Erik’s Trip

December 1, 2010 by

An introduction to Erik Davis’ Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoteria (Yeti Books, 2010). (To read more of my published essays, click here.)

My first memory of Erik Davis is of playing the Japanese game of Go together in an apartment in Brooklyn, in the dark days of the early 1990s, while the plagues of AIDS, the New World Order, and our own young male testosterone-addled consciousnesses swirled around us. Dinosaur Jr. or the first Sun City Girls record was on the stereo as antidote, and there were stacks of comix, used pulp SF novels and other pop arcana all around glowing with totemic intensity. We played Go because we were both high on Deleuze and Guattari’s recently translated theory Bible, A Thousand Plateaus, which approved of Go as a rhizomatic, non-hierarchical game. It all felt like something out of a back issue of Doctor Strange, the two of us seated cross-legged on some abstract gaming board, calling forth whatever powers we could. We were both interested in materialist magic, some kind of key that would unlock and transform the universe around us, and one of the places we sought it out was in writing.

Erik has been one of the chief chroniclers of some of the madness of our times, publishing his work in magazines that make up a catalogue of the US hipster avant garde post-1980s: The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Details, Mondo 2000, Wired, The Wire, Gnosis, Hermenaut, Yeti, 21C, Feed, Reality Sandwich, Arthur. Sometimes one of these magazines morphs into the mainstream and an actual paycheck, sometimes one of them sinks without a trace. Either way, except for the web-based Feed and Reality Sandwich, these are some of the last vital gasps of the Gutenberg galaxy, the universe of the printed word whose outer limits Erik has explored, without any security or guarantees.

Erik is known for his writing about gnosis, subject of his acclaimed first book, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. But what is the gnostic situation? A basic definition: you are in a trap and you need to escape! Many of us have lived our whole lives in this strange trap that’s variously given the names of late capitalism, postmodernity or just simply Babylon. What happens to writing and writers in this situation? Greil Marcus wrote that to understand Lester Bangs, you’d have to recognize that the greatest American writer of the 1970s might write nothing but record reviews. To understand Erik and his fascination with weirdness and esoterica of many kinds, you’d have to recognize that just writing record reviews would be way too conservative an approach to actually describing our world today.

Erik has been one of the most enthusiastic advocates of Philip K. Dick’s writing and vision of the future, and like that great master of late twentieth century fiction, Erik has made his way on his own, without academic backing, through the deserts of the real and all the strange encampments lurking there, whether in Nevada, New York, San Francisco or London. Like Dick, Erik is a native Californian, and a passage from a letter from Dick to Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem illuminates something of the method and environment that they share. Lem had previously praised Dick as the only great SF writer around (besides presumably himself!), but sniffed that it was unfortunate that Dick appeared to be so obsessed with such tawdry, disreputable subject matter. Dick responded:

But you see Mr. Lem, there is no culture here in California, only trash. And we who grew up here and live here and write here have nothing else to include as elements in our work; you can see this in ON THE ROAD. I mean it. The West Coast has no tradition, no dignity, no ethics – this is where that monster Richard Nixon grew up. How can one create novels based on this reality which do not contain trash, because the alternative is to go into dreadful fantasies of what it ought to be like; one must work with the trash, pit it against itself, as you so aptly put it in your article. Hence the elements in such books of mine as UBIK. If God manifested Himself to us here He would do so in the form of a spraycan advertised on TV.

Dick died in 1982, but the trash has continued to pile up sky-high. Using the word “trash” sounds condescending — but the point is that in our society, anything of value is thrown out, devalued, abandoned and forgotten. Take Erik’s second book, a magisterial reading of Led Zeppelin’s fourth LP that appeared in the 33 1/3 series of books (OK, I lied, Erik does write about records too). Zoso is a mass-cultural artefact, and the object of a million banalities. What Erik does is draw out a whole esoteric history that informs the record, both in its production and reception, tracking the way that revolutionary energies are both displaced onto but secretly resting in an object of everyday life. What distinguishes Erik’s work from the mass of pop cultural meditation and academic cultural studies that have blossomed since the 1980s is his affirmation of religious or spiritual energies as valid aspects of this everyday world. But it’s a critical spirituality that Erik affirms, equally skeptical of postmodern irony, dogmatic materialism and born again fervor, but at the same time open to the world as he finds it.

There is a tradition here that Erik is a part of, a tradition of religious dissent, independent, non-conformist, often hedonistic in orientation. Its most recent form is the great revelations of the 1960s, whose echoes and ripples were still everywhere in Erik’s 1970s SoCal childhood. From there, we go back to the older, weirder America, the DIY transcendentalists and Great Awakeners who persist in the margins and rooming-houses of the imagination, back to the vast history of vanquished seekers, the Ranters and other heretics of the English Revolution who crossed the Atlantic, the Albigensians and Anabaptists and other dissenters from Christian orthodoxy that haunt European history, right back to the gnostic sects of the Biblical era, trying to square Jesus with Epicurus and the Upanishads, and beyond that to the murky characters lurking at the very beginning of what is called history, who refused to get down with the priests of the Rig Veda or the founders of the state of Uruk. And that’s just in the Western lineage, which is only one small part of the history of what has gone on on this planet. A lot of unfinished business … which is why it persists and returns today.

Second definition of the gnostic situation: a flash of illumination that allows you to escape. But how do you do that? Erik’s interests are a catalog of the spaces and practices by which contemporary people have tried to trigger that flash that allows escape. They include: yoga, Buddhism, taoism and other Asian religious traditions; hermeticism, Neopaganism and other Western esoteric traditions; psychedelics, of both the old (LSD, shrooms) and new (DMT and MDMA) diaspora; theory, notably of the Deleuze and Guattari lineage, but including skirmishes with Zizek and anarcho-mystic Hakim Bey; pop and subcultural artefacts including zines, comix, fandoms; festival/party/pilgrimage scenes such as The Rainbow Gathering, the global outlaw rave scene that originated in Goa, and Burning Man, of which he is the most celebrated chronicler; the personal computer and the internet, and the proliferation of cultural forms around them including MUDs and MOOs; most of the interesting music scenes of the last twenty years from the Mekons’ post-punk, through the 90s alt diaspora, Goa trance and other electronic sounds, to the freak folk scene and enduring tricksters such as the Sun City Girls.

Did anybody actually escape through any of these means and forms? That’s a secret — you have to find out for yourself! But what makes Erik a writer in the heroic sense of the word is his ability to get on the bus and take the ride without a whole lot of delusions or Romanticism about achieved utopias. In fact, the problem of “failed transcendence” is not high on Erik’s list of priorities, and he can put up with all manner of goofy shtick if the result is a generous and progressive social situation – as in Burning Man for example. There’s a whole vocabulary of enjoyment that comes with this: “fun” of course, but also the “juicy”, the “tasty” and the “yummy” — moments where righteous vision is attained, usually through some kind of protocol or practice.

Erik’s work has an ambiguous relationship to the world of academia. A graduate of Yale during the heyday of literary theory, he gravitated instead towards a tai chi teacher he would visit after his Hegel and Nietzsche seminar who said to him: “PhDs don’t impress me, people who’ve confronted the void impress me!” The category of “the impressive” is a puzzling one to me — after all, there is no one to impress but the Gods in the zones where anything that really matters happens — but it’s an important one in Erik’s lexicon too, both in terms of what he’s attracted to and his own stance. I take it to refer to the importance of the gift economy to him, the generosity of attainment which serves as a vehicle of friendship, prestige and community. It recognizes the authority of practice over theory, event over system, action over word — with the twist that, as will all great writers, he still is drawn to write about this stuff!

Erik moved back to California in 1995 and has become a cultural archeologist of the region, uncovering scenes and characters including the alternative film and visual arts worlds of LA and San Francisco, figures like Wallace Berman and Jordan Belson, and the locations and histories described in his third book, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape. Perhaps Erik’s solution to the gnostic dilemna–which as scholars such as Hans Jonas have noted, is one of existential homelessness–is to explore the groundless ground of what is called home, which for him means the state of California, and the various attempts to found intentional communities there, and to attain realization.

The title of this introduction is taken from a song on Sonic Youth’s remarkable record Daydream Nation, which came out around the time that I first met Erik. This record, which both of us love or have loved, is always associated in my mind with Erik. The sense on that record, of urgency struggling to make itself known in the face of an overwhelmingly deep, sluggish trance, a trance which the band is all too familiar with, reminds me of Erik’s work, as do the enormous surges of euphoric clarity, which do break through that trance, again and again.

April 2009.

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Copycats on CBC radio, Saturday Nov. 27

November 26, 2010 by

Sook-Yin Lee took a stroll with me through Chinatown to discuss copying for her radio show DNTO, which airs this Saturday, November 27, 2 p.m., on CBC Radio 1. You can listen to the podcast here.  We did a whole section of the interview live in a TD Bank ATM booth, watching people taking out cash, and trying to think through what that weirdest of copies, money, is really about. While it’s quite clear to me that paper money is literally a copy, the question “what is money a copy of?” is a very difficult one. Best response for me is found in George Simmel’s remarkable 1907 book The Philosophy of Money, which I notice Arjun Appadurai is also a fan of. Money is very close to the unstable plasticity of mimesis itself. It represents, i.e. imitates, value, but again, what does that really mean? For Marx, value itself could be a kind of hallucination whose effects were nonetheless very real … something that the current financial crises confirm. Money proliferates, it’s a great example of the contagiousness of mimesis, and it was a pleasure to watch people taking  small stacks of bills from the ATM, one after another — a very orderly proliferation.  But as a copy, money is also unstable and disappears, as those that bought subprime mortgage instruments in the belief that they represented something, now know.  Simmel struggles with this paradox: that money is supposed to be a guarantee of value, of the stability of the system of valuing, but is nonetheless in practice highly unstable.  But isn’t the enormous national and international financial apparatus, from the World Bank to academic economics to governmental monetary policy an indication of how much work it is to maintain the stability of the “original” of monetary value, and stop it from turning into a “mere”, “worthless”, “copy”?

When I was working on In Praise of Copying, someone told me, or perhaps I read somewhere that the Canadian visual art group General Idea had written that “money was the first multiple”, i.e. the first mass produced art object a la Marcel Duchamp.  I tried to verify the statement, or find a source, but I was never able to do so.  I guess that would make it a counterfeit statement about counterfeiting? Buyer beware …

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Rorotoko Interview

November 12, 2010 by

An interview with me re. copying and related matters in Rorotoko.

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The New Yorker, National Post, Chronicle and Erik Davis on In Praise of Copying

October 16, 2010 by

Several thoughtful early responses to In Praise of Copying….

The first is an excellent blog post by Jenny Hendrix for The New Yorker concerning my Borgesian Brooklyn book launch and how to handle the universality of copying, in the bookstore and elsewhere.

The second is the audio of an hour long radio conversation I had with Erik Davis and Maja D’Aoust on their Expanding Mind show on the Progressive Radio Network.  Erik was his usual brilliant self, and we covered everything from compassion for viruses, to cumbia, to the struggle to understand what sameness means.  A great pleasure to chat with these guys.

The third is a piece in the National Post by Adam McDowell entitled, “Copying, A Right“, which looks at my book and other recent attempts to figure out how to balance an expanded right to copy with restrictions that support artists and other copyright holders.  I do want to note that the conversation at the launch described at the end of the piece actually ended with a monologue by yours truly on the broader crisis of the workplace today, for artists, factory workers and everybody else, to which my questioner responded “that’s a good answer!” But this is generally a very astute look at a problem that we’re still barely able to even articulate.

Finally, a great piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, discussing In Praise of Copying along with Lewis Hyde’s Common As Air, and the notion that books are always copies of other books.

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Uploading My Book to AAAAARG.ORG

October 15, 2010 by

I am uploading my new book onto the internet. Yes, I am.  The book is not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of commodification … OK, I’m copying again, from the introductory lines of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “Unpacking My Library”, which media theorist Julian Dibbell riffed on in his  dawn of the downloading age essay “Unpacking My Record Collection”.   Those two excellent essays were concerned with the figure of the collector.  But what concerns me here is, to use the title of another of Benjamin’s essays, “the author as producer”, and the act of donating a book, “my book”, to a library, if library is the right word for the place where my text is being deposited.

Walter Benjamin’s library card, Paris, 1940.

While I was finishing In Praise of Copying, I became interested in the circulation of texts.  I wondered whether it was hypocritical to write a book that celebrates copying, while still slapping a copyright notice to the front of the book.  There are easy ways out of this: I could say that what I’m doing is presenting a critique of contemporary society but that obviously I have to work pragmatically within existing economic conditions, even though I disapprove of them.  There’s some truth to that. In fact, the copyright notice to many academic books is in the name of the publisher, not the author.  When I talked to people at Harvard, they pointed out to me that in signing a book contract, I had already signed away most of the rights to the book, and that it was therefore more honest for the publisher to claim and look after the copyright.  I could have requested that I retain the copyright, as I did with my first HUP published book, but I thought there was something persuasive about their argument.  And that I don’t need to own the copyright in order to feel some sense of agency in relation to what I’d written.

But I still wanted to explicitly allow people to make copies of my book about copying.  I asked Harvard whether this was possible and they said yes.  As of October 1, 2010, the book has been available from Harvard’s website as a pdf, free to download, but with a creative commons license that restricts the uses of the copy.  I wrote the following text to accompany the web page:

“Given the topic and stance of In Praise of Copying, I wanted the text to participate openly in the circulation of copies that we see flourishing all around us. I approached Harvard to discuss options and they agreed to make the book available as a PDF online. The PDF is freely available to anyone who wants to download it, but it does come with a creative commons license that sets some intelligent restrictions on what you can do with it. Although generosity is a wonderful thing, this isn’t especially intended as a utopian gesture towards a world in which everything is free. It’s recognition of the way in which copies of texts circulate today, a circulation in which the physical object known as the book that is for sale in the marketplace has an important but hardly exclusive role. A PDF of a book is not an illegitimate copy of a legitimate original but participates in other kinds of circulation that have long flourished around the book-commodity: the library book; the photocopy or hand-written copy; the book browsed, borrowed or shared. We all know these modes of circulation exist, as they continue to do today with online text archives.

Perhaps these online archives just make visible and more “at hand” something that was happening invisibly, more distantly, but continuously before. At the same time, something new is going on. The physical book today is one copy, one iteration of a text among others. What that means for publishers, writers, readers and other interested parties is something that we are working out – on this webpage and elsewhere.” —Marcus Boon

I’ve been reading some of Douglas Rushkoff’s arguments for writers abandoning conventional publishing for a direct web based sales approach as well as the various arguments for and against eReaders, and Ted Striphas’ terrific book The Late Age of Print, which outlines some of the desperate strategies currently employed by authors and publishers.  I understand the need for both authors and publishers to have a functioning economic model today.  I’m a professor at a university and I don’t rely on income from books to make ends meet.  The right to work and get paid is often invoked as a justification for existing intellectual property regimes.  It’s a serious matter and I don’t have an easy solution to it.  It’s not only authors and artists who are wondering how they’re going to get paid.  Couldn’t you say that the car plant worker whose job is outsourced is also experiencing a crisis in the way that we relate to copies?  In this case the industrial age copies that so much of our economy has been built around.  I don’t think that economic arguments are the only important ones – there’s such a thing as a moral right, not just for authors, but for those who participate in the public domain, i.e. all of us.

For example: in the last couple of years, the two most important independent booksellers in Toronto, Pages and This Ain’t the Rosedale Library have both gone out of business. While the chainstores are still there, the newly published “alternative” book as physical object has almost ceased to exist for those living in downtown Toronto.  Such bookstores were more than places to make cash transactions for books, they were an important part of my education: as a former teenager/student/bohemian lowlife/grad student/freelance writer I browsed there, I read chapters, consulted indexes, wrote down citations.  They were places were books were curated and presented in a powerful way I had more or less unimpeded access to the book as object.  Probably if I’d tried to photograph pages from a book it wouldn’t have gone so well, but it never occurred to me to do that.  And if I really needed to copy more, I would have searched the libraries and then copied a chapter while at work. Or actually bought the book, if I had the money.

All of that activity has moved online.  I don’t think we should rely on Googlebooks making texts available online. We should do it ourselves, or through our publishers.  The pdf functions more or less the same way as the book sitting in the bookstore or the library, and I’m happy that my writing will be accessible to those who have a somewhat marginal relationship to book buying, as I myself have had at different points in my life.  Making pdfs of all of our work available online is an easy but powerful gesture towards an expanded public domain.  And it may even support the economic needs of writers and publishers: James Boyle believes so. So do I.

There are proposals in the US for a National Digital Library, and perhaps one could dream of a Borgesian global Digital Library where every text ever written was to be found.  Those proposals raise a number of interesting questions.  But while the negotiation of legal protocols that would allow such a library to come into existence are daunting enough to make the project seem like a utopia, something like this library has already come into being, in a haphazard, piratical way on the internet.

Which brings me to AAAAARG.ORG.  AAAAARG feels like a secret because a lot of the texts that are listed on the site (but stored elsewhere) are arguably in breach of copyright law. But how secret is anything that has a URL?  It’s already an open secret in the sense that scholars like Sedgwick and Taussig described it: something that everybody knows about but no one can talk about.  And what is that something? The public domain itself as the primary fact of our society or any society. Many grad students, artists and professors I talk to have heard of AAAAARG and browsed it. It’s an amazing, but controversial resource, since the site is a library of theoretical texts that encompasses most of the work of most of the key thinkers of the last hundred years … except when  their publishers have issued takedown notices to prevent copies of their texts appearing in the AAAAARG archive.  There have also been attempts to shut AAAAARG down completely, including at least one this year. But the site floats up A.AAAARG turning into AAAAARG or some other iteration.

I enjoy the curatorial aspect of AAAAARG and it’s become one of the first places I go to when I want a quick heads up on a topic, usually be looking through one of the many “issues” that link various texts in the archive.  Anyone can add a text to an issue.  I added IPOC to the Piracy, collaboration, Collage, objects, surplus, Aesthetics, copyleft cuture (sic) groups. Not that I think that’s an accurate summary of what goes on in my book, but it’s a useful set of links.    What happens next? I think that’s something we’re all waiting to find out.  “Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects”, said Benjamin as he finished unpacking his library.  A book collector dwells and lives inside the books that he owns, he continued.  Today, the question of how we can dwell in or with the objects that surrounds us has never been more pressing.  Books, as Benjamin knew very well, are just a tiny part of it …

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PDF of In Praise of Copying available from Harvard website now!

October 6, 2010 by

You can now download the entire text of In Praise of Copying from the Harvard website. There’s a Creative Commons license attached but otherwise it’s free. I’ll post some thoughts on this in the next few days …

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Toronto Launch of In Praise of Copying w. John Giorno, October 12

October 5, 2010 by

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010, 8 p.m.

This Is Not A Reading Series presents:
Marcus Boon and John Giorno in a creative performance and dialogue
at The Annex Live, 296 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto. $5 cover charge.

For the Toronto launch of In Praise of Copying, I’ll be reading and talking with the great New York poet John Giorno, whose work I recently edited.  It’s a great honor to be reading with John and an auspicious way to launch my book.  Aside from admiring his mastery of the poetic practice of copying, repetition, montage and other mimetic forms, reading John’s work allowed me to see the ways in which Buddhist practice and avant garde techniques and critiques of originality and authorship resonate with each other.  John’s also an amazing performer … it should be a great night!

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In Praise of Copying for Dummies ….

September 17, 2010 by

This cartoon just about sums it up …. thanx to Rob Cruickshank for pointing it out!

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In Praise of Copying: A Borgesian Book Launch, Brooklyn, NY, Oct. 1

September 14, 2010 by

“Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.”   — Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard”.

In Praise of Copying, Marcus Boon’s new book  from Harvard U.P. makes the bold  claim that everything in the universe is a copy, and that that’s a good thing.  Join us on Friday October 1 at 7 p.m., to test that theory at the New York launch hosted by the excellent booksellers Spoonbill and Sugartown of Williamsburg.  Instead of reading from his book, as is traditionally done at a launch, Boon will read from books selected  from the copious and wide-ranging shelves of Spoonbill, revealing the secret Borgesian omnipresence of copying in even the most obscure or popular places, recreating the argument of In Praise of Copying using materials found in the store.    Refreshments will be served; discussion encouraged; books signed.

In Praise of Copying: A Borgesian Book Launch

at Spoonbill and Sugartown, 218 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Friday, October 1, 2010, 7 pm

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Catherine Christer Hennix, Drones and the Changing Same

September 12, 2010 by

I’ve spent the last few weeks finishing a profile of Swedish mathematician/visual artist/composer Catherine Christer Hennix for The Wire, in honor of the recent release of her 35 year old sustained tone masterpiece The Electric Harpsichord.  The conversation spiraled off in many ways, from mathematical logic to quantum field theory to the Swedish jazz scene in the 1960s – take a look, it’ll be in the October issue.

It also got me thinking about drones some more, and why they can be such powerful audio experiences.  My general hunch is that it has to do with sameness, which is a topic I became fascinated with in writing In Praise of Copying.  Mostly we celebrate difference, diversity, novelty in our society. We associate sameness with fascist conformity, boredom, lack of imagination.  In some ways of course, there is a sameness to things today that is disturbing: we value diversity but all diversity today has to be channeled through the marketplace, and with globalization, an increasing uniformity of places, cultures, societies.  But maybe, as Alain Badiou says in his Ethics, the problem is finding the right kind of sameness.  I note that Jacques Derrida, in his original essay on “Differance” actually wrote that “we provisionally give the name differance to this sameness which is not identical.”  Somehow, that sameness dropped out of the picture as post-structuralism developed, and differance became mere difference.  What did Derrida mean? Approaching this problem through Buddhist philosophy, I come to the notion of “nonduality” or, more clumsily but maybe more helpfully, “nonconceptual sameness”, meaning the nonexistence of concepts that allow for the elaboration of difference.

I think what some people find irritating about drone musics is their sameness, nonconceptual or otherwise.  But to me that irritation is a sign of resistance to what’s going on, because there’s always something new going on when you let yourself experience a drone fully.  La Monte Young argued that “tuning is a function of time” and that as you tune into the harmonics in a drone, you experience new aspects of it.  Your own relationship to that continuous sound changes because second by second you are changing, physically and cognitively.  At the same time though, when you relax into the sound, it can be ecstatic, and that is where I would locate the “nonconceptual sameness”.  You loosen up your own sense of yourself and something opens up.  Somehow, the drone lets you concentrate … on what? The sound? On your own psyche experiencing the sound? Both probably.  I think there’s a taste of the power of the drone in all copying, since a copy is a repetition, just as a drone is a repetition.  That’s really what I meant by “in praise of copying”.

The Electric Harpsichord is an uncanny piece. Henry Flynt wasn’t exaggerating when he called it “a revelation”.  I’ve listened to it a number of times over the last decade and I invariably have the disconcerting but elating experience of the ground beneath me melting about half way through the piece.  This is presumably what Hennix and Flynt meant when they coined the term HESE (“Hallucinogenic Ecstatic Sound Experience”) to describe works like EH in the late 1970s. When it was composed/performed, EH was part of a whole cluster of multidisciplinary efforts that Hennix was involved in ranging from visual art works to abstract Noh plays, to treatises on logic such as “17 Points on Intensional Logics for Intransitive Experiences, 1969-1979” and “Toposes and Adjoints”.  Aside from a remarkable journal issue Io #41 published in 1989 (subtitle: “Being = Space x Action”) this work was never published.   The Io issue is remarkable: it also features work by Hennix’s mathematical mentor Alexander Esenin-Volpin, a founder of the human rights movement in Russia as well as the mathematical school of ultra-intuitionism, a key essay by Flynt, work by poets George Quasha and Charles Stein, and a lucid introduction to Hennix’s work by Stein.

As a non-specialist in the outer regions of advanced mathematics, it’s hard to evaluate how solid the mathematical work is, and how directly it can be related to the soundworks that Hennix was producing.  Yet the argument, made by both Hennix and Flynt, that one could extract a method for producing ecstatic sound works that is based on a radically reworked philosophy that takes in and appropriates mathematical logic, amongst other things, remains an intriguing one.  Who even has that kind of ambition today?  The notion that a radically different science or set of scientific goals could or would emerge from a different set of values to those that our own societies are built around today could be a very powerful one, taking us beyond techno-fetishism of both the libertarian and Marxist kinds on the one hand, and Luddite attitudes on the other. A lot is asked of those who want to take this path … but is that such a bad thing?

Finally it comes down to the work, and, archivally, there’s not that much of it: EH was only performed once, though there are other unreleased recordings by Hennix from the 1970s. A number of Flynt’s HESE-related recordings, as is a duo recording with Hennix entitled “Dharma Warriors”.   On the other hand, Hennix is alive and well and living in Berlin, where she now has a band called the Chorasan Time-Court Mirage, featuring the marvellous Italian born dhrupad vocalist Amelia Cuni. A demo recording that I’ve listened to is pretty mesmerizing: a digitally produced drone, with Hilary Jeffery’s trombone and Hennix’s voice.  It’s trance inducing but not New Age at all!  Definitely a work in progress ….

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