Long time no write. What’s been going on in my life? Everything, nothing, movement, stasis, creation, blockages, etc.
I swore “Persona Non Grata” was the definitive end to this maQLu business, but then I also used to say maQLu was my evil twin; well, the problem with putting your evil twin to bed is sometimes that’s the best friend you can have.
Also, something something shadow integration something something soul retrieval blah blah blah.
(Last song I ever played as a DJ on CiTR Radio in 2015, albeit the album version. Playing a GNR song was the biggest fuck you I could think of, well, other than the Nickelback song I played right before it, lol… but the lyrics also pretty much summed up my attitude in walking away from the SJW infestation with its mandated speech… “no logic here today”… but I digress…)
Is maQLu going to be my main project? No, certainly not. I’m writing new songs with a friend, that’s all rock n roll and nary an electronic element to be heard. When we’re ready to roll that rock it’ll have a project name of its own. Could be next month, could be next year, could be next lifetime. Dunno.
I live on Hippie Island now, soon to live on the shores of Hippie Lake or on the southern fringes of Sort-of Hippie Town. A wolf in sheep’s yoga pants.
I hide my fangs now in my daily life. I have new friends who have a vague idea I used to do something with the music industry and I knew a lot of scumbags.
They don’t know I could go toe to toe with said scumbags. They don’t know I come from a braid of bloodlines made of warriors, chieftains/royals, and thugs. High and low, right and wrong, left and right, meek and might.
I show up to our get-togethers showing off my latest pretty nothing made of cloth and thread but I don’t talk about my ancestors who wore crowns or my other ancestors who burned, raped, and pillaged, or my more recent relatives who killed cops. And I sure as Hell don’t tell them of my aural exorcisms chanting death to my enemies from a few years back. Currently all the experimental work from the maQLu back catalogue is scrubbed.
But maybe I’ll never get my shit together until I slap it out there again. Will I bring Avenger to guild meetings? Of course not. Time and a place for everything, etc.
But it’s part of who I am. I’m as much a necromancer as I am a quilter, as much a hissing demoness as I am a thrift store DIY diva. And I can be nice, but I can be vicious, and hiding my fangs just makes me a flimsy fake cartoon of myself. It’s like if I talked in falsetto all the time.
And even when I was doing maQLu there was a bit of that split, though the darker side came out in my work. In many ways it was frustrating, because I didn’t know how to make the sounds in my head so I settled for artificial noise. Every so often I listen to some of that shit and thing at least parts of it were way better than I remembered thinking it was at the time (though still not as fantastic as certain disturbed individuals thought it was, which says more about them than about me).
You could say my inner thug really came out in my remixes, which were more deconstruction and mutilation than anything else, but there’s a beauty in ruins… at times:
Funny how much is missing from that Soundcloud account. I guess either I deleted a ton in a frenzy of frustration one day or when I stopped paying the annual premium all the newest stuff got put on lockdown due to their upload limits. And I do recall deciding Bandcamp can suck a tailpipe over some sort of political virtue signalling they did a while back that I forget the specifics of. Oh well.
When I (briefly) stopped making music I took a detour through comedy. Stand-up doesn’t really serve my purpose, but maybe I’ll revive my old Under My Skin podcast again, dunno. People can google me and find out the shit I said on the Dry Shave Show, and I stand by that shit even if I generally seek to shirk the consequences.
But this is the funny thing about this reality: David Icke ain’t wrong. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it’s all a Matrix illusion, but it is a quantum reality in ways I can’t explain.
I’m essentially unemployable but I don’t want a job and I don’t actually need one. And the universe seems to support me in that so long as I don’t fight who I am and what I do… kinda like how you can float just fine if you relax and tax a deep breath and let the water push you up.
I sense a sea change, just as big as when I was a student at BCIT’s New Media Design program at the end of 2008 not knowing what the Hell I was going to do with my life right before it all turned on a dime and I landed at Nimbus with Garth Richardson and Co. A year later I was on college radio twice over – as a DJ at CiTR and also as an artist in rotation with the first of my assorted chart positions. Would them play me now that they can find out I’m a thoughtcriminal? Probably not, but I don’t see myself wasting money sending those fucktards free CDs anymore either (see above comments). College radio is dead anyway; give it another few years and the whole idea of “college” will be as well. Why pay tens of thousands of dollars to emerge stupider and more useless than you were when you went in?
Eventually even the gulag system collapsed under its own corruption. The modern “college” experience is even less educational.
So yeah, I’m out of that wasteland (and have been for a few years now), and a few others as well. I’m about to buy a house of my own and have total freedom to live according to my own whim as schedule. I used to have a bit of that when I had a jam space at Renegade in Vancouver, and I was extremely productive.
I have no idea what’s coming. I know there’s the rock project. I feel the urge to get back to a long-abandoned joke electro project I never got off the ground, that would be under an alias because it’s a social experiment/psychic warfare against the radio hipsters. And of course I will have plenty of distressed-paint furniture and stuff to make for my new house, loads of quilts and loads of cross-stitch, and I have designs I will make for those that I figure I’ll slap up on another website under a business name. I might get into making meditation drones and binaural beats, I might get around to finishing that op-ed book on music and tribalism, I might sell hand-dyed quilting fabric or teach workshops, I might become a crystal healer. We’ll see.
Maybe there will be new maQLu as well. Whatever the day brings, right?
I guess part of this comes up today from listening to the latest Jim Goad show where he interviews Shaun Partridge, and it reminded me of what it always reminds me of every week when I listen: these guys, like Boyd Rice, lay it out there. Take it or leave it, but they don’t run and hide and live a double life like I have, or worse, a single life and a squelched one.
So what’s my excuse? Anything I would lose by doing the same wasn’t mine to begin with, and at this point I’ve lost pretty much everything a few times over.
I’m going to be 40 real soon and I’ve destroyed my life several times over, fragmenting every time. Maybe it’s time to try bringing it all back together.
I like Guns n Roses and Motley Crue but I also like Boyd Rice and sculptural noise. I like low-immersion hand-dyeing my own aida cloth for cross-stitching but I also like a touch of brutalism in my art. I like primitivism and energy healing, chippy paint on fake farmhouse furniture and sleek IKEA shit, Indian textiles/sequin work and Walmart AC/DC t-shirts, Tibetan singing bowls and the shrieking distortion of a 1980 Les Paul run through a 1979 Mesa Boogie amp, the wilds of the west side of Shawnigan Lake or Salt Spring Island and the tidy orderliness of that one needlework/knitting shop in downtown Victoria. I like peace and quiet and I like iconoclastic shit disturbers. Etc.
And maybe I might occasionally start writing about it, either here or on my main website pyradraculea.com.
