Showing posts with label playlists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label playlists. Show all posts

1.06.2022

RGMS End of Year Retrospective: 2021

There’s something special in the end of the year, marked first by the winter solstice. Each passing year it grows more dear, with a deeper connection to the past.

Striving to understand this sentiment, even though it evades definition and explanation, I tend to think of what this season meant to our ancestors. There was a serious reverence for the season – after all, life was not guaranteed. Life was tough, and winter tougher. Death was a possibility.


RGMS End of year Retrospective 2021 Playlist


Community strengthened in feast and spirit wasn’t simply for fun. These rituals, while religious, were deliberate and focused on survival. There was an importance of sustaining through the worst - from the passing of one year, to the rebirth of the next. A transitory period adorned in myth. This kind of survival, however, was not merely a clinging to life as we may think of the word today, for the etymology reveals it was rather a celebration of ‘supervivere’ or ‘super-life’. Thus, survival was a form of venerating not only life, but the gods and goddesses, and the prima materia, which made life possible and allowed to the potential of life beyond sheer being.

The days were soon to get longer, but winter – cold and snow – would continue for months to come. Celebration was in order, but was constrained by the bounds of this unforgiving winter…best to not venture too far away from home, especially during the brutal winter night, when one could be whisked away by the wild hunt.

Today we seem to take such past experiences for granted, yet this deep spiritual yearning persists. Old myths are co-opted by modern culture, but not acutely understood.

The myths surround us. RGMS aims to understand this modern world, the ancient past, and the synthesis of new mythology to come, asking how we may breathe new life into the experiences of being through ritual, through sound, and through the sowing of such deeper understanding. The opportunities are endless, a search for meaning lasting a lifetime – RGMS enters its second year end retrospective making sense of these unconscious artifacts. Year after year, layer after layer, we look forward to what is revealed.


RGMS presents a collection of 2021 works apart of our Year End Retrospective:




RGMS Works in 2021 - 


MUSIC RELEASES

[RGMS-008] these memories are not my own, they're borrowed from my past (-2,-1)




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12.31.2020

RGMS End of Year Retrospective: 2020

Last Light in the Forest by Michael Handt

RGMS End of Year Retrospective: 2020

 The wilderness is gathering up all its children again, beckoning psyche become still as an iced over pond - a reflection before dawn. 

With hardened soil and leafless trees, sounds of the winterscape reverberate in these freshly bare lands. Ears to the ground, we might catch a glimpse of the stirring Spring, mycelium matrices underneath, or even thoughts in a new light. 

Before long the mild sun sets beyond frozen hills, making way for ethereal hosts. Looking out into the midwinter night one senses something - something metaphysical, subtly placed, layered beneath time...

...Here we are again, at the edge of the year, where death feeds into birth. A stillness permeates the landscape, seizing us - and if we are attentive, it invites us to turn inward.

***

RGMS not only commemorates its inaugural year, but also the vast and varied spirit of the season. From the yulefest toast with holy ale, to the unadorned aluminum Festivus pole - new threads of religious syncretism stir. To say the least, we recollect the beginnings of Rhineland Christmas firs, the spectral procession of Odin’s Wild Hunt, and the boreal spruce trees sprouting troops of Amanita Muscaria at their roots. 

Cyclic workings would tend to escape us, yet present themselves in plain sight. Cyclic workings, which overlap and coil concurrently. Such cycles as the lunar phases and this month’s December Cold Moon, but even so on greater time scales, with the recent sightings of the ‘Christmas Star’ on the winter solstice, marking an 800-year cycle in the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn...and yet, a human lifetime is allotted, experienced in default view, alas, grasping just a bit further. 

Among such a mindset, a practice, and a settling down for the passing of a momentous year, RGMS reflects on our work published and the work to come. We present a playlist featuring our selected works this year aimed to construct a new, cohesive experience. We invite you to listen with us, to start new conversations, and become a part of future endeavors. 


RGMS End of Year Retrospective: 2020 (spotify playlist)


Polaris, a guiding light, sits upon the sacred tree. Axis mundi, the world ash - center of the cosmos and the structure of the universe - turns again between the celestial poles. During this season such imagery surrounds us. We find it’s reference wherever we look. A reminder, in a way, that is seemingly mystifying and mundane altogether: we are of the same substratum that encompasses throughout, as far as light can reach. Our action in alignment with these ideals is a gesture of universal workings, and we can only hope that from these most sacred of months that we hold fast to these customs as a new year is borne, bathed in cyclic time. It is a cycle longing for a retrospective in the face of the immanent wheel. A cycle, which is nothing without reprise, yet desires to corkscrew towards some seeming linearity, first convolves in upon itself before springing forward into uncharted territories. As the RGMS coils, we hold our collective breath at such potential energy; here we are my friends, anticipating the daredevilish leap over the abyss, pilgrims on the vessel 2020 reaped, ready to sew new forms to prepare for any and everything. To 2021, and many years to come! 


RGMS Releases in 2020: 


RGMS Publications in 2020: 




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