« 035: Holes | Main | 037: A Whore For That Special Rhythm » April 18, 2003

036: Recovery Through Ancient Ceremonies

I am in need of a regenerative ritual.

These past few weeks have knocked me out of my comfort zone. I took this last week off to coincide with my wife's spring break vacation and we had planned to get away for awhile, see the sights, and generally not think once about all the things in our lives which were piling up. Plans didn't work the way we would have liked: a recent decaffeination has left me sluggish and tired, the day job called mid-week and needed to see me, and our cat, Ernie, got squooshed by a car. It's Friday and every time I have plunked my ass in front of the keyboard, my fingers have curled up like sun-baked earthworms and refused to work.

I guess you could call this writer's block.

In the past, I just haven't felt like working and have stayed away, knowing that anything laid down during these times was going to be shit and not worth keeping. You might as well spend your time building balsa wood airplanes or learning how to bake pies. But this feels like there is a huge plug in my skull which is keeping everything from flowing. There are words in my head which want to come out, but the internal editor has lowered a grate over the entrance and quarantined my creative process. It's like part of my brain has been diagnosed with SARS and it can't play with the rest until the antibodies kick in.

But what do you use to dissolve this mental block? What antibodies are there for rescuing the sequestered portion of your brain?

I'm listening to This Morn' Omina's 7 Years of Famine right now, an explosive piece of ritual music. Part techno, part industrial, part ambient, and part rhythmic noise, 7 Years of Famine is a spiritual whirlwind of these genres along with Middle Eastern and African rhythms, everything spun into a orgiastic nocturnal ceremony. It shouldn't work, and even as I describe it, it sounds impossible. But this is what This Morn' Omina is all about: making ritual music with any element they desire. They don't cling to conventions; they laugh at genre boundaries. They are building powerful ceremonies to forgotten pantheons, striving to shake the sand from buried statues and to ring the heavens with their sound. They want to release the bound and captive energies of mankind by striping away pretense and self-imposed limitations.

I've tracked down and ordered their entire back catalog after hearing 7 Years of Famine. Sure, it is a junkie's reaction, but only because I have this desperate faith in what music will do for me. I have to. The walls are coming down, one way or another.

-----

This Morn' Omina website: http://www.hegira.be.
7 Years of Famine is out on Ant-Zen.

Posted by Teppo at April 18, 2003 11:30 PM

Comments