Alex Mizell Gets Close to the Electrons with New Retrofuture Synth Album Rising Tide

By Wrenja February 15, 2021

Alex Mizell Gets Close to the Electrons with New Retrofuture Synth Album Rising Tide - Written By Alex Mizell

I have found that the most subtle and sometimes the most effective magick is practiced in the recognition and adjustment of the small details which most people neglect. Of course "they" say The Devil, also, is in the details. Maybe this is why magick and the occult is so often associated with demonology. I think it need not be, but when you're down in the magical details it's pretty typical to find some devils down in there too. This is known.

Wrenja asked me to say a little bit about the occult aspects of my new album, and I am honored to be granted a place in these pages to talk about it a little. Thank you Wrenja for the opportunity to speak to a wider audience than usual. Before I begin I feel I should clarify my terms: I take the word "occult" to mean only "hidden, or occluded" and I wish to make it clear that I don't see it as being the equivalent of demonology, or for that matter equivalent to any individual paradigm belonging solely to western esotericism or built up around regional superstitions or fortune-telling systems. I see that as taking too narrow a viewpoint on a very large subject.

To me, occultism is synonymous with a generic sort of esotericism, and may be loosely defined as "the study of things which most people do not care to know about". I’ll file Crowley's magick ("the art and science of causing change in conformance with will") as well as stage magic and an even more generalized conception of magic all under this larger "occult" heading, and hereafter I will refer mainly to that last version of magic which exists as plainly as the nose on your face but which often is hidden in the little creases and folds of our shared world, and which is easy for most people to ignore in favor of celebrity sales pitches and social media influence campaigns that would like to steal away your precious attention for their own nefarious purposes, like selling you CDs.

Firstly, of course, any song is a sort of magical spell, and every DJ, musician or pastor worth their salt knows this. So I figure a musical album is a bit like a short book of spells which, should you have the proper reproduction equipment on hand, along with an animating electrical force, can be cast and recast at will in your home or car. So then you might well ask, what is the purpose of my spells? What precisely are they meant to do? What are we conjuring up?

We know all know that songs can convey ideas and emotions that are highly nuanced, difficult to express in a few words. They can set into motion larger patterns of behavior in a person. They can raise our spirits, give us energy when we're feeling depleted and maybe even help us to feel joy, if only momentarily. They can make us feel nostalgia, casting our memories back. They can help us relax if we're anxious. They can inspire meditation and chains of thought which might not otherwise have occurred to us. The drums might hypnotize us through a process of brainwave entrainment, which measurably increases our suggestibility, and this can make suggestions "stick" better than they might otherwise would. If the intention is to program ourselves, it’s on us to choose the messaging wisely here.

IN addition to the musical programming, I also tried to use the album art and graphic design to convey a certain profound truth which was revealed to me during the CD production process. Here I have to again mention this wonderful cover art by Artisan Oasis' own Chris DiSalvatore - he really nailed it didn't he? So colorful and attention-grabbing. What I find fascinating about it is this: as fantastical as the image seems to be, his cover art is depicting a naturally-occurring optical phenomena called a "brocken spectre" which happens when a person's own shadow is cast from the sun behind them onto fog or clouds which are out in front of them. The unretouched photograph on the back of the CD is depicting that very same optical phenomena as it appears in real life. NOW perhaps that photographic depiction of the brocken spectre is a bit less exciting, a bit less colorful, a bit more mundane than Chris' artistic rendering - yet it is in a sense "more real". (It is interesting that things can be classified as "more real" and "less real" isn't it?)

Chris' artistic depiction is of course real too, in another way, otherwise I would not be able to receive it from him and put it there on the CD which you can hold in your hand, but it got me to thinking about that distinction - perhaps an artificial one - between the awe-inspiring, ephemeral, perhaps highly improbable events that we might accept as evidence of "real magic" in the world and these depictions of real events in larger-than-life, color-saturated retellings that eventually become the stuff of magic and mythology. I have seen that people sometimes become fixated on the grand artistic depictions of magick in the fantasy world and then sadly they might look right past the many mundagical events that happen right there in their own lives every day. How strange it is to be anything at all.

So the visual aspect of this project sets out to yoke together and express the underlying unity of these two different images of the brocken spectre - the "real" thing which is a brocken specre as you might encounter one on a foggy mountain trail in the mountains of Germany or elsewhere, and the artist's Technicolor depiction of that thing which is amazing, and beautiful, and real enough in its own right, but which sometimes obscures the fact that beautiful and strange and truly amazing things really do happen in nature every day. And science, which makes a point of exploring all the detectable aspects of the natural world, is in fact not a stranger to this sort of ephemeral magic at all. I think the fact that a brocken spectre can be explained in optical terms would in no way diminish the real magic of experiencing one, any more than knowing how babies are made diminishes the beauty of sexual intimacy between two people, the miracle of conception, birth or life in general.