CfOC: Elegy by ओम्

Artist: ओम्
Album: Elegy
Exhibit: Questionable Governance & Ghostable Questions -- The Myth & Mythology Of Nestor Senada

Elegy was born of a five year quest by the founding members of The MVM titled Create & Destroy.

In 1994 the Carnival de Carnitas Coven disbanded.

!N! & unA had begun studying with the wandering witch Nestor Senada two years earlier, and by December 1993 had given one year notice at their jobs. In December 1994, they were finally prepared to undertake a mystical quest for him, to find their own purest musicks. Nestor taught that in order for them to reach their full potential as witches they needed to be free of all external and internal expectations. The music needed to precede mind, emerging like sweat, and passing unnoticed and undesired by both audience and composer. Sounding needed to become autonomic.

The first step was to swear off archiving of any sort. All of their sounds would be crafted and expelled, and then forgotten as they moved on to the next iteration. Living would become musicking and musicking magick. This practice was christened Create & Destroy, as all the musick they made and all of the spells they ensorcelled were to be undocumented, cast to the wind, performed in private, summoned without even the demons who appeared knowing who had called them.

To begin, this Sentimental duo spent the first nine months of 1995 scouring the world for the ingredients they would need to combine, ferment, and then ingest in order to escape themselves effectively. This time on the road and at sea was harrowing, and broke the young covenless souls in both body and mind (the concoctions helped, of course.) They entered 1996 whispers of themselves, shades. The harrowing evisceration of the previous year leaving mere fleshells, which slowly sound began to fill, organically, naturally, unwelcomed, undesigned. The hollow meat voids drew in from without that which had not and could not exist before; their viscous emptiness an enchantment in itself which Musick could not but answer.

By December 1996 they found themselves on the Pacific Coast of the United States, in a small town, crafting new sonic sorceries to banish certain darknesses. These charms are, of course, lost to history as they still lived under their pledge to destroy everything they made the moment it was complete, and to continue creating and destroying until they felt they could finally express the world they heard in their heads.

By December 1997 they were in Los Angeles, reintroducing the magicks of hard liquor and ecstatic dance to their magical practice. Their spellcasting was improving and their aural control was better than it had ever been before. Through sonic practices of meditation and irritation which they performed together each day, Magick was flowing through them, and they could report to N. Senada a new sensation of being powerless, out of control, conduits for something richer and darker than they could ever be, or likely ever imagine.

December 1998 found the pair in Chicago. They had fully embraced a mystical, somewhat crusty, knowmadicism, emanating vibrations of sound at all times, unnoticed, unwanted, essentially unheard. Four years couch surfing will do that to a witch.

December 1999, and Elegy was manifested from the aether like so much protearwaxm. Hundreds of works and thousands of hours had gone before it, prepared the ground, so that when the failed pentagram was drawn and Elegy emerged whole, the witches, stunned, recognized that their years in the wilderness were complete, for here was an aphysical manifestation of what they heard inside their heads when they were not listening.

Elegy, they knew, could be kept, could be shared. Elegy, they knew, was their new craft, their new branch of soundcraft and witchscape: Magia Sonare

Magia Sonare, an alchemy of temporal elements harvested in the wild, plucked at the peak of perfection, and combined in ways that crafted Keys to Outer Doors. A Magick that in remixing the sounds of one’s life opened new pathways into that life, its future, its past, its different presents. Magia Sonare would go on to be the form of Magick that the witchlets would study, develop, and eventually master (if such a thing can be said to be possible) over the next two plus decades, exuding a grimoire of sorceryscapes the way a fractured mausoleum exudes the rotted stench of generations failed.

Elegy, they knew, was but a beginning, startled, fresh, naive, unworldly. And the obscurity that had called it down into them was not something to be taken for granted. And so, in consultation with Senada, they agreed to limit its release into the wild, to embrace their obscurity and remain identityless, to be adrift outside the tides of conscious awareness for all time.

Elegy itself is a horspiel, a form of radio play alive and thriving in Germany still today. Horspiel tells a story in sound and word. Ever since this blossom work, we at the MVM have leant away from language, often describing our horspiel as abspiel, instead. Words or no, abspiel are crafted tales. But what tale, whose tale is left to the imagination of the viewer.

Elegy is not the first abspiel the MVM ever crafted. But it is the first saved and shared. It was released in an edition of 10, in glass CD cases with leather inserts.
3 copies of the CD went into the 3 CfOC box sets created in 02000. Two of those were sold to friends we are no longer in contact with. One box set was given away to a friend we still adore. We sort of hope he still has it. We sort of hope he hasn't lugged around a glass box containing 12 CDs and a DVD all packaged in glass and leather for twenty years. The other 7 CDs? No idea. Honestly, we do not know to whom we gave those 7 copies. We do know that then as today, participation in commerce was anathema.

Elegy also launched the CfOC project, which culminated in the nightmare of the Black Massacre, calling into being and then shattering the original coven of which we were born and formed. The Sentimental Witches, crippled and deformed, crawled from the wreckage of the Black Massacre, a trinity enfused, enfleshed. A new madness wicking through our flesh, a mewling wyrd enwrapped, weeping skin trapped our aural auras three into the wetness of the Now you experience yourselves. The meat casement tomb forever realized, beginning and end.

Elegy embodies and predicts this predicament, launching our second musicking era while also singing out the first notes of our impending doom.

But more of that tale in the coming CfOC releases.

The digital gift shop for the bricks and mortar institution that, given its size, should be much easier to locate simultaneously in both time and space

Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble
oRSo
edme.threadless.com