#virtualplaygroundfest

LORD (A Spotify Playlist) [Click HERE to listen]

The portal continues to open, and transition continues on our plane...

LORD is a playlist of mostly electronic music: a journey of transformation.

My first exposure to electronic music was the soundtrack to Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade, by early synthesizer pioneers Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley. I still have the 7-inch picture disc I got during my first trip to Anaheim in 1974…a treasure which I played countless time on my General Electric shoebox record player in baby blue. About a year later, I went through a phase of London Phase 4 Stereo LPs. My Uncle Babi turned me on to Moog!, by Claude Denjean and the Moog Synthesizer. I remember listening to the record on his quadraphonic stereo.

Every time I listened to these records and many subsequent others, electronic music became my refuge, my zero-point center for manifesting reality. Those thoughts were the template of reality. Many epiphanies were had on the rocking chair at the terrace, or in the music room. I would land again in my body after listening.

Via acid house and Detroit techno during formative first years in New York, the point of contact deepened, aided by mystical repetition, and layering of chords.

Jim turned me on to the Virtual Playground Fest presented by EDM Chicago, broadcast May 30 on Twitch. As I listened to the sets over the course of the weekend, I was humming and celebrating and feeling generously nourished by the energy, spirit, and melodic program of the music.

I was enthralled by the selection of techno and house music in endless variation, played by a parade of DJs in one-hour sets broadcast from their homes…so connected to the historic jams of the 1980s and beyond.

Inspired, I put together this playlist of some of those seminal jams, mixed in with ones I heard during the broadcast. In a way, this is a techno version of my playlist The Other Cheek. After all, today’s electronic dance music festivals can be traced to the classical music festivals of the 1800s to 1920s.

The cover image is Lord by Bubi Canal, a part of the Hologram project, where the character appears in video. Bubi made the headpiece, bracelets, and necklaces; he had the hen wand in his collection for several years, waiting to find its place in a photo.

According to The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, edited by Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin for Taschen, hens inspired alchemy’s image of the “chick-point of the egg as the mystic germ or center brooded into life by the henlike heat of the unconscious and the meditation of the adept.”