From a text I wrote about this at the time of its release:

“Dawn” comes. The bass line echoes the melody of “Death Tunnel”, signaling return. Although we are beginning again everything looks, sounds and feels different. We are much stronger now. As the sun comes up and edges begin to become clear again, we drive slowly through the still sleeping city.

Black Meteoric Star - 06. Dawn

From a text I wrote about this at the time of its release:

In “Dream Catcher” it becomes clear that neither the masculine nor the feminine side can win. They
have to coexist, and can, when each side acknowledges its own strengths and resolves to use them toward a mutual end. In terms of the club land metaphor this is the point in the night where people hook up. As the longest of the six tracks its story is about total surrender. For me it evokes both lovers surrendering to each other and the devotee surrendering to his God. At this moment we acknowledge that there is no way out but through.

Black Meteoric Star

Black Meteoric Star - 05. Dream Catcher

From a text I wrote about this at the time of its release:

The second single “Dominatron / Anthem” takes place after midnight. The animal energy encountered in “World Eater” is released and splits itself into female and male parts. This 12” is the story of their struggle for power over one another.  “Anthem” is the masculine side. As in a possession ritual, each side appears and does its dance.

Black Meteoric Star - 04. Anthem

From a text I wrote about this at the time of its release:

The first single “Death Tunnel / World Eater” Tells the story of the entry into night. In “Death Tunnel” the rhythmic lines lose their edges as they repeat. We are driving fast and want to get where we are going. This creates a particular kind of ecstasy. As in twilight, borders become unclear and the boundary between inner and outer becomes soft. A sound like electronic waves links the experience of nightfall to entering the ocean, as both are vast, unknowable places of transformation. The sound of the waves passes and we become fully submerged.

Black Meteoric Star - 01. Death Tunnel

From a text I wrote about this at the time of its release:

The second single “Dominatron / Anthem” takes place after midnight. The animal energy encountered in “World Eater” is released and splits itself into female and male parts. This 12” is the story of their struggle for power over one another. “Dominatron” is the feminine side.  As in a possession ritual, each side appears and does its dance.

Black Meteoric Star - 03. Dominatron

“Shelled Landscape” is the reality of what happens when those in power are given free reign. It is the reality of much of the surface of the earth today whether it be the embattled oceans, metaphorically shelled as they are filled with waste or even literally shelled through their use as the site for military testing, mines, submarine warfare and missile launches… Or the bombed out areas which, having outlived their use, are abandoned by profiteers though many still live there and build their communities despite the deprivation of resources… Landscapes shelled by forced labor, mining, logging, drilling, fracking… Countless nations decimated by wars of power, decade after decade, total unending unwindable wars for wars sake. Gentrification produces wave after wave of metaphorical Shelled Landscapes as entire communities and ways of life are stamped out or displaced by increasingly corporate and useless businesses and temporary residences for the rich and out of touch. To speak of this landscape as post apocalyptic would be to ignore that many are already living the apocalypse. And still, communities are built, children are raised, gods of truth and justice are worshipped, bonds are made, the human spirit is strong despite the merciless greed of those who wish to harness it for their profit.

“No Map” emerges directly from the sound of the track that comes before it as a new consciousness, a new wildness born from a landscape of apparent destruction. It clearly proposes that salvation lies in nature, but not in the exploitation of nature. Salvation lies in total surrender to nature. The map will annihilate us, we must put it down and listen to the voices of our ancestors and the spirits of nature within us. No human power can save us, make us safe, give us direction. Stop trying to fix it. Stop trying to make it work. Stop trying to protect your pride. Get lost. Give up. Let the wild swallow you whole and spit you out as you were meant to be. It knows. It has been moving since long before we were born.

The Xecond Xoming of Black Meteoric Star

07 - 08. Shelled Landscape - No Map

“Deceptive Surfaces” surround us and drag us into a world of illusion in which we are in constant competition with each other. These surfaces also, because they emerge from the divine source, contain a spiritual essence within them. The challenge is to perceive them for what they are, not what they claim to be. The willingness of the military industrial complex to maintain and expand power by any means should not be underestimated. Futuristic weaponry built for the total conquest of the natural world and mass exploitation of humanity lurk just beneath the Deceptive Surface of wars against drugs, terror and the rhetoric of freedom, democracy and liberty for all. The official version of history is an illusion. When we speak of stealth technology we can understand that concept to operate on at least two levels. On one level this is technology that operates without detection by radar or other forms of surveillance… However this technology is also stealth in that it is used to accomplish tasks with very different goals than those which were stated to legitimize its creation and use. So here is musical stealth technology repurposed for freedom fighting, its surface purpose is to entertain, but that surface is also deceptive for just beneath it lies the strong motive to liberate the truth, create a network of interaction between humans that serves their actual needs and melt systems of top down exploitative organization.

06. Deceptive Surfaces

“Physicality” states firmly the desire for bodies in the presence of one another. For interaction on a nonlinguistic intuitive level. For the collision of sound and flesh, the experience of collective connection. For direct connection with our elders, not just their words and voices but their aura, their breath, their hair and eyes, the sound of their hands moving as they speak. For love across the spectrum that we have been taught to refer to as gender, for real first hand experience of those whose experience differs wildly from our own… Society has become organized into a perverse database of types and classifications that actually deny the reality of what each of our individual bodies is speaking to us, a physical reality that is constantly in flux and defies all categorization. Bodies in motion, bodies in communication, bodies living , bodies dying, bodies being born again.

05. Physicality

“Cave Wall Shadows” refers to both the metaphorical and literal act of living in a cave. It inhabits the cross roads at which these two concepts become the ultimate contradiction. Plato’s metaphorical description of society as a group of people sitting around a fire in a cave watching shadows and believing they are real life juts abruptly into the stark reality of life in the most basic of dwellings with physical survival at the forefront of the daily rhythm. More and more techno-fascist society stretches us between these extremes. In the midst of this relentless war on the spirit it is not surprising that a desire to return to a more “primitive” way of life manifests even among the elite… Who is really down for it remains to be seen. When all is said and done we, the modern cave dwellers will not continue to be mesmerized by the shadows on the wall, projections of others’ dreams of who we should be. We will claim the fire for ourselves.

04. Cave Wall Shadows

“Street Lamps All Out” is the collapse of infrastructure. Total shut down. The deprivation of utilities such as electricity or water is used as a method of control. Street Lamps All Out is an indication of where a neighborhood, district or entire city stands in the value system of capitalist and colonialist exploitation. When the Street Lamps are All Out those in power are afraid. In the darkness of the unlighted street plans are made and carried out. We become invisible. Under cover of night, forces of resistance gather and create new methods of understanding. The borders between things soften. That our streets must be lighted at night, that we can be controlled by whether or not we have this light, that we are unsafe without it, these are not fixed truths. Human kind has lived by the light of the sun by day and the dark of the stars by night for thousands of years. Turn out the lights.

03. Street Lamps All Out

“Hostile to Categorization” speaks to the corrosive effects of genre classification, a practice deeply tied to the colonial world view. Genre classification, a marketing tool which actually suppresses rather than facilitates the experience of music imprisons meaning and blurs the critical territory between expression and imitation. Music exists in the charged space between the music maker and the music listener, even if those two roles manifest in the same body. The more one experiences this simple fact, the more resistant one becomes to the the externally imposed hegemonic desire to place this singular experience in one box or another to be repeated, repackaged, regurgitated and ultimately relegated to the junk pile.

02. Hostile To Categorization

“Symbols Drawn in Marker” describes the survival of the creative impulse in a mechanized world, despite the relentless attempts of technological hegemony to erase individual voices of resistance people have always taken to the streets to express their truth in images and words, overlapping and editing one another. A model for a social organization that honors difference without absorbing it as “diversity”. Marks of power are etched on the walls, as was done from time immortal. We can make our individual truths heard outside of capitalized systems of communication exchange. We may break the law or damage property, but we must question who are the authors of these laws, the owners of this property? Do they share our truth?

01. Symbols Drawn In Marker

From a text I wrote this at the time of its release:

When I hear the bass line of “World Eater” I see the shoulder muscles of a big cat like a leopard or a panther as it prowls through the jungle. The song tells the story of discovering the restless animal inside oneself. This part comes alive at night. “World Eater” was created under circumstances such that I have no idea how many of the sounds were achieved.

Black Meteoric Star - 02. World Eater

Death Tunnel / World Eater

Death Tunnel (12" Version)

Death Tunnel

Dominatron

Dreamcatcher / Dawn

Dawn (12" Version)

Dreamcatcher (12" Version)

World Eater

Dreamcatcher

Anthem

World Eater (12" Version)

No More White Presidents

Three Trains

Coffin Maker

Stealth Technology

Black Meteoric Star is an ongoing experimental performance project of interdisciplinary artist and Voluminous Arts founder Gavilán Rayna Russom. Beginning in 2006, to date the Black Meteoric Star project has included audio recordings, works of visual and graphic art, videos, social media transmissions, live performances, and writing. Black Meteoric Star has released recorded music accompanied by graphic artwork via DFA Records, Nation, Modern Obscure Music, and Voluminous Arts. In addition to presenting performances in clubs and underground art spaces, Black Meteoric Star has appeared at museums, galleries, and festivals, sometimes in collaboration with the artist collective Assume Vivid Astro Focus. In 2017 Black Meteoric Star appeared in, and composed the soundtrack for, Gavilán Rayna Russom's film No More White Presidents.

Black Meteoric Star

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