2/1

Played: August 17, 2020.

Monday, March 26, 1973. URIEL sans Mitch (he usually doesn’t show up until late afternoon) assembles at Livermore for an “all hands” meeting. Sophie presents her findings on the Oakland-based band called “Mansa,” along with its lead musician, E.L. Moore, whose recent interview in Rolling Stone has raised a few memetic alarm bells. Roger gives the group a bit of a précis on Moore, his music, and that whole scene. The band’s label, Dominoe Records, has been around since the mid-1950s, mostly producing blues and R&B. It’s a relatively small company but is certainly the most prominent in the Black community of West Oakland. Dominoe got into the rock ‘n’ roll scene starting in the mid-1960s, and since ‘68, has been putting out a fair amount of psychedelic soul. The label itself is owned by a guy named Josh Williams. Josh has been around forever. He’s a local entrepreneur, neighborhood boss, and loan shark. Not necessarily the leg-breaking type (though that’s always an option!) but definitely a powerful dude and not someone you want to cross.

Moore, meanwhile, is well regarded by Oakland’s Black community. He has a good reputation. Smart kid. Neither he nor Mansa has hit it big outside local Black radio, but they have a lot of talent and people are predicting that their star is rising. Mansa’s music can only best be described as “cosmic funk” or “Afrofuturism” — blending jazz, rock, and funk with electronic instruments and synthesizers, concepts drawn from African legend and the Black Power movement. They are on the cutting edge of the genre. Real pioneers. The block party Mansa intends to hold to celebrate the release of their new album, Ikenga, is supposed to have a little more “juice” than the usual West Oakland block party. A bit more formal, more security, more media presence (though still no major outlet coverage). The whole thing is being organized by Dominoe as a publicity event. The party will be on Saturday, March 31, five days from now. Ikenga is slated for release on Tuesday, April 3.

Jocasta volunteers to check out Sebastian Keiner, the West German artist mentioned in the Rolling Stone piece. She also says this one seems real simple: sounds like URIEL can just flip Moore using one of its many, many tricks (glyphs, hypnotism, etc.). Archie tells Jocasta to rein that in a minute because they still need more information. Sophie interjects and explains that her analysis reveals definitive History B influence in Moore’s recent work, and that Mansa is almost certain to break big sometime in the next two years. Archie says this warrants more investigation before they take any action. URIEL needs to acquire a copy of the new album, Ikenga, as well as Mansa’s three previous albums. They also need to learn more about Keiner and the tapestry-mural he painted for the Ikenga block party. Roger says he has two of the albums already and he agrees with Sophie’s esmological predictions. Mansa is definitely going to be big. He also says he thinks more investigation is the better path, because in his estimation, Moore and Mansa are legit — perhaps whatever History B taint they’ve been exposed to is coming from somewhere else.

Marshall asks Sophie what she knows about Keiner. Sophie flips through her records: not much. He’s a little older than the members of Mansa. He hooked up with some German jazz musicians in the ‘60s to do album covers. Those were well-received; his success brought him to the United States in the late ‘60s, where he did more album artwork for various American acts. According to INTERPOL, he has been involved in leftwing politics in West Germany and is believed to be sympathetic to the Red Army Faction. He’s expressed support for various student uprisings in West Germany and the USA. That’s not too unusual, though, especially among the avant-garde set. Currently he’s an artist-in-residence at the de Young, where some of his work is on display and where he teaches a few seminars. His most recent exhibit went up in February. He’s here on a visa and the visa is good until the end of the summer. Sophie has also been able to assemble about a dozen samples of Keiner’s prior work — album covers, paintings, etc. — but none of it hints at History B. A lot of it has a Middle Eastern “flavor” to it, but she hasn’t spotted any ziggurats.

Archie turns to Roger and asks his take on this “musical subculture.” “This stuff about secret sub-Saharan linguistic codes and everything,” he inquires in what he thinks is a non-patronizing tone, “how on Earth would someone fall into that? Get exposed to that sort of thing?” Roger says:

Well, there is something I need to talk to you guys about, which is that the SANDMAN organization has put me in this situation before. I have done undercover infiltration of a kind of, well, a cult that, you know — anything that's like Afro-Caribbean, something like that, I’ve been put on it. The last time it did not go so well and some covers got blown. I'm a little worried about the connection to the Black Panthers because those people don't forget anything or anyone. So, yeah, there's a large network.

But, you know, Black people talk to each other. Cultures all over the world sharing with each other these kind of things, like linguistics and dreaming of a better world and all the rest of that stuff. It's going on all the time and, I mean, I’m sure even Sophie could probably go into one of the neighborhoods and pick up a whole bunch of documents and things, but when the Black Power stuff was really going everybody was turning this stuff out. So yeah, there's a lot of subcultures and a lot of this stuff and people trying to reclaim their history. Literally. Not in terms of History A/B. So of course it's going to mix in here.

I mean, I can't tell you that I didn't read that that first opening paragraph [of the Rolling Stone article] and go, “Right on!” And then, you know, it kicked in that, yeah, we don't want to have the Red Kings come back. That's not really — no more slavery, right? We don't want to go down that road and end up slaves again. But you gotta understand the appeal. The other thing is, you gotta understand that, uh, funk is huge and I know it really isn’t your scene but it is gonna take over the world. Sophie can make the predictions with whatever calculations she wants, but some of us have heard it and gotten down to it and we know.

Sophie agrees. “It’s true. Part of it is the fact that they’re going to be riding a wave that’s going to crest musically in this country over the next couple of years. Music is very, very powerful. I mean, symbols and memes are powerful but music gets to something deeper than words or even pictures. It’s something about the heartbeat, the respiration, the basic physical parts of being human.” Archie leans forward and rests his elbows on the conference room table: “But isn’t there something … atavistic about this kind of music? I mean, it’s not really music, right? It’s just rhythm. It’s not melodic in the sort of way that we—” Jocasta makes a subtle “cut it out” gesture with her hand which catches Archie’s eye. He shuts up. Sophie smirks and says she did find it interesting that the writer of the Rolling Stone piece explicitly compared Mansa’s music to swing. Roger, too, cracks a smile, saying that they’ve got a whole horn section — of course they’re going to make it big, acts with big horn sections always do. “They’re gonna be big because they aren’t going to be too Black, let’s just put it that way. I mean, you don’t need to have Elvis this time coming in.” Archie nods and says that more investigation is warranted, but that they shouldn’t get too tunnel-vision on Moore and Keiner. “We have a whole 12-person ‘collective’ to vet and I think we should look into this Ben Fong-Torres character also, just to cover all our bases.”

Marshall speaks:

I think we have two sets of problems. The first problem is the album itself. We don't quite know its contents and it's in a state of production that it's going to be released absent some sort of intervention by us. Query whether we want to intervene because as far as we know, having not heard the album, maybe it's harmless gibberish. Maybe it alludes to History B but it doesn't do it in any sort of grand way that warrants our intervention. The other problem, though, is Moore himself, who does seem to be being fed information or otherwise in tune with things that he is not supposed to be in tune with. I am skeptical about whether we can recruit him if he's turned down two invitations already. I would say, then, that my natural inclination would be to simply discredit him, which I feel we could easily do given his affiliations with the Black Panther Movement. We could plant information among the local Black Panthers that he is a confidential informant of the FBI or the local police. They would likely deal with the problem for us and it would permanently mar his reputation making it impossible for him —

Roger interrupts: “They’ll kill him.” Marshall resumes:

Well, possibly. But either way the thing that we need is that he needs to be discredited. He needs to not be taken seriously as a musician anymore if he's going to keep making music like this. Now, could we get him to make music like what we need him to make music for? That seems extremely difficult.

Roger responds:

If you want to discredit him, first of all, you don’t have to discredit him in the white community. That’s not going to help anyway. And if they [the Black community] discover in any way, shape or form that it is coming from y’all, uh, it’s not going to fly. He’ll just become an underground sensation. If you want to discredit him, he has to sell out. If he sells out, if he sells out the neighborhood, if he does anything where it’s just like, “I’m getting the big bucks … ” Sorry, I’m trying not to use too many offensive words here.

Marshall: “They’re just words, man.” Roger: “Words are like knives sometimes. I don’t want to do that to him.” Archie cuts them off, saying he thinks this idea of discrediting Moore by, paradoxically, promoting his work is really quite intriguing. But, he says, he thinks everyone is getting too far out over their skis because they still need to get a better handle on what they’re dealing with, including getting ahold of Ikenga and learning more about the relevant players. The team debates how best to go about obtaining an advance copy of the album and getting eyes on Keiner’s artwork. Jocasta reiterates that she’ll take Keiner. She can brew up some credentials as an art student or whatever, and use that as a pretext to meet him. Marshall and Archie sign off on that idea: from a honey pot angle, it’s smart to send a lone female asset. Roger volunteers to go scout out the West Oakland neighborhood where Moore lives to get a lay of the land and make his face familiar so the locals don’t immediately peg him as an outsider.

The team adjourns just as Mitch arrives. Sophie catches him up on what he missed. Roger contacts Granite Peak to get ahold of a SANGUSH glyph for use in his recon. Archie and Sophie start working Archie’s entertainment contacts to get access to an advance copy of the Ikenga album and (critically) succeed. URIEL will have an advance copy of the pressed Ikenga record delivered tomorrow morning. Marshall heads back to the Mission. Mitch grabs a seat in the common area. He ponders possible points of entry with regards to Mansa. He suspects he won’t be able to get himself into the group in a musical capacity. Mansa is a collective, they don’t need or really even want guest or session musicians. Plus, Mitch is white. So that avenue is likely foreclosed to him. He sips his coffee and pulls a few of his Tarot cards.

THE LAST JUDGEMENT

I have said that this symbol is essentially invariable in all Tarot sets, or at least the variations do not alter its character. The great angel is here encompassed by clouds, but he blows his bannered trumpet, and the cross as usual is displayed on the banner. The dead are rising from their tombs — a woman on the right, a man on the left hand, and between them their child, whose back is turned. But in this card there are more than three who are restored, and it has been thought worth while to make this variation as illustrating the insufficiency of current explanations. It should be noted that all the figures are as one in the wonder, adoration and ecstasy expressed by their attitudes. It is the card which registers the accomplishment of the great work of transformation in answer to the summons of the Supernal — which summons is heard and answered from within.

— A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot

WANDS. FIVE.

A posse of youths, who are brandishing staves, as if in sport or strife. It is mimic warfare, and hereto correspond the Divinatory Meanings: Imitation, as, for example, sham fight, but also the strenuous competition and struggle of the search after riches and fortune. In this sense it connects with the battle of life. Hence some attributions say that it is a card of gold, gain, opulence.

— A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot

Mitch intuits that the cards are telling him that large gatherings of people can be dangerous.

In the library, Jocasta does some research on Keiner, drawing both from local media and various artistic journals. She finds that Keiner has been active and recognized within the artistic community for the past 10 years. His early work was naïve, but had an expressly occultist quality to it. A lot of it involved Rosicrucian-style symbolism. By ‘66 or ‘67, he’d gotten more surreal and his style had come to incorporate certain Middle Eastern or Arabic influences (though no obvious references to ancient Mesopotamia). His most recent work does incorporate a lot of elements of post-Ontoclysm symbology, however. Overall, Keiner’s catalogue is very much located in the medieval and onward traditions of the West, the East, and the Middle East, in that order.

Keiner’s premier piece at the de Young is a giant room-cube that, from the outside, is reminiscent of the Kaaba: a black, featureless box. But on the inside, the box is painted in almost blindingly bright surrealist scenes. These scenes include depictions of weird landscapes and the occasional person with an animal head. Everything looks meticulously detailed, possessing a quality that people say “draws them in,” and the scenes all resemble something that could be something else: is that painting of a woman a depiction of the Virgin Mary or of Kuan Yin? Keiner calls this installation “Beth-El,” the Hebrew word for the House of God.

Tuesday, March 27, 1973. URIEL convenes at Livermore to listen to the advance copy of Ikenga that Archie obtained, except for Jocasta, who heads into San Francisco to find Keiner at the de Young. She locates him teaching one of his seminars to a small group of disciples — a combination of students and passers-by, most of them women — in the sculpture garden. Keiner is in his early 30s and cuts a definitive Continental bohemian vibe. He’s trim, sophisticated, with colorful clothing and the air of a mad scientist. A bit of a peacock. Jocasta eavesdrops on his lecture, sketching out the scene in her notebook while pretending to draw a still-life of a statue. His English is pretty damn good:

Everything you see exists in two places. It exists in the metal that you can feel (here he presses up against one of the metal sculptures) and it exists all around it — where it would be in the past, where it would be in the future, how that person over there at the far end of the park is looking at it. This is basic Cubism, obviously, but we go beyond that. Beyond the dimension of time. We go into the dimension of feeling. Of color. You do not see color the same way I do. I see colors as emotions and emotions as colors. This is how you must approach the art that you make. It must be … not post-impressionistic, but meta-impressionistic.

Jocasta pegs a lot of this as bullshit, but sophisticated bullshit. It has a certain appeal and is plainly getting traction among the group of metaphysically-inclined folks who are gathering around him. As the seminar wraps up, Jocasta makes her approach. She introduces herself and after a little polite chitchat, asks why the size of his work has grown so noticeably over the past few years. Keiner says Jocasta is very perceptive. He discusses how his most recent project, a tapestry, is huge and took months to create, even with the “local help” he obtained. Keiner tells her that the tapestry will be displayed at a concert and is going to be the cover art for a local Black band’s new album. Jocasta can tell Keiner clearly thinks highly of himself and his talents. As for Beth-El, Keiner expounds on how he “wanted something people could enter,” something they could “be in the heart of.” “Art is nothing,” he says in a somewhat hurried clip, “if it does not affect you and if you are not — if you are watching something on a flat wall, it is only two dimensions. I wanted something that people actually enter. A house of God, if you will.”

Jocasta then subtly drops a hint about History B, remarking on the “Sumerian” influence on his work and asking what sort of “local help” he obtained. Keiner is now warming up to her — he’s a bit of a lothario — and explains:

Yes, the Sumerian … well, you know, a lot of people say that those myths are at the center of everything that came after. That literally every religion in the Western world owes something to those — the Flood and Marduk making the world out of Tiamat's shell and all of these other, you know, the echoes that reverberate down through Jewish, through Christian, through Islamic, through Zoroastrianism — that all these traditions come from that one central location. I’ve never approached it before because, what can I say? I find the occult traditions of people I can understand much more compelling. I find ancient Mesopotamia to be very, very difficult to — you must understand, it is not that I deny that they are somehow influenced by Sumerian myth, but not directly. Would you like to come see Beth-El?

Jocasta can tell Keiner is lying. The handful of figures she has seen reproduced from Beth-El and other works Keiner has completed have a clear Anunnaki inspiration. Nonetheless, at the invitation, she enthusiastically agrees.

At Livermore, the rest of the team checks out the Ikenga album, starting with Keiner’s artwork. The cover of the album is exactly as described in the Rolling Stone article: a cityscape with tapered crystalline towers and hover cars zipping all over the place. The Black citizens on the ground project an air of pride and confidence. In the distance is a giant metallic crystalline robot-totem with a bull head and curved horns. The robot-totem is assisting in the completion of a skyscraper. Marshall, Archie, and Sophie are pretty confident that this robot-totem is a representation of an irruptor, specifically, a kusarikku. The team gingerly opens the gatefold of the LP and find two other scenes depicted on opposing panels. The first is a marketplace scene. Archie immediately spots the machine from Altamont sitting on a table at one of the marketplace stalls. The second is an agricultural scene: endless green fields growing more food than could ever be consumed.

Marshall asks Mitch what he makes of the artwork. Mitch says he thinks it looks pretty cool, but is “History B-ish.” That is, the artwork itself is not infected by History B, but some of the representations it contains very faintly set off Mitch’s preternatural ability to sense History B. If he had to wager a guess, he’d say that someone from History B had a hand in designing the artwork. It feels like it was created on the other side and than relocated here. Marshall and Archie give each other a look and silently share the assessment that the Ikenga art contains Anunnaki memetics. Could an ordinary teenager in Oakland reproduce it with all the horror vacui details it depicts? No — not without help from the other side and even then, not without incredible patience and skill. But this is a “sticky” meme, to use SANDMAN parlance.

After setting up the audio equipment, Roger pops the record on and hits play. The music makes everyone feel like they are swimming through water. It conveys a great deal of sensory information, even though there are no lyrics — it’s all instrumentation. As the music goes on, Roger and Marshall, both versed in hypnotism, sense that the album is attempting to lull the listener into a hypnotic state. There is something to the acoustics that’s meant to make people suggestible. In a live concert setting, it could create a mass hypnotic event. Roger closes his eyes and attempts to parse what he’s hearing in the context of his Catholic-Voudon upbringing. Nothing that he hears resonates with Papa Legba or Maître Kalfu, however, and none of it resonates with any of the music he recalls from his youth. This is a bit surprising, suggesting to Roger that Ikenga draws from a non-African, non-Caribbean tradition. As side A winds down, Roger declares: “I don’t know these beats.” He flips the vinyl over to side B. These tunes are more traditional, more pop, more in line with Mansa’s earlier work. But even this music possesses the strange, sleepy, water-like quality of side A.

At the de Young, Keiner leads Jocasta to Beth-El. Upon arriving, he asks her if she has ever worked on something of this size before. She says no, she’s only ever worked on a small scale, but that the size is partly why she finds Keiner’s work so fascinating. Keiner smiles and politely inquires if Jocasta would be interested in working with him on the next project he undertakes. She says yes, absolutely, and gives Keiner a phone number that links up with a dummy line at Livermore. After a few more minutes of polite conversation, as the gallery clears out, Keiner extends a hand and ask Jocasta if she would like to see God’s House. Jocasta smiles back. “Yes, absolutely.” She gives Keiner her gloved hand. He leads her inside.

The interior dazzles Jocasta. Somehow, Keiner has managed to make the box entirely soundproof; she can hear nothing of the outside world while standing inside. The exterior lights that surround the box project through the walls, giving the paintings on the walls and ceiling an almost stained glass quality and spraying little splashes of colored light on the floor. Jocasta suddenly finds herself a little lightheaded, a little disoriented, but she manages to keep her head together. As she looks around, she sees a number of troubling scenes: a woman melting in a sort of Dali style, the fractal-pattern Rosicrucian cross with a wilted rose, and on the wall opposite the entryway door, an inverted Eye of Providence pyramid. Suddenly, Jocasta gets the distinct feeling that if she remains in the box much longer, she is going to find herself someplace else.

Back at the URIEL offices, the team finishes listening to Ikenga. It’s about 45 minutes from start to finish. It’s good! It’s good music. Danceable. But there is something wrong about it. It does not tell the listener to do anything in particular, but it does make the listener suggestible. There is a manipulative quality to the album. The team discusses what all this means. Archie suggests that the album may be a “setup” for a subsequent memetic or hypnotic command. Maybe something will be added to the album later. Maybe it will be followed up by something. He also wonders aloud if the hypnotic effect of the music would be heightened by the influence of chemicals. “It’s possible that the young people at the concert will be under the influence of drugs, after all.” Marshall confirms that the answer to this is definitively yes.

Marshall sighs and says this album obviously is not a harmless artistic expression, but he’s not sure how one stops production of a completed album slated for release in a week besides buying every copy and destroying them. Mitch says he sees a billion ways to stop it, but that very, very few of them are subtle. Roger says that they are missing a third thing, still: the record is one thing, the art is another, but both are a primer for some third thing. Mitch thinks aloud that the music and art are almost incidental. He says that there’s a local quality to this, to the anticipated performance in Oakland. Archie agrees. He posits that the distribution of the album is a long-term problem to solve, while the upcoming release party is something that needs to be dealt with ASAP. The team debates the various avenues open to them at this point, evaluating the subtle and un-subtle ways of disrupting the Ikenga release and the block party. Marshall proposes that URIEL gets eyes on Moore. Realizing that Jocasta is currently with the person who made this dangerous art, Archie says the team should dispatch Roger and Mitch to the de Young to make sure she is OK.

Inside Beth-El, the situation is deteriorating for Jocasta. The floor is sinking, the walls are receding away. Everything is swimming. Keiner’s voice, from somewhere, his eyes wide and hypnotic, almost wild: “Come. With. Me.” Jocasta takes a deep breath and steels herself. She quickly makes an excuse about needing to get to another class, extricates her hand from his, and hastily exits the installation. As she does, she notes that Keiner looks a little surprised but also somewhat … amused? Upon emerging back in the de Young, Jocasta finds the world as she left it. Things feel stable, mundane, normal. She lights a cigarette with shaky hands and goes to find a pay phone to call Livermore. Sophie picks up. Jocasta explains that she’s on her way back now. “Something very strange happened here. I’m a little rattled. We need to … we need to focus on this Sebastian Keiner fellow. He’s deeply, deeply into something and I barely got out of there safely, I think.” Sophie covers the receiver with her hand and stops Roger and Mitch as they pack their things to leave.