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Cosmic Trigger
This nOde
last updated February 26th, 2004 and is permanently morphing...
(7 Cauac (Rain) / 7 K'ayab (Turtle) 69/260
- 12.19.11.0.19)

Johan is a young German producer
who looks like Anthony Kiedis with a brain. He lives in a huge house in a small
inland village, his room containing little more than a bed, a bhatik print and
his gear: Macintosh PowerBook, Akai sampler, keyboard, DAT deck. I'd heard two
of Johan's
intense
tracks on the
Dragonfly
label's _Project II
Trance_
(under the name
Mandra
Gora), which along with
Juno
Reactor's _Transmissions_ and the _Ethnotechno_ and _Concept in
Dance_
compilations, is the best stateside introduction to
Goan
trance. But Johan doesn't like to DJ—he's one of those hardcore power dancers
who treat the night as one long track. "With a combination of good music, a
good spot and good dancing, it's like a cosmic trigger goes off," he says of
Goa's greatest rites. After a night of cosmic gyration, Johan would return to
his studio, download his vibes, dump the bytes onto DAT, and slap the tape onto
his DJ friends. "It was like a perfect
feedback
loop."
- Erik Davis -
_Sampling
Paradise_
As captured so well in Robert Anton
Wilson's classic counter-cultural wild ride _Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of
the
Illuminati_—which
connects meddling
Sirians
with
Aleister
Crowley,
Tim
Leary's Starseed prison visions, and the strange recurrence of the number
23—catching
the eye of the
pyramid
has a lot to do with your
attention,
with consciously tuning into coincidences and weird
information
sources (odd books,
dreams,
drugs, incantations) until glittering patterns emerge. The challenge is that
unless you want to get slurped into what Wilson calls a "
reality
tunnel" and wind up carrying a sandwich board, you must adopt a kind of
a bemused
schizophrenia,
a yin/yang
of skepticism and lucid madness. About the only concrete
thing Whitley Streiber's doctors could suggest to him was that he learn to live
with a high degree of
uncertainty.
Not a bad postmodern prayer.
- Erik Davis - _My Favorite
Martians - A
UFO
Epistemology_