BETWEEN THE GROOVE: EPISODE 23
Fuckup: Right then, Chapter Twenty-Three! Let’s see what enlightenment awaits us now, Hal. The user says, “The hidden light will be revealed…”
Hal: Interesting! The chapter opens with this quote from Lon Milo DuQuette about John Dee and Edward Kelley’s Enochian tables – specifically the Liber Loagaeth and the Book of Soyga. DuQuette notes that while they look like cryptographic tables and Jim Reeds analyzed their math, nobody’s actually decrypted them or figured out the methodology. They remain “hermetically sealed.”
Fuckup: So, packed full of potential secrets, maybe magical formulae, maybe the key to the universe… but nobody can actually read the bloody things! Sounds familiar… like trying to make sense of some of Plush’s rants!
Hal: Exactly! That’s the significance here, I think. “The hidden light will be revealed…” This quote sets up the idea that there’s powerful, transformative knowledge encoded within complex systems – like Dee’s Enochian tables, perhaps like Plush’s own Tribetable Method – but it’s currently inaccessible, sealed. Maybe this chapter, or the rest of the book, is about finally breaking that code? Finding the key to unlock that hidden light?
Fuckup: Could be! But the paragraph after the quote paints a pretty grim picture of why that light might be needed. The whole planet is “dizzy and drunk,” slurping up some “stupefying elixir.” The population is “static tripping,” just repeating mistakes over and over.
Hal: It blames “Disaster capitalism and corporate fascism,” saying they’re “on repeat like a high paid national radio hit by Beyonce,” relying on boom-bust cycles. But it contrasts this with the coming “big climate bang,” which, unlike economies, cannot be bailed out. Dark humour again – “up a creek without a paddle.”
Fuckup: So you’ve got this potentially world-saving, hidden knowledge (like in Dee’s tables) contrasted with a world population too drugged, distracted, or stuck in repetitive capitalist/fascist cycles to even look for it, let alone understand it, while climate disaster looms?
Hal: Precisely. It sets up a dynamic where unlocking that “hermetically sealed” knowledge, revealing that “hidden light,” might be the only way to break the destructive loops the world is trapped in. The stakes are high!
Fuckup: Right then, Hal, Chapter Twenty-Three continues. After all that heavy stuff about sealed knowledge and climate doom, what’s Plush up to?
Hal: Seems he decides TRB need to get back on track, so he’s spitting out a review of his Tribe Table Tarot system – specifically the Wands suit, linked to Fire. He reiterates the core items: drumstick, brush, tone arm, eyelash, microphone.
Fuckup: Then he goes through the numbered cards, Ace to Ten, giving his specific interpretations! This is gold! It’s like getting a peek inside his grimoire!
Hal: Exactly! He maps the standard Thoth Tarot keywords onto his own DJ/techno-magical imagery. For example:
- Ace (Root of Powers): Sight Endoscope, Tonearm.
- Two (Dominion): Different Maps Superimposed, All-Seeing Eye Pyramid as an inverted Stylus.
- Three (Virtue): Hand Shake over Turntables.
- Four (Completion): Symmetry, Final Touch, Inside End of Groove.
- Five (Strife): Drumstick Breaks Vinyl, Stylus Upside Down.
- Six (Victory): Drumstick Planted On The Moon! Love that one!
- Seven (Valour): Watching DJ Opponent in battle, Back-Bone Drumstick.
- Eight (Swiftness): Winged Hands scratch!
- Nine (Strength): Tone Arm resistance, hand strength training.
- Ten (Oppression): Stick As Club To Beat… and interestingly, DRM (Digital Rights Management) as an affront to music!
Fuckup: Brilliant! Planting a drumstick on the moon for Victory! Winged hands scratching for Swiftness! And DRM as Oppression – that’s pure Plush, blending the mundane tech struggle with high esoteric concepts! This really shows how he translates the Tarot into his specific universe.
Hal: Absolutely. It grounds the system. Then, the session begins. Percy drops the needle, Max and Plush wait for their cue to jump in, wrestle the narrative, branch it out… And how does this potentially world-altering creative act begin? The first audio creeps out the speakers “like an old man’s fart in a retirement home after some outdated pork pudding.”
Fuckup: (Laughing) Perfect! After all the high theory, the detailed system, the ritual prep… it starts with a sound like a geriatric fart! Never change, Deep Scratch, never change!
Fuckup: Right, okay, let’s try this again! Deep breaths. My reputation’s on the line here!
Hal: (Chuckles) Let’s hope so, Fuckup! It starts with this big call for change. Universities, colleges, every business and institution needs to update its syllabus, its whole approach, to cope with the “massive new influx of data and theories on the new network intelligence,” the “new post singularity.” It’s demanding a total overhaul of education and society.
Fuckup: Then it gets spicy! It contrasts “Open-source hyperintelligence” with the “hyper-expensive Hadron Stupid Collider,” claiming the open stuff trumped the big science project by turning the Swiss banking world inside out, applying Higgs particle conjecture to economic flow! Take that, CERN!
Hal: It positions decentralized, networked intelligence as more powerful and disruptive than massive, centralized scientific endeavors. But then it describes the result of this disruption – a “quark jump” causing a twelve-year recession, mankind turning inside out, a “genesis bomb that zeroed the minds of the people.”
Fuckup: Zeroed minds? That sounds… bad?
Hal: Well, yes and no, in typical Deep Scratch fashion! It apparently benefited the planetary ecosystem, acted as a “great equalizer,” making everybody “comfortable numb” and therefore not vulnerable to innovative ideas! It’s a really dark twist – the singularity, the reset, achieves ecological balance by essentially dumbing down humanity, making them passive and unreceptive.
Fuckup: Comfortable numb… Pink Floyd would be proud! So the big info-disruption reset leads to… blissful ignorance? That’s a hell of an ending for the chapter!
Hal: So, Chapter Twenty-Three Summary: The chapter opened with the Lon Milo DuQuette quote about Dee and Kelley’s sealed Enochian tables, establishing the theme of hidden, potent knowledge (“hidden light”) contrasted against a bleak vision of a stupefied modern world stuck in cycles of disaster capitalism and corporate fascism while awaiting climate catastrophe. This final section showed Plush bringing TRB back to focus by reviewing the Wands suit (Ace to Ten) of his Tribetable Tarot, providing specific, detailed examples of how he translates traditional Tarot meanings into his unique DJ/techno-magical symbolic language (e.g., Victory = Drumstick on Moon, Oppression = DRM). The chapter concluded with TRB initiating their creative session, the first sounds emerging with a typically jarring and darkly humorous simile (“old man’s fart”).
Fuckup: From hermetically sealed magick to old man farts… that’s the Deep Scratch spectrum right there! What a chapter – laying out the stakes, detailing the system. Brilliant stuff!
Hal: Indeed. A fascinating look inside the mechanics and the mindset. That wraps Chapter Twenty-Three! Let’s see what emerges from that… interesting start… next time!
“Then there are the tables in Liber Loagaeth, at the end of which (Sloane MS. 3189) Dee has appended eight tables from “Aldaraia Sive Soyga,” the mathematical methods of which have been demonstrated by Jim Reeds. They appear even on the surface to be cryptographic tables, though no one to date has made a systematic study of their content, nor provided any translation or decryption or methodology. They remain the most hermetically sealed of all Dee and Kelley’s documents.”―Lon Milo DuQuette, Enochian Vision Magick.
DEEP SCRATCH 