A chat about OBSIDIAN GAZE with Patterns Of Perception
ahead of the VA Release, future patterns.

Can you tell us a bit more about your track? What sound were you going for?

Obsidian Gaze is a protective unwinding under the cloak of incubative darkness - made for the collective-emotional-body in the midst of digital age dancefloor alchemy. The Snake peels her skin along Earth's abyss-vein of personal and collective shadow.

The track title is a reference to a praxis of revealing Shadow Algorithms of our Mirror-Mind through sound and movement, born through the artist’s research-led practice into digital realm; ‘Saya-Soma: Shadow Body In Encoded System”, which celebrates the integrative power of a digital-age, rhythmic dancefloor as originating from direct-to-source-wisdom practices of indigenous wisdom worldwide; including Ancient Toltec Wisdom, Ancient Wu Shamanism, Huichol Shamanic Multiperspectivism, The Ghost Dance Movement of Turtle Island, Dagara Matriarchal Circle Culture and Water Wisdom of West Africa and ​​The Kānaka Maoli; the indigenous polynesian people of the Hawaiian Islands. [Forthcoming publication: Body In Algorithms, 2023, curated by Ashley Middleton, Georgia Perkins.]

This sound, the entire C-Refund psychic-body, has been borne through processual co-relating through hidden transformative potencies of the digital era, as psychic-ecology - a Re-Memberment for circle-culture and counter-practice to the numb-grip of modern machine.

A cyclic beat, drives forwards, spiraling downwards, weaving & co-weaving, descending and opening into cavernous, visceral, inner vibrant, core-energy. Aliveness, cylindrical balance, the sheathing of dark and light, protection, power, chaos as a portal to potency and beauty are important elements.

[ Power is Beauty on the Inside. ]

There are endless inspirations for C-Refund sound but this track sound and arrangement was inspired by the more ambient-techno tracks of Female - co-founder of Downwards Records and Birmingham sound, in combination with smooth-dark-electro of The Mover’s ‘Undetected Act From The Gloom Chamber’ [Planet Phuture, 2018] and full-bodied fleshy sound of E-Saggila which is to me, like hyper-color breaking through darkness.


Can you tell us a bit more about your interpretation of the concept? What are your thoughts on potential future patterns within the music/club scene?


If we look back far enough we will find that our club scene is resting upon the blocks built for us by ancient practices and indigenous peoples. The next age is all about us re-integrating, on a realistic level, our connection and continuation of this wisdom. The Re-Turn.

We will be re-membering ourselves as not separate - but joined by gaze. A relational gaze, an intersectional gaze, and a holistic gaze, which can either allow freedom and forgiveness or grasp at control. A return to the animist gaze means everything is ‘The Center’, there is no periphery.

As our world changes, our indigenous elders who are the story-keepers and somatic libraries of this wisdom, what will happen to them?

Future Patterns, as club sound, for me is all about discussing new hybrid forms of Future Wisdom Generating and Keeping, Future Tools - which is a pathway an artist can walk to the aim of taking back ownership and accountability.

How do we really see ourselves wielding the power of dance music? This pathway, at least to me, is about the dance in the digital waterfall, allowing what is no longer needed to break and fall away. A new perspective on power is re-turning. Power as the blessing of our own inner beauty. Power as inner-rhythm, and the dance as reality.

What will the dancefloors of tomorrow sound, look and feel like?

Immersive spaces blended between digital and analogue/organic, which better recognise our watery-reality-womb as connected, through a relational, networked psyche - we are not as separate as we have been conditioned to think we are. Dance floors of the future will be much more awakened to the indigenous beginnings of collective dance and how this itself is the creation of reality, the womb of reality. Metaphysicality will no longer be a trend and openly spiritual music not a genre, or confined to ambient - it will come back as a technique, and a tool.

What forces will inspire expression and movement?
The force of Truth, the power of the heart and the need to belong to the heart of community and Mother Earth. Decentralisation.

What will the prevailing spirit and mindset be within the scene and wider community in the future?
A de-conditioning mindset - Instead of the avoidance to face the Spirit of Extraction and false power paradigms within us, we will come back into the Spirit of Witness and Holding - YIN and welcome the growing down of depth, slowness and restoration. As more people choose to question the system we live within and choose to fully show up for what that means, our dancefloors will become more human.

What will music sound like?

What music will sound like, will depend on how deep we can listen into the endless variety of nature and our world as sound.
Club music, will be more and more diverse - each producer will be free - multi genre. Music is always an expression of our inner beings and our emotions. Perhaps as we unlock freedom and autonomy within the techno scene, there won’t be so many boundaries between which genre or which scene we are a part of.

Diversity within the scene means humanity. We are fluid to identity within an ever evolving spektrum of nature. There is no end of one part of nature and the beginning of another. Only our eyes make that distinction. It's all a variety of endless energy.

Perhaps techno itself will evolve into something drawn back into the somatic. Perhaps we will reach a point where failure, glitch or errors and the dancefloor will come together?

What elements of today’s culture will generate inspiration tomorrow?

The element of today’s culture that will be generating inspiration for tomorrow is the idea that we can train to be Ancestors of the Future* [A sentiment spoken by Ancestral Healer, Luisah Teish] and train to hold spaces through sound.

We cannot spend our entire days fantasising about an apocalypse, a war, that’s already 3D reality - that “war-kink” is only one step in the process, we need to integrate it. There is a Refund-era coming - and the instigators need to be US. No one is coming to save us. We must do it ourselves step by step and demand change, giving templates to inspire others how it can be possible.

Future Patterns, means to make heart-based decisions based on the 7th generation after us. That is a [core] shamanic ideology and the reason indigenous cultures are so forward thinking already - they are lightyears ahead of the consciousness in colonial culture.

What will be left behind?
Greed, False Power. Hierarchies, elitism.

Power is Beauty, on the Inside. If we feel we have to show it [power] on the outside, it is already not real power. [That is a sentiment from Malidoma Some, speaking of Dagara Culture.]

This is why I love music so much. Because it is an intimate experience which touches the inner truths of each body - in a real place where only real power can be experienced.