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Watch any top ten video on youtube with a title that rings somewhere between “Top Ten Reasons Why To Move To Portland OR” and “Six Things That Suck About Portland OR” and undoubtedly lurking between #2 and #4 will be someone either complaining or heralding how weird the city is. “It is just so weird there”. “Everyone is weird”. “The music is weird”. But in a world where every music scene across the planet is filled to the brim with flannel wearing, bearded noise musicians sawing through bass drum heads with one hand while eating coconut pie with another, at the same time as turning up the delay on a modular thingamabob with their toe (no, really, check out the DOdiy entries for Arizona, Brazil, and Turkey, as well as the basement show happening down the street from you while you are reading this), in a world such as this, can anything really, truly, claim to be different?
Not that there’s anything wrong with the aforementioned performance artist archetype, (really, everything has a time and a place), but my favorite fringe artists have a narrative that comes along with them, some kind of story to tell about their relationship to home: and whether they are coming to it, leaving it, or carving it out of the pure essence of reality. And this is where the podcast “Wayward Worship”, prepared and curated by We The Hallowed comes in: a monthly to bi-monthly collection of artists, musicians, and magicians who come together (or work apart), to pull the veil up just a little bit and let us see just another inch farther down the yellow brick road. I had the honor of catching up with Keats Ross (also known as Dakota Slim): one of the leaders of this “Open source art-religion” in between his many endeavors to get some answers about the big moves this pacific northwest collective is making!
BH: If music is a magickal act in and of itself, it could be theorized that even performers who are not actively treating their music as a ritual are still generating energy in such a way. If this is true, how do you think it affects the importance of interviewing and archiving people who are connecting their spirituality and musicianship in a more intentional way?
KR: Allowing artists the forum to showcase their creative exorcisms through the artistic ritual of performance, to investigate or share their deepest creative intentions through discussions and lectures and to integrate the individual artist within a community that celebrates the confluence between magick and the artistic process is We The Hallowed’s (the collective behind Wayward Worship) purest intention.
All artists and luminaries associated with the collective, or attend the salons and are guests on the podcast are fully aware of the metaphysical ouvre of the collective. We have no intention in proselytizing “occulture” so it’s not a prerequisite to be involved and I make a concerted effort to tether creators who are either uninterested or unaware of the mystical hoopla. Initially, I found myself explaining too much for fear of discouraging potential guests or listeners, but I had a revelatory moment when I was able to distill the idea of “magick” to a universal tenet:
creation (specifically artistic) is to physically manifest psychical concepts through the ritual and ceremony of the creator’s artistic process. This is the pure, irrefutably pragmatic definition of magic(k), and one that helps rid “magick” of all the high-falootin’ esoterica that sullies the initial interest of the “uninitiate.”
Sometimes I like to think the Wayward Worship podcast is an outreach program for the “magic(k)ally discouraged” artist, and if the ideas therein sing to them, we give them a community to explore the concepts within We The Hallowed!
BH: You get some amazing conversations out of the podcast. Obviously your guests have some neat stuff to say, but there seems to be some skill coming from you as a guider of interviews as well. Where does this come from?
KH: My unwavering investigative nature and obsessive curiosity, somewhat unfortunately, is a transcendent engram, no doubt consistent amongst many lives and deaths. I’m a fervently interested conversationalist, and thankfully, that sincerity overshadows a lot of my insecurities as a novice host! I must say that creating, producing, hosting and editing my first foray into podcasting as a series of live events have revealed a plethora of bad conversational habits and unrefined interviewing techniques. A trial by fire, indeed! As I muster through the live recorded conversations for upcoming releases, I’m generally unimpressed with my poise; I believe I had an uncomfortable need to pander to the live audience through humor or by keeping the topics more general than I’d like – so henceforth the format of the show will be largely intimate and in-depth conversations. I have a long road ahead when it comes to podcast professionalism but I look forward to straightening my sea legs.
BH: As someone who grew up strictly anti religious and anti christianity but now works as a music director in a church, I have come to find how wonderful it can be to have someone perform a personal piece or song during a sermon. When listening to Wayward Worship, that is how it felt when you had the guest musicians perform. Would you mind speaking to that?
KR: I grew up catholic for the first half of my childhood with my mother, Jewish for the latter half under my step-mother, and all the while visiting my father who lived on Marilyn Ferguson’s compound which hosted heretical figureheads and heroes like Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary bopping around my peripheral. Here’s a video of my father interviewing RAW from that era. These extreme contradictory environments only fueled my fascination with theology, spiritually, sure, but more applicably, the western concepts of “church” and “communal worship” (see: WE THE HALLOWED). Forever a shit-kicker when it comes to the big bad Christian Church, WE THE HALLOWED is structures as a religious-anonymous as an anti-dogmatic institution while deconstructing the Christian church’s structure. Naturally, the only way to solidify such blaspheme was with an evangelical satire, thus Wayward Worship.
Wayward Worship’s initial conception was to be a video based, punk-rock televangelist variety-hour. Years ago a pilot was shot keeping with this intention (I’m not sharing but it’s easy to find) but the ambitious production stalled due to a lack of post-production help. This past year, when the collective was awarded a monthly residency at the Waypost here in Portland, I decided to rebirth and reformat these showcases into Wayward Worship but as a live podcast with hopes of integrating film- it successfully merged the monthly salons, showcases and W†H meetings – and although I toned down my glossolalia-inducing southern-preacher character for the first few episodes, the format will slowly morph back into the hyper variety-hour, tent revival format…
BH: What other activities does We The Hallowed take part in? What are you excited about for the future?
KR: W†H just completed the live residency last month, so while I continue to experiment with the podcast’s format, record more conversations and release new episodes bi-monthly, the intention is for W†H to recalibrate to more philanthropic endeavors such as clothing and supply drives for local homeless encampments here in Portland. Last year was a huge year for this recent iteration of the collective…collaboratively, we released our first literary and art zine, a music compilation, the residency, the podcast, not to mention the multitude of individual members’ projects that were released… so personally, as “Revelator” of the thing, I’d like to focus back on the tenets, the spiritual minutiae, of the W†H philosophy, “THE LIBER YOSOTROS”. My goal is collaboratively editing and publishing the first edition of its scriptures this year. Of course, we’ll continue to host salons but focusing more on injecting new artists and thinkers into the collective and act as publisher and record label to release and promote members’ individual albums, chapbooks, videos, etc. We’ve proven to be a pragmatic (pragmagick™) and productive art collective by releasing collaborative efforts across most artistic mediums, now it’s time to tend to the community’s spiritual infrastructure and maintain a creative homeostasis that self-sustains individual members and the collective as a whole.
