1.06.2024

RGMS End of Year Retrospective: 2023

The Wild Hunt

RGMS has long spoken of the ineffable experience that arises out of transcendent musical engagement. We’ve spoken of ways to carry that experience beyond its inception, its edges of embodiment, to connect it symbolically into our being outside of space and time. But what of the characteristics of that ineffability itself? Can it be hinted at in words? in concepts? What is to be said of the elusive phenomena that comprise such a mysterious experience? Might we give them a name to better know their features? To dialogue with the beings that inhabited that moment of great release? Those curious altered states of being.

We continue the wild hunt for the keys to these altered states and the map to the pathways to and from they arise. The way is easy but labyrinthine, seemingly veering of course in those prolonged silences. Yet, the alchemical approach beckons the opposites to contrast and play. What is movement without stillness? Just as the hunter stalks the deer, careful not to make any sudden movements as the prey grows near, we must remember that to be motionless is not always to be still. For inside, the organs of existence persist in their unending flow of wondrous rhythm, breathing out and then in - out… and then in… And this curious rhythm never dormant until death, yet susurrating beneath the din of our perpetual being, those undulating waves like the notches in a lock, hold the key to these elusive states of perceiving - altered states of being, new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling - What happens to these rhythms as we cross the threshold from mundane into altered? From atomized to transcendent? For now it may only be speculative, yet what is map making without speculation? We must find those rigid edges of the shores by leaping into the unknown and daring to etch lines into shape even when north may in fact be south and the world might just be a thought.

Somehow then, between the riff and the raff those undulating rhythms of our organs of perception, our brainwave behavior, when exposed to the pulse of the music begin to mirror - to harmonize with the beat that is grooving, driving the spectrum of audible frequencies into colorful illusion. And in this entrainment, an extraordinary phenomenon may start to arise… if the many rhythms of activation within begin to find a synchronicity, such that the ebbs match the ebbs and flows beget flow in some manner of relative consistency, then we have the magnificent state of divine coherence. The body and the brain, an amplitudinal echo chamber of itself, creating energy where it was not from the delicate balancing act of alignment within through the synchronization with the rhythmic design that floods the space in which our bodies reside.

With this newfound reservoir, a well-spring of animating resources, the laws of perception begin to find the limbs to bend. The neverending stream of perceptual data, once filtered into carefully determined branches of pertinent / non-pertinent, now stirred by the inner alchemist in the mind eye’s cauldron, suddenly unveils to our souls that which those before us have called the divine and the mystic…

…Divine indeed, and oft found yonder an unsuspecting corner. On this Twelfth Night, we recall the miraculous narratives and ponder how they inform our curious modern lives. A certain demarcation to end a festive timespan , but alas, the end of one year, and the start of new adventures to come. Day by day, year by year, the map becomes slightly more clear, yet the wild hunt never ceases...



2023 releases