Although it has been a mere seven days since that fateful night, the changes it has wrought on my body and mind are of such a radical nature that I suspect I will never again regain the equilibrium I lost in those final, terrifying moments. The music continues to exercise its powers over me and the fits come upon me with such regularity, that the mere writing of this text requires a concentration so acute that I am left exhausted after composing a single sentence. I can only hope that by leaving this record of my experience others will take heed not to enter lightly into communion with music of such mind shattering power, so that they might at least prepare themselves physically and mentally for that furious onslaught of sound and image which has forever altered my consciousness.

Growing concerns for a young friend had led me to the ballroom that night, to see for myself if the rumours surrounding this musician, Andrew WK, were, in fact, credible. My friend had, some months previous, attended a concert which seemed to have brought about a startling change in his personality and demeanor. Normally a dour and inexpressive lad, he had in the days and weeks after the concert become increasingly animated, and he began speaking of this Andrew WK with a fanatic zeal which began to worry me greatly. Several times he attempted to push a CD into my hand, demanding in the most insistent tones that I listen to it. His pain appeared great as I refused each time, repulsed as I was by the image of the wet and bloodied young man that adorned its sleeve. Initially I assumed that the changes in my friend's expression and persona were nothing more than a phase, however it soon became clear to me that something had happened to him at that concert, that something had been obscurely gained in his soul that would set him forever apart from ordinary men.

Having little else to do, I began researching this musician, availing myself of various newspaper clippings, and spending countless hours poring over obscure websites in an attempt to better understand what had happened to my young companion. What I discovered was a miasma of half-truths and innuendo so thick that I began to doubt the very existence of this Andrew WK. Some maintained that he was little more than a construction, a persona invented by music company executives. Others claimed he was a puppet of another, perhaps better known musician, who wished to explore new creative avenues without alienating his old following. Still others suggested that he was the son of a police chief, and that he had been named after a Detroit Michigan serial killer. I discovered a list of supposed pseudonyms the length of my arm, and countless suppositions and explanations of what the W and K in his name stood for. This obfuscation was endless and by the time I finished my initial researches, my head was swimming, and I felt no closer to understanding what had happened to my young friend.

But as I hinted above these were not normal circumstances. I'd been doing my duty for my rock band (Elgin's own mighty MASHERS) that afternoon, getting drunk and handing out comp tickets for our upcoming show (Friday August 9th... Double Door, Chicago) and talking to anybody who had an opinion about Andrew W.K. and Rock Action in general. I struck up a conversation with a group of guys who basically looked like they belong on the show jack-ass. You know, pretty boys who are too friggin' nuts for their own good. These guys were a blast!

Days later I began stumbling across reports from those who had supposedly attended concerts conducted by the mysterious WK, and they were filled with much of the same fanatic zeal and hyperbolic verbiage as that employed by my friend in his frequent exhortations on the subject. My skepticism grew as I read these fantastic tales, and I doubted that any sane man could grant them any credence whatsoever. However, the sheer volume of these outlandish and hysterical accounts was a cause for some alarm, and I vowed, then and there, to witness one of these events for myself, if only to discover the truth of what had happened to my young companion.

It was overcast the night I attended the concert, and the pendulous clouds reflected the street lamps, bathing the streets in an otherworldly orange light. After I paid for my ticket, I wandered up the stairs to the giant wooden-floored ballroom. I was happy to note that I had missed the opening band, as I had little interest in listening to the caterwauling of local miscreants. Hundreds of people were already gathered around the stage, and I immediately felt the air close in around me, damp and cloying with its heavy sense of fear and excitement. I was thankful for the tenebrous quality of that large space, for it obscured from my sight the faces of those around me, an indescribable horde of human abnormality. The crowd thronged, tense and trembling with anticipation of the furious feast which would soon come. Some silently made the shape of a W with their fingers, a symbol long feared and respected for its power, the shape of two arms locked in unyeilding strength. Someone near me began to chant W…K…W…K, a terrifying incantation which others soon took up, until the high ceiling rang with the sound of their voices, rising and falling rhythmically, as though they meant to summon some unearthly force from the heavens above. As I listened to these dread uluations, I noticed amidst the crowd a small group of what I can only assume were devotees, or acolytes of WK. I approached one of them, a particularly unwholesome looking lad, lanky, with a sallow complexion, his head crowned with a wild mop of greasy and tangled curls. I attempted to engage him in some small talk, trying to discover as much as I could about this cult my young friend had been initiated into, but my efforts were in vain. He appeared wholly incapable of rational or coherent conversation and I suspected him of being of a mentally aberrant type. In his hand he clutched a wad of small mimeographed tracts which he tried to force on me, and I had little choice but to politely excuse myself from his unsettling company. He then turned to talk to another of these devotees, a shorter, thicker built red-headed youth, equally loathsome in appearance and obviously foreign born, his words accented so thickly that his chatter was near incomprehensible. What little of their conversation I overheard made no sense at all, as they spoke in a highly developed code, using names and references so obscure and of such awful specificity that I was shaken by its strangeness. The pungent aroma of stale sweat emanating from their soiled clothes and their bloodshot eyes and pasty flesh spoke of the extent of which they had debauched themselves.

Suddenly I was convulsed with a paroxysm of fear, and only by the greatest exertion of my will did I refrain from running from that stage in terror. Just as I was about to make my way over to one of the tables at to the right of the vast edifice, so that I might compose myself, a figure walked out onto the stage, and against my will I was swept forward by the surging crowd. I caught only the briefest glimpse of this man, before my vision was blocked by the jostling bodies, but I could hear him introducing Andrew WK, the man everyone there had come to see. Seconds later the crowd parted so that I could again see the stage, and assembled upon it were a group of men who looked as though they had never known so human an emotion as fear, a hard bitten horde, their tracks across the land doubtless laid in blood and burning embers. They raised their hands and brought them down on their instruments with thunderous force, sending a shockwave across the audience which exploded into raw and chaotic life.

Seconds later he came bounding onto the stage, and a wolfish grin split his face. A yell of untrammeled passion and intensity was wrenched from scores of human throats as they beheld his lupine features. With preternatural agility he leapt into the air, and holding the microphone to his lips, a deep toned roar went up to the heavens. The fierceness of the wild was evident in his broad shoulders and long muscular arms and with fearsome authority he wielded the microphone grasped in his hand. As he tore into his first song, several long red streamers were launched from the audience, like jets of arterial blood, arcing high in the air and onto the stage. With a berserk fury, WK grabbed them out of the air, thrashing them about so that his arms became a red blur of speed and energy. From the first notes I could feel the music exercising its power over me, electricity moved across my body, and I could feel my blood begin to boil. Try as I might to resist, the sound crashed over me like a tidal wave, engulfing me. The music drove its fist deep inside my stomach, roughly fingering my entrails and shattering my spine, so that I had no choice but to spasm and jerk like a thing possessed. On the stage he stood, feet apart, legs braced hard, body tensed, as he exhorted the reeling crowds to greater and ever more terrifying heights.

Suddenly, in a voice so guttural and bestial that it rooted me to the spot, WK commanded the audience in no uncertain terms, to "Take It Off." As this second song began, I found myself pressed against the metal barricade, amidst a forest of fists pumping to the explosive beats hammered out by a drummer whose knowledge of the black arts is well documented. The crowd, a giant human knot, writhed and weaved across the wooden floor in demented ecstasy. Like a sea of human bodies, the audience shattered themselves against the stage in thunderous waves, while I helplessly listed back and forth in the centre of this maelstrom. Then, as though he were not satisfied with this red chaos, WK annihilated any last vestige of normalcy by encouraging the audience to storm the stage. All around me bodies hurtled over the barricades until the very stage itself became a rolling, crashing sea of bodies. Like two oceans clashing, the stage and the floor became locked in a chaotic life and death struggle. The mass motion on the floor was left to right in an endless circle of bacchanale celebration. Somewhere in all the madness I noticed that someone was hurling fistfuls of silver confetti in the air, adding a perversely festive quality to the insanity surrounding me. The very floor itself seemed to move under my feet, as though the wooden boards were not securely affixed, but instead merely resting and sliding on some greasy or icy surface. At times the very dimensions of the room appeared to change; one moment I felt as though the room were of awesome size, limitless and amaranthine, the next as though the walls had folded in and the ceiling was inches above my head. All the rules of matter and perspective came undone, and the relative position of everything seemed to shift and pulse in tandem with the feverish movements of the hypnotized crowd.

WK glowed iridescent under the stage lights, and in a voice which rang out with the intangible power that throbs in the howl of the devil wolf, he cried out to the crowd "you better get ready to DIEEEE!" The band began striking a series of chords like thunder- strokes, splitting skulls and rending bodies with each explosive note. The titanic yet melodic strains of the songs were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of such a captivating quality that even now I can recall them note for note, word for word. While his songs gave the illusion of familiarity, I was yet certain that none of WK's harmonies bore any resemblance to any kind of music I had ever heard before, and I became convinced that he was a composer of diabolic genius. Suddenly, with a speed wholly unnatural, he jerked the microphone, and the long cord sprang to life, whipping me directly in the face, hard. I stumbled backward, stunned by the blow, but the adrenaline now pumping through my veins rendered the sensation transitory. I hurled myself back at the stage like a raving thing attempting to glut its fury.

The songs continued driving without cease or pause so that no human power could stay the onslaught. Then, when human flesh and blood could stand no more, the tide ebbed for a moment, before once again the music came crashing, and the bodies began clashing. WK's terrifying guttural growls explosively punctuated the skull splitting music, and I felt as though my very mind were under siege. With inhuman strength, he lifted people bodily off the stage, holding them in the air, or hurling them back into the molten maelstrom of the seething dance floor. The looks on the faces of those who surrounded me were those of a terrible transcendent bliss. I noticed that one of the devotees I had earlier seen handing out literature was now standing beside me, his knuckles split and bloodied as he dashed his fists against the monitor before him. All around me a well-drilled chorus of hoarse and ragged voices shouted the words in unison with WK, a roaring catechism of ecstasy and freedom. For a moment I saw what appeared to be a bleeding skull floating in the fray, but a split second later it was gone, reabsorbed into the turbulent foaming chaos. Just as I thought my capacity for fear and awe exhausted, and that the music could become no more fantastic or delirious, WK launched into his penultimate song, "I Get Wet." This was music of such awesome power and perfection that a wave of hysteria came upon me and I began to shake uncontrollably. The scene was wholly kaleidoscopic, my senses so overwhelmed by the whirling chaos of sights, sounds and colours that I felt as though I was dissolving, as though the fabric of my body was becoming un-knit. These were sounds which held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth and I gave myself over to them wholly, unquestioningly.

As the song reached its fever pitch I felt a series of explosions detonating deep inside my brain. My ears rang, my imagination seethed, and red visions throbbed in my brain. As WK screamed "I Get Wet" over and over, I saw great cyclopean cities torn asunder, a vision of the world engulfed in flames, a global fire sweeping across the planet, cleansing and purifying the earth to make way for some new order. Then, as quickly as it had come, the vision passed, and in the moment of supreme weakness that followed, I was swept up in a titanic wave of bodies which crested above the metal barricades. Folded in half by the massive pressure of the forward momentum, I was belched from the wave and slammed down hard onto the stage, deposited like an offering to some ancient god. Trying to catch my breath I squirmed like a new born foal at the feet of WK, who had begun singing the last of his convulsive compositions, "Party Hard." As I looked up he towered over me, soaked in water and dripping with perspiration, his black hair like a veil of night around his face. All around him people danced in ecstatic, demonic frenzy. I pulled myself shakily to my feet, and for a moment I took in the sight of the monster on the dance floor below, a huge, formless polypous mass, it slid back and forth, foaming and wet, its writhing feelers thrashing in orgiastic fury. Utterly lost, I gave myself back to the beast, leaping headlong into its slavering maw where once again I was seized by the music and pulled to and fro like a puppet in the hands of some palsied maniac. The floor was now slippery with pools of sweat, water and what appeared to be blood, and twice I almost lost my footing on that sticky and greasy surface. Stranger still were the sweets that continuously exploded from the depths of the ravening creature that monstrously flopped across that slimy floor.

The playing grew ever more intense, ever more hysterical, yet kept to the last the controlled qualities of supreme genius. As the song came to its end it swelled into a chaotic babel of sound, a sonic pandemonium that threatened to tear the entire building apart. WK threw himself into those final moments with such furious abandon that I expected his very body to come apart at the seams; he became a whirling dervish, something more than human. In those last seconds the entire place became a blind, ecstatic, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even begin to suggest, and so overwhelming that mercifully my mind could accept no more, and I blacked out. The last image I saw before my total loss of consciousness were the hundreds on stage holding WK aloft in the air, his clothes glowing an unearthly white under the lights, as though they meant to raise him to the heavens.

When I regained consciousness I found myself on my back on the sticky wooden floor. How long I had been there I could not say, but my joints were stiff from lying on the hard and unyielding surface. The floor was littered with confetti, torn paper and sweets, some of which were glued to the floor in sticky gelatinous pools of congealed blood. I examined my body and discovered several large bruises on my chest and shoulders, and what appeared to be teeth marks in the flesh of my bicep. I stumbled back to my car, and drove out of the city for several hours, trying unsuccessfully to rid myself of the memory of that terrifying, yet beautiful music, and the man who had created it. Eventually I pulled over to the side of the highway, and slumped forward over the steering column of my car. Looking out of the windshield I saw great arcs of green and blue light extending from the sky to the horizon. I stepped out of the car, and looked into the night sky, where the throbbing Northern Lights had formed into the shape of a huge fiery phoenix, sending long arcs of light out in every direction. As I stood there, I realized that something had changed, deep inside me. The walls I had built up around myself since childhood had been torn to pieces, and I stood there defenseless against the world. And yet I felt strangely content, as though the music had left something in place of all that it had destroyed. I realized that the music had liberated me from myself, and what it had left me was the opportunity to reinvent myself and the world around me. As I stood there in the cold night air I slowly became aware that my cheeks were wet, wet with tears of fear, wet with tears of joy.

-KS