MICHAEL IDEHALL Interview

 

Michael Idehall is a Swedish artist, musician, visual creator, and writer who started Belzebez.  His work doesn't fit into neat categories, but it systematically explores the places where mind, matter, and spirit meet. His work doesn't try to entertain or add to culture; instead, it tries to break through the normal way of seeing things and open a door to a dimension that isn't separate from the everyday world but is hidden by the weight of habit. Because he knows that everything around us, from sounds to gestures, possesses latent energetic charges, his creative process pays near-surgical attention to these invisible connections. The coming together of the old and new doesn't seem like a case of naïve futurism or nostalgia, but rather a deliberate clash between symbolic systems that continue to throb under the veneer of technological modernity. The natural and the artificial, once seen as diametrically opposed, become complementary components of the same flow in Idehall's work.  As a top-notch deconstructionist, he breaks down cultural, religious, and aesthetic structures to look at how they work on the inside. He doesn't want to destroy them; he wants to show how they work energetically. In his music and visual art, the spirit is not just a figure of speech; it's a real thing that goes through the object and turns it into a way to experience something. His artistic output posits that the world is neither finite nor depleted, asserting the existence of dynamic thresholds and suggesting that creation, approached with discipline and insight, can facilitate perceptual transformation… Let’s explore what Mr Idehall has to say here…

Your music has been described as seancetronic, a term that opens doors to the ritual, the dreamlike and the machinic. What does that concept mean to you and how do you feel it in your own body when you're creating?

Adopting the genre denomination Seancetronica for my first album release back in 2012 was a conscious tactic that I employed in order to avoid the aesthetic trappings of other genres. I attempted to describe the concept in the esoteric journal Feral Transmissions 2: "The term Seancetronica has been adopted in order to describe a particular method of esoteric music technology, which is harmonious with the Draconian current of sorcery in its ideology, procedure, and cosmology. Seancetronica is a synthesis of the words seance and electronica since it contains elements of both, but is itself something completely different. The term does not exclude or include any specific music, but is rather a means of formulating and exploring esoteric concepts that have existed for some time within the creative occult milieu. The seance element of the term seemed appropriate because its French etymologically pertains to a duration by means of a session, which entails a beginning and an end, and it also describes a stationary process, not unlike a meditative ritual, which makes it a more pertinent analogy than a broader and more general term (magic, ritual, Qliphoth etc.)"My approach to music is quite shamanic in nature and the instruments that I use to produce my art respond to me in an animistic way. Whatever vibrations or intelligences my day is under the auspice of will intervene and assist me as I engage with the electronics and the materials. It is like a possession where I allow my inner fire to intermingle with forces beyond time and space. Sometimes I feel cleansed by the process and other times I feel that I have entered into a new phase of my artistry and that more work is required to fully reify that experience.

In works such as Deep Code Sol or Apokryphos, the listener perceives a sound architecture that oscillates between the industrial, the mystical and the apocalyptic. Do you build these landscapes from a meditative state or from an almost physical, bodily pulse?

Each composition comes from its own place in the sense that some are written more by me and others less. Bertiaux's book Cosmic Meditation comes to mind. Perhaps I have become so accustomed to the non-ordinary consciousness associated with artistic endeavours that I do not notice when I enter and exit.

Your sound installations seem to invoke not only an aesthetic but an atmosphere of presences. Do you conceive of sound as a living entity capable of inhabiting a space, beyond the human ear?

Everyone who has studied acoustics knows that it is a metaphysical field of knowledge. Sound has intelligence and a viscous purpose. To quote from my previously mentioned article:  

"From the perspective of Draconian sorcery, the universe is not first and foremost a place of solid objects but rather a place of vibrating energies. Our consciousness can be viewed as residing at a nexus or a point of assemblage for several modes of vibrating energy and this is also where our experience of perception originates."

You are both a painter and a musician and a writer. Where is a work first born: in the image, in the sound or in the word? Or are they manifestations of the same inner source?

All of my work originates in an unseen location. The different mediums which I then employ to manifest the final pieces are like a matrix of approximation. None of them provide an accurate depiction but they all reveal something that is true.

In Pyramidox Vel Heb A Qual and your other books there is a language that seems to be a hybrid between poetry, alchemy and manifesto. Do you feel that writing is also a ritual, an invocation in itself?

Writing, in a foreign language nonetheless, requires a particular kind of mindset which restricts my movement in a certain way. Even though the authoring of text is quite a cerebral process, I always attempt to maneuver my consciousness into a receptive and magical state.  

You have spoken of magic and art as the same channel. How do they merge into your practice: as personal symbols, as objective energies, or as a dialogue with the unknown?

The Great Dragon must rise through the actions of the sorcerer and I believe that the abstraction of an artistic practice lends itself particularly well to such a task. The reification of spirit into matter is a process of alchemy and it would be difficult for me personally to separate art from magic.

The repetition and rhythmic minimalism in your music seem to be reminiscent of both a mantra and the echo of a machine. What role does repetition play in your spiritual and aesthetic vision?

My musical artistry is to some extent split in twain: there is the music that I create for outer sources (record labels) which contains a lot of rhythmic elements and then there is the music that is composed for ritual purposes alone which contains fewer rhythms and is often presented as longform pieces (most of them released on BELZEBEZ). My outer music contains tropes and motifs which are often familiar to the listener and is written to be engaging also in a mundane way. Here, repetition is key for our listening and understanding of the music and this seems to be a fact of our psycho-acoustical otology. Our heartbeat, our mind, our days: repeating rhythms which create a pattern on which we can project subject and externalize experience in order for us to comprehend it.    

The concept of "apocalypse" in your work seems more intimate than catastrophic. Is the apocalypse for you a personal revelation, an inner revelation rather than an end of the world?

The end is always present: Death is stalking us our entire life. In my work I have approached the apocalypse in the sense of initiation. There is a place which frightens us the most and that is the place of power. We must enter that horrific destination in order to grow and become renewed. The end of the world is a symbol for the end of my world and the end of my old self. Not to appear solipsistic but I can only interpret the universe through the lense of my own path and experiences of it.

Which artists, musicians or thinkers have been true invisible companions in your creative and spiritual process? 

Early on I developed an appreciation for composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis but I also enjoy listening to folk/tribal music from around the world. As a devoted perennialist, I believe that all human experience is connected and therefore a tribe on a remote island can share their symbols with me.

In your literature the cryptic, the esoteric and the gnostic appear. Do you feel that you write to be understood or to provoke a state in the reader, even if he does not understand all the keys?

My texts are never authored to be cryptic but I sometimes use poetic aesthetics to help the reader to enter a conducive state of mind. I try to use Occam's razor and remove anything which is not absolutely necessary. In the same way as I create my music, I try to be exact when it comes to detail and I do not try to confuse the listener unless there is a point to it. 

The visual aesthetics of your albums, from covers to art, seem like a mirror of what it sounds like. How do image and sound dialogue for you in the same creative ritual?

Many of my albums were not designed by me. Often, I have channeled a catalogue of symbols and patterns which I then send to the designer to incorporate into the design. Leaving this important part of the work to another person creates a magical potential. Think of it as a form of automatism. 

Your works seem to navigate between myth, science and technology. Do you see a bridge between the ancient magical tradition and contemporary technological thinking?

Modernity is only an illusion in my opinion. We are the same creatures who wandered out of Africa and we always will be. Everything that we create is a manifestation of our humanity, for good and for bad. Ancient magical traditions are present here and now because we are here and our minds and hearts are unchanged through the generations.

In your pieces you can perceive both beauty and unease. Do you think that art should reconcile opposites or open wounds that do not heal? 

Art has the same terrible potential as magic, I believe. For me, art is a conduit of both healing and harm. With my art I attempt to project the gnosis of the microcosm of my magical universe into the macrocosm of the world. I sincerely hope that when I depict the myriad of ways in which I break, others can become whole from the recorded experience.

How is your relationship with the public? Do you create to share a message, or to invite others to immerse themselves in a state that is inevitably personal?

One of the main objectives of my artistry is to create and project a conduit between my magical universe and the existential sphere of other people. I believe in collectivism, both magical and mundane. We grow through sharing and understanding each other because we are all a part of a great cycle of returning feedback, small points of power in a great Dragon of magic.  

The book Feral Transmissions talks about the wild and the primitive. What does "feral" mean to you in a world so domesticated by rationality and technology?

The term "feral" was chosen to describe an ideology of reenchantment of the world and an uncensored magical signal which was pure in the sense that it was not shaped to fit the square hole of contemporary magical publication and organization. To quote the editorial of the first instalment: "It will serve as the vanguard of experimental occult artistic expression within the scope of contemporary initiatory sorcery. As the name suggests, this journal strives towards uncovering the wild location in the human being, from where a raw signal of pure magical creativity can be channeled and transmitted into the world."

Your practice seems to be sustained by a balance between discipline and trance, between the rational and the irrational. How do you handle that tension in your day-to-day life as an artist?

Being a human is difficult. I have yet to discover the secret to being complete and, if you will, perfect. All we can do is to struggle on and attempt to find comfort where we can. 

The notion of the sacred in your work does not seem to be linked to dogmas but to direct experiences. How do you understand the sacred in the 21st century?

In my experience, the truly sacred and holy cannot be violated. It is not affected by mundane comings and goings but is, like a star, a remote beam of essence that enters our world from afar. I have previously mentioned both modernity and reenchantment, and I believe that the reader should be able to notice a pattern by now. To me, magic exists beyond time and space and is woven into the fabric of our world. The attitudes of people may change but the emmanations are still there. 

Finally, if you could leave a single work as a will, would it be a record, a painting, a book... or something intangible, such as an inner state transmitted to whoever approaches your work?

Recently, I saw that you can have your ashes made into a vinyl record. I want to leave myself as a necromantic artifact for future generations of sorcerers to use in their magical pursuits. I donate my body to magic.     

 

Michael Idehall

https://idehall.bandcamp.com