This was another step in the creation process for Cognitive Dissonance, taking the Cognitive Dissonance Prolix posts and turning it into a series of strange dialogues. In the process I managed to take the thousands of words I'd written out and begin restructuring as verses and shorter bits.
My fine colleagues at Alterati.com let me hijack the show and with the help of James Curcio and Anna Young, what you can hear here was dramatized:
This unique episode takes you through a number of open-ended tales, told by the voices of a schizophrenic internal monologue. It can be taken as the voices in the mind of a sleeper, on the brink of sleep, or a mental patient, strapped into a bed in a moldy room in an asylum. Maybe these events happened, or have yet to happen. That’s for you to decide.
In addition to your loving host, this show features the voice acting talents of P. Emerson Williams and Anna Young, and the music includes much atmospheric material from Veil of Thorns and Ariana van Gelder.
Strap yourself in, put on the headphones, and enjoy the show.
Here are the first embryonic early tracks interspersed with short P. Emersonite bursts for you, my darlings. Vocalists don't usually like to have anyone hear anything but the most spot on, confident performances, but I'm going for a feeling and a story, and these are my sketches.
The mixes are my usual thick and resonating things, as they were before I sent them off to the masterful mastering of Ari. Contents need to be decanted as they may throw off a sediment....
The image is the gateway to the file, and the player below starts the stream.
Further dissection of the sounds. I had some radio signals coming through the guitar as I laid down the tracks, and I've made liberal use of them here. Unlike the album itself, I layered, layered the layers and added extra layers to boot.
I think my machines feaked out and became possessed in the process.
We will be bringing you works in progress from the next Veil of Thorns album "Salon Apocalypse" and mangled wrecks thereof soon. We can't say just yet if we'll run the full cycle of revisiting the Cognitive Dossonance sessions or if they may intersperse with the Apocalypse podcasts and sketches.
Now:
A special one for this dark and cool evening. Click the picture for to download.
I made this outta the bass tracks from the album. Mostly you're hearing one track of bass with no layers but the real-time FX, though there are a couple points where the cello creeps in.
A few inexplicable voices emerged that weren't recorded by me. If it fits as a soundtrack for your evening, I want to hear the story.
Click to Play The figure with the ugly shirt and big ears (you do love the mirrorkaleidoscopics) is Joe Six Pack and also every wino that nips at my heels and slobbers at me. I cannot believe how ugly he is. He is the bastard son of Wal-Mart and Choice Point. Anti-Choronzon, face of the Duh Beast. Death by marriage. Marriage by death. The kitchen floor and the ovens, oven cleaner fumes, clean as a whistle, she lies there under the faucet.
The serpent is escaping or about to, but the doors close too fast and it slides into itself...the end, the end, end, end, the one with no beginning or middle.
Michelle Remembers chronicles Pazder's therapy in the late 1970s with his long-time patient Michelle Smith. Smith allegedly recovered memories of Satanic ritual abuse that occurred when she was a child in the 1950s at the hands of her mother (Virginia Proby) and others in Victoria, British Columbia. Among other things, Smith recovered memories of being placed with a corpse in a car that was then deliberately crashed near the Malahat highway, being kept locked in a cage with snakes without sleep or sustenance for weeks, being forced to ingest poison and other noxious substances, and taking part in bizarre ceremonies in a round room and at the Ross Bay Cemetery (e.g.: being placed in an open grave and having dead cats thrown on her). The book reaches its climax with the details of how in the fall of 1955, Satan himself appeared at an 81-day non-stop ceremony (allegedly involving hundreds of participants) attempting to claim Smith as his own, only to be opposed by Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the archangel Michael. The book concludes with Smith, having been saved by the Virgin Mary and Jesus, awakening to find she had no memory of the abuse that had occurred and to find her parents telling her that she was recovering from the measles.
Pazder's therapy and treatment for Smith's alleged experiences included hypnotism, exorcism, and conversion to Catholicism. During this time (the late 1970s), Smith was named as the co-respondent (the "other woman") in Pazder's divorce. Pazder and Smith later married (she had been married to Doug Smith during the therapy).
Pazder died suddenly and unexpectedly in his home in March of 2004 of a heart attack. Smith still lives in Victoria. Michelle Remembers is out-of-print as of 2006.
In his last years, Williams dwelt in Damask silk, where the Gothronomicon (O Az-If) was written. In art, in the Dictionnaire Infernal, P. Emerson Williams is depicted as a nude man with dragon-like wings, hands and feet, a second pair of feathered wings after the main, wearing a crown, holding a serpent in one hand, and riding a wolf or dog.
The "good" P. Emerson in recent use is largely
a literary device (e.g., Maxwell's P. Emerson),
though references to good P. Emersons can be found in Hesiod and Shakespeare.[1] In common language, to "P. Emersonize" a person means to characterize or portray them as evil, or as the source of evil.
