Posted By: Thad McKraken Mar 5, 2014
Artist’s Statement:
Initially conceived as merely “cool shit for stoned people to look at while we play live” visitors (SUPERVISITORS) ended up becoming a legit 23 minute Occult film unto itself. It just sort of happened that way. Largely created using a technologically updated version of the cut up technique popularized by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs back in the day, the movie takes various footage depicting mystical states of consciousness from the 70’s and re-assembles them with a lot of the sigil collage art I’ve been honing in recent years. For those in the know, it has long been theorized that using the cut up technique potentially allows the artist to tap into what’s often referred to as “the third mind” or to see what the art “is really saying” and that’s what’s so odd, transcendent, and baffling about the picture. Let me explain.
I’d say about half of the parts where it appears as if the footage was calculatedly coordinated with the music were just accidents. It’s beyond freaky. We just randomly laid down clips that we thought looked trippy and were both sort of like, I can’t believe it lined up with the music like that without us even trying. But it gets even stranger because upon watching the final edit several times I realized something even spookier was afoot. A completely unintended narrative had materialized which is so complex I can barely put it into words, but I’ll try as briefly as I can.
Visitors is the story of a young but undisciplined mage who casts a sigil as part of a sex magick ritual designed to mold him into a master sorcerer. While he’s performing this ritual he considers the irresponsible nature of his previous experimentation with magick and how this might ultimately affect his ability to achieve this goal, while further contemplating the nature of the various glowing orb visitations that surrounded these events. Because of his unfocused nature, he was never going to become a master in just his current life, as this lofty a goal could only be achieved by living a cycle of three. One as himself, a gifted but rather irresponsible mystic, another as a more hard wired scientist with a thirst for hallucinogens, and a final incarnation combining the chaos and order of the previous two.
What he comes to understand is that the visitors he summoned were actually future projections of himself from this third incarnation as an aspiring master. Their purpose was to lead him into a timeless state of mind where the karmic wounds lingering from his drug addled relationships with women in the previous two lives could be repaired. Fixing these karmic roadblocks to ascension was the final test of his future sorcerer self who was encountering them in the form of a dark witch maliciously blocking his passage to the higher realms.
Yeah, it’s all there and again, this is not something we did on purpose. It gets even stranger when considering that the title to the movie visitors (SUPERVISITORS) was the working name of the song we recorded long before we’d ever even started working on the video end. It was just something that popped into my head while I was ganj-i-tating one night after working on the track. Even that’s sort of hilarious because what came into my head was actually visitors/supervisors, but Dean wrote that down wrong and I thought it sounded cooler the other way so we ran with it. Then we accidentally made a film about mysterious visitors summoned by sex magick which I’ve been involved with for nearly a decade now with quite similar results. Strange visitations and everything.
It should also probably be noted that the idea to start making Occult films germinated in our minds while attending a showcase on the topic by former Disinfo contributor Brian Butler right up the street from Dean’s home studio on Capitol Hill. Both of us were intrigued but honestly not super blown away by Mr. Butler or his work and thought we could do better with our combined experience as musicians involved with Chaos Magick, even though neither one of us really knew much about video at the time. Less than two years later and we’re dropping our first Occult film. Our plan is actually to abandon the found footage angle and start staging our own bizarro scenes very soon. Stay tuned true believers!
visitors (SUPERVISITORS) contains footage from the movies Simon King of Witches, Altered States, the Occult instructional videos of Poke Runyan, and the Dr. Strange TV movie. All culled from Youtube.