"our experience of the world is navigable and communicable because of this sameness. it determines our rhythmic regime – a specifically anthropomorphic regime: linear time, simultaneous, three-dimensional space, and objecthood are its framing parameters – its tempo or its beat. inside these parameters, diverse and idiosyncratic rhythms unfold – but they never break the beat...what if “forwards” and “backwards” were to lose their meaning entirely? what would it feel like to interface with a spacetime – an alien rhythm – that does not follow any recognisable human pattern and whose agency remains opaque? who are these perverse creatures that would desire such a thing?...memory ceases to function; names evaporate in the zone. those who enter it finish up by becoming something else, subject to invasion by exterior forces. artists of dissolution, driven by desire for an alien rhythm. “you want to know what it’s like in there?” asks seasoned stalker emil bonaventura of his protege in nova swing, “the fact is, you spend all those years trying to make something of it. then guess what, it starts making something of you.” connection wrought through division."
- amy ireland
alien, one of few adjectives that seems to perfectly resonate with every fan of ferraro's early 2000's output of low fidelity drone and noise albums. expressing something as entirely extraterrestrial, in a way that implies an intrusion from a place "not here", a brand of music whose sole purpose is not to describe or exaggerate the real and its affects, but rather to subvert it entirely and create universes of their own, numinous subways that form the exoskeleton of infinite possibilities. absconding to positive spaces of freedom, moulded by a brand of esotericism both immanent and ancient. it is only the alien that can guide us up a rope (woven with contradiction). we do not know where these sounds are from (and deep down we do not want to know), and it is that very severance from encountering the known that helps thrust us into the unknown. of all of ferraro's releases in the early part of the new millennium, one album stands tall in the context of his inclination towards the mystic and describing a tangible gnosis through a tailored film of degradation, aperiodicity, and musical arrangements that both frighten and delight the listener.
"live smokeshows from inside the ciguri cave hazed diamonds with windswept hair" released by ferraro in 2005 (under the name teotihuacan) is by far the closest one can come to an actual abduction from the present to a lysergic outside. combining sprawling keys, a wall of ritualistic vocalizations that sound like shamanic drones, submerged whistles and hums, and muffled percussion that sound like tribal drums buried behind a fountain of ice, all concealed under the veil of the crackles and breaks of its tape recording, this album is as out there as it can get in the context of ferraro's vast catalog of noise releases.
cover art for “live smokeshows from inside the ciguri cave hazed diamonds with windswept hair”
"recorded october-december 2004 in tijuana mexico and the desert outskirts of el cajon california. music for the desert temples of extraterrestrial light."
- liner notes on the casette
the album art contains a royal lace medallion dolly (a specific design for paper mats) with what looks like a backdrop containing a starry sky (modest in detail compared to ferraro's more densely packed black and white collages). however, the more intriguing ties to the native american culture inferred so far come from a term in the album title, "ciguri". the first (and only) mention of the term i could find was in the account of french artist antonin artaud's travels through mexico, in particular his time spent with and learning the rites and rituals of the tarahumara tribe, situated near the north of the country. in his book titled "the peyote dance", artaud describes his experience with the hallucinogenic cactus called peyote, the rituals associated with the consumption of the psychedelic, and its many spiritual and metaphysical insights that were disclosed to artaud during his participation in the ceremonies of the tarahumara culture.
- antonin artaud
the peyote cactus (and in the context of the rituals performed called the ciguri plant) is used to help dissociate the real from the unreal, truth from untruth, good from evil (the tarahumara do not view good and evil as two opposing forces, rather, they describe good as that which is real and eternal, and evil as that which is fleeting and false). the peyote dance which the tribes engage in involves consuming controlled doses of the cactus in it's powdered form, and with the guidance of a priest, engage in a long and trance like dance that brings the participant in contact with the primordial force of ciguri (a creative force). antonin describes many more fantastical elements that marked his travels and interactions with the tarahumara people, including detailed accounts of the life of the tarahumara, the history of their rites, his profound visions under the influence of ciguri, its role in helping him reconcile and make peace with many of his inner struggles, the pneuma-somatic relation between the liver and one's ability to sift through spiritual truth, and a rather wild concluding deduction where artaud claims that the person who introduced the cactus and its magical healing properties to the region many generations ago was jesus christ himself. for anyone interested in a concise account of the specifics of the ritual, one may read the below poem written by artaud titled "tutuguri, the rite of the dark sun".
and down below, as at the base of the bitter slope,
cruelly heartbroken,
the circle of six crosses opens,
far below,
as if embedded in the mother earth,
unclenched from the filthy grip of the drooling mother.
the earth of black coal
is the only moist place in this crevice of rock.
the rite is that the new sun must pass through seven points
before bursting forth from the mouth of the earth.
and there are six men, one for each sun,
and a seventh man who is the raw sun itself,
dressed in black and red
and with each leapcomes the increasingly dark
of the drum,
until suddenly one sees, arriving at full gallop,
with dizzying speed,
the last sun,
the first man,
the black horse with
a man on it — naked,
completely naked and virgin.
having finished circling, they uproot
the crosses from the earth,
and the naked man
on the horse
raises high
a great horseshoe
which he has dipped in a cut from his own blood.
a tarahumara shaman seated with peyote buds on cloth, mexico (1892).
it makes perfect sense to see why ferraro's tendency to combine the occult with his brand of dizzying drones and noise is a perfect vehicle for an eerie revolution of our basic intuitions. musical dissonance functioning as epistemological dissonance, breaks in the ordinary life, the sounds he moulds work so well to evoke this feeling not because they're entirely foreign, but precisely because they retain enough familiarity (notably through their sampling of older music, obscure media, and his own voice stretched and torn beyond recognition) to work as a crossing path. it is neither random clamor, nor is it conventionally digestible music, balancing on a razors edge whose ends tear through a tapestry. employing crackles, noise, and a transmuted perversion of the expected to create these worlds. artists like ferraro (and spencer clark) would be better described as experimental metaphysicians than noise artists.
the peyote cactus (sections of the stem called buttons are used in rituals for their hallucinogenic effect)
"the fantastic can emerge and can once again scatter in our consciousness its phosphorescence and its haze. and this fantastic is of noble quality, its disorder is only apparent, it really obeys an order that is fashioned mysteriously and on a level which normal consciousness does not reach but which ciguri alows us to reach, and which is the very mystery of all poetry. but there is in human existence another level, obscure and formless, where consciousness has not entered, and which surrounds it like a mysterious extension or a menace, as the case may be...for the rite of ciguri is a rite of creation, which explains how things are in the void and how the void is in the infinite, and how they emerged from it into reality, and were made...we can no longer understand god unless he first touches our souls, and our dance will be nothing but a mockery, and the phantom...the phantom which pursues ciguri will be born here once again!"
- antonin artaud
even if we discount the mystic undertones found here, the music sounds distinctly timeless because its elements defy the contemporary association we hold them to, music outside of its time, music that breaks it, brought back from the dead and reimagined not as a revival, but rather as a tool to grind down our concept of linear rhythm. the ritual chants and instrumentation not only work as a sonic ornament, but instead solicit an outside, a time machine. it is this ritualistic aspect of the music that has allowed their brand of low-fidelity music to sidestep the rapid commercialization of the approach in other genres. poverty that refuses to be sublimated, suspended in a sphere of its own making. take for example the second track on the album titled "extraterrestrial light", the section that truly sets the album in motion. containing some of the most beautiful arrangements in ferraro's entire discography replete with glittering keys, what sounds like drawn out moments of throat singing, and uplifting walls of synths, all amalgamating into something that resembles a brief peek into a divine experience found on albums like "heavens gate", "genie head gas in the tower of dreams", and other releases that feature a greater presence of ambient tracks.
nakoda and cree men and women sitting around a fire, praying silently during a peyote ritual
another aspect i've come to appreciate particularly with this release in his series of drone and noise albums is the layer of dissociation that resembles listening to mainstream media through cheap speakers in the worst acoustic environments possible, from south indian songs i've heard blast from garbage trucks early in the morning, to bhajan cdr's no longer in press being played in the open atmosphere of a crowded temple complex, the music expresses an uprooting of media from its original source to a forced rebirth within the confines of sub-standard tweeters and subwoofers, an effect that cannot solely be reduced to simply graining out the audio. an intentional divorce to redefine the familiar beyond relentless splicing and remixing of the source, a re-situation of audio into liminal architectures. the eerie is then pushed into the alien with what i would describe as a complete reinvention of the way sound as function is used by ferraro. (more focused examples from the discographies of ferraro and clark include albums like foreign correspondence, night dolls with hairspray, and others)
"one enters an anechoic chamber, as silent as technologically possible in 1951, to discover that one hears two sounds of one’s own unintentional making (nerve’s systematic operation, blood’s circulation), the situation one is clearly in is not objective (sound-silence), but rather subjective (sounds only), those intended and those others (so-called silence) not intended. if, at this point, one says, “yes i do not discriminate between intention and non-intention,” the splits, subject-object, art-life, etc., disappear. "
- john cage
the skaters' reinterpretation of functional sounds, in particular incidental ones that are a byproduct of the functioning of a certain object or environment, as opposed to functional sounds that work to pass on a message (the sound of an alarm clock's function is to wake one up, whereas the beating of ones heart is a sound that is a byproduct of an already functioning system) is another feature which i feel lends to the absolutely unique atmospheres their work builds. taking the incidental approach to functional sound and blurring the lines with intentional, the music samples sounds that feel so familiar (like direct references to contemporary objects; for example, i can't remember the number of times the percussion on some of the tracks on their noise albums like the jarvid trilogy, and skaters' releases like "wind draping incense" remind me of the rhythmic whirring of a washing machine), and then turns them on their heads with all sort of twists and distortions to the source to transform these incidental sounds into something unheard of while keeping that root sense of a reference to an actually existing object (when there isn't), a central aspect that helps appreciate why their music sounds so unearthly (bizarre to our daily experience).
huichol art depicting peyote motif
this category of sound as function and not as aesthetic, remodeled to invoke functions, objects, and environments that don't really exist to us, combined with an aesthetic reconciliation of the distant past and the hyperreal and industrial present is in my opinion the central pillar that guides and moulds his early (and spencer clark's current) discographies into audio that works as a guided sonic disintegration of the anchors that weigh us down, much like the peyote as an instrument to channel a similar disintegration and breakdown of our linear rhythms to better observe and separate the truth of reality from falsehood.
"eerie impasse[s]’ arise ‘when mismatching modes of intelligence, cognition and communication confront one another. when brought into contact with an eerie outside agency, ‘“we” “ourselves” are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces’. because both the weird and eerie describe the ‘new’ in this radical way — an intrusion of alien outsideness — whether as the operation of an eerie agency or of something in the environment which does not belong — they automatically indicate the impossibility of knowledge and explanation: 'when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears."
- mark fisher
given the lore of peyote attached to this album, i’d consider this a sort of accompanying release with other projects featuring the plant as a central motif such as "observatory cg II & III (coconut of teotihuacan)", “chiuiji cactus juice energy of the eagle me”, and “peyote cactus rituals”. vertigo melodies for a hallucinogenic cactus trip, this album features mindblowing moments of low-fidelity hypnagogia and drone that would surprise and elate even the most seasoned of ferraro fans. meditative and confrontational in nature (if you allow it), there's a real potential in albums such as this to compel one to throw away their books, and see god in every street corner. a true hidden gem and a high-ranking favourite of mine in his ouvre of tribal ambient and noise releases, and a great introductory album for those curious to explore ferraro’s pre-far side virtual releases.