What has EsoZone meant to you? Have you met a partner or collaborator at EsoZone? What sorts of art and/or projects have you completed as a result in your participation (or lack thereof) in EsoZone? Has it changed your life in any way?
I’ll go first: I met my wife through EsoZone. She’s a friend of James Curcio’s, who spoke at EsoZone in 2007, and he encouraged her to buy a ticket and go to the PDX0 meetups. I’ve met a lot of other people through EsoZone, but forgive me for putting this relationship above all the others =)
I’ll also add that by giving me a venue for my noise art, EsoZone has driven my continued work towards that. I originally returned to noise art after a decade-plus long vacation as a distraction from EsoZone organization duties, but it was EsoZone itself that has motivated continued work.
So enough about me – what has your experience been?
I found out that esozone was going to be in this format the day before I decided to give my lecture, and came by after work on friday to check the situation. Many weirdos around, as expected. Seems that it would be an easy thing to give my talk, the subject having germinated for the last several years as a consequence of my sound and performance experiments.
My memory of friday was primarily composed of the discussion by Rev. Brainwash concerning an obsession with trains, underground tunnels, and hobos. This discussion ended up ranging all over the place, from some theories that mankind actually developed various abilities by spending time literally underground. No dogmas here, just possibilities. The spread of unauthorized heresay. A discussion with peers where you can make the decisions about what it bullshit and what might ring of truth. I knew then that this was something I could really enjoy.
Given that I had recently performed my first Soup Purse set incorporating ritual principles and imagery I had been using privately for years I felt forcing myself to give some kind of public explanation was a mandatory exercise for the next stage of its articulation. As magician of no particular creed, influenced in equal measure by chaos magic of the Burroughs/Gyson/Spare/-ish lineage and “traditional” methods picked together by years of immersion in obscure ethnographic literature and fortuitous meetings with various initiators, trying to adequately explain “where I was coming from” to was an impossible task for an introduction.
I had made a number of cards containing essential concepts and a vague tree shape upon which they might be fit, but given that I didn’t really have enough time to assemble them I was attempting to improvise both an explanation of the devices used and the context simultaneously. I’m sure some people walked out in despair at my disconnected mumbling, but as often happens during my music sets punctuated by the failure of one or more elements I think by the end I had managed to pull something together. In the weeks that followed I thought continually about what I had missed and how to do it differently next time.
While I have not contacted or been contacted by anyone I met at esozone this year (been busy yo) I certainly plan on it sooner or later, and I certainly plan on being involved in years to come.
Isn’t there someone on here who was interested in getting people together to experiment with Antero Alli material? Been very interested in his projects lately. Get in touch: greaseenvelope via yahoo. Also if anyone is interested in getting in touch re:soup purse shows. I’m playing on the 19th and the 21st. The 21st event specifically will probably interest many here as many of the performances have to do with ecstatic ritual contexts. http://events.iokaos.net/
| November 13, 2009 @ 12:51 pm