When the Music's Over

    This journey is over. It all started seven years ago with Out There Radio, Raymond and Joe and I all crowded around the precarious microphones dangling over the soundboard in the studio at WUOG. The boys would tackle topics all over the conspiracy, occult, and paranormal radar, and they did it with such humor and insight that I was humbled and honored when they asked me to join them in the studio.

    I was terrified and my voice quavered a little the first time I sat in front of that microphone to talk about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, and the war between Magicians. Imagine my delight when they asked me to return, to contribute a recurring segment called The Invisible College. It didn't take me long to develop the persona of Austin Gandy, Sorcerer Supreme, emissary of the College of the Adepts, as this persona was simply a hypertrophism of my own tendencies to bullshit and swagger, paired with a mind predisposed to synthesizing peculiar connections between data points where there were none before. And so I became the purveyor of weird news and Forteana, refracted and reframed for humorous and illustrative effect into mystical 'insights', ostensibly in the form of press releases from the Invisible College.
   It was incredible fun. While Raymond and Joe tackled the JFK assassination, faked moon landings, Jonestown, and 9/11, I was free to talk about pro-wrestler vampires, Tanzanian buttsex demons, squeaking aliens, botched exorcisms, and a nude wet meat soil bandit bent on what could only have been a mission to destroy the world.
   After the Out There series wrapped up at fifty episodes, we joined Disinformation in 2008. We've been making podcasts for them ever since, and nothing could have prepared us for the places that this would take us. We met, networked, and collaborated with some of the finest folks I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. We kabbalistically deduced Obama's win in the 2008 election. We interviewed Alan Moore, and listened enthralled as he talked about his Magick for an hour, and terrified that he would become cross with us at any moment and hang up. We cracked the Lady Gaga Code, a moment that I hope will be preserved by some curator of high absurdity. Raymond and I, my girlfriend KT in tow, went on an official promotional tour for Disinfo, screening a movie and giving an "occult stand-up" slideshow routine across the UK and Amsterdam.

   I wish to all the gods that we had a recording of the show at the Occulture Festival. It was one of the most thrilling and surreal moments in my life, a moment when it seemed possible for two skinny occultists to be treated like real rockstars.
   I will carry to my grave the image of a cute young british girl bouncing up ahead of the applauding crowd, her face all admiration and earnestness as she proclaimed "I NEED to talk to you!"
   I was so hopped up on adrenaline and endorphins, it was all I could manage to say, "I'd LOVE to talk to you, dear, but I'm going to go smoke a fucking cigarette now." I hope she didn't take it the wrong way. She really made the moment for me, but I really needed that cigarette.

   But heavens do I digress. I treasure these memories, and many others which sprang from this collaboration, and am grateful beyond words for them. But now it is done. The final episode of the Disinformation Podcast is finished, edited, and published.

Click for listen.

   Raymond is far afield on foreign shores, expanding his world and experience. Joe is closer to home, his love and life wrapped like a warm cocoon around his beautiful baby boy. This journey is over.

   The next journey is about to begin.







EDIT: The Apex of the entire experience, of course, was meeting Ken 'BIG POD' Eakins