LSD Magazine Interviews ELATE

Well it’s not often that we find ourselves at a loss for words here at LSD, but having read the interview that Elate - Jon Hammer sent back to us, apart from getting straight on the blower and asking him to write for LSD, we gorged ourselves on the stunning intellectual breadth, conceptual range and lyrical wonder of his sparkling mind. Tracing a primal path between the organic and the magical, his canvasses plunge us into the fault lines between the utopian and the dystopian and hurl us out into a molten core of shimmering imagination where genesis and apocalypse close the circle of archetypal consciousness. A pure old school graffiti writer, Elate has lived witness to the artistic evolution of daubing punk slogans in ’82 to the renegade rush of bombing trains, then the explosive colour and sizzling letters of the street into the concept projects of breathtaking pieces of collaborative creativity like Mutate Britain and Arcadia. Instinctively poetic, searingly perceptive, profoundly positive and inspirationally open hearted, his art and his words hold an enchanted mirror to the ebbs and flows of decades of underground subculture and beyond into the bewitching landscapes of the collective consciousness and the ideas, emotions, complexities, corruption and towering innocence that defines the hidden Hades of the soul and the trickling mysteries of the unchained mind. Seriously though - just fucking read this. - his first ever interview

Can you tell us a little about your early life and your initial drive into art?

I was born in 1970, on the enchanted day of the enchanted month, according to the ‘Old Religion’, or so I’m told. I’ve always been captivated by colour, patterns, reflections and how things are affected by light and shade. My earliest memory is lying in my cot, rubbing my eyes to marvel at the crazy patterns which I could generate. When I got my own room I stared at the artexed ceiling above my bed to make vividly animated landscapes and characters, which kept me awestruck, as did my kaleidoscope, much as kids these days play video games. As I grew a little older I was similarly transported by viewing slides through our antique microscope. I could already read and write when I started school so I drew, in full perspective, in an attempt to ease the boredom and was brutally attacked by a teacher for my efforts. At this point I first realised that making art would not necessarily be easy. I came from a poor but cultured family, our working class background was lit up with amazing colour prints and books on art and music everywhere. We only had a black and white TV but Heironymous Bosch’s visions hung in almost every room which I lost myself in continually. There was always a fresh supply of paper and art materials to hand. My aunt was an amateur archaeologist, armchair historian and expert on the classics, and took me round museums, castles and churches regularly from the age of three. I loved the sacred architecture, staring at stained glass and into the cabinets. She told me what the things were and where they came from, how they were made and how they found their way to the museum and this fired my enthusiasm for art and history.

How did early experiences of sub culture and counter culture impact themselves on your developing identity?

In the early 70s the consciousness revolution that happened in the 60s, had spread from the hippy underground into broader society. My parents were clearly affected by that ethic and the self sufficiency and whole-food thing, there would always seem to be Bob Dylan and blues playing, vegetables growing, joss sticks burning and yoga going on. I remember hearing Dylan and blues songs as a very young child and making visual narratives in my head so I guess that stretched my imagination quite a lot.

We lived in Norfolk back then. A lot of the people who were involved in the London hippy scene in the 60s moved out to the West Country and East Anglia to pursue dreams of pastoral living and put on festivals. One I remember very well was Barsham Faire in ‘74 and ‘75; a medieval folk festival with entertainers, and puppeteers, horses and dogs everywhere. I remember seeing adults, playing totally innocently just like us kids, banging drums and playing flutes and singing and dancing and basking in the sun in wonderful costumes, it was like being transported into a golden age, very beautiful times. I felt at home instantly and understood what was going on. It gave me the idea that there was another way of living, a higher human purpose of imagination and fulfillment that was beyond the everyday capitalist conformity of living in a house and going to work or school.

Back in the real world I got more disillusioned with the iron fist of my teachers and became more aware of the rapid outbreak of punk from the ‘shock-horror stories’ on the news and from playground rumours. After feeling completely powerless at the hands of authority it was as if aliens had suddenly landed in our midst, and they were on our side. The significance of their presence in society was something we instantly understood, and as we got older and became brave enough to stand up to the teachers we found that punk was there for us too, it became a symbol that there really was another way of living that us kids could actually do ourselves, whether our parents liked it or not. Back then punk really adversely affected them, threatening the whole fabric of society. When we saw the punks walking down the street the adults’ powerless anger and outrage made us warm towards that and copy parts of it so that you could cause a little bit of that outrage too, it was a way to take back power, of standing up for yourself and saying no, fuck you I’m different, even if it was just a badge or a safety pin, or the name of a band on your schoolbag it showed your mindset and loyalty and really pissed authority figures off. It’s difficult to comprehend now just how shockingly different punk was, people were reacting like it was the end of society as we know it, punks were regarded with the sort of fear and loathing normally reserved for killers, as in effect they were, they were killing the broader conventions of polite society, behind which lurked all the bullshit.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE IN ISSUE 6

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Soulflux (Team LSD) debates Big Bang, Religion & Consciousness

 If you tuned into my last column, you will have probably witnessed me have right old dig at the scientific mainstream for choosing a mechanical and lifeless model of the universe with which to indoctrinate the “civilised” world. Fair enough it may sound a damn sight better than the picture painted by western religion, where one step out of line will have you condemned to fire and brimstone for eternity, but I find both to be wholly ineffective at describing the world as I see it.

 The source of this great divide between science and religion is usually attributed to the philosopher Rene Descartes, who in the early 1600’s pioneered the idea that the world of matter is purely mechanical; that atoms are just lifeless balls of energy which coast around the universe governed by simple physical laws. Although he and his contemporaries still believed in God, they had created a secular science by extracting God out of the physical world; the universe became a clockwork device, where God was the watchmaker and had no further involvement after winding it up. The roman catholic church accepted this, and the scientific revolution began - people could explore the physical world with a renewed sense of freedom as there was no longer any fear of committing heresy and getting burned at the stake.

One of the consequences of this, was that man was essentially promoted to a God-like status within the physical world. Even animals were believed by the intelligentsia to have no spirit in them, but were viewed as mere complex clockwork phenomena resulting from the laws of motion, and thus equally amenable to scientific experimentation. One source writes “They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain … They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and watch the blood circulate, which was a great subject of conversation”.

So the so-called “Enlightenment” got off to a pretty unenlightened start, and although we have come a long way since that particular kind of vile materialism, the belief that Earth is merely a resource to feed man’s whimsical desire has persisted. It fueled the industrial revolution and underlies our entire world economy. Nothing is sacred except human life, and even then some of us are more sacred than others. In theoretical physics, the idea of a spiritually devoid universe has been explored to obscene levels. The creators of the universe, they say, are lifeless energy membranes floating in some hyper-dimensional vacuum and colliding with each other to produce “big bangs”. Most of the collisions lead to “failed universes” and we happen to live in one which succeeded. But don’t get too excited, because according to one recent article on BBC News, it’s all going to end in cold dark emptiness, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

You see, in between the big bang and the cold dark emptiness, the debris from the explosion accidentally happened to organise itself into what we call life. It’s a total fluke, an uncountable series of highly improbable events, one after another. Our consciousness is just the latest in the chain; an illusion at the leading edge of the big bang explosion. Eventually it will all decay into absolute nothingness, just like before the accident. Now to be fair, it’s probably one of the least ridiculous theories of the universe you can create without incorporating a spiritual dimension. But as many people will attest, this 400 year old paradigm of secular materialism is crumbling, and the global economy which is built upon it is sinking like the proverbial house on sand.

TUNE IN 2 SOULFLUX EXCLUSIVELY IN LSD MAGAZINE

READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN LSD MAGAZINE ISSUE 6  (Below)

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Matrix VI – Wayfarers of Reality

Matrix VI – Wayfarers of Reality – The Quest for Experience,
May 2007, Leading Edge International Research Group, Yelm, WA 98597. Edited by Val Valerian, 8½ x 11 Velo Bound, 534 pages. (Not a continuation of the M5 material, but a brand new project.)

We are all wayfarers, travelers in reality, each with our own unique individual journey, filled with hopes and dreams, discoveries, disasters, experiential loops, synchronicities, 20-20 hindsight and realizations which make up our experiential journey and our individual progression and the expansion of our awareness. What have you learned, upon reflection? What patterns in your life do you discern? What were the progression of events? What were the synchronicities? What were the experiential loops and the major decisions in life? What was the wisdom learned?

Since the Matrix V Trilogy addressed the individual and incarnational experience, the logical next step, in my mind, was to document the incarnational experiences of individuals, allowing readers to gain vicariously from anonymous accounts by other individuals and their retrospective review of their lives, according to intuitively developed guidelines. Wayfarers of Reality was the result. The perfect companion for those who have the Matrix V Trilogy! The book has stories from people like you, from all over the planet, detailing their unique evolutionary journey and their retrospective review. From the readers point of view, there is something that can be said for vicarious experience - what people go through and discover about themselves can be inspiring, and spur us on to greater experiences within our own unique path. The guidelines used in this project are also included, allowing the reader to also generate their own 'life review', which is itself a very cathartic process. The book leads off with an interview with Val done in Seattle and winds up with an an analysis of parameters of wild card events generated from the center of our Galaxy which will no doubt be part of EndGame.

LSD NOTE: This series of booklets (some are 1,000 pages) began in 1988 and i was lucky enough to find out about them and purchase my own under the counter copy in Australia 1995 cost me £100 each...Now i have 5...Makes the film look tame... Visit the Site TruFax