020080606 01:45 • 
“Quiet now, we don’t want to awaken the creatures living on the other side of this dimensional membrane… trust me, Lovecraft only half-knew what he was talking about. It is more real than even he understood.”
“Look… I can see the Room of Incomparable Riches glittering just ahead!”
“...wait. What’s that sound?”
“Drums… bass… and… curse Cthulhu’s black minions… I hear the voice of a synthesizer!”
“They’ve broken through! Quickly, set the flame of invisibility so we may listen without transforming into one of them! If their eye should find us, we will no longer be human.”
Currently emanating into the void, Harmaline is the latest and possibly greatest musical project involving my comrade Jeremy Dickens/Logickal. The product of a long-distance collaboration between Jeremy, Matt “Threv” Simpson and Ryan Dempsey, these guys apparently tore up this year’s Atlanta NoPhest. You can hear the lingering vibratory essence of that ritual in Jeremy’s weblog:
Harmaline - Live @ NoPhest 02008 04 19
I’m hot to hear the finished studio tracks from their forthcoming EP and was already having a hard time contenting myself with the small slices of demo brilliance audible on the Harmaline Myspace. This 36:13 bit of NoPhest liveset, rather than tide me over, has only further honed my appetite.
020080317 21:09 •
Troubles on the world seemingly tend to limited lifespans as fodder for big media, staying in the public eye only long enough to force a spend-to-forget reflex. Big troubles roll back cyclically. We’re at the top of the cycle again, and China’s oppression and killings in Tibet are in the news once more.
Somewhere along the cycle is also the plight of Burma, highly influenced by its shared border with China. The communist government in China holds vested interest in keeping non-democratic, shackled states as buffer zones. China supplies arms and aid to the military dictatorships in both Burma and North Korea. I don’t disagree with engaging China economically… I believe many of the social advances within China are a direct result of barriers being broken by information, money and, ironically, tragically, almost as redemption… consumerism. However, when a government massacres its own citizens or enables the genocides of others rather than allow those citizens the exercise of self-determination, the response should be a swift rebuke from every free nation, regardless of how much money in trade is at stake.
The easy impulse is to turn sword against sword, but I know this perpetuates the cycle of violence when what is required is a full stop. To this end, I’d like to highlight a peaceful means of engagement: Twelve Offerings, my friend Jeremy Dickens’ musical efforts as Logickal to create public awareness of the crisis in Burma and raise funds to aid the struggle. All proceeds from this recording go to the U.S. Campaign For Burma. While Twelve Offerings is connected directly to Burma, the feelings it evokes and awareness it creates are for every unfree people. It’s available (with sound previews) through iTunes, Beatport or direct from Jeremy via Paypal.
Created live over three days, this is Ritual Musick of the finest warp. There is life moving within every ambient piece, and together the twelve tracks are far more than their sum. This music spiritualizes every moment and place conscious listening occurs. Twelve Offerings on San Francisco’s subway system pulls the veil away: the homeless become radiant, the bus itself a mechanism of wonderment rolling on wheels of liminal magick, time exposed as fiction of the mind, light pouring from every surface and, in pulsing bursts, from every still beating heart.
I - An open doorway of sonic mystery: slow, reverberant, gong-like tones… their resonance slips vibratory tendrils around your brainstem, pulls you forward to a space far beyond headphones.
II - Clears the air of all obstacles, initiating a transformative process on your psyche: you become rarified atmosphere without definition. You become wind and you move through the sky.
III -Coalesces you as light rain falling on temple roofs, early morning condensate, animist communicative substance for the pre-dawn set. There is light here, but it’s not from Sol.
IV - Brings the dawn, dew gathered into the shape of a human once again. Rivulets of shine thread through the world, across the plain, across your eyes, your skin, your lips, your heart, your everything. Light grows in power, day blasts through the shifting sky and the world awakens.
V - Centers the full power of the day in your chest, a single drone entering to work its magick then slip quietly into each and every cell. This light, as this day, is now part of you and will endure.
VI - Temple gongs in perpetual, living weave as forces and powers released by the Light, the interplay of every being as the land expands in definition to take on the truth: it is, in fact, a deceptive, overlapping nexus of all time and space.
VII - There is peace here, a calm pause, a moment between actions which is an action itself: awareness spreads across the plain of existence in three expanding discs at height of heart, head and hands.
VIII - The conversation begins, in tones and drones of aching beauty. All beings are represented, from the smallest sparks between subatomic particles to the flotsam of single cells to the lumbering groupings we know as sentient creatures to the vast expanse of celestial colonies, their thoughts occurring once per light year through thin networks of interstellar matter.
IX - The work of the day is begun! Life has discussed, life has agreed, life has chosen. This evolutionary path, this entry portal, this way shall be opened and this shall move through into manifestation.
X - The realm is as it always was. The realm is something new. The realm is as it always will be. The realm is changed… you open your eyes and see, as if for the very first time. The realm is you.
XI - As you were created in this moment, in connection with every other action/reaction, every other living being from the rocks beneath to the friend beside you to the sun wheeling through the sky above, you move through the moment and carry it forward in the work. You are the moment, you are the work, you are the energy between everything. Footstep by footstep, you are the choice that life made.
XII - You are here. Burma is there. The people are asking for you. You become wind and move to heed their call.
020070427 00:31 •
The new Logickal single, Sugarknife, is out now on Discrepancy/dPulse-America... and a fine slice of bytes it is.
When my comrade-in-noise Jeremy Dickens asked me for a Blue Deceiver remix of Sugarknife for this release, I instantly said yes. If you check out his work as Logickal on last.fm, you’ll hear why: organic, layered, improvisational electronica crafted into deft tracks of dark surprise, one after another. He cites Coil, Peter Gabriel, the Subconscious triad of Skinny Puppy/Doubting Thomas/Download and many others as influences, all of whom form a similar foundation for me as an artist. We speak in related tongues.
I created a warped ambient reconstruction of Sugarknife, using only sounds found in the original material. Trust me, none remained the same… but they did all originate in Jeremy’s source tracks. I re-pitched and re-manifested the strings as a new melody, gritched out the island breeze blowing through the steel drums and bells until Dr. Moreau expressed immense pride, pulled sunken vocals from the wreckage of their backing oblivion and re-animated them as honey-dripping beat thugs. Lastly, and of course, I stepped into my time machine and did the final mix way back in 00500 B.C.E.
Listen to previews and download Logickal’s original mix of Sugarknife, my Blue Deceiver Reconstruction, Maurice Syntax’s Sweet Young Thinker Remix and the single’s four other excellent cuts at:
Dreamhost FilesForever, 320kbps DRM-free mp3s
Update: Jeremy put together a Sugarknife Maxi-Micro Mix as a podcast. All three versions of Sugarknife plus Logickal-related acts Harmaline and 3kStatic in a 26.5 minute continuous mix.
FlightDynamics Podcast 37
One. Sick. Mix. (26.35, 44.1KHz, 211kbps VBR, 40.6MB)
Logickal - Sugarknife Maxi-Micro Mix
(Original, Blue Deceiver Reconstruction, Sweet Young Thinker)
Harmaline - Live @ Nophest 4.20 Atlanta Excerpts
3kStatic - Live @ Gigi Philadelphia Excerpts
Logickal - Students Fear The Three Cs
020070128 21:00 •
We’re not even out of January and 02007 is taking on a distinctively tesseractic quality. Are the Great Old Ones near the cross-over point?
Jeremy Dickens (aka Logickal) is doing his best to break down Euclidean space and attract Elder God attention through the massive sonic vibrations found on his weblog, FlightDynamics. His wide-ranging series of podcasts are must-listens if you’re into warped electronica and reality-altering sound.
His current installment in the series is Episode 35: Daevl.Plugs and the LOEBT. Jeremy pulled the raw material for his continuous mixwork from tracks by Daevl.Plug users and members of The League of Extraordinary Beta Testers, all wrapped up in shimmering, Logickal magick. Music from Martin Spernau, Duane Sigel’s Legis Sustain, Joshua Goran, Thee Machete’s Orphan Of The Sea, Effect69, my own Blue Deceiver and Logickal himself are all mutated into one snaking line of rhythm and aural rotation.
The mix lasts for 29:10m, after which you’ll feel much closer to Cthulhu, guaranteed. I nominate Jeremy Dickens for a weekly DJ spot in R’lyeh.
020061201 00:06 •
Daevlmakr kicks off a new series of regular artist interview spots today, profiling a rotating cast of creative misfits and mad-people using the Daevl.Plugs.
Leading off the Daevls In The Pale Moonlight series is Jeremy Dickens, aka Logickal. A member of the League Of Extraordinary Beta Testers, Jeremy turns out time and space warping soundtracks for parties you didn’t even know were going on in a place 90 degrees away from where you are right now… in every direction.
Jeremy sat still long enough to answer the Nine Questions in suitably occult-laden terms, pondering time-travel, alien musics and coded messages for the illuminated. He also whipped off three tesseract-creating tracks with Daevl.Plugs all over them.
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