I Am Afraid of Sunset
(taking a wrong turn and finding yourself in the Abyss)
Available for preorder now at Industrial Coast, Andrew Nolan - I Am Afraid of Sunset, a previously lost album from 2009 now resurrected.
I’ve decided not to release this digitally for now, maybe forever. In the streaming era there is a flattening that occurs where all new releases are equally weighted and this release shouldn’t be considered my new album.
There are plans to use the material on this as the foundation for a release later this year.
let the circle be fortified by the Holy Names of God
I’ve long had a fascination with the point in which the artist as creator disappears and something else enters and takes over. Sometime in the early 2010s I was in an end of semester presentation, two of the people were from different storytelling traditions, Paula worked within an African oral tradition1, and Kai, a mix of Scandinavian (she was Danish) and Inuit2 oral traditions.
Both clearly underwent a deliberate internal switch before beginning their presentation. Paula’s was very fluid, there was an almost imperceptible movement, like a semi jerk of the neck and head, and when she faced the room her eyes were noticeably wider, her mannerisms different, the cadence of her voice changed. Kai’s shift was more pronounced and more strained. She leaned back in her chair, stretched out her arms, put her fingertips on the desk in front of her, went bright red, stared at the floor, exhaled rapidly, then stood up quickly and was an entirely different person.
I did my own presentation, I forget the exact content, it was broadly about switching perspectives so that you allow yourself to learn from your surroundings and to open up new thought processes. It was equal parts Robert Anton Wilson’s reality tunnels, pagan animism, and mysterium tremendum. I definitely spoke about learning from animals3. Afterwards I talked to Paula and Kai and shared my observations of the change they both underwent, I remember Kai saying she doesn’t know what happens. why it happens, or even how she makes it happen but she feels a change whenever she’s about to use her oral traditions to speak in public. I remember she said she had no recollection of the leaning back and exhaling rapidly. Paula’s response was something along the lines of “I get ready to do it and something comes out”
Give unto me, I pray thee, one drop of water from the pure springs of Paradise, that I may quench my thirst.
Let’s see how long I can last in this section because this can get real painful real quick4.
Spooky musicians and spooky occultists - let’s face it, these are usually one and the same - are enamoured with a romantic notion of both personal darkness and the Abyss. There seems to be a perpetual, wilful, misreading of Jung’s oft quoted line from Psychology and Alchemy
one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious
and I strongly suspect that many expensive occult book owners imagine themselves crossing the Abyss by levitating across it whilst seated in the lotus position.
Willingly crossing the Abyss is a hard decision to make, I suspect most people either accidentally fall into into it whilst spending too much time on the cliffs around it, or like I did, realize after walking for a long time that they’re in the Abyss and should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque.
I promise to threaten with the Dagger and command back into the triangle the spirit incontinent
I was going through an old hard drive earlier this year, I found an unfinished and unreleased collaboration with Bastard Noise from around 2005 (I think these were Andy Beattie’s first vocals since Man is the Bastard ended in 1997), and a folder full of electronic music I’d primarily put together between 2009 and about 2013. At one point some of this electronic music was due to be released by Crucial Blast, but it never materialized.6
The material for Crucial Blast was centred on possession; it was essentially a tale of a musician contacting an alien entity and being possessed by it and the music was the outcome. This is also the period in my life where I started skipping blindly into the Abyss, ignoring all the massive signs everywhere telling me what road I was travelling on.
The material on I Am Afraid of Sunset is mostly from 2009 (I can tell one track is from 2011 based on one of the samples in the song) and contains the bulk of what was originally going to be released by Crucial Blast. I gave it a light edit for clarity, a few tracks were entirely discarded, and I added two songs from the same era that weren’t originally intended for the album.
Song titles have changed, the spirit is there, but they reflect more Abyss like subject matter because it feels appropriate from this distance.
Once i clear a backlog of commitments this summer I intend to rework aspects of the tape into my current style.
Recently read:
Batman: Zero Year - Greg Capullo
Superheros eh? They’re frequently following their True Will, putting themselves in the throes of possession, and navigating the gulf between phenomenal world of manifestation and its noumenal source.
Anyway, Batman: Zero Year, a great alternate origin story with excellent art. Enjoyed this one.
Recently listened to:
Ambient Mortality - Cromlech
Primitive Knot related, not that far removed from the host project, Cromlech strikes me as a different emanation from the same source.
Cromlech is a distinctly Northern English sounding industrial project, and I can’t imagine them coming from anywhere else and sounding the same. A rock band pulled apart and put together in the wrong order. Vocals aren’t attempting to be extreme in any traditional sense of the word, instead they have a dour overtone to them - stern yet non committal - not unlike what you’d expect to hear in German power electronics. Long songs, driving minimalism, simple pulsing rhythms, and far more than the sum of its parts. Album closer Megiddo Stomp at times reminds me of strange collision of Big Black and the Sisters of Mercy if they had Jim Thirlwell influence.
I play with Cromlech on June 13th at Wharf Chambers in Leeds.
A lot of time has passed by, so forgive me for being so unspecific and mentioning an entire continent, the specific tradition is gone from memory.
On her Grandmother’s side, read about the Nyordningen forced assimilation social experiment.
“Man understand divinity like a dog understands electricity”
Not long at all as it turns out!
Archival footage (colourized) of Aleister Crowley in Algeria crossing the Abyss in 1909, completely avoiding an encounter with Choronzon. Victor Benjamin Neuberg looks different than I thought he would, but he does sing as beautifully as Frater Perdurabo himself had suggested.
This came up in conversation recently, Adam blamed himself for it not being released when the reality is I dropped the ball and moved on to other things.