Portland’s Spookiest Bands part I

Come on in, my pretties, join ELEVEN [a very mystical number] as we explore local bands unafraid to traverse other worlds, the occult, and holy freakshows of sound.

Portlanders come alive with the memento mori that is fall, lit by the high holiday of Halloween. The weather matches our ghoulish notions of repelling summer, carving in cozy book time, eating Pho, connecting in dive bars, descending into hot soaks, and crossing town for horror film marathons. The city’s plentitude of goths, introverts, nerds, and witches thrive, retreating into the darkness that consumes all when we reset the clocks. Indeed, late autumn means that the music scene that treats us, along with the venues that house our wayward souls, can further showcase those in the spooky zone.

PART I  

Riff or Treat: Holy Hauntings

Catal Huyuk

Marisa Christabel and Marios von Kerpen form the skeleton Catal Huyuk, Portland’s bone-i-fied power duo, whose power is the ancients pulsing through deceivingly simple instruments. Christabel’s vocals seduce with a dark goddess; thundering with the oldest rhythms, her drum work mimics the heart’s march through time. For Christabel, “Drumming has always been a spiritual technology; hypnotic, transportive, and capable of changing our consciousness.” Von Kerpen plays an odd box guitar he fashioned with raised frets that can alchemize collective pain with dissonances and primordial drone. “Though we’ve played the same songs many times, we always hear new sounds and notes—it’s like the instrument is a presence in itself, with its own desire to communicate,” they add, noting that its “overtones that emanate can open a frequency portal in which spirits sing out from beyond the veil.” And sing the ancestors do, unbothered in the summoning.

Catal Huyuk stuns listeners with a primitive immediacy, one that confirms their mission: “To become a vessel in which people from ancient times, long dead, might have a voice. When we began playing music together, we imagined what feelings and ideas could be transmitted using traditional instruments played around a fire in a dark cave.” Naming themselves after ruins in central Turkey of neolithic egalitarian cultures further cements the band’s psycho-anthropology. “The people of Catal Huyuk venerated the great mother goddess and the life-giving power of women’s bodies. Their society was based on agricultural production and connection to the natural cycles of the earth.” The band’s inspiration stems from partnership cultures, whether paganism or modern music audiences, as an act of resistance against the true horrors of patriarchy. However peace-mongering a people,  Marios colors in a natural violence: “[They] honored their dead by performing sky burials, in which vultures would eat the flesh of the corpses, leaving the bones, which were then buried under their floors and periodically removed for ritual purposes.” So offer yourselves up this October 31 at Azoth Space, where the band plays a Samhain Soiree.

More on Instagram: @Catal Huyuk.

The Cosmic Tones Research Trio

Any musical instrument or group that composer and producer Roman Norfleet touches or toots will flow with the Mystery. The Cosmic Tones Research Trio is no different, releasing their debut, All is Sound (Mississippi Records) on the Day of the Dead. In it, the ancestors breathe and percuss with robust force through Roman’s alto sax, flute, and vocal work alongside Harlan Silverman’s cello, flute, lap steel, and electronics, and Kennedy Verettt’s magic touch on keys and blessed tongue on flute and didgeridoo. Their music is a delight and a necessary nourishment.

Cover art by Roman Norfleet and Kennedy Verett

From creation to practice to performance, the Cosmic Tones Research Trio vibrates with the Holy Spirit. “Our practice begins with a ritual of intentions. This process often involves incense which clears the space and lays the foundation for the invitation for collaboration. Bells, shakers, and other small metal objects are shaken to loosen and exfoliate, an offering to what is to come. Acknowledging what has come before, and surrendering, allowing ourselves to be vessels and bear witness.” All is Sound’s first notes from the song “Creation” invoke this and penetrate through “Peace Prayer” to the album’s last piece, “The Offering.” Drawing from free jazz, afro-futurism, the Coltrane ecosystem, devotional music, sound science and nature, their music activates listeners into divine order despite the current chaos. When asked if music is a transmission, Verett answers: “Music is a transmission of frequency direct from the ancestral plane into the future. It is innate and all-consuming. It is what allows us to Transcend.”

And transcend we do. All is Sound when we welcome the loss of the corporeal. We can safely shed the human suit to reveal one energy, one spirit.

Pick up All is Sound from Mississippi Records in person or digitally.

Luneau

Ever wonder what it’s like to be transported by the white goddess or gnostic aeons to Venus? To harness the moon as a compass for astral territories? To purify others via ethereal catharsis? Soundscape artists Rachel Rusenko and Tom Asselin decided to find out. Calling themselves the French word for “moon water,” Rusenko, a self-described lunatic and daily ritualist, plays handmade chimes (encasing ritual objects), singing bowls, harmonium, and vocalizations to enchant with themes of “collective conscious, subconscious, and healing.” Throw in Asselin’s expert guitar experiments and key work and the band burns the tricky material plane — indulging in pure sound candy. When one listens to Luneau, an earthbound resistance is removed, restoring our fluid state of  love.

Runes, the ancient Norse alphabet of divination tools, are inherent in Luneau’s recent compositions. Asselin and Rusenko worked with rune educator Jonathan Rigby to do so. Rusenko explains: “At the beginning of our writing and recording process, during a particularly nasty ice storm, when most of Portland had lost power, we studied the runes together and chose the energy we wished to invoke, on a personal level and for the collective. These choices were then distilled into two bind runes, which are the basis for our debut EP.” The title of the EP, The Dance of Death Whirls Life from Trance to Trance, riffs off of Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot writing. Within that, the tracks “All Truth Resounds” is a beacon intended to dissolve clouds of illusion, and “The Bardo of Dream” is a reference to Tibetan spiritual tradition “to signify the cycles of death and rebirth—and the small death we experience nightly while in the dream place.”

Cover art painting by Rachel Rusenko

Lucky for us, Luneau are witches of the liminal, makers of ambient ambrosia that drips of our boundless nature. They view improvisation “as a practice of creating space to become a Channel for the Unseen,” noting that their music is “a practice of releasing control to welcome the Mystery.”

Immerse yourself into this abstract but tender cosmology by visiting Luneau’s Bandcamp.