P. Emerson Williams
Demimonde Mesila Thraam
Choronzon
Influences
Experiment Haywire, James Joyce, Current 93, Coil, Killing Joke, Voivod, Celtic Frost, Christan Death, Sleep Chamber, Throbbing Gristle
Sounds Like
Who are you, what do you want to know, and why?
Maybe you wonder what in the 31 varieties of Baskin-Robbins Hell "Xeno" is, or if you are really brave, are curious about what it sounds like...or if it has any potential side-effects, what the contraindications are, what not to take at the same time you're ingesting it...what it could do to your brain, body, and your potential to produce viable offspring--if you're crazy enough to want to raise KIDS, instead of raising energy vortices, demons, consciousness, etc. in the first place. ( We're not. We'll stick to raising Hell and switching it with Heaven and seeing if anyone can tell them apart.)
One gets the feeling this isn't a "band" with members who are in it for the money, the fame or the teenage groupies, so what the hell is it for? What does it do, besides make what could be the world's only music that can actually transmit insanity from creator to listener? (No, that's not just a silly quip. This actually has been known to happen.)
What's the deal with this demon - I'm sorry! Uh, "xenodimensional entity" - in whose honour it has been named? WHERE and WHEN did this all begin? What is the weird coinky-dink synchro-mesh behind it that made its formation different from that of probably ANY other band or music project you've ever heard of before?
WHAT has the Choronzon project been up to, and down from, lately?
That link takes you straight to our "Escapes" page so you can actually hear for yourself. But you might also want to look beneath all this yadda to the "Manifestations" column below.
That is where you'll find up-to-the-minute - oh, let's be real, up-to-the MONTH - news to answer those all-around "what are the project's members doing, both as Choronzon and as individuals?" questions.
~ Choronzon ~
P. Emerson Williams, D. Monde Thraam,
and Choronzon Itself
NEW WORLD CHAOS
Produced in 2005, this double album was the first collaboration of the two Choronzons as one. The entire project involved several very concentrated and protracted ritual effectuations, some of a somewhat meta-political nature, and others far more esoteric and internally-focused. Collaboration was all done via the medium of Internet and the invisible 333 Current. The two-disc work was completed hours before Hurricane Katrina went aground...making it the second Choronzon album to be followed by a major natural disaster within hours of completion.
Until CDs are available, the entire double album, including the half directed by P. Emerson Williams, Complicity Simplexity and that directed by Thraam, New World Chaos, can be downloaded in its entirety on this page or wander through the galleries that start thiswaywards; each track on both sections has accompanying text (some terse aphorisms, some verse, some prose, and Thraam's digital hallucinography.
Choronzon [ East ]
P. Emerson Williams
MAGOG AGOG
Where it all began for the "eastern" Choronzon. The most black metal-centric of the Choronzon works, it goes beyond the limits of the genre, and doesn't settle for the cliches. Fast, hard, raw sound carries the tracks to their target-zones; even appeals to individuals thoroughly bored with "metal" of any stripe.
ERA VULGARIS
The classic early Black Metal/Industrial album: driving, frenzied, and corrosively toxic to the hypocrisies of the "modern world" which have been so corrosively toxic to us all.
PSYCHOSIS EX MACHINA
The Choronzonic influence takes over...the black-metal sound fights back hard, but here and there, begins to give way to something else entirely, finally dying lovingly in the arms of a thing darker than itself; something even more out-of-control, more blissfully and blasphemously spastic and spasmodic. The sound gathers itself through its own vortex and comes out of it in steady, ritualised, untapped power. Underlaid and overlaid with the seeds of cryptovox - the voice of our Entity, or maybe your ownEntity...delivering messages for you that only you can decipher. Noisy, disturbing, not for squeamish or terminally "default-ness"-addicted. (Psychosis Ex Machina is reported by the Namesake Entity to be one of its special favourites among these treasured instantiations that are these inspired manifestations of this cthonic presence - heading straight for your "comfortable" reality zone.)
PANIC PANDEMIC
With Panic Pandemic, the process begun in the prior album continues and complexifies. The skeleton of the creature Psychosis Ex Machina devoured and subsumed is now transmogrified into an armature of bones on which is hung a mage-fetish, an effigy-object of sacrifice: standing for what? Western Civilisation? Your inner soul? The "Revolution"? All of the above? All of the below? The reality-twister that is the artist/mage in cahoots with cohort Choronzon, madly and yet with infinite care decorates these remains with the detritus of cultural effluvia turned inside out, into caricatures and mockeries, ornaments of fear, disdain, madness and love, carrying memory-imprints of notions, persons, lives, and what happens when such are turned against themselves and drained of purity of essence. Some of these ornaments have mirrors at their centres in which you'll see a familiar face. Stare too long into them, and you may scare yourself blind...but if you dare not look, you might just be, already.
This album release isn't merely a bunch of "songs" but an elabourate interplay of word, sound and image, heralding the direction of Choronzon's future, reaching out far beyond the limits imposed upon a "rock band".
Panic Pandemic is two CDs - a double-album of moving music and noise, resisting all genre-labels, while engulfing and digesting same into itself. - The audio comes bundled with a full-colour print book by P. Emerson Williams, an accomplished artist as well as noisician, which features his artworks in both oil and digital formats, with the sort of paper quality and printing they deserve. Though it's the size of a "coffee-table" book, it's not just a bunch of pretty pictures. Textuality runs through and around the images: a twisting, interleaved alternation of monologue and moodscape that just might scare the living shit out of you. And you thought you didn't scare easily? There's a first time for everything... A rare experience, not to be missed.
DAMNATUS
Film made in Germany, based on the Warhammer 4000 milieu. with characters and situations from the game. Material from Psychosis Ex Machina was chosen for the soundtrack.
Choronzon [ West ]
Demitria Monde Thraam
ZERO DIVIDED BY INFINITY
The Choronzon from the San Francisco Bay Area was incepted in 1989, three years after D.M. Thraam first encountered the Namesake Entity while engaging in more-or-less traditional "ritual magick" with a past lover who, being taught to avoid anything that seemed redolent of the Daemon of the Abyss, rather abreacted when she mentioned seeing "a gateway or door made of three triangles a-spinning, with an engagingly inviting Presence behind it". Against this Thelemic friend's advice, she took up the invitation. The rest was - and is, and shall be - history.
Zero Divided By Infinity, themed around the impossible tesseract geometry of the higher dimensions beyond those known by human minds, and fuelled by the love, wild power and inscrutable ways of this ineffable being whom Thraam took a shine to - and a year and a half to make an album as a paean to.
It was MIDI-sequenced on a very early version of Performer on a Mac IIci, hooked up to a Mirage sampler and an effects-box that could wring a slim fraction of the wonders of today's VST philtres upon sound. Also used was "Hell's Picnic Table" (a metal table, sans umbrella or legs, painted with the Choronzonic triptrigram and stood on its side, with contact-microphone taped to it, making fingertaps into thunder. One track enlisted the aid of bass guitar from Jan O. Sanguine of Katharsis - the most hard-edged, passionate "old-school" of San Francisco industrial bands in the late eighties and the only one known to involve a female frontwoman. (Katharsis' red-and-black and Choronzon's characteristic yellow-and-black were "the colours" of sheet-metal-bashing, amp-blowing industrial in those days.) With accompanying text, Xerox graphics...and one hell of a story about what happened the day the album (and its accompanying hoodoo) were finished. All tracks are downloadable and the textual inserts scanned for display. Though first ill-fated, Zero Divided By Infinity is proof that a thing once thought gone forever sometimes won't be.
If you came here looking for the definitive, canonical collection of Just About Everything pertaining to the entity Choronzon whose Number is 333, you are Exactly where you Belong. Salutations, Seeker!
Demitria Monde Thraam, acting as Annunciator to and for Choronzon, has gathered this material from all over the vast reaches of net-space: excavated it from hidden esoteric zones, dug it out from the depths of the World Wide Abyss, so that it may be preserved and presented here in one locale, to Enlighten and Endarken all comers.
Writings and art will run all sorts of gamuts: from good to awful, from interesting to dry, from relatively sane to stone-crow wack. It will entertain in one place, inform in another, and here and there, may cause a laugh or three to escape you: inbetween a groan or two.Choronzon values laughter and irony very highly; you may not always get the jokes, or get them immediately, though. Even Thraam, arguably as intimately close to this being as anyone could possibly get--Choronzon has been her animus and incubus, and companion in current-rides through the Aethyr, and loving Guide to the Xenodimensions for (on and off) nearly twenty-two years, now - even SHE doesn't always get them. Or gets them in a totally different way than intended; after which she usually proceeds to attempt to vex Choronzon right back. (And sometimes, even successfully manages.)
What lies within? If it is about Choronzon, you SHOULD find it here--or will, at some point. Miscellaneous Incomprehensible Psycholytic Fallout. All Manner of Mischief, Melee and Mirth pertaining to "That Mighty Devil". Anything at all that spills out of the centre of Choronzon--or even from the the back end. Textuality, Hallucinography, Perverse Verses. Various, Sundry and Sundered Notions of Reality, Unreality, Surreality et. al. cetera. The resonants of Choronzon are everywhere now, showing up in unexpected zones. Maybe your next door neighbour is one...
- Women Take Back The Noise has been released after years of work. You won't want to miss this. If you've been wondering where all the female noise artists have been hiding, the answer is, why they aren't hiding, they're here, and proud and loud as much as they are pretty and gritty. This three-disc compilation - with discs for soundscapes-and-ambient-noise, for weird-and-dramatic noise, and for guttural-thrashing-spazz noise, are all included. Choronzon's "Current" fell upon the second, naturally. It some pretty terrific company on this collection, including Cosey Fanni Tutti. And you can't beat the packaging on this thing. Have a look and a bite from a "noise cookie". (They're actually more like flowers, but not as quiet.)
- Work on Effect Affect continues apace, though the pace is slow, it's because it's worth doing correctly. It could almost be described as the inversion of New World Chaos. (No, I do NOT mean "Old World Order".) What comes from me and Our Lord of Hallucinations with this particular album is centered on that which goes inwards as opposed to outwards. There's just as much that needs correcting inside as out, just as much entropy to extirpate, which is what CHORONZON's bailiwick has now apparently become, as he continues his (or her, or most properly, its) foray through the solid-state universe, released at last from the confines of ZAX. For a demon who is loved can become a bigger thing--graduating, it would seem, to a different and more powerful level of existence.
For those of you who have just recently joined the chaotic proceedings, I'm posting a new review of an older release. The follks at Avantgarde-Metal.com are running a series of articles on Electro Metal and writer Olivier Côté has written a wonderful review of the Psychosis Ex Machina album posted below. In the player above, you can stream the entire album. The last.fm users among you will be able to add most of the Veil of Thorns and Choronzon albums to your playlists as of now.
Coming up soon is an interview with me given to M. Côté for the site. I'll keep you posted.
In 1998, Samoth's Nocturnal Art Records released something of a milestone record that went by without being noticed at all in the underground circles. Choronzon's Magog Agog, a mostly industrial-fed post-black-thrash-heavy psychedelic and nightmarish beast, however, probably surprised the few groups of people that actually had the chance to hear its bizarre malice, to the point where they did like me and followed with great care each of its subsequent musical steps. Well, six years later, P. Emerson Williams launched what I would call one of the most psycho-advanced and noise-demented metal album of the 21st century. I really had to write about this album in relation to our great electro metal celebration, because if you ask me, this is the real thing!
First of all, Choronzon isn't simply adding a couple of electronica elements now and then on top of a galloping rock metal band, nor does he recharge in expensive studios his compositions with a typically over-produced industrial, polished and clinical sound, as most actual so-called electro metal bands are doing. On Psychosis Ex Machina, Mr. Williams has found an ensemble sonore which doesn't allow you anymore to distinguish the noisy, EVP-fuelled and feedback noise overall dirt from the sometimes out-there majestic, sometimes spooky black angular guitar riffs. Despite all these abstract definitions that I'm making up here, Choronzon kicks major ass and is always on the edge of catchiness, but in an extraterrestrial fashion I should add.
That's why I love how Mr. Williams hasn't sacrified any of the aural rawness aesthetics which are usually linked with old-school metal. His music, as psychedelic and coloured as it is, has real bite, which means that it's got an authentic aggressive attitude and a futuro-retro punk-head archaism. I would say that it is right out of these subtle tensions that his musical boldness is expressing itself with a rarely witnessed power. It can bring out the caveman inside you as much as it can open up your mind to unknown forms of music. One has to mention the multi-layered shamanic vocal techniques that at every turn can easily overwhelm your attention spots. The man is screaming, whispering, singing, crooning, deep-throating, gagging, scratching, breathing, feedbacking, morphing, reciting - often all at the same time! Pretty engulfing, to say the least.
Among the album, there are three shorter segments of pure dark ambient music, where it is made clear that this man has been working hard with his alien machines before getting to a musical language as fluent as this one is. I won't settle down for a track-by-track description, since Psychosis Ex Machina is Mr. Williams clearly most diverse and genre-bending effort to me. For example, listening to The Enchanting Dead, with its ear-candy mystical far west cowboy metal groove, is quite a surreal experience I must confess, and it always makes me feel like I'm surrounded by miles and miles of desertic sand dunes, smoking mirages and dead-hot snakes. Asymmetrical Red Chamber, however, sounds like it has been generated by a furious, out of control machine factory whose irresistible penchant for dirge rythms and horror metallic sensory assaults will knock you down. And yet, when you get to Ornamental Crypto-Anarchy, the fifteen minutes vastly epic finale, you are first welcomed, at least for a few minutes, with some of the most felt-through melodic black metal guitar lines you'll ever have the pleasure to hear, only to lay down in the middle part of the song and let yourself be submerged by a much-needed evanescent lull, out of which, one by one, millions of massive ambient drone waves slowly build up to a godspeed climax of sheer, enthralling and grandiloquent post-metal beauty.
So if you haven't already, go and get yourself a copy of this high-quality album, turn up the volume and test the limits of metal. I mean, I've been for quite a long time a fan of electronic music of all kinds, but I've never ever heard something like that. Also, both the beautiful and very artistic cover and inside layout have been completely painted and organised by P. Emerson Williams himself, only raising Psychosis Ex Machina to a well-deserved classic status. Will you ever dare enter his world? It's all up to you by now.
Olivier Côté
..>
TRACKLIST:
01 - Dies-Ease (Wrath) 02 - The Enchanting Dead 03 - Crypt-Analysis 04 - Surge Of Blood 05 - Crossing I - The 30th Aethyr 06 - Asymmetrical Red Chamber 07 - Crossing II - The 29th Aethyr 08 - Justified 09 - Crossing III - The 28th Aethyr 10 - Ornamental Crypto-Anarchy
..>
..>
Some of you may remember High Weirdness By Mail, a book by Rev. Ivan Stang and others in the Church of the Subgenious that catalogued kooks, visionaries and rogue weirdos of every stripe. It seems that there's a web based High Weirdness Project that covers much of the same ground. Looking around, I found the following entry for Choronzon:
http://www.choronzon.org
Choronzon aren't a band. They don't jam together and play gigs. Choronzon used to be two projects, one in California, with a druggish, zany rivethead chick Demitria Monde Thraam at the helm. The other was in Florida, the guts-of-black-metal-after-it-eats-itself, incepted by P. Emerson Williams. Both these individuals used the same esoteric, occult-based name "Choronzon".Both started their projects in the late 1980s. When Thraam discovered Williams' site her jaw hit the floor. If they were jerks, there would have been wrangling and lawsuits and crap. But after a year of swapping email and Thraam upgrading her computer and music software know-how, the two did the only thing to do in a situation like this: merge their projects. After a little bit longer, they took it to the next step: collaboration. Perhaps it was Choronzon persuading them…for he is the project's THIRD MEMBER.
Choronzon is a demon - according to traditional occult wonks, the "first and deadliest of all the powers of evil". Less traditional "chaos mages" think of him as a jester. He supposedly guarded an "abyss" between this earthly plane and the higher stuff above the ego, and when clowns like Aleister Crowley attempted to cross over it, he'd harangue them and give them crap. Like anyone would, if disturbed in their own domain and yelled at to provide them with some magick words to ZIP them to the next level. (Enochian Magick thus seems to have been the impetus for the plots for nearly every video game in existence today.)
Ms. Thraam, who goes by her middle name, Monde, is rather fond of this entity, so fond she has essentially declared herself and it are symbiotes, that she has - with her love of the demon, brought him up (or perhaps down) from the Abyss, and into a state half-in and half-out of 3D "reality". Not stopping there, she instigated apotheosis and the demon is now officially the god he once was, "before he broke the laws of physics and ended up with the lame job guarding the Works". The pages on the project's site are loaded with screeds about Transversion Agents and Meta-Gods, in a metaphysical layout based on Chaos and Order, leaving out Good and Evil altogether. Essentially she's created what could be the first truly new mythopoeia that we've seen in Cnaos only knows how long…If anyone has taken the directions at the end of the SubGenius Book decreeing one ought to go "start their own damn religion" it could be this completely whacked woman…who has taken Choronzon as a se! cond mate, with her real-world lover's full approval and assent, and to read of her sexual experiences with "the Lord of Hallucinations" is to see an adult who never grew out of having an imaginary friend, and also see that maybe humans really do suck in bed in comparison.
The music is an entirely new genre: Xeno, meaning from somewhere else entirely, and it certainly fits. Choronzon is said to actually create it alongside the two three-dimensional members, and when hearing it, one might not have that hard time believing it. The sound is a sort of "industrial psychedelia" - or would that be "psychedelic industrial"? - evolving constantly, and containing weird, disembodied, barely imperceptible voices male and female weaving in and out of the noise, voices that seem to say different things upon subsequent listenings. It's the digital equivalent of "electronic voice phenomenon", or EVP - that "voices of the dead" trip that was a bit of a fad with the seance- oriented crowd in the early 20th century; Thraam says we can either think of it as some kind of techno-glitch or as the Voice of Choronzon, it matters not. It's pretty obvious what she thinks.
The other strange thing about this act is the natural disasters. Thraam's initial project - referred to on the site as "Choronzon West" finished its first album, Zero Divided by Infinity - 45 minutes before the Loma Prieta earthquake which shook her home city of San Francisco to the tune of 7.0 on the Richter Scale. Her occultist friends started giving her wide berth around then, but it was still regarded as "a weird coincidence." In 2005, the combined Choronzons first opus, a double album called New World Chaos, was completed on the last day of August, 2005 - the day Katrina went aground- not only that, but the area struck by the hurricane was positioned right between Choronzons East and West. The two creators must have felt something strange about this, since they devoted several months' worth of sales to the Katrina relief funds. New World Chaos is a documentation of several "effectuations" or rituals done as psionic war against the Con (or "Overcontrol and included a strike on Bohemian Grove in July ("Weaving Spiders and a very weird melding-together of unlikely bedfellows - Tanya Hearst and Karl Rove ("Buttonpushers".) The other half of the album ("Complicity Simplexity) is less meta-political, more metasexual, and seems to revolve around experiences with xenodimensional incubi and succubi (like, perhaps, the namesake, maybe?) "Undergoing Overcoming" stands out here…the pounding of a tympani and Williams' layers of growly cryptic vocals urge on the shivers.
Who knows what these crazies will do next? Or what disaster will subsequently strike once they do it? With all the truly uninteresting music out there, with seemingly no reason to exist, if you seek the truly weird, not the "weird-just- to-get-attention" you will want to look here.
There are reviews, and then there are analyses that show that someone has spent time pondering ones work. This is most gratifying.
Related to that, I've added New World Chaos to last.fm, so all you last.fm users can now stream the whole thing from there. I hope you do.
Here's the first part, New World Chaos, and next I'll post
The second half of New World Chaos. I'm leaving the
thoughts behind this part to be expressed by two simple definitions and those who are interested can explore further:
COMPLICITY:
1. Complicity is being in partnership; having an accomplice and sharing responsibility.
2. Complexity theorists Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart use complicity to mean the ‘emergence’ of large-scale simplicity from the convergence of different subsystems of rules, which ‘enlarges the space of the possible’. Examples include evolution, consciousness, economics. Complicity is also referred to as ‘super emergence’ (‘regular emergence’ is expressed in ‘simplexity’). (See SIMPLICITY, SIMPLEXITY, COMPLEXITY, EMERGENT PROPERTIES) (MP) - bioscience-bioethics.org
"The simplexity of a problem is the maximum inefficiency among the reluctant algorithms that solve P . An algorithm is said to be pessimal for a problem P if the best-cast inefficiency of A is asymptotically equal to the simplexity of P" - Broder, Andrei and Jorge Stolfi. "Pessimal Algorithms and Simplexity Analysis."
One of the key contributions of Cohen and Stewart is the way they relate (through the idea of complicity) the individual to the pooled sum of human knowledge. From the mathematics of complexity and game theory they use the idea of phase space and talk about extelligence space. There is a total phase space (extelligence space) for the human race, which consists of everything that could be known and represented. Within this there is a smaller (but still enormous and rapidly expanding) set of what is actually known. What they propose is the idea that each individual can only access the parts of the total extelligence space with which their intelligence is complicit.
In other words, there has to be (at some level) an appreciation of what is out there and what it means. Much of this ‘appreciation’ falls into the category of tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1967) and social and cultural learning (Lave and Wenger 1991). As an example, a dictionary may contain definitions of many thousands of words. But only those definitions that can be understood by the reader, i.e. they can interpret the verbal symbols and relate them to concepts that her/his mind can work with, will be accessible. - Wikipedia entry on Extelligence
SMK-11 LE MODERNISTE - A PART OF ME CD. 9 tracks, Industrial Rhythmic Noise from Belgium. July release date! http://www.myspace.com/lemoderniste
SMK-12 SYNCHRO MODE - RUESSELKAEFER CD. 13 tracks, Industrial Powernoise/Breakcore from Argentina. July release date! http://www.myspace.com/synchromode
SMK-13 MONOLITH OF DOOM - DEVASTATION PANORAMA CD. Unknown # of tracks, Industrial Dark Ambient/Powernoise from Germany. August release date! http://www.myspace.com/monolithofdoom
I'm happy to announce that my new album "Songs From The Films Of David Lynch" is out now.
"Truly unsettling and perplexingly brilliant... testament to both the quality of Lynch’s soundtracks and Truax’s talents" - The Skinny
"Truax is paying homage to a kindred spirit with this album. It's the best kind of tribute – affectionate and respectful, but with its own quirks and imaginative leaps and its own distinct identity." -The Scotsman
We are proud to anounce that we will release 001101100 Ghashtly Interface with the Astral Dominion Ep As a pro printed cover art cdr, limited to 101 hand numbered copy on 07 15 2009. 28 minutes of pure industrial soundscape.
You can pre-order your copy now for 9$us North America or 7Euro rest of the world www.alchemicsoundmuseum.com
Like the elation of a Virus as it infects that first cell, the new CD from New York's Legendary Metal Industrial Terrorists 'BILE' has now been released into the public consciousness.
"HATE RADIO"
Get the CD with extra stuff directly from BILE.
Contact: RHBEARBILE@AOL.COM for details.
The entire album is available for listening and download at:
and included a strike on Bohemian Grove in July ("Weaving Spiders
Online Now!
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