I: The Beginning.

“I'm going to do this until all hell blows into the world. It's got to be over the edge ice-age and back again.” “You just have to give in to it, and then start from there”*

It’s been more than a year now since my harrowing ordeal at the hands of Wilkes-Krier and his accursed melodies. I have during the past fourteen months, by various means, printed and electronic, attempted to warn others of the mental and physical risks posed by interacting with this blood-boiling music and its sinister and obscure composer. I fear, however, that my exhortations have fallen upon deaf ears - ears deafened by those very infernal and delirious strains I have so earnestly tried to decry! There seems little I can do to stem the tide of young people who have become enraptured by this dissolute young warlock and his gospel of unrestrained hedonism.

Nevertheless I must beg those of you left who may not yet be totally lost, to heed my words. Do not enter lightly into communion with this music. This music is a force beyond anything you can conceive of! Wilkes-Krier does not create songs – he creates precise mathematical equations designed to work chemically on the body and brain to produce a specific, and ultimately terrifying effect. The loss of mental and physical control you will experience at a Wolf-Kult congregation is not happenstance nor accident. It is the direct result of thousands of man-hours spent in pursuit of groupings of notes which will bring about these precise spasms of the body and mind. The songs have been painstakingly constructed with a meticulous hand and a scrupulous ear to induce a state of blind euphoria in the listener, a state in which all laws, rules, and even one’s very understanding of space and time are lost in a chaotic kaleidoscope of sound, image and sensation.

Wilkes-Krier has been alarmingly upfront about his desire to annihilate all existing regulations, ordinances, and hierarchies, claiming he will soon “crash down all walls, all boundaries, all rules, take it all in and make it all [his] own.” However, even this is not enough for the lupine prophet of apocalyptic ecstasy, and he has darkly hinted that the music “is just the beginning, the key to unlocking a huge vast universe.” Even more ominous is the fanatical ardour with which his followers seem bent on translating this insane dream into reality. The throngs of ‘sensory-extremists’ who gather together to celebrate their own rabid exultation are to be the shock troops in the Wolf King’s assault on the pillars of reality. So just where is this maleficent ‘musician’ with his hungry eyes and Pied-Piper grin leading his lunatic flock? What does he mean by his cryptic talk of keys, gateways, and doorways to a mysterious “unending, inexhaustible source of strength and energy?” My own experience, those many months ago in that tenebrous ballroom, convinced me that Wilkes-Krier must be stopped at all costs, lest something utterly beyond human endurance and comprehension be loosed upon the world! But before I speak of this coming inferno, we must first examine the methods by which W.K. has laid the foundations for his insane programme. If there is any hope of stopping him and his zealous adherents we must first understand by what means they intend to carry out their scheme, so that we might alert others to the grave danger this music poses to every man, woman and child on the face of the earth.

II: Music and the Human Brain.

“All I'm looking for is that chemical rush that starts in my stomach and goes to my head and spreads throughout my body and causes me to have chills and tears in my eyes.”

It is well known that all manner of self-proclaimed mystics, prophets, writers, artists, bohemian degenerates and charlatans have experimented with countless psychotropic substances in the hopes of opening the ‘doors of perception’ or experiencing some otherworldly state of being. Thankfully the only danger these sordid reprobates usually pose is to their own already disordered brains. However, imagine for a second if somehow the dislocating, psychoactive effects of the fringe-dweller’s ‘trip’ could be transmitted to others? What if it was possible to affect the brain chemistry of not one, but thousands, or even millions of people at the same time, without any of them imbibing an illicit substance! It is a terrifying prospect, yet this is exactly what happens at a Wilkes-Krier Krash-Party.

It is an established fact that music has a direct effect on an area of the brain known as the amygdala, which is known to be the ‘seat of all emotion.” Through the use of specific, orchestrated, explosive sounds Wilkes-Krier has discovered a way of triggering the amygdala which, through it’s neuronal connections with the pituitary and hypothalamus causes the adrenal gland to swell and flood the body with cortisol. It is this deluge of cortisol that causes the so called ‘adrenal rush’ many people experience while absorbing W.K.’s music. This ‘cortisol cataract’ causes a kind of berserk fury which fills the brain with red-fog and causes the extremities to flail wildly, often making the listener a danger to himself or those in his immediate vicinity. It is the opinion of most learned medical scientists that the protraction of this heightened, hyper-alert, ‘fight-or-flight’ state is highly dangerous, and can lead to a total dissipation of the body’s energies and the utter exhaustion of the immune system.

The diabolic genius of Wilkes-Krier is that simultaneously as his music sends the listeners body into this potentially lethal state of emergency it activates the ‘total bliss’ center of the brain which saturates the bloodstream in serotonin, melatonin, norepinephrine and epinephrine. The music orchestrates these various chemical processes so that the listener/victim is subject to conflicting feelings of excitement, panic, elation, terror and ecstasy. One has the feeling of being entirely engulfed, swept away in a tidal wave of sound. You have the sensation that the music is pouring into your body, liquefying the organs and filling the chest cavity with molten steel. The sound pushes its rough thumbs into your skull-sockets, bursting the warm jelly of your eyes and boiling your brain in it’s own cranial fluid. Worse yet is the knowledge that you are powerless to stop it. The music comes upon you like a thundering inferno, and you are transfixed, rooted to the spot, quaking as though you were tied to the tracks in the path of some immense screaming locomotive. Wilkes-Krier himself speaks candidly of the music as an unstoppable, inescapable force: “No matter how much you try and shield yourself, it will find you, and blow down your door, or creep through your window, or between your floorboards - no matter how thorough your efforts to seal yourself up.”

All of this neuroendocrinological manipulation of the brain’s juices and the rapid vibration of the various organs, glands, psychic centers, clusters, and cells is not carried out merely for the sake of physical pleasure, however. The physical and chemical reactions induced by exposing oneself to Wilkes-Krier’s music are but the first step towards something far more insidious. When I wrote “Shadow of the Wolf Kult” I spoke of what I then understood to be a hallucination which I experienced while under the dread influence of that devil-music. I now know that it was no mere ‘vision’ I saw, but rather that I came momentarily in contact with those forces beyond our sphere which W.K.’s music channels electrically and chemically to the brain. Now that you understand the chemical means by which the music renders the brain psycho actively susceptible to these ominous influences, we must look at the far more frightening metaphysical aspect of the music and the sinister intelligence which directs it.

III: Music and The Outer Spheres.

“Black keys, white keys laid out in an order. You can see the notes.”

One of the reasons Wilkes-Krier has been so successful in establishing the foothold he needs to bring about the great sonic cataclysm is that, by and large, people have overwhelmingly lost their fear of music. While it is true that there are many misguided parents associations and educational authorities that have organized boycotts against specific musical artists or have tried to enact legislation to control the lyrical content of so called ‘popular’ music, these groups have limited their focus to what is essentially a peripheral and irrelevant issue. If one were to use, as these groups do, profane language as the only criterion for quantifying danger in music, then W.K.’s songs would be placed in a relatively low risk category. This fact alone shows the ridiculousness of using lyrics as one’s benchmark of musical menace, for it is Wilkes-Krier’s melodies, not his words that are the key to his insane attempt to collapse the earth and the heavens. Intentionally or not, the energy poured into trivial concerns like having the cover of an album suppressed have only distracted from the true peril that his music represents.

While we in our modern technocratic world may have lost touch with our natural and primal fear of music, our ancestors have given us a model which might be used to combat W.K. and his demented acolytes. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church found itself faced with a similar problem to the one we face today. Having discovered a musical structure that appeared to offer direct communion with certain feared cosmic forces, the Church waged bloody war on the interval between the notes C and F#. This interval, known as the “tritone” was designated “the devil’s chord” by the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of the day, who wielded their then mighty influence to ruthlessly suppress this infernal interval, and effectively eliminated it from all subsequent European music. In her book, Sounding the Inner Landscape, Kay Gardner comes close to the truth when she writes that “the tritone, when sung at length as harmony by a group of meditators, will take singers and listeners to a place where they will be in touch with Divinity.” However, as the church certainly understood, it was not “Divinity” in any wholesome or Christian sense of the word that these singers were in contact with, but the same unnameable white-hot screaming abyss that is the source of Wilkes-Krier’s music and the final destination of its listeners.

IV: The Source.

“This Music dwells in the sky.” “Let it black out. Let go into the void. Reach into it.”

While we can only guess at the true source of W.K.’s overwhelming opus. He has, in his obscure way, given some hints as to its super-terrestrial origins. “There are people that believe very strongly and very convincingly in aliens and all kinds of stuff going on. That God is an alien. That we're all being worked on by aliens. That it's all been an experiment.” Wilkes-Krier speaks of being ‘visited’ by the music, and of being tested by it, saying: "This music is just true. It came to me and I was able to prove myself to it, just enough so that it trusted in me and gave me a chance.” Most interesting, and alarming of all is Wilkes-Krier’s belief that although for the moment “we're the only beings of this intelligence that we know of...hopefully that will change soon.” W.K.’s epistolatory language regularly makes reference to keys, doorways, the removal of walls and barriers and a final great leap into the beyond. The music plays a central role in this headlong plunge into the unknown and the unknowable, for it is the music that will punch a hole through the fabric of reality as we understand it, and it is the music that will forge a bridge to the strange inaccessible realms that lie beyond the reach of our feeble quintet of senses. Our reality is a fragile thing. It is like a thin eggshell, opaque and resilient, yet subject to incredible pressure from those incomprehensible and terrible forces of the ‘outside’ which press upon it from all angles. What this malign and inexorable intelligence wants is clear, an entryway into our dimension, and whether by accident or by design, it is just such a portal Wilkes-Krier is attempting to open with his sonic experiments. That the music is a bridge, a vehicle and mode of transport is something that W.K. does not deny. He has cryptically compared himself to a ship-builder and has said of his music that if he doesn’t make it, “those people aren't going to get across the water.” However, just as Wilkes-Krier’s Ark of Sound will eventually take its listeners to those spaces in the between and the beyond, so too will it give those utterly alien energies a pathway back to our reality. Just as God himself was forced to smite the Tower of Babel to stop his wayward children in their heretical attempt to reach the heavens, so too must we stop W.K. and his followers in their endeavour to create a soaring musical staircase to the stars.

V: The Transformation of Wilkes-Krier

“I get strength from this music. It’s so perfect. It’s not human. It exists in it own space. It simply takes up moments of time.” “It is invincible and all I have to do is gain strength from that invincibility and I become stronger.”

And what of W.K. himself, the man who has become the human vessel and voice of these intangible and unknowable forces from the ‘outside.’ Why was he chosen as receptacle and champion of this immense cataract of sound? At first glance, Wilkes-Krier’s past seems comparable to that of most self-proclaimed modern ‘prophets,’ ‘mystics’ and kult leaders – a youth marked by petty crime and self-abuse. A born confidence man and grifter, Wilkes-Krier was already selling expertly counterfeited labouriously fashioned ‘vintage’ baseball cards to gullible collectors at the tender age of eight By the time he reached his ‘troubled’ teenage years the inwardly focused young malcontent was heavily involved in all manner of criminal endeavours. Mail fraud, pyramid schemes, forged cheques, petty theft, vandalism, the manufacture of counterfeit athletic footwear and involvement in local youth gangs such as the “Pterodactys” (sic) and the “Wolf Eyes” are just a few of the questionable activities W.K. is known to have conducted. (It has also been suggested that his undocumented crimes may have been of a much more serious order.) For a brief time in the late nineteen-nineties, Wilkes-Krier was even forced to change his name to Steven Michael to avoid detection by several agencies conducting inquiries into his affairs. Suffice it to say that the nature and calibre of W.K.’s illegal activities were of a very different quality and scope to that of most teenaged neer-do-wells. They showed an intensity, a focus, and a commitment to detail far beyond that of the average criminal personality.

It was undoubtedly this combination of quasi-sociopathic criminal behaviour with it’s single-minded focus and meticulous attention to minutiae along with his raw aptitude for melody-making that made Wilkes-Krier such a tempting host for the music. Exactly when the music first made itself known to W.K. is unclear, but it can be heard in embryonic form in several of his early projects. Whether due to the influence of others, or because Wilkes-Krier feared giving total license to the sounds that were visiting themselves upon him, it was not until he sequestered himself away from the world in hermit-like solitude that he began to open himself up completely to the music. For a period of two or three years he worked in remote seclusion with feverish intensity to give shape and form to the melodies that crowded his brain.

Recognising the terrible demands the music would ultimately make of his body and mind, the lithe and willowy youth began a fierce and determined program of binge-eating and muscle-contraction to expand and toughen his frame which would have to first house, and then communicate the music to the world. A Spartan regimen of eating, strength building exercise and self-mutilation was undertaken with the goal of pushing the human body to the very limits of endurance and beyond. Through the fortification of his body and mind by strength training, and the testing of his will by flesh cutting and bone shattering, Wilkes-Krier forged a steel structure which might withstand the terrible punishment the music would exact. As he has said himself, “I never hurt myself. If I cut myself, I'm not hurting myself, I'm just cutting myself.”

No ordinary creature could spend two years immersed in that inhuman music without undergoing a monstrous transformation, and, as such, the sinewy thick-thewed Wilkes-Krier that emerged from that squalid tenement, bore little resemblance to the fine-boned anaemic youth who had entered those many months before Even W.K.’s human father expressed shock at the changes the music had wrought in his son saying, “He was a skinny kid when he left for New York, and now he's a hulk." The music had changed him. Instead of being consumed by the music, Wilkes-Krier had developed a symbiotic relationship with it, and, just as it needed him as its gateway into our world, so too he was able to harness it’s power for himself, to make himself ‘invincible.’ He had been tempered in that raging inferno of sound. He had run the flaming gauntlet and had come through bloodied but unbowed, grizzled and battle-scarred - yes, but with a clear focus and an indomitable spirit. Now all that remained was to gather a small troop of barbarous mercenaries and freebooters to help him unleash his sonic storm. With this contingent of hoary rogues assembled, the World Killer was ready to wage bloody war on the very foundations of reality itself, ready to, in his own words “take the World out!”

VI The Gateway and the Kult.

“I have to earn their respect, earn their trust, in order to jump off that cliff with them.” “We're getting a total running start for the massive free jump that we may never come down to land from!”

What can ultimately be said of the army of devotees the music has forged since Wilkes-Krier first loosed it on an unsuspecting world? One is given the impression that they have lost all capacity for rational thought, that their reason has been dashed and broken against the crags of W.K.’s towering musical edifice. They appear lost in a kind of fugue, their bodies folding and contorting in response to the unearthly chords, their brains drowning in chemical overload. They are like sponges, desperate to absorb as much of that uncanny energy as they can – desperate to ascend that flaming platinum staircase to the unknown. And yet, who can blame them for their transgressions? As I know from bitter personal experience, the music, once heard, cannot be resisted. It has an impossible inexorable power, and as it builds, note by note, chord by chord, bar by bar, it gains utter mastery of your senses. It is as though a thousand scarlet devils crawl inside your skull beating at your brain with flaming hammers until your very cranial cavity rings with the glorious sound of the apocalypse. As the songs thunder on to greater and more dizzying heights, strange, unearthly pressures build up inside the body,. You feel as though your chest may burst in a crimson eruption, that your muscle and tissue is dissolving under the onslaught of sound, that it is being torn from your bones by shockwaves blasting concentrically from the stage. Like amoeba under a microscope, the bodies around you seem to overlap and meld, passing through one another, united and suspended in the fluids of ecstasy. You can feel the pleasure of the people around you; it is thick, tangible, syrupy - it transcends language, culture, individuality - you drown in red chaos.

Even Wilkes-Krier himself is not immune to the terrible power of the music, and just as the audience feels the pull to that obscure place beyond our sphere, so too does the World Killer. As human instrument of the music, Wilkes-Krier has become a thing only half-man, and when channelling those sounds from the outside, he is forced to straddle both spheres at once. In interviews he has alluded to this in his usual, maddeningly obtuse way saying, “We've played quite a few concerts now and they always change and they always get better but I don't feel like I'm there. I really don't and I think that's good. I think that's good. I think I'm definitely somewhere else and it's a good place to be.”

From his dais, W.K. orchestrates the maelstrom, his audience/followers/prey jerk on the psychic fish-hooks he has imbedded in the meat of their souls, hooks which threaten to drag them bodily into the abyss. Ofttimes he attempts to spur the madding throng into forming a flesh and bone whirlpool, a mass counterclockwise movement of gyrating insanity. What dread purpose is behind this call for a vortice of human bodies can only be guessed at, but there is little doubt it is a key part in his experiments in the rending of space and time. Whether the blood-blind crowd whose limbs make up this terrifying funnel of flesh realise that the energies set in motion by their infinite corkscrew are being harnessed by the music is unknown. I have no doubt however, that given the right set of circumstances, the combination of this orchestrated mass-movement of adrenal-mad celebrants, along with the mysterious building of body and brain energies aroused by the titanic otherworldly strains of the music will unleash a pillar of amber fire which will shoot skywards, connecting us mentally and physically with those things which wait slavering in the yawning frozen gulfs beyond human knowledge.

VII The Global Fire.

“The World is like the sun, just a constantly exploding, burning bright ball of light. There is no lineage of time or events.” “Fire? It’s just a matter of time.”

And so finally we come to the crux of the matter. What will happen should we stand idly by and let Andrew Wilkes-Krier complete the earth-shattering experiment he has begun? Since that night more than a year ago when I witnessed - nay, participated in that catastrophic concerto I have been haunted by the things I saw in those brief seconds while my mind hung in the jaws of the abyss. It is...difficult to speak of these things. I will do my best to order the jumble of images that came to me as the music pulled and pushed me to the edge of that howling gulf.

I stood in an immense city of obsidian towers, undifferentiated skyscrapers of the smoothest ebon. Like charred trunks rising from the floor of some winter forest they rose starkly and majestically around me, their tips disappearing into the murky deep-red sky. Ahead of me was a wide black highway which cut a path through this dense forest of stygian obelisks. This highway rose slowly until it formed a great arched bridge, the top of which was lost in the low hanging red haze of the murky clouds. Ahead, at the foot of this arch, I could see the Wolf-King, glowing white against the pitch highway, beckoning toward me, a grin of supreme malevolence splitting his face. All around me I could hear his music, it seemed to pour forth from the red heavens themselves, echoing deafeningly against those faceless black towers. Suddenly I became aware that I was not alone. Behind me stood hundreds, perhaps thousands of the World-Killer’s followers. Wordlessly, he turned from us and began jogging up that ink-black incline in great loping strides.

Before I knew what was happening I was following him, pushed from behind by the momentum of those hordes of jostling bodies. As we ran, the glowing figure before us began to increase his pace, his feet slamming against the bridge, his hair whipping behind him, fists clenched, knuckles white. All around me bodies moved in unison, faces set in grim determination, muscles moving like pistons, a great mechanical engine thundering up that arc. With every footfall we gathered more and more momentum, feet crashing explosively on the pitch-black pavement with metronomic precision. The music around us swelled, rolling like ear-splitting thunder from the blood-red sky, shaking the steep black towers with its lacerating vibrations. And still we ran – faster and faster, silent except for the resounding and ever increasing drumbeat of our feet against that cold hard bridge and the inhuman white-roar of the music all around us.

My heart hammered in my chest, my feet burned with each punishing step, and my ears and skull rang with that impossible noise from the beyond. Somehow, though the incline became steeper and steeper we did not falter, nor did we lose speed, but thundered up that arc until the very ground beneath us began to split and crack under our unstoppable forward thrust. Looking down I saw the obsidian towers and citadels begin to topple under the maelstrom of sound. I could feel wetness in my ears, blood, or perhaps cranial fluids leaked down the sides of my neck. Behind us the bridge itself was crumbling, falling away into the gulfs of red chaos that swirled all round us. Yet still he ran on, and we after him, until at last I could see that ahead of us the bridge simply terminated, vanishing into thick air. Rather than slow or stop, the World-Killer increased his speed, his body a blur of gyrating bone and muscle, until at last he launched himself off the end of the broken bridge and into the swirling crimson hurricane beyond. Carried by the momentum of those behind me, urged on by the incessant stentorian throb of the music, and pulled by some nameless force that called from the other side of that red inferno, I threw myself headlong into the abyss.

I cannot fully recall what I saw after this. I suspect that I have suppressed the memories, for the stark terror they represent would doubtless drive me mad were I to ponder them too deeply. Though I have no memory of this, I scrawled some disjointed notes later that night which hint at what was shown to me in those final terrifying seconds. I present them here in full so that you might glean some sense of what Wilkes-Krier’s reckless endeavour may cost the earth.

“rupture cascade cataract the sounds the terrible majesty the impossible glory must stop must stop the red abyss the global fire wall of flame tsunami of magma a thousand miles high a hundred thousand flaming beasts stampede across the plains obliteration detonation utter destruction the darkstar makes itself known Nemesis the end of our lives the beginning of our lives the end of civilization a cleansing hurricane of flame...from the molten seas that cover the globe we rise again the second coming of human beings arms held high skin of platinum with crystalline eyes we gaze upon our charred earth our voices ring with the sound of passion unbound”

VIII: The End

“At the end of the day it’s all gonna burn up. Everyone’s gonna die and it’s all gonna disappear.” “Even when I’m gone it will continue on. Indefinitely.”

And so you must now understand why Wilkes-Krier cannot be permitted to continue on his dangerously irresponsible venture. The project he has set himself, and which his adherents knowingly or unknowingly support, will involve such a radical re-imagining of our world, and of humans beings themselves, as to lay waste to all we now hold sacred and true! The key he is trying to forge through his experiments with music, electricity and brain-chemistry will, if he succeeds, loose a tidal wave of euphoric energy which will detonate with the power of a dozen meteorites simultaneously slamming into our planet. A global fire of demented ecstasy will seize the earth, the very core of the planet will boil, and the crust of the earth will split, and when it has burned itself out, nothing human will remain. It is my ardent hope and wish that those of you who have read and understood these words will tell others of the frightful things you have learned here. If our planet has any hope of survival, it is imperative that Wilkes-Krier be placed immediately in some kind of secure asylum and that he be denied the means to either write or play music. I would also urge that all extant recordings of his music be destroyed lest some other unknowing soul accidentally stumble upon them in the future and again take up the researches that presently pose such a dire threat to our reality. I can only hope that these words reach someone with the authority to remove Wilkes-Krier peaceably from our midst. If not, I fear that soon we may have to take matters into our own hands if we are to ensure the safety and well being of our institutions and our loved ones. Lest there be any doubt at all in your mind about what I have written here, let me leave you with one final quote from W.K. “That's what this music is trying to do. We're making a deep core-cut tunnel right into our brains. When we splash through the other side of the skull, we'll be living in a 4th dimension.”

* All quotes from interviews with and writings by Andrew Wilkes-Krier. The complete transcripts of many of these interviews can be found archived at www.wolfslicer.com

-KS