The Brvtalist: Talk about the concept of “Previously Undisclosed Rituals”. How did these comps come together and how did you assemble the artists involved?
Maened Veyl: Alex and myself were planning a compilation fairly early on the label's stage, mostly as a way to test the waters with artists outside of, uhm… well outside of myself. After a few successful EPs we decided to give it a shot by inviting some friends to contribute, it was all pretty straightforward. We ended up with so many great tracks we decided to turn it into a series and both volumes so far happened quite naturally as one bled into the other. A third one is in the making as well.
It was also a great opportunity to invite Tomas (December) and Eliot (Vaal), who I’ve been a fan of for years.
The idea behind the name and artwork was a concept I came up with one day with Tomaso Lisca. In a few words, it revolves around the different artists being represented by the different steps or objects in a ritual.
In his own, bolder words:
The inspiration for the P.U.R. series came from a long-standing fascination with the occult and with the evolution of ritual magic practice in the digital age. New channels of dissemination and consumption (internet and VR) have inspired a radical qualitative change in the practice of magic nowadays. As a teen, I remember on VR platform Second Life, one could find numerous virtual locations, temples and magic circles where avatars could be animated to perform invocations, enchantments and rituals on your behalf.
Drawing freely from the currents around ‘chaos magic’, the idea behind the series was to combine real life and cgi/virtual reality in a single magic ritual. Imagine a laptop computer running VR software on a physical altar, thus taking the function of a ritual object itself, on a par with a quartz or crystal ball. Quoting Egil Asprem’s “Contemporary Ritual Magic” (Page 388, Chapter 39 in "The Occult World", 2014.), “This practice opens for a range of metaphysical questions for the magician: does the magic happen ‘in-world,’ or is the computer-mediated imagery merely a convenient tool for inducing ‘magical consciousness’ in a real-life ritual setting? Could the visions on the screen even be comparable, in terms of their ontological status, as those encountered in crystal visions – in other words, is it an actual, real magical world that now manifests in software?”
