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Daryl Parson (guest host Rachel Lally)
200 Plays4 years ago
This episode features guest host Rachel Lally (SRTN Episode 41 and Guest Host on SRTN 67) and Artist Daryl Parson.
Embracing an eclectic existence across Europe and beyond, Daryl Parson has taken to countless creative endeavours over the years. Most notably tackling bass duties for epic doom metal veterans Solstice (UK). A band whose bludgeoning riffs and astute lyrics have inspired both musical passion and unyielding attitude.
Off the international stage; Daryl is a wanderer, an artist, and especially, a writer. Through the juxtaposition of image and word he invokes insightful introspection across multiple media - with short stories already published and longer writings in the works. He is an occasional actor, previously appearing in film and television projects on both sides of the Atlantic; as well as dabbling in the more practical disciplines of sculpting and special effects work.
He is a self-professed practitioner of Chaos Magick and has found inspiration through exploring the esoteric and expressing 'True Will' through creativity, philosophy and technology. Tending to lockdown malaise, interests in psychology and Artificial Intelligence research have coalesced with the occult to create 'Servitor' - a paradigm combining Magick with Machine Learning to effective ends.
Forever seeking to connect and collaborate with other creatives and chaotes, the search continues for those who can keep up.
https://www.metal-archives.com/artists/Daryl_Parson/583781
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Transcript
Introduction and Special Episode
00:00:02
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host, Candelante. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer. So, okay.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast. My name is Rachel Lally, and you may have heard me before in the podcast, but I am doing an Irish invasion of the podcast. I'm taking over from KV, as we fondly call him in Ireland, Kembalante. And I am taking over for this week's episode. And I am joined this week by Darryl Parsons.
00:00:48
Speaker
of Salsa's fame.
Meeting Stories and Village Life
00:00:52
Speaker
We have, we met, I was trying to think about this thing, we met under an umbrella on the top of the Austrian mountains. Ah yes, the armband, you take on the mountains, got a very special place in my heart and it was going to meet you up there.
00:01:13
Speaker
Absolutely. Can you move slightly closer to your PC? I'm just worried about this sound. Oh, sorry. I've got the sound going through my headset, so hopefully that'll work. Let's do it. Darryl, where are you right now? Right now, I'm in a little mining village, just about 10 minutes drive away from Pontifract in West Yorkshire. I moved here about 10, 11 years ago and
00:01:43
Speaker
spent most of my time trying to get away from the place every weekend traveling etc but obviously with circumstances being as they are over the last few years I've learned to re-acclimatize myself with the surroundings and realize that it is a lovely place if a little bit quiet really it's it's an old mining village so there's always this sense of politics and social
00:02:12
Speaker
I wouldn't say deprivation, but certainly a sense of upheaval going on since all the industrial action happened back in the 80s. And that kind of thing carries forward into the community today, even though kids around the village have no idea what their minds are really. I don't know what their parents tell them. So as I've come here as an outsider, really, I've kind of become the village weirdo, so to speak.
00:02:42
Speaker
generally find my way through wandering around every day enjoying the surrounding farmland woods etc and just having a very peaceful life for a change and it's it's been a very strange experience getting used to it most definitely. That sounds quite idyllic and I totally release with this sort of being the first out of water having
00:03:09
Speaker
being born in Dublin, and my parents moved us to Kildare, which was right out in the countryside in Ireland, like in a little village, because you describe the place where you live as a village. And I have met many people who have lived in a village, and a village is just so much smaller than...
00:03:35
Speaker
anyone gives it credit for it. It's hard to imagine if you've never lived in one, but I know my village was pretty much a crossroads. It's in Ireland, so there's three pubs, obviously, a school, a church, and that's pretty much it. So like, what's in your village? Well, you've got twice as many roads as we have. There's a single road that bisects the village from one side to the other.
00:04:04
Speaker
There's a few housing estates further up the top end that have been built in recent years. But yeah, it's just one street that gets blocked off amusingly whenever it snows. But facilities, there isn't much really. There's a couple of corner shops, a couple of pubs, not that I've ever dared go into them.
00:04:25
Speaker
Really? Well, it's just like they do have the vibe of being local pubs for local people. Oh my god, definitely. I'm like a local in my local pub for local people. My dad is like a celebrity in our local pub. That's kind of odd. Well, in Yorkshire it takes a while for people to get used to it. Although I'm not a Yorkshireman myself, I've kind of paid my flat cap and whippet tax over the years.
00:04:49
Speaker
So let's just say my neighbours are slowly getting used to me now and maybe in about 10 years I could risk popping into the working men's clubs that I don't know. Oh my gosh, that's mental. Like the first thing I think my parents did when they were scoping out the house and stuff was like calling to the local to see. Like my dad still goes in every week and it's like
00:05:13
Speaker
I think when I was growing up in like rural Ireland, it was like you went to mass on a Sunday to get the kind of gossip who was going. You know, it was after after the church, like people would be like, oh, did you hear about Moira and Maisie and
Music, Visa Issues, and Cultural Experiences
00:05:28
Speaker
whatever? And like now it's like my dad goes to the pub and it's like, that's where you hear who's well, who's sick, who needs something, who's working on what, who's building a house, who needs to lay, who's
00:05:41
Speaker
do whatever and yeah it's all a bit mad. Well for me what socialization I do with the neighbours is mostly at the gym because luckily there's a gym in the village so obviously in lockdown times it's been ideal to just pop up their 20-minute walk away and keep looking after myself as it were so I've become the guy that people talk to when they want to talk about rock music at the gym.
00:06:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's a bad place to be. So, um, okay, let's, let's go back a little bit. So, okay. We've gone through like how we've met, which has been very uncomfortable. I'm like, you know, we, we don't know each other that well. So I have lots of, I have lots of stuff to ask you. I've a lot of things. So.
00:06:37
Speaker
So let's go in on the music angle because we met each other through metal and that's where we're about at and shout out to a couple of KV's friends, Kim Volante's mates who are Salsa fans in the US I have heard and they're super excited to listen to this episode. Thank you very much.
00:07:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's really, it's always very exciting. I think when you're like in a country like what, like Ireland or the UK, and then you're like, oh, there's a whole continent that like, this is your music. You know, you probably got to play in the US, have you?
00:07:20
Speaker
Not yet. I'm technically not allowed back in the US for various visa wavery type reasons. Tell us more about that. Well, just shortly after I moved here, I'd sold the house, I'd managed to actually make some money, even though it was a bit of a recession back then, cleared off a mortgage. So I thought, what do I really want to do with my life? And
00:07:48
Speaker
At that point, I had an opportunity to go over to San Antonio, Texas and work on films. So that was always been a lifelong dream to work in that kind of... Yeah, very much my background. I went to film college, so I'm with you. I didn't quite make it that formally, but I ended up interning with a group of lovely Mexican people called The Darkness.
00:08:15
Speaker
named after Tim Curry's character in Legend, not after the Rock Band. But yeah, they were basically a horror special effects and film production company working out of a warehouse in the middle of the San Antonio wilds, completely in the middle of nowhere and Texas.
00:08:38
Speaker
Let's face it, it's a great place if you like scorpions, put it that way. So it was always fighting off some form of fauna infestation that was going on in there. But yeah, it was a very exciting experience. I got to cut my teeth on practical special effects, sculpting, a little bit of acting, some production work. So I was kind of on both sides of the camera while I was over there.
00:09:04
Speaker
managed to wrangle me on IMDB page for my troubles, which was a nice bonus. But the issue was that I was coming through on a Visa waiver. And although I was interning, these guys were not technically paying me other than in tacos. So I had my food, I had my lodgings kind of worked out well.
00:09:27
Speaker
and for the first time I went over and that was fine and there's no complaint. The second time I went over, even though I'd requested to make sure it was still okay for me to go over, they noticed I was still on the full 90-day period of my visa waiver. So once I landed in Atlanta they took one look at me half deaf and confused because I got the cheap seat next to the engine for eight hours and
00:09:53
Speaker
And that was a great experience as well, just going from being living in Yorkshire for ages to going over to America. And there's this whole eight hour rebirth tube concept where I could go over there and completely reinvent myself as to whoever I wanted to be. Because as someone who grew up in the UK going to the US, what
00:10:17
Speaker
were the kind of cultural differences or what were the things that you loved about the US and what were the things that you loved about the UK then? Well, I think the greatest thing that I took over there was my accents because so many people came up to me and just said, Darryl, I really, really trust what you're telling me.
00:10:40
Speaker
And it's like, I don't have a clue what I'm saying, but because I have that slight graphidas of having a British accent and they're so used to British actors in certain roles over there, they just they just lapped me up completely and not as literally as I would have liked. But but now it's just in the end, when I went there the second time,
00:11:01
Speaker
eight hour flight, all bleary eyed and confused. They took one look at me and ticked me off on the bad list and took me into interrogation room for a while. So I'm there waiting for my connection, thinking, am I going to make my connection? And they're asking me, how can you afford to live for yourself over in America, live in America for three months? Where's your income? Next day, you know, I was a computer program event, still technically I'm now.
00:11:28
Speaker
So I had money put by, I figured I had about two grand put by on a credit, pre-paid credit card. That would be pretty decent, no? Yeah, but they said, how are you going to be able to live on that? And I just said, I'm going to, I'm actually said, I'm going to buy food from supermarkets and I'm going to cook for myself. Not live in a five-star hotel? Yeah, exactly. And
00:11:52
Speaker
they grumbled and groaned but it ended up saying okay we'll let you in this time but you can't come back in again so uh it could be now you know things are different it's a brave new world over there and uh obviously my old passport expired i could try again but at the moment i've never really needed to unfortunately yeah has been
00:12:16
Speaker
a plague on all of us. Literally, it's just been a nightmare for people in the arts, but I think especially bands because, well, bands in theatre, I'm in theatre world, you know, you can, films, okay, whatever, you can watch, you can stream a film online.
Impact of COVID on Arts and Music
00:12:40
Speaker
The live show, the live experience, the thing of
00:12:46
Speaker
the magic, the thing that I live for is the liveness of events, so theatre and music and being the audience. So tell me what has Covid been like for you, like the last
00:13:05
Speaker
three years. I've lost all track of time. Time does not have any meaning anymore. What have you been able to do? What have you not been able to do? And how are you adapting? I think the only constant in life is change and we're always constantly adapting to become the people we need to be given the circumstances we find ourselves in and
00:13:35
Speaker
I suppose pragmatically, you know, I'm still in the one band I've always wanted to be in all my life. Seriously, this is just like the ultimate fanboy experience for me being in Solstice. But obviously, I'm in Solstice.
00:13:54
Speaker
Are we gigging? No. Are we recording? Well, actually, I'm in the studio on Sunday just to lay down some bass. So. But now it's just the weird thing is for being in the band is that I've take, for me at least, I'm still in Yorkshire, but the rest of the bands have bands scattered across the globe.
00:14:24
Speaker
because they're stranded in different countries waiting to get back based on regulations and whatnot and obviously needed to be with people over in different countries so some of my band members I haven't seen or talked to for a while when we get everyone in the country when we can we have a rehearsal but unfortunately it has been a very disconnected experience and as obviously our
00:14:52
Speaker
I love the banter bits and I am deeply grateful for the experience of being in the band, but I just want to get back on and play again. But realistically, we are in a situation now where live shows are becoming severely marginalised in favour of other entertainment options which are slightly easier to manage.
00:15:17
Speaker
And I know, I remember, didn't you guys have that weird social media event thingy where you had everybody penned into little pens watching some generic disco music or something on the stage somewhere and there was... Yeah, they were always directing a play online and it was just so odd, like directing a show with actors who were in their houses all across Dublin and
00:15:47
Speaker
The script is written by an author in the UK, and part of it is like, the play is called A Marxist in Heaven, and it's about Marxism, and it has so much movement, and it's all about people coming together and trying to direct that show with people. You can't be in the same space together. Yeah, I guess it's been really challenging.
00:16:13
Speaker
you know, someone who's been in the band and is in bands, you just, you need to be together. You need to vibe off each other and play with each other and be present. And I miss going to gigs so much. Like I've been to one gig this year.
00:16:33
Speaker
Well, that's more than a lot of people have managed, but I got really lucky in the middle of the year. One of my favorite venues down in London, a little occult bar called Helge's. Specializing kind of like, it's a combination do metal occult psychedelic bar. So it's just every aspect of my interests are all intersect perfectly in this place. It's amazing. It's my favorite haunt.
00:17:01
Speaker
one of the best places I've ever been to and felt at home in, throughout Globe. And yeah, the moment that gig started happening again, they had a Doom metal band called a parish on there. And that weekend I was just straight on the train, straight down there, down the front head banning. And it just felt like a homecoming because as much as
00:17:29
Speaker
regulations come and regulations go that tell us to restrain ourselves, tell us to restrict ourselves. There is that certain visceral need, that carnal need to be in the thick of it all with the music washing over you, feeling the social connection you make from looking over at somebody who's enjoying the music and they're smiling back. And as much as we've got a playlist and we've got a band camp and all of that,
00:17:58
Speaker
it's not the same as the sheer confusion of being in a dark painted room somewhere with an oval LPA. And as I've traveled around you, because I do, back in the day, as you know, it's been, back in the day, three years ago before COVID, that like everything now will be like BC and BC, like before COVID and post COVID. But now it's,
00:18:27
Speaker
The one thing I found is that no matter where I travel to, there's always the dark painted room and the over-lowed PA. And it's a constant in our culture because obviously if you have fans of a certain type of music, you get on with a certain type of people. And that's fair to
Journey into Metal Music and Art
00:18:46
Speaker
say, I think. Well, what type is that, Tara? Oh, good question. Let's give it like five words.
00:18:58
Speaker
I'd say five words to describe the people that I hang around with. Magical non-conformists with a sense of spirit and adventure about them. I don't know if that's five words or whatever, but... I know you were just trying to make it as short as possible. Okay, that's really cool.
00:19:27
Speaker
Yeah, I can definitely identify with that. So, okay. Darls, talk to me about your journey into art, into magic, into metal. Like, where did that begin for you? I think it began in the 80s and there was a kid
00:19:57
Speaker
at school, not me, this other kid that people said, don't talk to that lad, don't talk to that lad. He's not one of the cool kids. He's not one of the clever kids. He's a bit of a nerd, he's a geek, wherever. And the thing is, I've come from a situation where I've never settled wherever I've gone because I've been bounced up and down the country wherever. So I've never, I've usually been the outsider. And I saw this lad being bullied and picked on, and I made a friend of him.
00:20:28
Speaker
and he was into okay it was the 80s we were like just dipping into teenagers and he was into games workshop so uh that and he's sort of getting into that kind of nerdy tabletop war gaming behavior and from that that was the time when the magazine they had White Dwarf
00:20:55
Speaker
had a flexi disk on the front from a band called Sabat so this weird sort of outsider nerdy sort of person actually introduced started to introduce me into more extreme music and that was about the limit of our contact he was like this gateway of like interesting stuff but then uh
00:21:19
Speaker
Games Workshop then brought out Bolt Thrower, A Realm of Chaos, pictured it. And my idea of music at that point was heavily into stuff like Hawkwind and maybe some movie soundtracks because that was kind of like where my
00:21:36
Speaker
attitudes lay. And obviously, being a kid, not into drugs or anything, but into Hawkins, that was a weird start of my life. But that's, that's been. That is a weird, that's a weird start. Yeah. But I love this, by the way, because like, I was born in 86. I feel like I should have been born like 10 years earlier. All of the music that I love is like, you know, I grew up in the like, the new metal kind of
00:22:06
Speaker
metal revival and like for me it was all about going backwards. I'm just like I want to love to be in the thick of it in the 80s like get like buying album because I was always like oh my god like this album that was released in 86 when I was born like so many good albums were released in 86 like so many great metal albums like I feel like the year I was born was like
00:22:33
Speaker
like the pinnacle of metal. I fucking miss it. Like if I had just been like a few years, if I had just been born earlier, like I could have totally appreciated this a lot. Well, that's the thing. To take things off in a slightly video game track here, there's a video game that came out a few years back called Brutal Legend, and it was like a sort of video game about heavy metal.
00:23:03
Speaker
And it had a Jack Black doing the voiceover of the roadie character in it, Eddie Riggs. And play on Eddie from Maiden and Riggs, the guy who did Maiden's artwork. But at the start of it, he's there talking to another roadie. And he just says, you know what, man? Do you know when I wish I'd been born in?
00:23:25
Speaker
the 70s. No, no, no, the early 70s. And no, that hits exactly when I was born. And I just fell in love straight away. It's like, yep, yep, they're talking to me with this video game. You know, someone should have had sex earlier. That's all I'm saying. Christian Catholic Ireland. We've all been born too late, but
00:23:52
Speaker
But now for me, I didn't really get heavily into the music until I moved to Bradford in the early 90s. And previously, I've been living up in Sunderland and down south in Essex. So I've kind of like never quite settled and bounced up and down the country as my... Oh, why did you leave so much, Darryl? What was that about? Oh, right. Well, basically, my mother was from up north and my father was from down south.
00:24:18
Speaker
They never got on as well as they could do, so I was kind of bounced to custody one side of the country or another.
Artistic Exploration and Spiritual Connections
00:24:28
Speaker
So it is what it is, but that's hence me having a really weird accent now because I've got this sort of like hindsight 57 combination of accents. That's really funny because I could never play, I was like trying to figure out where your accent was from. But like people say the same with me because I was born in Dublin but grew up in Kildare. So people always say, oh you sound like a really posh Dublin person but not also from Dublin. So yeah, I totally got that.
00:24:57
Speaker
But now it's, well, for me at least, I have a different accent depending where I was in the country when I learned the words I'm speaking. But yes, so yeah, eventually settled in Bradford in the early 90s. And that was because I wanted to go to the university's electronic imaging and media communications course.
00:25:26
Speaker
Which was huge. When you say Bradford, for me, it conjures, because I know a little bit about the UK, I know what Bradford kind of represents. I've never been there. For our US listeners, like three words to describe Bradford. I'll be kind. A beleaguered city.
00:25:55
Speaker
a really good city. It used to be in its heyday a huge textiles hub across the country. We had a lot of textiles, wool etc coming through the city. That changed as people's needs generally do and
00:26:17
Speaker
People would complain, oh, Bradford, you know, we've had a lot of immigrants in, I see hardworking people wanting to make a go of their lives and, you know, can absolutely respect that. But the Bradford for me was a creative nexus. It was it was my creative hub. It was a place where I learned my place in life. OK, that's really interesting. So what is what is creativity or art for you? What does that mean?
00:26:43
Speaker
The creator of your art, I'd say art is a conversation. But it's a mirror. It starts as a mirror. It starts as a dirty, filthy mirror you hold up to yourself. Broken, scratched mirror to try and capture an aspect of your internal metaphors, the internal structure in which you build your personality, build your sense of identity and self around.
00:27:13
Speaker
You hold that mirror up and you just capture something that speaks to you aesthetically. But anyway, you hold the mirror up to your soul and give a part of yourself, capture it in the glass. And that is the first step towards creating art. You've captured a part of yourself that's private and internal and you've given it form. The second part of it comes when somebody else comes along and looks into that mirror themselves.
00:27:44
Speaker
And just briefly, if they're willing, if they're willing to give apart themselves to understanding who you are as an artist, you can beat that gaze within the mirror and they see you and you see them in their interpretation of what you've created. And that's kind of like... Yeah, I find that fascinating because for me, this spectator is very much
00:28:08
Speaker
the person who makes something a piece of art rather than a sort of piece of self-gratification. So it's interesting for you to bring that up. I mean, most of my people over the years who have sort of reflected that back at you, like, you know, fans or people who watch you or like, what is the kind of
00:28:33
Speaker
you know, is there ever any kind of feedback that you've gotten or anyone that you've met or any stories, you know, from a spectator's point of view of how their artists touch them or affected them anyway? I'd say that being in Solstice, one of the first bands I got into when I moved into Bradford in the early 90s and I've been into the band as a fan
00:29:03
Speaker
for most of my life. They are a band which defines who I am as a musician. So playing in the band is just a dream come true. And before I was on stage, I was always one of the guys down the front there. And to be honest, when I'm playing, my heart's still with the guys down the front, the headbangers, the diehards, the people who've kept the support going. And
00:29:28
Speaker
It's weird because I don't see myself as being somebody as a musician who plays to inspire people. I play because I'm honoring the music I grew up on. I'm honoring the feeling it gives me to listen to and accept that I get to actually jump up and down on stage for an hour. Well, okay, it's two medals, so there's not that much jumping. But now I just feel that
00:29:58
Speaker
Some people I've talked to said they really enjoyed the show and I've really appreciated that and it's less like, you know, I'm just a conduit for the music that inspires me. In that case, yeah, it comes through me. I give it my own colour, I give it my own interpretation. But I mean, these are songs I've grown up on and these are songs which are defined to who I am as a person. Of course, I'm going to have this sense of ultimate gratitude
00:30:27
Speaker
that people are coming along and they're screaming and they're going crazy and they're pumping the air however, however people get into the music and they are enjoying what I'm doing and I know it's like you want art to be inspirational, you want art to mean something to other people, you want to make that connection, you want to be acknowledged, you want to be recognised for what you do and that's something I've always carried with me not just with
00:30:55
Speaker
music I do but in the writing I do my photography etc. All my creative endeavors are really a sense of trying to make that connection and seeing that aspect of myself interpreted from a different perspective and that's where the secondary person comes into play, the person who perceives the art. So how do they see me when I've got this perfectly structured internal image of myself which has very little basis on
00:31:25
Speaker
reality. It just really, for me, it's wanting to get what I do out there and see what people think about it. Because they say about art being a self, it's not just a selfish process because you could easily do things selfishly and say, OK, I'm brilliant, whatever, I'm going to write this down, I'm not going to share it. But if you're doing it,
00:31:55
Speaker
If you make any effort to release something that other people are going to look at and interpret, then of course, yeah, I'm going to want to know what they think about it. And it's not this hunger of needing to be acknowledged, need to be recognized. It's just like curiosity.
00:32:13
Speaker
Yeah, like there's a lot of stuff going on there and what you said, like there's this sort of the conduit, the idea of like being the vehicle between the art and the audience and also coming from the
00:32:31
Speaker
perspective of being the spectator and who's now the spectator looking back at the other spectators and also a very communal experience and you know I know that you like me practice magic and have an interest in the occult so how much does that sort of
00:32:53
Speaker
and thought process in terms of like your spiritual relationship? How does that relate to the art that you create or your music? I think that spirituality is a core tenet of creativity that you're essentially channeling some form of, I wouldn't say in what I do on stage with my bands.
00:33:20
Speaker
That is an expression of joy, that is an expression of gratitude. Joy is a terrible word to say for doing metal, I admit.
00:33:28
Speaker
but that's a beautiful thing to go on stage with though you know like i'm actually gonna take that on board myself you know like going on stage like i'm going on stage with joy and gratitude because it is very much a place of privilege and i mean you do feel very fortunate anytime especially in these days and you have you know the fortune the fortune of of being on stage and presenting work
00:33:58
Speaker
to people who were happy to listen or or give it some time you know exactly but as far as the magical side of me goes possibly as a result of getting into games workshop in warhammer back in back in the 80s i found a torturous route towards chaos magic in the 90s and for that
00:34:24
Speaker
That really came from me looking at the options which were suddenly widely available. Now I can look beyond the little villages I was living in. Obviously I was in Bradford, I had access to more knowledge. The beast with a thousand nodes, the internet, just manifested out of depth. Suddenly I was sat atop
00:34:50
Speaker
a very, very poorly filtered repository of the world's knowledge. And from that, I was starting to see the connections because, as you may have noticed, by the way, this conversation has been jumping around. I don't so much see things in a linear sense. I see things as a hyperdimensional matrix. So trying to navigate my thoughts through that pattern is always fun. But I think it comes from looking at the various
00:35:18
Speaker
paths that people follow, the various belief systems that they pin their, again, pinning their sense of self up against and noticing the similarities and realizing that a lot of magic is spicy psychology and these are common aspects, common elements found throughout the world's cultures just in different forms. I mean there's always going to be
00:35:48
Speaker
and adversary, there's always going to be, so somewhere along the line, there's going to be a virgin born child that comes around with the solstice. You know, Christ, Mithras, whatever, it's like these, these are all common elements. And from that, I realize it's not so much the person or the God, because a God is just an idea of delusions of grandeur. But it's the principles, it's how humanity projects
00:36:18
Speaker
their sense of self into the cosmos. And the curse magic, it's like, okay, we've got these concepts, got these archetypes where we want to invoke a certain sense of being in oneself. We want to achieve something we want to manifest success. We want to manifest bravery. We want to manifest boldness, whatever we need to achieve change within ourselves at some point.
00:36:46
Speaker
How do we do that? And look back and realize everybody has their own archetypes that become the, it's essentially their own private pantheons. And for me, I've always called my system Chaos Magic, well, a Chaos Magic influence system as a pick and myth philosophy. You pick things from mythology that work for you and you take that system
00:37:16
Speaker
which is unique entirely to how you've been brought up entirely what you've experienced in your own life because you know it's not a one size fits all concept you know you have to look inside yourself you realize okay why am i attracted to this fictional character because you know they're all fictional characters in the end so even we have fictional characters in somebody else's narrative but uh we are you look look back at
00:37:44
Speaker
those aspects and how they resonate within yourself and you think okay I like the feeling that this concept brings to me how can I manifest this concept stronger in a stronger way so from that you are so yep 99% of all of this is bullshit and pardon my language but at one percent that is the crucial thing that is the common core in every human experience and that is just the act of
Philosophical Reflections on Existence
00:38:14
Speaker
humanity trying to understand itself and from that on that on that sorry to interrupt you but so why why do you think there was something rather than nothing something rather than nothing okay that's that's that's that that's a good one i see why you bought me here right i have a think thinking about it is that
00:38:40
Speaker
At some point, we have a narrative, we have a fantasy, we have a mythology from the start of the universe. At the moment, it's called the Big Bang Theory. A couple of years down the line, it might be something else. Science never sleeps, and we will discover more about this great origin point, this great infinitesimal singularity from which the whole universe sprung from and kept expanding.
00:39:10
Speaker
At that point, it wasn't so much there was something, it wasn't there was nothing, there was everything condensed in a single point in life, in existence. And for me, it's a theory, it's all theories. And they say there was a big bang. And that point, that singular point of everything expanded out into the universe we see today.
00:39:38
Speaker
constantly expanding still. We look into where we think is the core of where it all started, and we see this radio pattern, this slight imperceptible change of heat in the universe. And within that, that is the reflection of everything that made us who we are. We're hydrogen trying to understand itself. And from that explosion, that complicated
00:40:10
Speaker
mass of everything we had our base elements they were flung out into the universe we had complicated metals they were flung out into the universe and at some point thousands billions of years ago a clump of those elements coalesced here around you know a yellow star somewhere floating around in space and
00:40:33
Speaker
through physics, whatever, that coalescence of elements, revolved and revolved and revolved. It became a ball. It discovered water, et cetera, et cetera. And it became the planet we are on now. Now that is just the tiniest fragment of that everythingness that was at the start of it all. And we look back and if somebody looked over at the map
00:41:03
Speaker
at this background heat level of the universe. Everything we have amounted to. All our hopes, all our dreams, all our gods, all our cathedrals, all our great citadels, castles, all our dominions, all our tiny petty pale blue dot quabbles that we have.
00:41:32
Speaker
it would be the tiniest nuance on that heat map. But something echoing in the back of our minds, something echoing in the back of who we are as beings, feels that everything that has become mathematically almost nothing and
00:42:00
Speaker
As we come together, we all fractured beings, we all fractured people, we hold up our mirrors and try to describe ourselves to others through our creativity. We look back and we choose through our perception, through the tiny little lens that exists for about 70, 80, maybe 90 years, through which we can conceptualise the great everything, the great nothing and everything in between.
00:42:31
Speaker
We can look back and we could say, I choose to make this something. I choose to make my moment here something because it's sheer bloody minded stubbornness that makes us do that. But more than that, it's knowing that if we do reach out to people, if we do make our mark, if we do strive to become the people we want to be, we strive to manifest who we can be. We might make that connection. Somebody else might see us in that mirror that we hold up to ourselves.
00:43:02
Speaker
And we might see them. And through all that, we might actually find something.
Identity, COVID, and Future Projects
00:43:07
Speaker
And that matters, and that's what I live for. Can I just say, we're all highly drawn to understand ourselves. That is amazing. That's incredible. And that's spectacular, Aunty. I'm much more complex, I think,
00:43:31
Speaker
then probably my answer. Well it's been a few years I've done a lot of thinking over here. Yeah I know it's always really interesting because it sounds like such a sort of simple question like why is there something about nothing and you would expect it to be like because x or because y and it's really fascinating all of the different answers that people give.
00:43:55
Speaker
I know you were kind of worried when I proposed this to you because you were like, oh, I don't know how I'm going to fill up all this time. You'll be really surprised to know we're going into the 45 minute mark now.
00:44:14
Speaker
So tell me, how can people connect with you or connect with your work, with your art? Like maybe there's definitely going to be listeners who have no idea who Salsas are and not familiar with the music, in which case you can check it out, you heathens.
00:44:33
Speaker
OK, celsius-englander.bandcamp.com for music. But if you want to connect with me, I'm currently working on getting my life organized in some manner of a website to cover all the crazy things I've done over the last couple of decades. But for now, the easiest way, I suppose, would be to go on to Instagram
00:45:02
Speaker
And my Instagram handle is at hevenstorm. So H-E-A-T-H-E-N-S-T-O-R-M.
00:45:11
Speaker
and that's a name that I kind of picked about 20 odd years ago now and you know I like to think oh was it is it is it something profound is it something special is something pretentious whatever and I could look back and say oh yeah heathen storm that's king leo on the heath with her being plagued by his daughters or whatever oh it's a psalm why do the heathen storm truth be told it was my xbox handle and I thought it was really cool
00:45:36
Speaker
And it was pretty cool to be fair. And then, so like, how is art looking for you in this sort of, I mean, in COVID times, I would normally ask like in the year ahead, but like, let's just focus on like, you know, the month ahead, or like, one is, are there things in the, I mean, I guess the UK is more open than,
00:46:02
Speaker
Ireland is a shambles right now. Things are closed at eight o'clock. Life is over at 8 p.m. here. And I guess the UK is a bit more opened up and you can still possibly play gigs, I don't know. Like what's the... There are still gigs happening at the moment. I'm kind of becoming more used to being in the little village in the middle of nowhere. And it works out, it's working out well for me. I mean, it's given me a chance to
00:46:31
Speaker
start off a lot more new creative processes. I'm working on another now. And I've also got my big crazy project called the servitor, which is the sort of weird conjunction of where magic meets machine learning. So with that one, I'm basically to use the clincher, teaching an artificial intelligence how to perform magic. And
00:47:00
Speaker
Okay, I'm going to have to follow up on that one. That's the catching phrase to bring people in. When you look at how the sausage is made, it's a lot more mundane, but things usually are when you realise how they work. And it's something that I've had going around my mind since I first got onto the internet back in the 90s. It's like people
00:47:29
Speaker
Uh, you know, we got this situation where everybody is connected online and they want to obviously be the best type of person they can be. They think they're connected online. But, uh, it's something that I, that came to be about a yoga. We actually got a name and about yoga. In fact, yoga next week, I did some automatic writing and I just described a concept.
00:47:59
Speaker
and basically we have this wake of data behind ourselves and we leave it behind ourselves and it's been exploited quite heavily over social media we've had our Cambridge Analytica's they've taken our data and how we post what we post etc and we
00:48:21
Speaker
and have basically used it to try to subvert democracy by making every important vote that is going on more or less 50-50 by constantly targeting the people who the algorithms predict will swing one way or the other. That's why Trump got in on about 50-50 thing. That's why Brexit came in almost 50-50. Any big vote these days, whereas enough sufficient interest in is being subverted by artificial intelligence technology.
00:48:50
Speaker
I didn't know this as much other than in a great the grandiose sci-fi concept did a lot of research into that last year and it's data science it's pattern matching and there's one thing that is also can also be ascribed to pattern matching it's synchronicity magic is that you look for patterns in your life that have correspondences
00:49:16
Speaker
So, you know, you pick up Crowley 777 off the shelf. It's just a load of tables. It was magic early data science. Data science magic.
AI and Personal Empowerment
00:49:30
Speaker
It's observing changes. Now, regardless of whether people believe in astrology or not, there's two facts here. The people who believe in astrology believe in astrology.
00:49:45
Speaker
And the patterns of the stars are trackable, are cyclical, and they're data. The physical position of stars, et cetera, has been interpreted as the zodiac, has been interpreted as the personality traits of people born in those particular month windows. Now, given that though that is data,
00:50:16
Speaker
But whether it's data, you know, you can look back and say, OK, in social media, when, you know, the sun was in the cusp of pistachio or whatever, you don't have to have any any specific. And the sun was in the cashew nut of the morning.
00:50:38
Speaker
But that's the thing, it's like the stars don't look down on us and say, okay, that person was born underneath me, I'm going to influence them. It's an observation made from within that projects our sense of self out into the cosmos. So knowing all of that, we've got the position to the stars as day tournaments, we've got wherever, we've got what people post online. We can match the
00:51:05
Speaker
We can use semantic analysis and that's really, really common these days. Work out exactly what type of tone, what type of mood a person is in when they post something. We can look at the pictures they post. Are they posting a lot of selfies? Is there a reason why they're posting selfies? Check the eyes, check the mouth, do they match? Are they sad in their eyes but happy in the mouth? Things like that. Facial analysis.
00:51:31
Speaker
And this is all stuff that we give willingly and it has been weaponized against us. Now, what I'm suggesting is that we use these to feed an engine. I call it the apophenia engine. That's basically finding these patterns in what we do and matching them together and analyzing them to say, OK, like last year at this time,
00:51:57
Speaker
For this particular set of stars, this particular weather, whatever, you were in this mindset and you didn't want to be in that mindset. How can we improve your mindset now? How can we manifest a better version of yourself? First, you're aware of that. Now you need to communicate back to the user. How can you explain that? And how can you achieve that change in a person?
00:52:26
Speaker
Now, the thing about magic is there's probably some person out there who reads a lot of books and they said, no, no, no, that's not magic. That's not magic. You know, your computers don't do magic, but people do. And by
00:52:45
Speaker
influencing through, I mean you're familiar with sigil magic aren't you? You manifest your intent in a thread, scribble out the vowels. It's so fascinating because I think one of the most kind of extreme
00:53:03
Speaker
sort of examples I've heard of this being exploited is like Spotify sort of capitalizing on your algorithm of what songs you're playing. Do you know what I mean? So they're like, oh, you know, Rachel plays these kind of songs and we can correlate them with her, you know, like Spotify knows what fucking mood I'm in. That's much like, you know,
00:53:32
Speaker
My family don't know what mood I'm in. My friends don't. But Spotify fucking knows, like, because I've played, you know, X-Song or I've listened to a certain podcast or whatever. I mean, it's the thought of that being weaponized against you. But what you're talking about is like a more positive kind of, amongst mental health approach of like, you know. A democratization of it.
00:53:57
Speaker
Yeah, we've noticed that you're, you might be a bit, you know, angry today. Like, do you want to, why do you know, how do you, how do you deal with that information? Like what, what is the follow-up? How do, well, by, for example, suggesting maybe you want to listen to something else on Spotify. Now, when all this started, I became very, very aware of how artificial intelligence tracks me. It's like you mentioned Spotify and the machine learning algorithms they have there did something terrifying. Now,
00:54:27
Speaker
If you go back to Donald Rumsfeld, the great warmonger and his great comment about there's things we know, there's things we don't know that we know, there's things we know that we don't know, et cetera. But the crucial one is the things that we don't know. Exactly. Now, the things that we don't know that we know are the interesting ones, because they're the ones where we've got all the data there, but we didn't know it was happening.
00:54:53
Speaker
and we didn't make that correlation and it happens with Spotify and it came up like last year because I chose to make myself aware of this and now what the thinker thinks the prover proves so I said okay I'm going to be aware of this let's see it happen and it started I was listening to one band and it started to recommend stuff that I really liked from completely unrelated genres
00:55:19
Speaker
And it was just like looking into what my private playlist would be if it was on Spotify. And it just terrified me. It's like, okay. What is it on Spotify? That's the terrifying thing. Well, I'm listening to Black Metal. I mean, it recommends some Witch Hazel, Christian Rock, you know. Sorry, sorry, sorry, Christian True Metal. I do apologize there, but not the type of thing that you'd expect from listening to Black Metal. And it understood all of this about me. And
00:55:45
Speaker
That was absolutely fascinating because it's the unknown knowns that are falling out the bottom of all these algorithms and all these neural networks. And it's fascinating for sense. The unknowns are knowns. Exactly. It's things that we don't know that we know about ourselves. The unknowns. That's the unknown. The unknowns, for what we thought. But anyway.
00:56:16
Speaker
what's come out of all of that is now we know this and especially with Spotify it just track what type of mood your music is and it can work out whether you're happy and sad from that that's that's low hanging fruit i could just pull that up today but more complicated analysis of like the images we post and how we post what colors we use especially how that relates to
00:56:39
Speaker
going back to Crowley 777, all the tables. Okay, you got your queen's colour scheme there. What does yellow mean there? What planet does that mean, etc? How does that relate to the astrology data that we've pulled in? Things like that. Well, you know, when you say that, because I read tarot cards, it's no different than being like, oh, you're drawn to this tarot card or that card. There's a decent amount of difference. It's like it's a decision that someone's made that you
00:57:09
Speaker
can read into, you know. Whether they know they've made it or not. And the funny thing is you mentioned tarot because what this ultimately creates on the other side is, I don't know if you've seen the toys that people are playing with now, media synthesis toys, where they like typing a phrase into an artificial intelligence thing and it creates artwork for them.
00:57:30
Speaker
No, what is this? I think there's one called a Wumba or Wumba, something like that. I can send you the link afterwards or whatever. But I've been playing a lot with that as a sigil visualization engine at the end of it. So we don't have the intent of a person writing down a sigil. We want to create something that would correspond to a subconscious in the same manner. So again, we look at what they've been posting.
00:58:00
Speaker
Okay, we want somebody to remind themselves at home. Where are they born? Like, you say you were born in Dublin, lived in Kildare, things like that. So if you wanted to be reminded of a time when you were in Kildare, and that gave you a certain sense of mental, a certain mental space, then you could throw out into this image generator, throw out a image
00:58:29
Speaker
sourced using some landmarks around Kildare that would resonate with you personally as a form of your own personal tarot generated based on the personality that the servitor believes you've created, that believes who you are. So by learning who you are from how you've posted and when you've posted etc and anything else you choose to willingly give it, it can then work out who you are and then
00:58:56
Speaker
resonate with that level of your subconsciousness. Again, throwing some sigils, use a bit of geometry, knowing what your favorite planets are, throw out the words and concepts, put them, merge them together, create a video or a image that you can look at and say, okay, think about this for a while. How does this make you feel? And then by looking at how you felt before you've come into the system and how we come in afterwards,
00:59:25
Speaker
I believe, and in the prototypes I ran, I mean, I ran the first renderer of like first prototype of it yesterday. It's very, very glitchy, so I wouldn't recommend people tune in if they have a sensitive disposition. Well, if they wanted to, how would they tune in? It's on my Instagram. OK. And yeah, it's something I call glitch magic.
00:59:54
Speaker
and it's really finding a way to speak to the subconscious because ultimately when you declare your intention in sigil magic, chaos magic, you write down what you want to do, you make a squiggle out of it, you enter a no-cis state while observing the sigil and for the sacred folks at home I won't explain what that entails and then you discard the sigil because
01:00:22
Speaker
have that point, that image has embedded itself in your subconsciousness and you don't realise it and you will subconsciously then, spicy psychology, end up trying to manifest that concept through your actions, through being aware of synchronicities in the real world and through observing. So essentially what servitor is, yep, it's magic. It's the process of understanding who you are and understanding what it takes to make you the person you want to be.
01:00:54
Speaker
And, you know, it's like I needed a hobby during lockdown. So I think it's imminent. There is one hell of a hobby. Imminentizing the Eshaton seems as good a hobby as any. I mean, yeah, absolutely. It seems, you know, and, you know, like I said, it seems to like tap into people's wellness and their
01:01:18
Speaker
their headspace and where they're at. And I think most of us can identify with struggling with those things over the last year or two. And the thing is, now I've said it, now I've actually, this is the first time I've actually declared it in something resembling a public forum. I've had some trusted friends that I've worked on with it over the last year now. It's starting to work for them. A friend of mine, I call her the Wood Woman.
01:01:45
Speaker
after Bathory, she is a sort of Danish shaman. She started using the principles in her own work. And, yep, she has started, you know, she's now one of my main contributors because she's realised that, oh, there is something that works here. And we're still stitching it together slowly, because, you know, this could be, this could be my magnum opus, this could be my lifelong project, I don't know.
01:02:13
Speaker
But I do want to work on it. I do want to continue with what I've discovered just because I think there's some worth in it. And it is about empowering people. It's not about taking their data and using it against them, weaponising their online existence, because everybody lives online these days. And how many people have had their social lives reduced to staring at screens and looking at video cameras?
Conclusion and Future Collaborations
01:02:39
Speaker
Well, look at us right now, you know,
01:02:41
Speaker
Exactly. We are, and we should have met in the mountains twice since this is the last time that we met. But yeah, so if you were trying to find Darryl, it's at Heathenstorm, which is H-Hate, but if you're English, it's probably H-Hate, E-A-T-Hate, E-N-S-T-O-R-M.
01:03:07
Speaker
Darryl, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. And thank you to KV, Camvalante, for allowing this Irish takeover. I feel like there might be more ahead. Because, you know, everyone needs a bit of a break. Everyone needs to stop. Everyone needs to take a day out and a holiday and all the rest. Darryl, I'll hopefully see you in June?
01:03:36
Speaker
juneish if if the mountain happening and they let me out of the country those definitely if not i'm certain we shall cross paths at some future juncture yes uh as please i like to talk to you this is something rather than nothing