Troubles on the world seemingly tend to limited lifespans as fodder for big media, staying in the public eye only long enough to force a spend-to-forget reflex. Big troubles roll back cyclically. We’re at the top of the cycle again, and China’s oppression and killings in Tibet are in the news once more.
Somewhere along the cycle is also the plight of Burma, highly influenced by its shared border with China. The communist government in China holds vested interest in keeping non-democratic, shackled states as buffer zones. China supplies arms and aid to the military dictatorships in both Burma and North Korea. I don’t disagree with engaging China economically… I believe many of the social advances within China are a direct result of barriers being broken by information, money and, ironically, tragically, almost as redemption… consumerism. However, when a government massacres its own citizens or enables the genocides of others rather than allow those citizens the exercise of self-determination, the response should be a swift rebuke from every free nation, regardless of how much money in trade is at stake.
The easy impulse is to turn sword against sword, but I know this perpetuates the cycle of violence when what is required is a full stop. To this end, I’d like to highlight a peaceful means of engagement: Twelve Offerings, my friend Jeremy Dickens’ musical efforts as Logickal to create public awareness of the crisis in Burma and raise funds to aid the struggle. All proceeds from this recording go to the U.S. Campaign For Burma. While Twelve Offerings is connected directly to Burma, the feelings it evokes and awareness it creates are for every unfree people. It’s available (with sound previews) through iTunes, Beatport or direct from Jeremy via Paypal.
Created live over three days, this is Ritual Musick of the finest warp. There is life moving within every ambient piece, and together the twelve tracks are far more than their sum. This music spiritualizes every moment and place conscious listening occurs. Twelve Offerings on San Francisco’s subway system pulls the veil away: the homeless become radiant, the bus itself a mechanism of wonderment rolling on wheels of liminal magick, time exposed as fiction of the mind, light pouring from every surface and, in pulsing bursts, from every still beating heart.
I – An open doorway of sonic mystery: slow, reverberant, gong-like tones… their resonance slips vibratory tendrils around your brainstem, pulls you forward to a space far beyond headphones.
II – Clears the air of all obstacles, initiating a transformative process on your psyche: you become rarified atmosphere without definition. You become wind and you move through the sky.
III -Coalesces you as light rain falling on temple roofs, early morning condensate, animist communicative substance for the pre-dawn set. There is light here, but it’s not from Sol.
IV – Brings the dawn, dew gathered into the shape of a human once again. Rivulets of shine thread through the world, across the plain, across your eyes, your skin, your lips, your heart, your everything. Light grows in power, day blasts through the shifting sky and the world awakens.
V – Centers the full power of the day in your chest, a single drone entering to work its magick then slip quietly into each and every cell. This light, as this day, is now part of you and will endure.
VI – Temple gongs in perpetual, living weave as forces and powers released by the Light, the interplay of every being as the land expands in definition to take on the truth: it is, in fact, a deceptive, overlapping nexus of all time and space.
VII – There is peace here, a calm pause, a moment between actions which is an action itself: awareness spreads across the plain of existence in three expanding discs at height of heart, head and hands.
VIII – The conversation begins, in tones and drones of aching beauty. All beings are represented, from the smallest sparks between subatomic particles to the flotsam of single cells to the lumbering groupings we know as sentient creatures to the vast expanse of celestial colonies, their thoughts occurring once per light year through thin networks of interstellar matter.
IX – The work of the day is begun! Life has discussed, life has agreed, life has chosen. This evolutionary path, this entry portal, this way shall be opened and this shall move through into manifestation.
X – The realm is as it always was. The realm is something new. The realm is as it always will be. The realm is changed… you open your eyes and see, as if for the very first time. The realm is you.
XI – As you were created in this moment, in connection with every other action/reaction, every other living being from the rocks beneath to the friend beside you to the sun wheeling through the sky above, you move through the moment and carry it forward in the work. You are the moment, you are the work, you are the energy between everything. Footstep by footstep, you are the choice that life made.
XII – You are here. Burma is there. The people are asking for you. You become wind and move to heed their call.
