Choronzon aren't a band. They don't jam together and play gigs. Choronzon used to be two projects, one in California, with a druggish, zany rivethead chick Demitria Monde Thraam at the helm. The other was in Florida, the guts-of-black-metal-after-it-eats-itself, incepted by P. Emerson Williams. Both these individuals used the same esoteric, occult-based name "Choronzon".Both started their projects in the late 1980s. When Thraam discovered Williams' site her jaw hit the floor. If they were jerks, there would have been wrangling and lawsuits and crap. But after a year of swapping email and Thraam upgrading her computer and music software know-how, the two did the only thing to do in a situation like this: merge their projects. After a little bit longer, they took it to the next step: collaboration. Perhaps it was Choronzon persuading themâ?¦for he is the project's THIRD MEMBER.

Choronzon is a demon - according to traditional occult wonks, the "first and deadliest of all the powers of evil". Less traditional "chaos mages" think of him as a jester. He supposedly guarded an "abyss" between this earthly plane and the higher stuff above the ego, and when clowns like Aleister Crowley attempted to cross over it, he'd harangue them and give them crap. Like anyone would, if disturbed in their own domain and yelled at to provide them with some magick words to ZIP them to the next level. (Enochian Magick thus seems to have been the impetus for the plots for nearly every video game in existence today.)

Ms. Thraam, who goes by her middle name, Monde, is rather fond of this entity, so fond she has essentially declared herself and it are symbiotes, that she has - with her love of the demon, brought him up (or perhaps down) from the Abyss, and into a state half-in and half-out of 3D "reality". Not stopping there, she instigated apotheosis and the demon is now officially the god he once was, "before he broke the laws of physics and ended up with the lame job guarding the Works". The pages on the project's site are loaded with screeds about Transversion Agents and Meta-Gods, in a metaphysical layout based on Chaos and Order, leaving out Good and Evil altogether. Essentially she's created what could be the first truly new mythopoeia that we've seen in Cnaos only knows how longâ?¦If anyone has taken the directions at the end of the SubGenius Book decreeing one ought to go "start their own damn religion" it could be this completely whacked womanâ?¦who has taken Choronzon as a se! cond mate, with her real-world lover's full approval and assent, and to read of her sexual experiences with "the Lord of Hallucinations" is to see an adult who never grew out of having an imaginary friend, and also see that maybe humans really do suck in bed in comparison.

The music is an entirely new genre: Xeno, meaning from somewhere else entirely, and it certainly fits. Choronzon is said to actually create it alongside the two three-dimensional members, and when hearing it, one might not have that hard time believing it. The sound is a sort of "industrial psychedelia" - or would that be "psychedelic industrial"? - evolving constantly, and containing weird, disembodied, barely imperceptible voices male and female weaving in and out of the noise, voices that seem to say different things upon subsequent listenings. It's the digital equivalent of "electronic voice phenomenon", or EVP - that "voices of the dead" trip that was a bit of a fad with the seance- oriented crowd in the early 20th century; Thraam says we can either think of it as some kind of techno-glitch or as the Voice of Choronzon, it matters not. It's pretty obvious what she thinks.

The other strange thing about this act is the natural disasters. Thraam's initial project - referred to on the site as "Choronzon West" finished its first album, Zero Divided by Infinity - 45 minutes before the Loma Prieta earthquake which shook her home city of San Francisco to the tune of 7.0 on the Richter Scale. Her occultist friends started giving her wide berth around then, but it was still regarded as "a weird coincidence." In 2005, the combined Choronzons first opus, a double album called New World Chaos, was completed on the last day of August, 2005 - the day Katrina went aground- not only that, but the area struck by the hurricane was positioned right between Choronzons East and West. The two creators must have felt something strange about this, since they devoted several months' worth of sales to the Katrina relief funds. New World Chaos is a documentation of several "effectuations" or rituals done as psionic war against the Con (or "Overcontrol") and included a strike on Bohemian Grove in July ("Weaving Spiders") and a very weird melding-together of unlikely bedfellows - Tanya Hearst and Karl Rove ("Buttonpushers".) The other half of the album ("Complicity Simplexity) is less meta-political, more metasexual, and seems to revolve around experiences with xenodimensional incubi and succubi (like, perhaps, the namesake, maybe?) "Undergoing Overcoming" stands out hereâ?¦the pounding of a tympani and Williams' layers of growly cryptic vocals urge on the shivers.

Who knows what these crazies will do next? Or what disaster will subsequently strike once they do it? With all the truly uninteresting music out there, with seemingly no reason to exist, if you seek the truly weird, not the "weird-just- to-get-attention" you will want to look here.


Disc One:

 NEW WORLD CHAOS

. Ritual Actions Upon the Externum .

Directorship, Armatures, Vox: Demitria Monde Thraam

Additive Layerings + Vox: P. Emerson Williams

Visual Art: Demitria Monde Thraam, P. Emerson Williams

Cryptovox / Ritual Activation: The Xenodimensional CHORONZON

Additional Textualities: Eianorange, Pvra Dalem


)+(


.01. Stretchawake
.02. Atomsweight
.03. Current
.04. Forewarning
.05. Buttonpushers
.06. Obeah : Removing
   (a) Graven Owl
   (b) Weaving Spiders
.07. Reaping the Whirlwind
.08. Mutagenerator
.09. Enigmatic Theomorphisms
.10. Transduction of Indweller
.11. New World Chaos
   (a)Ghost Dance Redux
   (b)Revolution 333
.12. Mater Mundi
(Words: Pvra Dalem / Oration: D.M. Thraam)

Disc Two:

 COMPLICITY // SIMPLEXITY

. A Vision Based Upon Itself .

Directorship, Armatures + Vox: P. Emerson Williams

Additive Layering, Art + Conceptual Interpretations: Demitria Monde Thraam

Cryptovox / Ritual Activation: The Xenodimensional CHORONZON


)+(


.01. Deliquium
.02. Concentric Circles
.03. Neurosis
.04. Surcease
.05. Undergoing Overcoming
.06. Walls Once Sand are Sand Once More
.07. Thaumaturge
.08. Grace Under Wire
.09. Autonomy
.10. The Fallen Sky