrating some religious holiday and take peyote together, in a safe and comfortable law-abiding environment. He invited us to check it out. He said he’s take us. We asked what it was typically like, if there were people our age or older, and then what the experiences on peyote were like. He said the age range was wide. He said the experience was indescribable, but he’d try to offer a glimpse. Laughing, he said that once everybody was “in,” once everybody had ingested and then puked up the , it was kind of a singular experience as opposed to a group one. He said the last two times he tried it he had similar experiences. The highlight, for him, was a kind of an astral projection where he watched his forehead open up, and these little elves came out of his forehead. He spent some amount of time watching them build the entire universe around him. He said the elves are always rearranging, adding and subtracting to our surroundings, we could only see the elves with the help of entheogens. He said it was a beautiful thing to behold. The elves were literally shifting the building blocks of life all around him, and it gave him a better sense of how the world works on a microscopic elven level.
The first time I heard this Atrium Carceri album, and I listened to the track “Machine Elves,” I thought maybe I understood the guy a little better. Then I researched this record and I learned that — taken as a whole — this record is supposed to replicate the emotions one would experience while taking a casual stroll through an insane asylum. “Faith does not prove anything.” There is another quote included in the gatefold of the front insert of this CD. It says, “The thinkers dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.” – Richard Adams (b. 1920)
Atrium Carceri
Cellblock
(Cold Meat Industry, 2003)
MediaFire DL Link
01. Entrance
02. Black Lace
03. Machine Elves [MP3]
04. Corridor
05. Blue Moon
06. Stir Of Thoughts
07. Depth
08. Crusted Neon
09. Halls Of Steam
10. Reborn
11. Red Stains
12. Inner Carceri
