Nomad Codes

to approach it in a certain way. It’s always good to not know. If you approach the thing in an established way, you’re assuming that you have to do it that way because that’s what’s required. But if you just play off the energy at the time ...”
    “It’s strange,” says Alan.“ When the three of us are on stage and we’re in it and we’re on it and the electricity is moving, we get this thing going to where it’s an unexplainable phenomenon of energy. It’s like traveling overseas: how far you wanna go? We trust it, we live for it at times. And it’s an addictive thing.” The longer they have played together, the more this “invocational phenomenon” seems to occur. “I sometimes don’t know where some of this stuff comes from. Are we just receptors channeling personalities? Are some of the more flamboyant characters from the last five thousand years just pirating right through?”
    Anyone familiar with Alan’s singing would have to offer a qualified yes, as his vocal chords are regularly hijacked by a range of strange and androgynous entities: a moonshine-swilling hick, a sarcastic guttersnipe, an Indonesian banshee, and a hilarious two-bit wise guy named Uncle Jim. “Often I fall into characters that I’ve already evolved and it’s comfortable,” says Alan. “But sometimes if the path is open I can invoke some character I’ve never invoked before.” In the beginning of the aptly-named eleven-minute title track of Cameo Demons and their Manifestations , for example, Alan randomly coughs. Then he starts dredging phlegm from the back of his throat, a nauseating deep hiss that mutates into a Gollum-like wraith whose infernal whispering channels the pitch black below as eerie close-miked shaman rattles pan back and forth through the mix.
    Then there’s the matter of the garbled or fake tongues that Alan spews during some of the band’s “international” tunes. Alan knows bits of Indonesian, Spanish, and Burmese, but he’s not particularly facile with languages and some of his singing is outright glossolalia. “Sometimes I’m singing exact words from a language and sometimes I’m not singing words from any language,” he says. “And sometimes I’m singing my own language of before birth and after death.” Alan guesses this peculiar skill started when he was a kid, making fun of Chinese or the Arabic he heard at home, but now it has blossomed into an expressive art beyond linguistics—a vocalization of the unsayable. That’s also why Alan prefers to listen to music sung in languages he doesn’t understand. “I like things that are undefined. It’s the same attraction to travel, to going out as far as you can go. Whether it’s in your face or very subtle, I’m looking for the undefined.”
    I wonder how desperate this search may become. The world today is experiencing a claustrophobic saturation of mediation and control, as the totality of human existence is recoded into a grid of data that saps the romantic imagination and blocks the ancient avenues to the beyond with cheesy simulacra and manufactured fear. And so I ask them whether their search for the undefined, for the space before birth and after death, is harder to achieve these days.
    “Maybe,” says Alan. “Everything seems to be closing in. There’s a spin out there that people aren’t as free, that there’s too many rules, too many obstacles to be able to express our selves. It seems harder to get to the folkloric knowledge that could be far superior to what this reality we supposedly live in has to offer. I don’t think we’re really that restricted though. I think it’s all still there and can be tapped into. But perhaps too many people have the power now to convince us that it’s not possible.”
    In such a world, it’s good to keep the doors of perception as wide open as possible, if only for the otherworldly perspective it provides. “When I look at Attorney General John Ashcroft and company, I’m looking down at them,” says Rick. “I refuse to give them power. Sure they could come at me anytime. But until they come knocking at the door, I’m going to put myself above them. When it’s all said and done and we move on, it’s not gonna mean anything. I’m only planning for the next whatever-it-is, the next life, the next big flash. The big bright light, whenever it comes.”
    2004

THE GONE WORLD

    The Secret Museum of Mankind

    One afternoon, in the same anthropology section of San