What does the term occult mean to you? What does the concept of magic mean to you?

How do these definitions manifest themselves in your life? How have your own de finitions of these words evolved over time? Despite the ways in which you might gauge your own understanding and interaction, what still remains misunderstood, confounding or frustrating to you with regard to magick? Well, you could define occult in a lot of different ways, and people do. The ter m occult stems from the word occluded, so in a pinch it can be summed up as the study of things that are hidden, and when you think about it, for any human, tha t s the majority of the universe. People are thinking around you all the time and you can t pick up on any of these thoughts, but you d be hard pressed to get anyone to argue that it s not happening. Astronomers tell us that something like 98% of t he universe is invisible to us and is comprised of what they refer to as dark ma tter and dark energy. I find the methodology on that fairly sketchy, but it s fasc inating none the less. At the heart of it though, I d say a prototypical magickal practice would involve two basic components. One, making contact with extra-dimensional forms of intell igence, which I ve found I can do through things like sex magick and astral projec tion. A lot of occultists just completely gloss over that because they don t want to sound like they re nuts, but that s the most important aspect. Crowley was channe ling entire books. Using sigil magick techniques largely credited to Austin Osma n Spare, I can put myself in light sex and weed trance and have what classic occ ultists would refer to as a conversation with my holy guardian. It s right there in the literature and it was happening for quite a while before my rational mind wo uld accept it. So yeah, in a way that s how my practice has evolved over the years . I ve gone from being in complete disbelief to being more and more comfortable wi th the constant high strangeness. I listen more now. Whatever the fuck I m communi cating with, beings from the Sirius star system, grey aliens or what have you, t hey know things about the world I exist in that I decidedly don t. They ve demonstra ted this to me over and over and over and over again. They ve told me they exist ou tside of time, and that they re me somehow. Certainly a level of precognition going on. I have a lot of psychic dreams. Just saying things like that makes you sound like you re on the complete lunatic f ringe to most of humanity, but it s something I taught myself how to do by reading books and was recommended to me by other people, so you know, I m not sure how th at can honestly be considered crazy by any conventional definition. There was a period when I first started doing this where these, what I call hypnagogic light entities, were installing updates in my brain when I woke up in the middle of t he night. Information moving faster than I could even come close to processing. This went on regularly in the hypnagogic state (between dreams and sleep) for ro ughly six months. Then one night these entities were proud of themselves, as if they d constructed something, a link. Telepathic communications software. I didn t h onestly get it, but soon thereafter I started chatting with them. It took me ano ther several years to truly believe that it was happening. The other primary component that would go into a basic magickal practice would b e casting spells, for lack of better terminology projecting sigils as one might call it. This involves trying to change the universe in accordance with your wil l. Basically it s the concept that you can influence outer reality with inner gest ures. Again, completely crazy things to think about from a Western perspective, but if you re looking at it from the point that we re all tied together inwardly and that matter is comprised of consciousness, it makes perfect sense. I ve done a lo t of this, and in all honesty, it s very difficult to judge the results in any kin d of scientific manner. Maybe in another ten years. I can say that your life bec omes an increasing amount of impossible synchronicities and that you begin to ex pect them. You start to realize that this whole thing s basically a sort of dream. Again, incredibly hard to accept for someone with a more materialist upbringing . I mean, I m a guy from Ohio who grew up listening to rock music, drinking beer,

and playing basketball. That d be the other thing I didn t choose magick, it chose m e. Long story that involves spirits awakening me from a sort of hypnotic trance and telling me to pursue magick. Sounds odd, but again, nothing uncommon at all. I m not the first to report this type of summoning and I won t be the last. Those two components however would be considered your low magick. Your high magi ck would be the pursuit of whatever it is you re passionate about in the world, or maybe just figuring out what that is in the first place. The low magick should be fueling the high magick. As for things that are frustrating, I d go with the church slandering the occult t o the point that everyone thinks it s Satan worship. There s a reason the term witch hunt exists. I look at a lot of metal bands and think you have noooooooooooo id ea what you re talking about, at all. Summoning your holy guardian angel. Not super dark or evil, but rather Jesus-y in all actuality. Sorry, metal dudes.

Where do you think your interest in and attraction to what we might broadly term as the esoteric stems from? Have you always felt more or less out-of-step with the world around you? Can you recall your earliest memory of having the thought that there is something more to our surroundings, power in the unseen? Psychedelic drugs. That s where it started. I have an abnormally strong reaction t o things like LSD and mushrooms. I see what I jokingly refer to as transdimension al demon lords everywhere. My entire micro-verse is bombarded with what I can bes t describe as rapidly mutating transcendent art. I turn into living, breathing a rt which moves and changes faster than I can possibly process, and there always seems to be an interaction or communication going on. Like I m staring into the fa ce of a higher intelligence and it s imparting information into me on a subconscio us and sometimes direct level. The best way I could communicate what this is lik e visually to someone is by showing them this painting by Luke Brown called Bapho met. I see shit like that. Everywhere. I ve also had the typical thousand eyed god withi n visions that you see in the works of people like Alex Grey, before I ever saw t hose paintings. I did mushrooms once when I was 18 and didn t have the ability to perceive the world in the same way ever again. There s just no accounting for that kind of thing. If you saw it for two minutes you d be contemplating radical ontol ogy as well. Very abnormal reaction, but then, you read about people doing DMT, which I ve never actually gotten ahold of, and it s like, well, a lot of people see similar anomalies on that. In a way smoking pot for me is like taking acid. When I do that and meditate, or ganj-i-tate as I like to call it, I see incredibly i ntense visuals and hear music that I can typically control to a certain degree, in my head. So yeah, psychedelic drugs randomly lead me into astral projection, as my mom ha d experimented with it in her youth and still had the tapes and books. I could t alk about that for hours as it s so fucking bizarre and flies completely under the radar. In a nutshell, you intentionally put yourself in a sleep paralysis state and attempt to separate your consciousness from your body.

Ten years later, I had this hypnotic awakening experience where I became a sorcer er or magickian or mystic or shaman or whatever you want to call it. Something in me s apped and I realized I had these abilities but was afraid of them and ultimately pretty much wanted them to go away so I could lead a normal life. This is where most of my misery was stemming from at that point. It s what people in the shaman ic world would refer to as submission to a higher order of knowing. It was instant aneous and seemingly tied to another astral encounter in my youth where I was pu lled from my body into what I can best refer to as a psychic sky temple by myria

d versions of me. What can you tell us about your own personal musical evolution? What was the fir st music to truly capture your attention in your adolescence? How have your feel ings about that music changed over the years? What were some of your earliest mu sical obsessions? How do you think your own sense of musical appreciation has pr ogressed over the years? I grew up in the 90 s in suburban Youngstown, Ohio, pre-internet, but my mom lived in Seattle so I spent my summers here. There was a bit of an awareness of the u nderground because of that, but not much. I was fortunate to grow up during a ti me where artier shit was being pushed by the mainstream more, so that helped. As I moved to cities like Columbus, Ohio, and later Seattle, in young adulthood I realized how vast the musical sphere truly is. I listen to so much music these d ays it s preposterous because I write music reviews and have people sending me shi t, and I m completely addicted to buying music online. I actually spend a lot of m oney on downloading music despite the fact that people give me music for free, a nd I browse the library and grab random stuff I ve maybe kind of heard about there as well. I have to constantly listen to new stuff. It s a compulsion. The first psychedelic music I got into was like Monster Magnet, Sonic Youth, Kyu ss, old Verve albums, Meat Beat Manifesto, and The Future Sound of London. The f irst time I ever ate acid (I d done mushrooms) my friend kept playing Dopes to Inf inity on repeat. I mention that because despite listening to so much shit over t he years I think you can fairly easily hear all of those influences in Black Sci ence. In a way I think what I was trying to do was take everything that I think sounds cool when I m high and cram it into one band. Stoner metal, shoegaze, noise rock, and weird electronic stuff. Truthfully, we were always just trying to be a 2012 version itely the band everyone in that project could agree on more Take a simple song, insert jam here, repeat. What we didn t re we jammed the more structured it got which isn t what we we just found ourselves doing intuitively. of Pink Floyd. Defin than anything else. realize is that the mo were planning but what

Oh, and I used to yell in an incredibly angry neo-spiritual rant metal band call ed The Nemesis Theory before I started Black Science. Completely different vibe as I didn t write any of the music in the project. Worth a listen though and you c an grab those albums for free at www.dmioccult.bandcamp.com. It s funny, the occup y movement came around and I was suddenly like, maybe we were onto something wit h that. At what point did your interest in the occult and your interest in music interse ct? How would you describe your initial attempts are bringing the two realms tog ether? Do you feel that music holds a special place in the hearts of those seeki ng magical power? What is it about music that makes you feel powerful? What is i t about magic that makes you feel powerful? Well, oddly, before I started actually directly dabbling in magick, I did in fac t attempt a rudimentary experiment which was partially inspired by an article I read about William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. I made an album comprised entir ely from samples of local metal bands and I honestly had no idea what the intent was. They were bands The Nemesis Theory had played with or liked. I guess I was trying to harness the psionic energy in the local metal scene or something. Odd idea, and one of the most brutal records I ve ever made, as it s you know, remixes of metal bands. Anywho, I called it Sorcery and the first night I played the fin al mix, during the first song, the volume on my stereo jumped to full, scaring t he living shit out of me. I went over and turned it down but like five minutes l ater it happened again. If you think I was startled the first time, this time I was perfectly terrified. It was so sudden and loud, and also, you know, shouldn t

have been happening. It was during this period that I started to conceptualize what I was doing as a musician more precisely. I d been making sampler driven psychedelic music for year s. I started when I was roughly 19. It s a project I eventually called Thanaton (a fter the Paul Laffoley painting), but I almost never play shows doing that stuff although I m thinking about maybe doing some in the near future. It s music I make primarily just to fuck with my own head. Eventually I realized that what I m doing is a summoning ritual of sorts. It s an offering to the aforementioned transdimen sional demon lords I m trying to draw them into my world. Works when you re high, to o, but mainly for when you re tripping. I actually did an experiment with this. I gave myself a low dose of psilocybin i ntentionally so I could kind of gauge whether or not it was the drugs or the mus ic that was spurring the visions. Sure enough, I wasn t getting any visionary stuf f but when I put the music on, for the album s duration I had my prototypical psyc hic invasion thing happen. A swirling pit of infinity even opened up on my floor on cue. Then when the album was done, the visions stopped and I went right back to normal low dose perma-grin territory. So yeah, that s the intention to what I do. It s a type of auditory spiritual techno logy designed to put the user into contact with whatever the fuck otherworldly f orces I m in contact with. It works on me and that s the point. Does it work on othe rs? I have no idea give it a whirl. Me suggesting this potentiality might be the most important part of the whole equation. Research into psychedelic drugs has been fairly impossible to get done although it s starting to happen again. Obvious ly things like hyper-maximalism, delay pedals, drone, reverb, echo, etc., sound cool when you re high or tripping, but you can t get research done to prove somethin g like that at this point. It s an obvious fact. Why do you think psych bands have been doing it for so long now? What I m trying to do is create a tear into anothe r reality via your subjective perception of time. Psychedelics might be referred to as a time decelerator to a certain extent. I m creating a wormhole distortion by which they can get in. As far as magick making me feel powerful, well, as much as I have psychic abilit ies that most other people don t at this point in human history, I m still honestly trying to figure out what to do with them. It s an ongoing process. Moreover, it r eally makes me feel like I know absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things . Very humbling. Becoming acceptant and comfortable with the idea that you don t k now dick and you never truly will as a human is the key. Ego destruction. You ve got to embrace the mystery. It s all pretty hilarious if you look at it right. How would you summarize the approach of Black Science over the years? Of which t hings that you accomplished as a band are you most proud? In which areas do you feel the band still had fertile soil to till? What was the most surprisingly gra tifying experience you had with Black Science? Well, what s funny is that when the band first started out, I kind of thought it d b e more about my songwriting, which you can hear on our first lo-fi album. We wer en t even honestly a band at that point, just some guys recording and we needed an other member at least. We realized pretty quickly that the band should probably be far more about my guitar playing rather than my songs. I think we could have done more, but it had run its course. My brother Adam (gui tar player/vocalist) is moving to Edmonton with his girlfriend and the drummer i s having a kid. Kind of both at the same time. At some point, I d say I ll probably have a new band that sounds kind of like Black Science and plays some of that ma terial. I might call it Black Science haven t honestly decided. As for a surprisingly gratifying experience, I wanted to play a show in Portland

last summer and I asked my friend Vivian from Redefine to help me book somethin g. It ended up being one of the coolest shows I ve ever played, or have ever been to for that matter. It had performance art dancers, psych bands and a general oc cult theme, based on her knowledge of my interest in mysticism. Midday Veil, Swa hili, Billions and Billions, and Golden Retriever played, so, you know, radtasti c. So yeah, Emily (from Midday Veil) and Vivian are going to be doing two of tho se a year now apparently, and the fact that I unintentionally inspired that kind of blows my mind. What are your thoughts of Forever ? What did nal, released piece of iginal intention? What o communicate with the ns ? on the final Black Science album, An Echo Through the Eyes you hope to accomplish with this album, and how does the fi art differ (either positively or negatively) from your or can you tell us about the song Anywhere ? What do you mean t words, Same vision/Same faces/Same programs/Same motivatio

I think it turned out phenomenal, but more than anything, I just feel a sense of progress. That s the fourth full-on studio album I ve made. I ve made tons of lower-f i electronic stuff, but that s fairly easy to record. So, the second Nemesis Theor y record was better than the first in my mind, and the first Black Science studi o album (Cosmodemonic & Beyond) was better than that by a long shot, and then Ec ho is better than that, so there s definitely a sense of progress there in my mind , which is important. Same deal with the art. I ve been getting better on the visu al end as well. I did all three Black Science layouts and again, definitely a se nse of progress. The song Anywhere is actually the only song in that band that was initially writte n by another member, my brother Adam. He demoed the chord progression, concept a nd everything. Of course, I completely re-wrote the lyrics and added a bunch of shit to the arrangement, but it was his baby. It s actually about the corporate ta keover of America and how a lot of times, if you go anywhere outside the city, t he towns look fucking identical due to exact same chain stores, strip malls and what not. That was Adam s idea, but of course I added a mind control aspect to the whole thi ng and joke that it s about the Illuminati the desire for hollow materialistic pur suits and militarism implanted into the minds of America through their televisio ns. It s pretty tongue in cheek as well. I had a hard time singing the line: I can t take all the psychic mind rape with a straight face. Despite the eye-rolling that may occur, what can you tell us about your interest in comic books? Which comic book had had the most enduring influence on your li fe, what is that influence and why do you believe it has made a lasting impact o n your life? What do you think is the most harmful preconceived notion that noninitiates carry regarding comic books? Well, that s particularly pertinent because the most well know occultists of our t ime, and in my mind the two most interesting spiritual philosophers, are Grant M orrison and Alan Moore, who are both comic book writers by trade, not spiritual philosophers. Definitely something odd about that, but also not surprising, beca use in the comic universe things like alternate dimensions and psychic powers ar e a part of the whole cosmology. So, I imagine growing up geeking out on that st uff probably hypnotizes you slightly to be more acceptant of the possibilities. An interview in Arthur magazine with Grant Morrison is what got my interest peak ed and starting to read about the occult in the first place. Kind of embarrassin g in retrospect but at the time I had no idea who he was. Two years later I was a practicing occultist after the whole hypnotic awakening thing. Even more stran ge, it was right around that period where I realized that the library stocks ton s of graphic novels, so I got waaaay into that again for a while, catching up on

a bunch of stuff I d missed. I d turned my back on comics as a young adult mainly b ecause they re expensive, but for free at the library, why not? As far as biggest influences, that d definitely be The Invisibles by the aforement ioned Mr. Morrison. That work was intended as what he referred to as a hyper-sig il designed to influence and raise the consciousness of the reader and it s fictio nal but largely based on his experiences with the occult. Kind of what I was tal king about earlier with the music, similar concept, art as spiritual technology. I have a freakishly good memory, so I rarely re-read things, but I ve read that t wice and will probably read again, because there s so much going on. So many layer s. As a matter of fact, Black Science is named after a storyline in that, so we wer e trying to directly capitalize on the energy of the sigil that Grant ignited (w ell, truthfully, Adam just liked that name better than the others I d written down but we ran with it). I d say about a month after I decided I d name the final track on the album Our Sentence is Up which is the final declaration in The Invisibles we learned my brother was moving and the drummer, Gael, was having a kid. So is the nature of magick. Even more eerie is that it plays on the whole 2012 thing, which I ll talk about he re because I was told to mention it while in a trance state last night, which is hilarious because I don t honestly understand what I m talking about here much at a ll. Basically, what my cosmic over-soul wants me to think is that we re about to e nter a new era in human history, which will be the third world Aeon of Horus, th e conquering child, as Crowley called it, but that s just one way of framing thing s. So, if you re familiar with all the ancient architecture anomalies, it seems ap parent that there was another civilization which predated ours, based on feminin e energy and shamanism. And now there s this Aeon based on materialism and misogyn y, which is now nearing its end. 2012 specifically has never been mentioned, so I have no idea how long this process will take, but we re destined to evolve into a hybrid of the two. I ve been told flat out that consumerism is going to fail com pletely, which we re already seeing. With that being said, I think the biggest misconception a lot of people have inv olving comics would be that because a lot are about super heroes, they re not seri ous art and just for kids. What they re missing is that since a lot of the super h ero titles pay, they attract some incredibly talented writers. Oh, Christ, and have long been a bastion for psychedelic concepts, not to mention on the forefro nt of censorship battles back in the day. Despite the eye-rolling that may occur, what can you tell us about your interest in psychedelic substances substances like drugs ? Which psychedelic substance had had the most enduring influence on your life, what is that influence and why do you believe it has made a lasting impact on your life? What do you think is the most harmful preconceived notion that non-initiates carry regarding psychedelic substances? I certainly touched on that earlier, but I think it s of incredible import. My fav orite psychedelic drug is weed. What, say, Robert Anton Wilson was trying to tel l us in books like Cosmic Trigger and Sex, Drugs and Magick is that at the heart of all these occult conspiracies, what almost never comes up and is kind of the elephant in the room is the idea that through weed-induced sex magick you can c ommunicate with forms of intelligence hitherto unknown. I m honestly just continui ng his work, which he in fact abandoned because he couldn t deal with it. So yeah, I think if marijuana is legalized, which seems imminent, there s a lot greater tr ansformative potentiality there than anyone I ve ever talked to is recognizing. It possesses incredible potential in helping to re-program your brain, which we ve b arely explored at this point.

People largely gloss over the fact that Timothy Leary was obsessed with Crowley and even explored this very avenue of channeling via his Starseed transmissions. Most people of this era are so wedded to the potentiality and infallibility of science, they fully ignore the fact that s it s just as corrupt as the government, b usiness, or anything else in our culture. Take psychiatry. It s fairly obvious tha t psychedelic drugs have the most potential of anything to actually help people, but that research has been basically impossible. And so we get mind-control, nu mbing drugs like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors which are total bullshi t for people who aren t severely depressed. Basically, take pills rather than addr essing your psychological issues. Run away from your problems rather than confro nting them. Heinous. I have a degree in psychology and I realized pretty quickly that you can t study t his stuff inside mainstream academic institutions. It s fucking impossible, which is why I went rogue. Ask anyone that s tried to study even, say, psi-phenomenon i n general. If you get results, no one will even look at them or care, and they w ill slander the fuck out of you for having the gall to even bother based on phil osophical underpinnings alone. The problem is the powers that be have no idea ho w to make money off of it. It challenges everything. Look at the studies into re mote viewing. As far as I can tell, they ve proven the reality of psychic phenomen on, but seemingly no one cares at all. The idea that I d ever get a study funded b ased on sigil magick is a complete joke. No fucking way. If I wanted to study, s ay, the efficacy of prayer and pursued that, checks would be falling into my lap . Einstein said, imagination is more important that knowledge, and more than anyth ing, psychedelic drugs have the ability to expand our imaginations and save us f rom the materialist dead-end we ve created. I like a lot of the materialist dead-e nd stuff, though. We ve made some great records. Jeffrey J. Kripal writes the following: Usually, the human imagination is a producer of fantasies, a dreamer, a daydreame r. But sometimes, sometimes, it is infused or empowered by weird metaphysical ener gies. In these moments of influx, the human imagination is no longer a projector but a kind of translator or mediator of Mind, which communicates, which probably ca n only communicate, to the social ego through symbol and myth. Here the fantasy is also the fact. The trick is the truth. Your thoughts? If someone were to listen to me talk about the occult and say, That s crazy!, I d say: yes. If they said, Isn t that just your imagination?, I d say: exactly. We ve never sol ved the mysteries presented to us by things like schizophrenia, and I d be the fir st to admit that I m kind of touching on that with what I do. I think as a mystic I m kind of like a half sane\half schizo hybrid. Shamanism and westernized materialism are almost like completely opposite philos ophies. One tells you inner experiences are the only things that have real meani ng, the other perspective tells you that they are completely meaningless. Develo ping a balance between the two is the next step for us a species. Dreams, vision s, and such are just as much a part of my life as anything that s happened in ordi nary waking reality. I remember them just as well, and they are just as much an influence on my behavior. A westerner would read this and think: this guy is tot ally batshit, and a shaman would look at it and think: this guy is incredibly nav e. A materialist tells you psychedelic visions are drugs influencing chemical re actions in your brain making you hallucinate, a shaman tells you you re talking to gods. From a more shamanic perspective: thought does not arise from matter, mat ter is comprised from thought. That s why magick works. It s all a dream and you can tweak the parameters if you re clever enough. What s next for John Gillanders?

I have a new project I m working on called Chapel Supremesus with Dean Swanson who s in a great band called Hidden Number and who recorded the two Black Science rec ords. It s incredibly anti-structural stuff and I think we re going to intentionally skewer the dark occult mythos that s so trendy these days. Also, I m going to start working on more video, which is new for me. I ve been doing graphic design for a while so it seems like a natural progression. Also, I might be starting another band with the drummer from The Nemesis Theory. It s a ways off. Other than that, I have a book about my experiences with the occult, The Galacti c Dialogue, which should be out in fall. It s my second and the first one I m actual ly quite proud of, mainly because it s straight up non-fiction which is something I was running from. If you think this interview was intriguing, you ll freaking lo ve it. It s a non-fiction book which is weirder than any piece of fiction you ll eve r read and all entirely true. Well, as much as memory can be considered true. Al so, when that comes out I want to do some spoken word, which is something I ve wan ted to do forever but have never been able to find the proper venue for. Where d o you give occult lectures exactly outside of the podcast world? I have no idea but I m determined to figure it out. Stay tuned true believers.