at the mountains of madness
a fiction cluster by Alice M.
A1 Feral
Listen to Atrium Carceri’s Codex with binaural headphones and palms over your eyes. Fingers dovetailed on your forehead like supplication. Skin warmth clears your sinuses and what do you see? The blood in your eyelids? Phosphenes dancing? A vision?
I¹ saw myself on a bone shelf above a chasm webbed in sinew. Raised my head and there was a gore cathedral, spires stabbing a yellow horizon. I smelled the rot.
My inner visions pulled me to stranger music. What new places my darkness could birth. After Codex I left the fringe of industrial along the sacral influence trail to noise, a wasteland waiting to be walked. I found online records of the cassette tape in a dire corner like a discarded gimp suit in a parking lot trash can.
A1 Feral
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A2 Shemhamforash! (Steel Mix)
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A3 De Natura Sonorum
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A4 Furies Child
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A5 Corpus Experimental
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A6 Bestiality
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B1 Realm of the Leper
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B2 Symphony to the Black Fields (Movements 1-4)
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B3 T'ward the Red Wall
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A1 Feral 📼 A2 Shemhamforash! (Steel Mix) 📼 A3 De Natura Sonorum 📼 A4 Furies Child 📼 A5 Corpus Experimental 📼 A6 Bestiality 📼 B1 Realm of the Leper 📼 B2 Symphony to the Black Fields (Movements 1-4) 📼 B3 T'ward the Red Wall 📼
I would paint the cover art, if I could paint. A howling face emerges from a wall of skin, thick white fabric tied over its empty eye sockets but slipping, mouth echoed by a copy of itself. On the rear tab of the Jcard is a quote by Oswald Spengler, from Der Mensch und die Technik. “It imparts a high dignity to Man, as a type, that he is a beast of prey.” I listened to the rips online. Five tracks have been uploaded. The other four are impossible to hear without a hard copy.
Jonathan Briley³ left music and the public eye forever after At the Mountains of Madness was released in 1986 by Inner-X-Musick. Briley was a member of the band Sleep Chamber, whose founder John Zewizz⁴ also ran the label. Peebs didn’t know the album but knew Sleep Chamber so she asked around. Peebs works at the record store I live above. She came back with, if it’s a 1986 original, it has black leader tape and a white letter written on there in paint or grease pencil or something⁵. Black leader tape, I said, I’ve never heard of that. She shrugged and was just like, that’s what I heard. But it’s old. All the original copies will have warped sound⁶. Don’t get obsessed with this fucking tape.
Man, too late.
A2 Shemhamforash! (Steel Mix)
Shem HaM’phorash means “the explicit name”. You can listen to the track online. Droning choral music over mechanical noise and a sermon spat into the background, they bled whiter than snow. Shem HaM’phorash is a Tannaitic term describing the true form of the four letter Tetragrammaton, the name of God.
Shem HaM’phorash illustration by 17th century German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher.
I sat with the track a few times and then I took Peebs for milkshakes and laid it out for her and she listened because she’s used to me⁷. Blaise de Vigenère, expanded by Thomas Rudd, suggested Shemhamphorash is a balancing force against the Ars Goetia, an important component of the Lesser Key of Solomon though not specified in the text. There are 72 inferior angels, intermediaries of the 72 demons in the Ars Goetia. In the Sefer Raziel HaMalakh⁸, a Kabbalistic⁹ grimoire dating from the Middle Ages, the Shemhamphorash has 72 letters. I said, think about this, angels are messengers. That’s what the word angel means, messenger. So each messenger speaks a single letter of the true name of God, which is the whole message. Is that a thing or did you make that up? Peebs said. It’s not a big leap, I said.
Milkshake¹⁰ gave me the worst brain freeze of my life. Abnormal.
Like a bullet hole in my right eye.
It went away on the walk home. Came back later but different, as though I dipped it in sand. I’d close the eye and let tears flood the socket. Move my eyeball under the lid. Up and down, side to side, fast. Spin cycle¹¹ ¹². This washing made the pain go away for a sec.
A3 De Natura Sonorum
It’s in the nature of tape to degrade. After thirty years you inevitably get distortions and drop outs. If the tape isn’t played the glue binding the plastic to the magnetic strip will stick the tape into an unplayable block. The rumor goes these original cassettes are still weirdly good quality, Peebs said over beers. I’m reluctant to tell you this because I don’t wanna encourage you. By this point I had to put saline in my eye every few minutes and cover it with my hand the rest of the time. Nothing you say will discourage me, I said. Well that sucks, she said. Anyway if it’s true I guess the label’s manufacturer found a new way to make longlife cassette tapes¹³ and kept it to themselves.
Cassettes record the same frequency range as human hearing, from about 20Hz to 20kHz. So why are the online rips crawling at the edge of sound like plugin vermin deterrents and power lines? MP3 only encodes faithfully up to 16kHz, after which there’s significant dropoff. But I play the rips and there’s a shadow of sound flitting in the corners. Can an impossible noumenon be encoded within the limitations of tape and digital compression? Can compressed instructions unfold into impossible phenomena in the mind, like the expansion of formulae into Cantor sets? More from Man and Technics: “Technics is eternal and immortal¹⁴ ¹⁵ like God the Father, it delivers mankind like God the Son, and it illumines us like God the Holy Ghost.” Human, a prey animal elevated by technical worship. Or technics are the Metatron, God’s most conscious angel, His¹⁶ record keeper. I don’t share this thought with Peebs.
What invents the inner landscapes when I listen to a new track? My mind, or the sound?
A4 Furies Child
Being alive is not all right¹⁷. Is it a cluster headache? Someone’s trying to push my eye out¹⁸ from the inside. My skull burns. It burns through my sinus. Comes every day in the afternoon. I pace. I bang my head against the wall. The fate of the human race is misery (Ligotti, again¹⁹). It’s a conspiracy. The more you see the world is malignantly useless, the more you want to be ignorant of that. Overly conscious beings must constantly engage in activities of dissociation to ignore, subvert, or cope. In Ancient Greece the Furies signified chthonic vengeance against broken oaths or defiance of fate. Ligotti says art is sublimation, technology denial. I am the child of furies.
I am unresolved. My fate lies in the tape. My headache is things half formed in the phenomenological landscape bursting through in febrile matter. I have to hear the whole tape or they will escape, bodily.
A5 Corpus Experimental
My fucking corpse is an experiment. My right eye bulges under the brow. When I strain the pupil away from my nose and stretch the check ligament²⁰ in a mirror, there is a suggestion of flesh beneath.
A limb, joints, cartilage.
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A limb, joints, cartilage. 🦴
I can’t hold this position long enough to take a photo. It gives me brownouts. Feels like my eye collapsing on itself like an anus or a black hole. Corpses are experimented on. The corpus of experimental science is experimented on. The corpus of experimental science is a corpse. The human in me is dying. Something on the ripped tape tracks is killing it. I didn’t ask Peebs to check out the rips. I looked myself. Every account that commented under those videos was abandoned a week later. Corpus Experimental is online.
Whining metal like an orchestral string section. Muttering about cadavers. I think the tracks are rerecording new music over my humanity. But I can’t listen to every track unless I get the tape. I remain partially rewritten. I am incomplete.
Don’t listen to it.
Don’t listen to it.
