Neurot Recordings & Atlas Obscura present a recording of Janaka Stucky live in Seattle with special guest Lori Goldston
Published in 2019 by Jack White's publishing imprint, Third Man Books, Ascend Ascend was written over the course of twenty days, coming in and out of trance states brought on by intermittent fasting and somatic rituals while secluded in the tower of a 100-year-old church. Rooted in the Jewish mystical tradition of Hekhalot literature, which chronicles an ascent up the Kabbalistic Tree of Life to witness the Merkabah, or “chariot of God,” this book-length ecstatic poem drafts a surreal, mythological landscape in which maximalist language shreds the natural world. Light becomes rainbowed sex. Intestines tangle into an aria. The sky is gallowed. At the center of this apocalyptic devastation stands the speaker of these poems, asserting: I explode. I shall love. I ascend. Equal parts Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” Ascend Ascend makes us both passenger and witness as we participate in the ecstatic destruction of the self through its union with the divine.
Upon the book's release, Third Man Books & Records partnered with Atlas Obscura to sponsor Janaka Stucky on a 7-city tour where he presented Ascend Ascend in its entirety through a series of highly ritualized performances. In each city he recited the book in its entirety from the confines of a magic circle—drawn with sigils and seals on the floor—ringed with beeswax candles, incense, and live marigolds planted in an outer rim of soil.
In Seattle, Janaka gave an improvised performance with cellist Lori Goldston—who has played with a number of premiere musical acts including Nirvana, Cat Power, and Earth. This one-of-a-kind event was recorded live at All Pilgrims church, and is now being released by Neurot Recordings in May 2023.
To celebrate the record release we have crafted all sorts of exclusive items like signed & numbered fine art prints, limited edition colored vinyl, and special VIP access to a new round of live performances around the country that Janaka is planning with Atlas Obscura in 2023!
“Janaka Stucky is extraordinary, and his work riveting.”
“It is steeped in soil, rot, stardust, moonlight, the dissolution of the self, and ‘heartblood pouring from a ram horn/ On the pubic shadow of the earth.’ Part prayer, part yowl, part spell, it’s grounded in the ancient and the occult.”
“Ascend Ascend is a mystical epic in which visionary experience continually emerges from life in the world ... Through fractured prayers, incantation, and lithe entreaties that refigure spiritual conventions, Stucky suggests that revelation is pragmatic, inexhaustible, and vital to questions of identity and community. ”
“Ascend Ascend is a passionate trance poem of praise, incantation and divination … One is grateful, in these imperiled times, for such forceful ritual and invocation: ‘Every word along the way / Lit like a flame upon / The wick of its origin.’”
“Stucky’s writing is a miracle, not only in its genius, but in its generosity. This is a love poem that shocks with secret links and revelations. It will lift you out of whoever you think you are.”
“A genuine return to a poetry of extasis, both in experience & in language. Breathtaking and wonderful, I’m truly delighted to add Ascend Ascend to my repertory of contemporary works.”