Blues on the Burgas Bay, Bulgaria, August 2023

more photos of the bay below in link

    As some of you may have heard already: on August 8, in the wee hours, near Burgas, Bulgaria, while camping on the bay giving onto the Black Sea, someone broke into our old Volvo wagon via the rear passenger window and stole my field recording kit & tools suitcase, among other things. Inside the suitcase they grabbed was the Zoom H6 (a constant companion since 2015), the new hydrophone, two self-built piezo contact plate microphones, that Tecsun PL-600 shortwave radio, numerous cables and many home-made patches, various tools, walkie talkies and worst of all, the irreplaceable SD cards with the last few days and nights of recordings (about which I was very excited) and another SD card, recordings from 2021 from Romania, Poland & Bulgaria, some of which had not been archived yet). The experience I'd been contemplating of this beautiful Black Sea coast was primordial and exhilarating: rugged beaches, some still heaped with millions of tiny shells (future sands from former homes), with visible shoals and sand-bars, views of the ports, cormorant perches, foxes calling to each other in the scrub at night, a peninsula obviously once inhabited in Homeric or earlier times jutting out, steep cliffs falling off. I had long and fruitful recording sessions and walks along winding paths of wind-blown wild grass. I had hoped to bring listeners closer to these shores and into the electromagnetic pulsations of the ionosphere full of resonance and Perseid meteor showers.... 

 I had started to snore most likely just when the glass shattered, the sound of breaking plastic glass masked and blended with the crashing, distantly lulling Black Sea waves. Nothing short of a miracle will replace the recordings but a little help from friends can go a long way towards recouping I and Karolina's expenses in replacing the lost gear and getting our home recording studio back in order and get us back in the field again. Our automobile insurance doesn't cover theft. In fact, the insurance company wouldn't even pay for the glass replacement. So the greater loss is the gear, the clothes, the tools, some medicines and the whole day spent enjoying the inside of a Bulgarian police station. 

 Donations to help us recover the gear can be made to my paypal account jeff.gburek@gmail.com or if you would prefer another means of support message us directly. Many thanks to our Bulgarian friends Den Stefanova and Rozaliya Mitrova who reposted here my all points bulletin days after the theft.

 I would like to thank Nina Rholfs, Charles Whittaker, Bob Bellerue, Kenneth Bradburd for their contributions to the recovery campaign. And thanks to all who shared the post and offered condolences.

photo sets from Burgas Bay

 https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=jeff.gburek&set=a.10231318870819628

 

 https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=jeff.gburek&set=a.10231307825263496

 

 

 

 

Tracks inside the Sonic Footprint. Sound Art with Ecological Perspectives. An interview with Marta Zapparoli. (English and Italian)

 

      Marta Zapparoli, practices a living art form that is open-ended, interactive, connected with the earth, it's electro-magnetic fields and evolving elements. Among sound artists, a rare few, if any others, share the same diversity, polymathic instrincts and pure curiosity. Her field is our actuality: vibration, energy, communications networks, invisible forces of nature, order, chaos and pollution. Through multiple sound media such as shortwave radio wave resonance, natural and urbanistic field recording, tape machines, self-designed antennae, she has advanced her art of listening and sharing to eventually attempt translation of the inaudible pulsations of solar plasma into a sensual experience as in her most recent performance work on the Northern Lights entitled "Interdimensional Generated Space".

https://dissipatio.bandcamp.com/album/interdimensional-generated-space

      Marta Zapparoli's work is down to earth and yet "up in the air", in the ionosphere: an address to the epoch wherein the "connectivity" of virtual sociality has created a web of 5G satellites, mind-cancelling and bird- & bee-disturbing technologies. On the fringes of the old acoustic ecology she helps keep me focused on the great sense of trying to listen across the gap between the current biosphere and the ancient chthonian, primordial forces, a re-evaluation and re-formation of consciousness of the Gaian planetary spheres suggested by Lyn Margulis as a symbiogenesis.

I met Marta in Berlin and we continued the interview via email.

 

-What was the first sound you ever heard that was an omen of the path you are on now in your sound art?

Honestly, there were many sounds that somehow directed me onto my path in sound art. From a young age I was a careful listener of environmental sounds surrounding me, both in nature and cities. I became more involved with sound when I moved to live in a city, as a sonic observer, especially in listening closely to the industrial noises around of me. After a while, I became obsessed with how to deconstruct the noise cloud into small definite sound particles, and how to record it, and to use the microscopic parts that made up the overall noise in a constructive and artistic way. Probably the industrial sounds of the city, heard and consequently recorded in macroscopic detail, were a great stimulus for me to enter the world of sound art, then using them in visionary and imaginative ways during my first live performances.

Qual è stato il primo suono che hai mai sentito che sembrava essere un presagio del nostro attuale percorso nell'arte sonore?

Onestamente , ci sono stati molti suoni che mi hanno indirizzato sulla strada dell'arte sonora. Fin da giovane, sono stata un'ascoltatore attento dei suoni dell'ambiente che mi circondava, sia in natura che nella citta'. Quando mi sono spostata a vivere in citta', sono stata catturata profondamente dal rumore industriale che mi circondava, e stava diventando un'ossessione l'idea di come come scarnificare i rumori in piccole particelle sonore definite, e come registrare, e usare queste microscopiche parti che componevano il rumore generale in modo costruttivo e artistico. Probabilmente i suoni industriali della citta', ascoltati e di conseguenza registrati in modo macroscopico e dettagliato, sono stati un grande stimolo per me per entrare nel mondo dell'arte sonora, usandoli poi in maniera visionaria e fantasiosa.

 

-What was your very first field recording? What equipment did you use?

My first field recordings were made using the radio receiver, recording onto cassette tape the music and noises in the short wave radio frequencies, using the radio of my father. I basically grew up with a small tape recorder and radio, so this was my first approach to field recording.

Le mie prime registrazioni le ho fatte usando la radio, registravo su registratore a cassetta la musica e il rumore delle stazioni, sintonizzando nelle frequenze radiofoniche a onda corta con la radio del mio papa. Sono cresciuta fondalmentalmente con un piccolo registratore a cassette e la radio, questo e' stato il mio primo approccio con i field recordings.

      -How did you get involved with VLF (Very Low Frequency) or Natural Radio listening and recording? Can you briefly tell us in simple terms what this is?

Working for some years with self-made field recordings of vibrational sounds, industrial places, machinery, cities, acoustic ecology, underwater, underground, abandoned places, among others, I slowly grew more interested in what the environment is hiding under the multicolored layers of acoustical noises and sounds. I asked my self: what am I NOT able to hear in a chaotic city ? Or on the top of a mountain or in a desert and in many other places around the world ? After some time of research, I started to experiment with a wide range of antennas and radio receivers, during out-door recordings, to hunt and receive the invisible web laying under the acoustic environment.

Also, in a dramatic and sad moment of my life, when my father passed away, I started to grow more obsessive about energies and the inaudible. Reflecting on the connection of our life with the universe, I started to explore and research in the vast field of radio astronomy.

Since then, I'm focusing my artistic work and research on the use of self-produced recordings of electromagnetic radiations coming from nature (our atmosphere and from outer space), including also radio wave communication, wireless, and electro-smog coming from our technological world.

I'm very fascinated by the origin of Natural Radio phenomena (VLF), I have done a lot of research on this -- radio, is also "natural" and was heard even before was invented, it has been always there from the beginning of the origin of our planet.

Natural Radio (VLF) are fundamentally electromagnetic emissions which originate from natural phenomena from the atmosphere and the outer space such as thunderstorm, weather phenomena, Northern Lights , solar wind and other events.

Lavorando per alcuni anni con i field recordings, specificatamente sui suoni vibrazionali, luoghi industriali, macchinari, città, ecologia acustica, registrazioni sottomarine, sotterrane, luoghi abbandonati, etc. mi sono lentamente interessata a ciò che l'ambiente nasconde sotto gli strati multicolori di rumori e suoni acustici. Mi sono chiesta: cosa NON posso sentire in una città caotica, in cima a una montagna, in un deserto e in molti altri luoghi del mondo?

Dopo qualche tempo di ricerca, ho iniziato a sperimentare con una vasta gamma di antenne e ricevitori radio durante le registrazioni all'aperto, per ricercre e per ricevere la rete invisibile che si cela sotto l'ambiente acustico.

Oltre tutto, in un momento drammatico e triste della mia vita, quando è venuto a mancare mio padre, sono diventata piu osessiva riguardo le energie e l' impercettibile. Riflettendo molto sulla connessione della nostra vita con l'Universo, ho iniziato a esplorare il vasto campo della radioastronomia.

Da allora, sto concentrando il mio lavoro artistico e la mia ricerca sull'uso di registrazioni autoprodotte di radiazioni elettromagnetiche provenienti dalla natura ( dll'atmosfera e dall'universo), comprese le comunicazioni a onde radio, wireless, e i campi elettromagnetici (EMF) provenienti dal nostro mondo tecnologico.

Sono molto affascinata dall'origine dei fenomeni radiofonici naturali (VLF) e ho fatto molte ricerche al riguardo - la radio, anch'essa "naturale", è stata ascoltata prima che fosse inventata, è sempre stata presente fin dall'origine del nostro pianeta.

Le radio naturali (VLF) sono fondamentalmente emissioni elettromagnetiche che provengono da fenomeni naturali dell'atmosfera e dello spazio esterno, come i temporali, i fenomeni atmosferici, l'aurora boreale, il vento solare e altri eventi.

        -Has your perception of the shape of the earth changed since you began your research as a recordist?

Of course my perception it has changed ! This is unavoidable!!

Being a sound artist, recording environmental sounds, I have developed more awareness of climate events, atmospheric movements, expansion, amplitude, instability, time and mutation - I discovered how microscopical ecosystems can trigger huge events. All these realizations changed my perception of the earth. Its shape is in constant transformation.

Certo che la mia percezione e' cambiata! Questo e' inevitabile !

Essendo un artista del suono che registra suoni ambientali, ho sviluppato una maggiore consapevolezza degli eventi climatici, dei movimenti atmosferici, dell'espansione, dell'ampiezza, dell'instabilità, del tempo e della mutazione - ho scoperto come ecosistemi microscopici possano innescare eventi enormi. Tutte queste consapevolezze hanno cambiato molto la mia percezione della Terra. La sua forma è in costante trasformazione.

-Did you become aware of ecological challenges of climate change while in the process or did any ecological sensibility or sensitivity draw you into recording or was it just rather everything happening all together at once?

The process of recordings, guided me towards a path of awareness of the ecological challenge of climate change. At the beginning of my career I recorded more often the noisy and chaotic industrial cites (I was living in cities most of the time and interested to listen and to extrapolate details from the global noise field with different microphones and experimental

techniques) while at the same time I was also fascinated by the natural rural environment which looked so silent but instead could be very loud and chaotic and unpredictable too. And so I recorded a lot of nature too. It was somehow a parallel process. The more I grew aware of the technological, the more I got interested and fascinated with how the natural world is so independent and malleable, strong, wild and unpredictable, and how everything in it adapts, mutates, in a polluted environment, in order to survive.

Il processo di registrazione mi ha guidato verso un percorso di consapevolezza della sfida ecologica del cambiamento climatico. All'inizio della mia carriera ho registrato più spesso le rumorose e caotiche città industriali (vivevo in città per la maggior parte del tempo e mi interessava ascoltare ed estrapolare dettagli nel rumore globale con diversi microfoni e tecniche sperimentali), ma allo stesso tempo ero anche affascinata dall'ambiente naturale rurale che sembrava così silenzioso ma invece poteva essere molto rumoroso, caotico e imprevedibile, e così ho registrato anche molta natura. È stato in qualche modo un processo parallelo. Più ero consapevole del mondo tecnologico e più mi interessava e mi affascinava come il mondo naturale fosse così indipendente e malleabile, forte, selvaggio e imprevedibile, e come si adattasse, mutasse, in un ambiente inquinato per sopravvivere.

-You are based in Berlin. When did you first arrive there? How has living there changed your process? Has Berlin itself changed in your view?

I arrived in Berlin in 2007 because I won an Italian competition to realize an audio portrait of the city in the length of time of four months. At the time, I wanted to leave my country anyway, due to the lack of attention offered to women sound artists & noise-experimental musicians.

Berlin was an open door to freedom and possibilities. I had more possibilities and time to focus on my working process, to reflect, research, experiment more. Meeting people from all over the world, experimenting and learning in workshops, exchanging with other musicians knowledge and information, collaborating with ensembles and groups, was an important challenge to grow as an artist and as a person.

In the past 10 years, Berlin changed very much in negative and positive ways, but also my relation-feelings "in" and "with" the city changed. It is a mixture of things together that evolved in multiple layers. Despite the negative side of gentrification, pollution, inflation, the expensive of living costs etc... aspects which of course are known all over the world, still, Berlin is an incredible, excited, multicolored city with good opportunities, strong culture, great vibes, and grant possibilities to support artistic works.

For most artists, it is an incredible privilege to live here and we should never forget this and to work hard to make good use of it.

  Sono arrivata a Berlino nel 2007 perché ho vinto un concorso italiano per realizzare un ritratto sonoro della città, nel periodo di quattro mesi. All'epoca, volevo comunque lasciare il mio paese, a causa della mancanza di attenzione nei confronti delle donne artiste sonore, musiciste noise-sperimentale. Berlino era come una porta aperta di libertà e possibilità.

Avevo più possibilità e tempo per concentrarmi sul mio processo di lavoro, per riflettere, ricercare, sperimentare sempre di piu'. Incontrare persone da tutto il mondo, sperimentare e imparare nei workshop, scambiare conoscenze e informazioni con altri musicisti - artisti, collaborare con ensemble e gruppi, è stata una sfida importante per crescere come artista e come persona.

Negli ultimi 10 anni Berlino è cambiata molto, in negativo e in positivo, ma anche il mio rapporto con la città è cambiato. E' una miscela di cose che si sono evolute a più livelli. Nonostante gli aspetti negativi, tra i quali la gentrificazione, l'inquinamento, l'inflazione, l'aumento del costo della vita, ecc.... che ovviamente si riflettono in tutto il mondo; Berlino è ancora un'incredibile eccitante città multicolore , con buone opportunità, una forte cultura, grandi vibrazioni, con possibilità di sostenere progetti artistici.

Per la maggior parte degli artisti, è un incredibile privilegio vivere qui, e non dovremmo mai dimenticarlo, e lavorare duro per farne buon uso.

-Would you like to travel in outer space?

If it could be physically and emotionally possible, I have a dream-desire to sit on the furnaces of a comet and to navigate in the outer space to feel the transcendental connection with the universe; then, to enter in a black hole to feel the speed limit of the cosmos.

But, in general, I travel in outer space all the time when I perform live with my vortex of noises, energies and radio waves.

Se fosse fisicamente ed emotivamente possibile, ho un sogno-desiderio di sedermi sulle fornaci di una cometa e di navigare nello Spazio per sentire la connessione trascendentale con l'Universo - poi, di entrare in un buco nero per sentire il limite di velocità del cosmo.

Ma in generale, viaggio sempre nello Spazio quando mi esibisco dal vivo con il mio vortice di rumori, energie e onde radio.

Please visit Marta's website for further information.

https://martazapparoli.klingt.org/

 

 

Amanita Muscaria as a Medium of Gut Biome Reflection: Notes on This with a Healthy Dose of That

image by unknown artist

    Neutrality is not negativity. It only appears so when it doesn't get counted in the vote. And it only appears so when we want to weaponize neutrality. This is how we treat quantum mechanics in our daily life: as something that doesn't matter, doesn't fit with the results until decisions have been made and sides have been taken. But the ground state underlies all conditions, all states of matter and potentiates all observations, all interventions. Things themselves, when satisfied, self-consistent, enjoy being at rest. All struggles are enjoined to regain this self-consistency, homeostasis, using the laws of entropy to go contrary to itself for a shorter or longer period of time. The drama of Sisy-phusis' labor is not human in scale but cosmological. It is reduced to the simplest action merely to teach the children of ancient Greek civilization a fundamental idea about energy. It further involves, as already hinted, Chronos, time, that cut from space, the dimensional reduction in which we dwell. It demands the development of cyclical process. At the root of time is this broken, segmented periodicity. The serpent of the night. Our moons our suns our zodiac now our megagalactic clusters. Churning in our guts and minds as if one.

    Written as a reply to a comment I read in the Amanita Muscaria group on FB. Multiple ideas come to mind. As always, we should stop thinking, but cannot but... Reason can choose to not exist. But it's a choice of not choosing (familiar paradox). By recognizing itself as generating illusions reason can stop creating them, stop believing one is more significant than any other, can start deconstructing the language of thought like you have already begun doing above. Mind and matter maybe coextensive and therefore infinite. As an old poem said the mind mirror of matter moves into itself backwards. What I've liked most about Amanita experiences is that it brings about a sense of connectivity. So there is no sense of being in a prison (gnostic matter) but it's rather an experience of networks like the wood wide web or the mycelial understory or the gente de yage (the spirits of the rainforest plants and animals in some of the Ayahuasca curandero/a traditions.) Amanita seems to tell me wordlessly it is not a trap and that's because there is no final border. If there is a border it can be penetrated, gotten through, worked upon or worked with.

 When reason is being reasonable it opts for diversity because choosing for less than a number of things is logically impossible if one sticks to the idea of what counts. That might seem like a play on words, and it is, but with a purpose. One may contain all things but unity is a process in which all things are interactive. This is what the Gaia concept offers as a remedy to the mind matter dilemma. In other theories matter is merely energy or information seeking translation and these do not stand in opposition as they do in dualistic systems

 In other thought systems (philosophies) there is often detected a harsh definition, a hard line, between what is living and so-called inanimate matter. The Gaian concept introduces us as a mixed bag of both in some kind of infinite food chain or eating chain of things metabolizing. Parallel universe theories developed to explain how quantum mechanics actually works suggest that more than two contrary states can exist simultaneously in the absolute universe if infinite probabilistic combinatorics. In the words of Wolf, matter is constantly being reborn as spirit and the spiritual matters composing the mind are eventually unable to keep the body from being reborn as matter without particular thoughts or without thoughts we particularly think.

 The Amanita process is dovetailing a lot of concerns. It's truly a revelation of relatedness and brings one to see more of what is essential and necessary inside all things. In the forest, there is nothing really there by chance but it all seems like a jumble, random, senseless, when taken from the human pov. Now a lot of scientists would say that is true without needing to get so spiritually excited about it. I find the recognition however heartening because it makes me rethink my whole life configuration in a similar way. I am no longer thinking my life is nearly as fucked up as I thought it was a few years ago. Microdosing the amanita has something to do with the mood stabilization but it's the quality of that which matters the most. I was allowed to see how I got to Amanita through the forest. Reading about forest, mycology and ecological interdependence made the idea of consciousness being a result of all these processes seem much more believable since the mind and body literally find in nature that which supports them fundamentally, contrary to the industrial and classic Western idea that nature is an enemy and matter being slow, stupid, lacking intelligence.

 

On the use of pscyhedelic states and how to achieve them. In reply to Thibault Delfiere

 I tried to follow this in the translation and with my latin languages background making guesses into gaps of significance. I did get the idea that you mentioned three kinds of drugs and that the third category, the psychotopics/psyhedelic being the one you had the least experience or knowledge about and yet they (this class of mind altering substance) seem to be the drugs you believe create the most bizarre combinations of imagery. The short answer to why strange imagery accompanies these experiences is because they expand the onieric temporality of the brain's processing and permit one to dream consciously... what's this all about? What is lucidity in dream space?

 (Pupil dilation changes amount and exposure time of photonic energy, causing new visual temporal processing dynamics). 

Various visual hallucinations are often the result of slowed redistribution of serotonin in the synapses accentuated by the dilation of the pupils allowing more reflective light into the apertures. This may seem trifling because the speed difference between photons relative to the curvature of space might seem negligible on the macro scale, not to mention nil on the cosmic scale, but on the subjective plane, this re-adjustment of the framing of perception is huge enough to cause wonder and reflection. 

 Double or trip-le or quadruple takes. It causes you to see more of what is there to be seen and because it works on phenomenological feedback loop, it's related absolutely to the actuality of becoming rather than distortion of it. It merely shows the relativity of the various distortions (reductions) we call "perception". All of our perceptions in fact are selected focus spaces, screened or filtered versions of the absolute information network that is the ultimate reality beyond our culturally manufactured limits.

The great problem with illegal substances is that one speaks of them publically these days through a veil of self-censorship (although the internet provides you with numerous forums to discuss this kind of "kink" and you can absorb details without ingesting any of them, retaining your virtual virginity, so to speak. For example, I've never ingested any ayahuasca potions but after 10 years of studying the topic I'm pretty sure I understand what can happen if I would take it and as a result I have never sought to do it outside ceremonial conditions in the natural tropical rainsforest ennvironement where the spirits of thos medicinal concotions dwell. I am pretty sure those who drink ayhuasca outside this context are not getting the ayahuasca experience. They get some kind of re-organization of mental space certainly but context is everything. Normalizing data and urbanity rushes back in. For those who don't believe in nature spirits, they are just sampling another recreational adult knock-out beverage the post-modern market place offers maybe. I mean to say they might also have profound experiences and revelations but these same revelations or experience could be obtained through sythesized pharmacueticall created intelligently. Those who believe that the trees, fungi, forest animals and waters living in symbiosis are part of the mixture will want to meet face to face with the source.

    Ample information is available about the way consciousness is affected by all pyschotropics. We are in a heyday of open communications in the West where mostly we can still talk about things that are illegal if we do so in an intelligent, reasonable and scientific manner. The impact of mind altering substance on art is an old and still controversial one. 

    My own view is that art really is a form of symbol making that can include or ignore certain sets of phenomenological data or imagery. Deep art that delves into archetypal forms will occasionally take a more visceral or somatic than mental path and if the way to the image is through the body anthropomorphic and messy imagery of bodily process may be more understandable to the person under the influence. Both creator and viewer. When the experience is more mental or intellectual, the imagery tends to be tentacular, branching, associated with vibration, aura, multiple images, trails, wires, diagrams, sacred geometry: establishing patterns of connectivity. Perhaps this division of spheres follows bicameral, left/right brains specializations (These are neural binding geometries based on serotonin affinities of psychoactive alkaloids.). 

No matter what "causes" or "results", in either case, the issue is how intelligently our mind continues, carries on, give vent to our relation of & to ourselves and the environment and the cosmos. This is what allows us to see in art even prehistorically the vehicle that carries many stages of the evolution of self consciousness from animist religions to science. 

Mind altering substances have always been ingested. The urge to merge and combine.

It's in the food or it is the food. In some cultures certain foods were taboo except as medicines. The medicinal foods had to be given in microdoses. The priest (a witch, in th west, mostly) was the first doctor. You probably know this. Yet what you don't know about psychedelics is that they provide mental pathways and create new ways of perceiving interiority. Meditation practices and isometric exercise can also bring about these mental states. Just do it. My personal question at the moment is why should we make art if we already feel good and perfect about our consciousness? The answer can be as different as every person is different. Maybe art is simply the art of being different. Of being the differand as Deleuze put it. 

 

Recontre avec T.D. contd

Yes, you most clearly show that you don't understand psychedelics because you cling to the idea that there is dependence involved. I think you are able to understand but maybe you do not try or don't want to try. Maybe it is more convenient to have a behaviour related to dope and dopes who use dope which you can compare and contrast your own more heroic behavior as a singularity artist.

In any case, I think you are correct to say you don't need any drugs. But this also missed the point: people don't take psychedelics out of need but instead out of desire, will, or as a sacrament. It is like any decision to make a painting or sculpture or performance. It is to engage consciousness to take a challenge and engage with the material that is one's own self. 

Regarding darkness it is the supreme challenge because it is without externalized media. We speak here of enlarging sensibilities not about reducing them. But we speak here also about removing obstacles and rigid binaries. We can experience light also. Light as darkness is one of the most generative discoveries of the psychonaut. Psychonauts are concerned with living experiences and perhaps little or not at all concerned with leaving traces although nothing is forbidden and everything permitted. In this sense they are also wilful and assert themselves as you might put it. I think the biggest difference we explore here is the one concerning externalization. I know you make art and do performances. I also know well and feel deeply your frustrations since I share the sense of not being able to set up performances, exhibitions. I too lack recognition for my endeavors. Yet the interesting aspect of the spiritual path is that it alone allows one finally say fuck off to society and find some peace and freedom -- of mind mainly -- but who knows -- the world and the mind may be more intricately interwoven than we can tell. Freedom is just a process of by-passing or shrinking one's self to fit through gaps in the system that enslaves.   I hope you accept my statements as a friendly contrarian viewpoint and not as any attack. I respect and admire your tenacity in process. Good morning!

 

 

 

 

Entheogenic & Mycology Forums, where people say stuff like "dang, I guess that this Mucor is symbiotic with AM. Like AM is symbiotic to pines and birch, this fleece lives on its mushroom host and spings to life when the AM has released its spores and begin its breakdown, or when dry AM tissue is rehydrated! That there is a hitherto unknown or unidentified symbiosis in the amanita muscaria. This might lead to a new level of understanding of mycology." WHICH IS TO SAY WHAT MY BRAIN WANTS TO WRAP AND CARESSES Just now

 lovingly to understand the understories of the limits of what we all don't know

and fathom relations of Gaian potential remappings

Are there any Mycelials out there? In the Cosmogram

Let's talk

Cosmomycelium...

The community dicussions groups (in English, as far as I can tell, mostly)

 Mycotopia

https://forums.mycotopia.net/showthread.php?t=18931 

Entheogen Network

https://entheogen-network.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=7417&start=180

 (first critical reflections on the thread: it loses a lot of informational focus after page 28 but the rest is very engaging --  amanita M. has high levels of organic antibiotics and scaleable vitamin D resources --  it starts to feel like the weedy fungus has some interesting survival tactics we can learn from --

 Amanita Research

https://forum.amanitaresearch.com/viewforum.php?f=12&sid=08d87c0dc674dbbbe2490045a7753ba7

 
Ambrosia Society (Archive Only, Original Website Down)

This is the website founded by Don Teeter, researcher and writer on the subject of Soma and through study of the Amanita Muscaria decantation methods he feels are stipulated in the Rig Veda. Everything in that archive is worthy of perusal. There are pdf donwloads of books and studies without any paywalls

https://web.archive.org/web/20190118203911/https://ambrosiasociety.org/

Ink on Paper by Jeff Gburek

it's all about understanding what's eating you, people

and understanding what your eat

symbiont holobiont

Totempole:
I apologized for calling you tadpole. I did not mean to ruin your thread. It’s part of my affliction as I have warned everyone that has taken muscimol in previous writings. I’ve known about muscimol for a very long time and about its impact on societal formation. I’ve been waiting for Teeter for a long time. I don’t believe you will ever find the kind of high you are seeking (the euphoric high). The overdose of this poison after the awe-inspiring part) is like what you observe in newborn children. The part where you can’t get enough of life and you want more yesterday. There seems to be an innate understanding built into the aftermath of the poison such as interpretation of symbology. I’ve seen two Mythratic Statues: One of a small child riding a raging red bull. My interpretation is this is the large overdose of muscimol and the psyche can not control it. The second shows a young man slaying the red bull. My interpretation is this image is the psyche controlling the muscimol overdose.
I agree with Amamark and Peele that things should be looked at very carefully. I have written before that I believe this is a National Secret entheogen. The results are on the News everyday.

The Art of Prepared Guitar, Volume 1 by Jeff Gburek on Ramble Records. May 19, 2023

 

                           The Art of Prepared Guitar began as a brain-child almost ten years ago. I'd mentioned it to Tom Carter who said, tell me when it comes out: so I'm telling him and now you too. It was supposed to be an album wherein I'd try to recap all the extended techniques, show essentially what's in the mojo bag, & track back through moments when I remembered first taking my eyes off the frets, when I started to play purely through sound and timbre. Initially I thought I would name my mentors in homage but at my age all the influences have been blended, boiled back down or up into genetic plasma from which each playing session recombines all the traits or strands into a novel structure negotiating the playing experience. The titles bear witness to the irony of daring to make those definitions or attributions. I would say that this album however bridges a space between those psychedelic music moments of noise guitar (Syd, Jimi, Kath), no wave, free jazz noise like Sonny Sharock, then Derek Bailey and Keith Rowe -- players who probably would never have appeared on the stage together but who regularly haunt me while playing. My resultant discoveries via prepared guitar did not speak of a purely abstract space though. I did feel the guitar becoming more modular as Keith observed, as I applied micro-cassettes and radios over the pick-ups, I noted that altering the guitar in various ways also revealed traces of more aboriginal music, ethers and archeological bleed. In essence, I became more of a receiver and relayer of energies via the guitar, the guitar was a listening device. In attempting to move into the future of the guitar or the post-guitar (as in the case of Kevin Drumm or Annette Krebs where the guitar became deconstructed and/or displaced into other electro-acoustic processes, if you will), I also discovered aspects of earlier ethnic music, blues and tonalities that hinted at other mysteries of acoustic resonance ecologies, bugs and ghosts in the machinations. The guitars come and the guitars go. I think sometimes the mermaids are within ears reach. Thanks to Michael for hosting my havoc.

Recorded in March 2023. 

Guitars: Ibanez (chrome blue), Hagstrom Viking, Höfner HCT-CS10. 

Amps: Vox Mini, Hartke Bass and... preparations!

A limited amount of free download codes are available for those fallen upon hard economic times and/or for those who would like to review the album. Just ask me via email

 

Soundscapes of Charleston, South Carolina, 2006 now posted on Bandcamp.

   These soundscapes of Charleston, South Carolina were recorded to SONY minidisc in 2006 with the ECM-MS907 (try not to laugh!). It was the infancy of my life as a field recordist. I did strange things back then. Hitting the pause button in the middle of a session? Resuming it later with no sense of continuity or seeming purpose? I suppose this was some kind of self-randomizing authorial/editorial function, since my aims back then were to resample sounds for the dance and theater projects.There was a way to make track marks within the tracks and skip around on the disc, put the snippet into the looper pedal then continue the live. By contrast, there are very long form captures here where you must wait for the drama to evolve. Some of it is pure crickets. Crickets as in peace and quiet. It's about 45 minutes of strange suburban calm with frogs and insects typical of the South Eastern coast of the USA that I have not heard in a long time. Enjoy with sweet tea. https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/charleston-south-carolina-2006

Photo by Ephia Gburek, 2006

 

                     Notebook 2023:  Earth as communications manifold whose essence only appears when linear messaging models and binaries dissolve or become secondary.. Restoral of mythic anatomies. Clouds have meaning etc. A scale of planetary weight and balances that postulate niches of available elementary compositions. Ability to predict probablistic life forms and through artistic methods converse with futurological entities. Desire as an expandable modality of consciousness involving multiple species.

"On the Sufism of Henry Corbin (1903-1978)" & "On Johnny Cash and Walking the Line"

 

  On the Sufism of Henry Corbin (1903-1978)

  

"Here let us pause, for it seems to us that with the symbol of Ibn ‘Arabi as disciple of Khidr we have reached the center which dominates the co-ordinates of our spiritual topography. Whatever name we may give to the disciple’s relationship with his personal invisible guide, the events it determines do not fall within quantitative physical time; they cannot be measured according to homogeneous, uniform units of time and chronology regulated by the movements of the stars; they find no place in the continuous chain of irreversible events. These events, to be sure, are enacted in time, but in a time that is peculiar to them, a discontinuous, qualitative, pure, psychic time, whose moments can be evaluated only according to their own measure, a measure which in every instance varies with their intensity. And this intensity measures a time in which the past remains present to the future, in which the future is already present to the past, just as the notes of a musical phrase, though played successively, nevertheless persist all together in the present and thus form a phrase. Hence the recurrences, the possible inversions, the synchronisms, incomprehensible in rational terms, beyond the reach of historical realism, but accessible to another “realism,” that of the subtile world, ‘alam al-mithal, which Suhrawardi called the “Middle Orient” of celestial Souls and whose organ is the “theophanic Imagination” that will concern us here."

     

          —CREATIVE IMAGINATION IN THE SUFISM OF IBN ‘ARABI

 

thanks to Nate Mackey for the citation (the follwing is comment 

that I typed beneath the poet's facebook post

 

most of the mystic traditions still applicable to our lives

normally deprecate time as being something overly bound to gross matter

slowness and the whole gnostic sludge argument

circulating through various degradations and corruption

hence to be avoided at all costs (and the costs are high)

new age versions of everything seem to dis temporality,

informing us about meditation retreats, timeless times,

and they insist on living in the eternal now (which, to a degree,

is very seductive wisdom, helpful for the healing body

since the sleeping body is in a pineal sanatorium

where all the body systems resurrect vitality

so this timeless sensation is not without merits.

but the hard question for the astrophysics of mind

demands some kind of coming to terms with time

and what it's variable tempi might mean cosmologically

and literally in our endeavors, so Corbin shows us

how Ismaili gnosticism was aware of relativity, parallel universes,

cyclical time, synchronicity, frame dragging

-- they didn't seem to name black holes and wormholes

and rabbit holes outright but the modal relations

between the prophetic figures seems to allow for

transitional signatures of a trans-human intelligence

that gathers evidence from textual paleontology

that eternity and time are not at odds with one another.

this I feel is related to the concept of truth and redemption,

the healing that comes from compassionate polylogue.

the greatest most convincing example of this came to me,

many years ago now, via the abbas kairostami film

rendered into english as "close-up"

where a truly compassionate glimpse of understanding

the motivations of a criminal fraudster

might come to the fore as being related to the unrealistic

expectations and contradictions of our social environments

 

read about Iranian film maker Kairostami here:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/04/abbas-kiarostami-obituary

 

Henry Corbin was first brought to my attention by Charles Olson via some recommened

reading of the poet Jack Clarke (1933–1992) Corbin wrote extensively about various Sufi mystic philosophers and poets where divine forces were accesible through angelogy, a concept that

ran against the grain of orthodox Islam and was at times claimed to be heretical. Sufism however is the most syncretistic and through it's deep focus and uniting of ancient Greek philosophy with Arabic culture created a unique bridge and hybrid form of faith captivating both psychologists and poets.

  To speak with Earth meant always to meet the worms, exchange breaths with sediment, learn subsidence -- and how long the study? -- Ibn Al Jabr

 

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On Johnny Cash and Walking the Line 

 

for Karolina

 

the other day she asked me about the song line where Johnny Cash walks the line because June was his lady, his doll,  his madonna and whoever speaks, walks, talks as Johnny alone through jail cell back and forth or drunken, shiftless alley he alone can call June the lady of love promised by herself to him as mine, my love, and by walking the line it means to stay, you know, kind of straight but not as if he'd been crook'd but that anyone going straight would quit gambling, boozing, whoring, any and all wrong-doings that might compromise pure and courtly love etc.

 

and I said to my love, my lady, that the chiseled face of Johnny Cash, weathered by time and grey

and strong in "the man in black" days which were permanent, actually, for a character of such fate, to be strumming, stuck in Folsom prison (sometimes misptyped as Fulsome, as if abundant with the suffering incarcerated souls) that he wanted to get straight for his lady so that one day they might meet in the heaven they might have mutually believed in although I am not his nor anybody's biographer and do not possess articles about their faith

   

 and further more while walking amidst these birch and spruce perfectly delineated forest plantations

which seemed like a paradise for us those few days over Roman Easter 2023,

while meditating on how each tree has its own perfect warp, twist and lean, a straightness never quite straight, never parallel, this corridor (depicted in the photo) seemed to me a ski slope straight and narrow to the Angel of willowy light, at the end of any tunnel of terror darkness and existential harrowing of meaningless (dante!, always rendering the forest as dark!) should end in the light of this kind that would be like a vision of beatrice which dante had before being obliterated into particles of light swerving endlessly from star to star in the unmeasurable bodiless god body

  

  so it occured me that she asked about a song and a line and bruce chatwin's songlines jumped into my head as a recounting of the aboriginal walking song paths of our australian ancestors and to walk here now perhaps was connected to another earth within this earth when all earth was one land mass

and that this path is the very one for us in eternal aboriginal now of the wholeness of geological time

 

Rogoziniec Forest, Poland

 

   and as by divine faithless synchronicity I found by chance 

flipping through a book we'd been reading the following passage:

   "The ley lines, the straight-line roads symbolize spirit travel, journeying into the otherworld of the spirits, of the ancestors, which can be seen in shamanic terms as simply another level or dimension of the physical landscape."
-- Paul Devereux,

cited in Breaking Open The Head by Daniel Pinchbeck

Some field recordings from our trip to Rogoziniec (birds)

  https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/six-scenes-at-rogoziniec

 

 

 come to understand that the majesty of that Beloved is like the sun 

 that can be seen reflected in a mirror. yet, 

whoever looks into that mirror

 will also behold his or her own image.

 if Simorgh (thirty birds) unveils its face to you, you will find

that all the birds, be they thrity or more

are but the shadows cast by that unveiling

what shadow is ever sperated from it's Maker?

Do you see? The shadow and it's maker are one and the same

so, get over the surfaces, delve into the mysteries!