Wildnisgeist:
a sonic ritual for summoning the other.

This album was developed gradually throughout 2016-2017. The sounds were born from ideas which came to me regarding the possibility of summoning cryptid creatures. As I have written multiple books and recorded one other full album on the subject of cryptids; created a podcast which often covers the topic; and have been on several investigations of various sightings of cryptid creatures, I have come to one conclusion: Whatever these things are, they are not regular animals of some undiscovered species. They are other. In the past we would have called them trolls, faeries, or daemons - but today, disconnected from our folklore and separated from nature where these spirits most often dwell, we stumble to find words which adequately describe the decidedly uncanny nature of these mysterious beings.
Today so many researchers try desperately to jam these creatures into modern scientific classifications. They talk of obtaining a specimen type; of relict hominids and undiscovered animals. Guesswork and conjecture are spoken as if they were fact. The origin, population numbers, diet, and family/tribal groupings of the creatures are debated amongst cryptid researchers. Meanwhile, no amount of evidence seems to be enough to convince either casual skeptic or mainstream scientist that these creatures are real. Science doesn’t have the tools to measure such things, nor the vocabulary to speak of them. Science simply isn’t prepared for the other. It is hoped by many that quantum physics, with all it’s inherent weirdness, will begin to unravel the mysteries of cryptids - but I feel it will only lead to more conjecture and guesswork.

I feel similarly about the occult. Great efforts are made to apply science to magic. Quantum physics, again, is being used to explain the possibilities of the occult - that is to say how magic might work. To my mind it’s just more guesswork and another desperate plea for the cold god SCIENCE to accept something which it never can and never will accept. Magic is our way of contacting, interacting and communing with the other. As such, I believe magic is an art, not a science. Creativity and intuition will yield better results in magic than the scientific method.

This is one reason I do not dismiss folklore out of hand as many with an interest in cryptids do. How many times I have heard a researcher hiss “that’s just folklore” in an attempt to insult or dismiss a story or an idea! Folklore, in the past, would have given us the vocabulary to at least speak of these things with some definition. Folklore has always been the myths of the people - as opposed to mythology being for the priests, so to speak. Often folklore isn’t concerned with a particular religion or god, but with passing information or wisdom through stories. Folk magic has a similar relation to “high magick” which is why I will always prefer trolldom and powwow to some kind of goetic or Thelemic religious or pseudo-religious practice.

Back to the work at hand. There are some commonalities which apply to most cryptid sightings. One of these is the proximity to creeks or other flowing water. One of the first questions I ask any witness to a cryptid sighting of any kind is: was there a creek nearby? To this date I haven’t been told “no” in answer to that particular query. The science-friendly response is along the lines of this: “Of course they are seen near creeks. All animals need water”. My creative-intuitive reply to this is: Maybe. Or maybe it is something else. Perhaps it is relative to the movement of water over certain kinds of stone or over the earth itself. Or perhaps it’s something else we haven’t considered...

I was hiking one day and pondering this “maybe”. I was on top of a high ridge and just as the trail started to descend in a series of switchbacks I was greeted with the sound of a rushing creek from the valley below. It is a sound I count among my favorites in all the world. On this particular day I was struck with the notion that maybe it is this sound which has something to do with the cryptids’ appearance near creeks. Maybe the ever-changing rush and bubbly drone sounds somehow draw the creatures from wherever they normally dwell and into our world. Maybe the creatures use the sound in some way to enter our world from the other... and maybe we could use the sounds to draw them here as well.

I began to carry a recorder with me on all of my hikes. I sat quietly and recorded many creeks on my journeys - or left recorders on rocks and logs in the middle of streams only to return and gather them later. These creek sounds are the bones of this working.

I added to the creek recordings sounds I recorded on a number of paranormal and cryptid investigations and at reportedly haunted locales. Some of these were common “natural” animals like frogs, crows, owls, and other birds - but other sounds were unexplained - including unidentified animal noises, screams, and some very odd “speech” I captured after leaving the recorder overnight at a highly active area for paranormal / cryptid sightings. These sounds were included as an act of sympathetic magic - like attracts like.
Along with these various field recordings I played harmonium, srutibox, and tamboura-lyre. All of these sounds - the instruments, the creeks and the other sounds were combined and manipulated in various ways in an effort to build the sound-ritual at hand. My goal was to make something that is interesting to listen to as a piece of drone music as well as a functional sonic ritual.

How do you use this ritual? That is up to you. You can incorporate it with your own practices: sigils, spells of summoning, or your magical method(s) of choice. You can add the trappings of your religion as you see fit. Be creative. Listen to your intuition.

You can listen to it while sleeping via headphones or on a speaker set just loud enough where you must concentrate on the music to hear it. What will visit you in your dreams?

OR you can simply play the sounds. I recommend playing this piece out loud on speakers, as opposed to just using headphones, at a comfortable volume and allowing time for the recording to play all the way through (it is approximately 62 minutes). I have had some success with this in the form of poltergeist-like activity following me for some days after playing the recording.

This poltergeist activity brings me to the name of this album, Wildnisgeist. The term was coined by my friend and fellow paranormal author, Joshua Cutchin in an article he wrote on bigfoot creatures. Josh along with Seriah, host of the paranormal radio show / podcast Where Did the Road Go?, pointed out to me how often things otherwise attributed to bigfoot in the woods mirror poltergeist phenomena in houses. Knocks, disembodied screams and voices, stones being thrown, horrible smells, etc. This was quite the revelation to me and has lead me to wonder how often bigfoot encounters are actually some kind of poltergeist encounter and, inversely, could some poltergeist encounters have something to do with bigfoot? Are they the same thing entirely or some kind of a manifestation of the same (or similar) things? The poltergeist resides in houses or other structures. The wildnisgeist lives in the wild. It seemed to me the perfect title for this work and I am overjoyed that Joshua gave me his blessing to use it.