In The Light of A Thousand Flames

Spell—A Waxing Moon Over Babylon (2024 / Hypnotizing Heavy Metal)

Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re doing something a bit different; it’s called self-promotion, sweaty.

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I have been making posters, logos and merch for bands on & off for about 30 years now.

I was doing this most consistently during the great gigposter boom of the early 2000s, but by 2010, my focus had shifted back to my contemporary art roots. Occasionally I would still do something here and there though, for friends. Now, I seem to be doing this kind of thing again, with increasing frequency. I guess I can’t stay away from it.

Recently, I was asked to work on a video.

What follows below (besides said video) is my artist talk about it, because some people find that type of thing interesting and I have an overwhelming need to explain my experience working on this.

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Spell is a heavy metal band from Vancouver, British Columbia, whose core members are two brothers. They’ve had a few lineup changes, and have put out four excellent albums that I highly recommend. They’re a fantastic band that just keeps getting better and more interesting. I feel like it’s hard to even categorize them as Heavy Metal at this point—expect elements of Prog, Goth, Hard Rock, Postpunk if you want to start trying to define things.

They’re also good friends and we share a love of the cult band, The Devil’s Blood (who I’ve posted about before). It was unexpected, but it made sense when they approached me about getting involved with a video they wanted to do for their upcoming cover of The Devil’s Blood’s calls to the she-demon, Lilitu (Lilith).

Without hesitation, absolutely.

I sat with their still unannounced recording for a few months, listening over and over and over and sending them emails about how I wanted to approach it; I knew almost immediately I wanted to pick back up on an animation technique I had worked with before, except this time with a better soundtrack and a bit tighter concept. I was thinking along the lines of animator Harry Smith, classic silent horror movies,1970s Giallo film trailers, and my own background of screen printed poster process. Somehow that’s all it took to get them to trust me.

Thing is, my life was absolutely chaotic in the meanwhile. I couldn’t actually sit down and get to work on it.

I could feel the pressure building to an unstable level as months passed and yet I still hadn’t actually started making anything. The email check-ins became more frequent. I didn’t know what to update other than to keep coming up with new references to where this was all heading . I started drafting out apology emails in my head that I was going to have to bail, last minute.

I was feeling t e r r i b l e.

Over the thirty-odd years of my life making artwork that has any kind of deadline, the recurring methodology is something like this:

— Clarify a project outcome

— Get really excited thinking about it

— Freeze

— Get overwhelmed and almost give up

— Have a sudden epiphany where everything becomes crystal clear and then go into an almost lunatic state of obsessive working.

It was at this midnight hour panic that I remembered the most important thing I took away from art school, which is that I’m a research based artist.

So I dug in.

About The Devil’s Blood: They were not a gimmick, like the band Venom. So any attention to occultism that I referenced had to be done as legitimately as I, a non-occultist, could convey—there had to be weight behind the ideas.

In art history classes, they referred to this as signifiers and signified.

I contacted a friend, I needed guidance. I wanted to include magic sigils. In fact, I’d wanted him to draw some for me, as he’d invest the creative power into them they required to be authentic but I was ringing him up last minute, as relayed above.

He sent me an in depth email about the song, its meanings, and some scans from some books he had regarding Lilitu.

I was off to the races. Went in deep. Read. For hours. I went down down down the rabbit hole, for about two days—just reading and thinking about the mythology of Lilith, and of how this she-demon is a signifier of the misogyny baked into so many cultures.

The hysterical woman. The seductive woman. The temptress. The evil woman.

I read bout how Lilith was Adam’s supposed first wife, cast from Eden for demanding equality with him rather than subservience, and for being cursed by God for speaking his secret name, and how a deal was struck: God would kill 100 of her demon babies a day, and if she were to find a baby wearing a protective amulet with the names of any angels, she would leave them alone. It was said she would take the form of a man’s wife and seduce him in his sleep, and households might have incantation bowls at their door designed to trap her should she stop by. She has been associated with the owl, and the snake, and the night.

There’s way more, and I’m essentially paraphrasing a lot that I’m sure readers of this usually goofy newsletter can school me on, as well as take pity on me for not knowing. I’m just a dumb guy waking up to the world, honestly.

Once I started making this from that point, a spirit seemed to take over me. I couldn’t get the song out of my head. It was constantly playing in the background of my mind. The idea too, of Lilith…she just kept appearing to me, in all the various women I’ve been involved with, as if to show me how I’d also played into that misogyny of stereotypes, of anger, and of all the things I have maybe held an unconscious contempt for about women, about sensuality, about everything. Like, it frightens me how much unrealized and internalized misogyny I have in me. Coincidentally, while I was in the middle of this all, came the ten year anniversary of Selim Lemouchi’s death by his own accord (Selim is / was the creative hand behind The Devil’s Blood, and they are inseparable). People online were discussing his effect on them. I began to feel a hand at work that was not wholly my own. It made me think about the possession of artists, and of how creative madness has been perceived of in the past.

It all got a little strange in my head. And this is the result.

My name is Jamie, I celebrate the flower of woman, and I sometimes make art for music.

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