Audioccult Vol. 52: Blackest Ever Gold

Light a candle. Draw the required sigils. Now, raise your arms above your head and slowly, gently, exhale your soul. You won’t need it here. This is Audioccult, and it’s time to get low. Illustration: SHALTMIRA

DJing when you’re feeling depressed is a weird thing. Of course your mood affects what you play, but also how you respond to the crowd. You can allow yourself transcendence by their presence, or you can remove yourself from them, wrapped in yourself, erecting new constructs around yourself to escape the old forms you had erected before, building and building in a continuous loop—MC Escher working the crowd. Only when you’re faced with the horrible photos afterward do you realize the mistake. It’s this overly thoughtful sort of regret, that thousand-mile mental stare—vacant, stagnant, and even as you recognize it you know it’s the end result of the evening unless you strike quickly. In desperation, you grab the nearest human escape available: “Hey baby, how about we go to your place after so I can use your internet?”

The Quietus‘ track-by-track preview of the last few months of my life reveals a pattern: too many false smiles. Choosing click ->Share and paddling along the surface too often. A declining shift of thought, humor lessened by a need to self-destroy even as I worry about Matthew Lindsay’s writing pushing mine down and calling it little baby scribbles that will never be a grown man’s writing. A bomb-ass editorial sails through the window and calls me Sissyphus before punching me like it thinks Goku would and taking my freelance money. The entropic pounding of Robedoor and Oake form the soundtrack for this tearjerker scene, the musical equivalent of the mocking handclap from God himself. The symmetry is off, Escher askew. Eschew. Gesundheit.

What consumes me is music; it chews me up and silences all else like a Hubba Bubba gag. The divinity is in the details, and through close examination I am Saved. No longer comfy in Nihil, I discard the enormous sweatshirt with the “I Have Given Up” block print (Arial Bold, NOT Helvetica) and I’ve blingee’d my soul to add that diamond sparkle to my eye. There’s a line in the second Terminator movie about NO FATE and if you pause it at just the right time—when you’re utterly obliterated on narcotics—it looks like NO FART. Long past the boredom of the skinny jeans holding in all the horrible stench of my personal pains, I redress my soul with increased personal emphasis on looseness in a post-JNCO world. Take a moment to revel in this rather obtuse mental image. In the URL we’re bombarded with and even perpetuate a false representation of our true selves. Some would consider this a negative, but I’ve found it a useful platform to build off of… that loop again, which can be a good thing. Remember, however, to keep your IRL as healthy as your URL, lest you find your soul eventually consigned to an enormous virtual warehouse filled with dusty links to the “Whip My Hair” video, unclicked since February 2011.~

Published April 25, 2013. Words by Daniel Jones.