Weird Studies retweetledi
In January 2026, a portal opened between the ivory tower and the numinous unspeakable. For three days at IU Bloomington, scholars from around North America convened for a rare and precious opportunity to explore topics normally forbidden in a university setting: spirits, precognition, magick, and other affairs of the occult and transpersonal were all fair game. Organized by the hosts of @weirdstudies, Phil Ford and @JF_Martel, and IU's Center for Possible Minds (directed by Jacob Foster and Erica Cartmill of @DivIntelligence), with special guests Jeffrey Kripal, Shannon Taggart, and Cat Hobaiter, and daytime colloquia organized by myself and Emma Stamm, these glorious sessions felt like a watershed moment in the long arc of a decades-long struggle to ask some of the most important and difficult questions available to us in a unusually hospitable setting—and, perhaps, an opportunity to sow the seeds for a new research network of academics and para-academics committed to probing them with rigor and new institutional support.
The first night of the week featured an opening for Shannon Taggart's gallery show Séance at IU's McCalla School, where she displayed an extensive collection of her photographic experiments in cataloguing the practice and culture of spirit mediumship. I was honored with the invitation to perform a kind of séance of my own that evening, improvising over an hour of electroacoustic music on electric guitar, synthesizer, and hardware electronics.
But the weekend before, the Eastern United States were hit with an historic winter storm that delayed flights and buried Bloomington in several feet of snow. For a moment it looked like the whole thing was off—with my locally-sourced amplification suddenly no longer available, I was encouraged to not make the effort in order to spare myself the trouble of lugging crates of equipment across the country given the likelihood my flights would be delayed and I would miss the opening entirely. But I asked the Tarot what to do and got what felt like a clear signal to pare my kit down to the bare minimum in order to carry my own amp on the plane...so I did. And what followed was an appropriately raw, strange, and heady site-specific "channeling"—a lengthy invention informed by Shannon's gorgeous and haunting photography and the charged atmosphere of the event.
Played mostly on the unbranded custom Stratocaster kit build that has accompanied me to highlight gigs at Burning Man, Arcosanti, and the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference, and edited slightly for time and electronic noise reduction, this set miraculously survived a week that—as is so often the case when people try to make recordings of their rites of high strangeness—mysteriously erased the recording of Weird Academia's keynote panel discussion. Maybe it is because I left the unspeakable as such, and carried with me only the traces of the music it left in the room. But who can say?
Listening suggestions: candlelight, essential oils, and headphones or a speaker system with analog tubes (which may constitute a wider window for the ingress of otherworldly beings). Photos of dead loved ones. At least one other person to verify that whatever happened actually happened. Divinatory tools only at your own risk...
michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/s-ance-l…
English
