#  Audio: Pop Apocalypse: Episode 10: Music and the Esoteric Imagination 

 





December 04, 2024

 

 

For Episode 10 of Pop Apocalypse, we welcome the musician, composer, and producer Trey Spruance. We discuss Trey’s early musical and occult explorations and how reading the philosopher Henry Corbin changed the course of his life. Trey then takes us through the esoteric dimensions of Secret Chiefs 3 and how albums like *Book M* and *Book of Horizons* are filled with correspondences to Kabbalah, astrology, Hermetic magic, and Pythagorean musicology. Along the way, we touch on Trey’s work with John Zorn and the Kronos Quartet, his conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and the afterlives of Saint Cyprian the Mage.

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##  Trey Spruance bio 

Trey Spruance is a musician, composer, and producer. With Mike Patton and Trevor Dunn, Trey founded the experimental rock band Mr. Bungle. In 1995, Trey started his own musical project: Secret Chiefs 3. Secret Chiefs 3 has released nine records, including the acclaimed trilogy of *Book M*, *Book of Horizons*, and *Book of Souls*. Spruance has also arranged and recorded two records for John Zorn in *The Book Beri'ah, Vol. 10: Malkhut* and *Xaphan: Book of Angels Vol. 9*. His compositions have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, the Black Square String Quartet, and the Krasnoyarsk Philharmonic Russian Orchestra.



 

\[MUSIC PLAYING\]

MATTHEW DILLON: Greetings, listeners, and welcome to The Pop Apocalypse. I'm your host, Matthew Dillon, and I'm a researcher at the Center for the Study of World Religions here, at Harvard Divinity School. Now, that musical intro you just heard has an extra important meaning today, since it's a composition from our guest, Trey Spruance.

Trey is a musician, composer, and producer who has blessed the world with some of the most sophisticated and spiritually rich music around in the last 30-plus years. Starting off with Mike Patton and Trevor Dunn, Trey founded the experimental and totally at times danceable group, Mr. Bungle in the mid '80s. In 1995, he started his own project named Secret Chiefs 3, which has issued these mind-blowing records like Book M, Book of Horizons, and Book of Souls.

He's also recorded two records for Jim Zorn and composed two pieces for the Kronos Quartet. And we're just scratching the surface here. He has done so much more than that. Now, on a personal note, I've been, myself, a big fan of Secret Chiefs 3 for a couple of decades before I met Trey back in 2022.

One-time TNT postdoc and all-time awesome guy, Hadi Fakhoury invited Trey to give a concert as part of this Adventures in the Imaginal conference dedicated to the work of Henry Corbin. And it was because Trey and I met at this conference that I was able to ask him for permission to use samples for this show, so "The Owl in Daylight" and "The End Times."

Not only is it a huge honor that he honored that request, but Trey's music represents everything that Pop Apocalypse is intended to be about. As we discussed in the interview, Trey didn't just read Corbin. He found ways of adapting Corbin's theological and philosophical ideas into music. And not just Corbin-- Trey's compositions take correspondences from Pythagoras, Suhrawardi, Aleister Crowley, all over the place, and transforms them into music.

It's hard to come away from the talk you are about to hear and not get the sense that Trey's music deserves the same sort of close reading we might grant to the paintings of Kandinsky, or highly symbolic novels of Hermann Hesse.

And now, speaking of spirituality and music, before we dive into this interview, I want to give a quick note. There's a major program coming up at the CSWR. To wit, the Armenian mystic GI Gurdjieff has come up in about half the interviews that we've done so far. Well, Carole Cusack, Gosia Sklodowska, and the team at CSWR are putting on a major conference entitled "The Legacy and Teachings of GI Gurdjieff." That's going to be December 4 and December 5.

There'll be 14 papers, a musical event, and ample discussion that bridges scholarship and practitioners. So wherever you're listening, if you go down into the show notes of your app, there'll be a link to the conference information, and from there, you can register to attend certain panels or events via Zoom. So I highly suggest it. It's going to be amazing.

And without further ado, the interview with Trey Spruance.

\[MUSIC PLAYING\]

So it is my great honor to welcome to the show Trey Spruance of Mr. Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3. Trey, how are you doing?

TREY SPRUANCE: I'm doing great. Very, very pleased to be talking with you.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, so excited about this. I'll have talked in the beginning about how we met through the Corbin conference and everything, but it's just nice to see your face. So I start every one of these interviews the same way, with the exact same question, because I think it actually frames things in an interesting way.

So what was your religious background as a kid and a teenager? Were you raised in a religious environment in any way, or were you in a more secular home? What was your level of exposure there?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, I had no religious upbringing at all. Both of my parents-- I guess I would say my mom veers towards atheism and my dad is kind of an agnostic atheist. He leaves the door open a little bit. But really, my formative years were spent in Eureka, California, which that was where I just encountered a lot of evangelical, kind of Christian stuff there.

And because, I guess, probably because of my background and just not really fitting in very well there, I drew a lot of negative attention from a lot of people there. I mean, this is very early before I had any commitment to anything. It's as stupid as wearing Devo stuff to school. I got my ass kicked by people. So really, my first exposure to religion was its violence, its intolerance, directed specifically at me, and then this enormous conspiracy of a whole society there sort of agreeing on some fundamentals that maybe aren't religious, but they're cultural. And I was definitely on the outside of all of that, big time.

So as I grew up and our music started to develop, we took a pretty oblique stance on all of that kind of stuff. And yeah, I would say it was just a very negative impression of anything religious. I didn't need it. Personally, I was totally anti-religion. I became completely nihilistic and very angry about the whole thing.

Those are my humble beginnings with the religious experience.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. So interesting. So it's primarily sort of evangelical and traditional. Is there a new age scene in Eureka, at this point?

TREY SPRUANCE: There is now, just because anything could be new age now. Trump people can be-- Everybody's new age now. But Arcata, there's a University there, which is a nearby town smaller than Eureka. Eureka is a very industrial lumber town, or was. And the school had hippies and stuff like that.

Before I had time-- Before our band was going to Arcata to play shows for those people, my dad was introducing me to Nietzsche. We had great teachers at our school in Eureka. It was amazing. We had a great literature teacher. We were reading Shakespeare, and he was slipping us Jerzy Kosinski novels kind of under the table. We were very lucky we were shepherded by some very bright people who knew what we were facing. When I say "we", I'm talking about my Mr. Bungle bandmates.

So they understood, we had potential and we're not idiots, but we're having a hard time. And they're trying to tell us, look, there's a wider world out there. Maybe this will appeal to you. Read The Painted Bird.

MATTHEW DILLON: So Mike Patton, Trevor Dunn. Before we dive in, when did you start playing guitar? When did you take it up?

TREY SPRUANCE: I think I was 12. Late in my 12th year, I started playing guitar. I was playing trumpet before that. And I met Trevor in-band because I would play euphonium and trumpet and stuff, so we were aware of each other before we formed a band.

MATTHEW DILLON: So we're going to go off track pretty early here, but this is a weird question, and you seem like a really good person to ask it to. So the field, academically, of esoteric studies, Gnostic studies, is both-- it's basically a bunch of teenage metalheads grown up. Somehow, some way, all of us were just nourished on thrash, death, doom, whatever it happens to be. And so it struck me both Patton and Dunn and yourself were in metal bands before Mr. Bungle, then Mr. Bungle, the first demo, "Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny," it's this hardcore thrash record.

Do you have any-- and obviously, your records end up going in this very esoteric direction that is deeply infused by all this stuff-- do you have any idea why this is the case? I know correlation is not causation, but what is the relationship that makes so many teenage metalheads turn into this sort of esoteric milieu later on?

TREY SPRUANCE: Oh, I think it's because we have a natural inclination for divine things, things that are beyond the reach of our-- no matter how well-developed our rational capacity gets, the fundamentals of being lie just beyond that. And to have these kind of impostors come in and choke the life out of the potential to reach for that creates a dark longing. It creates a very profound, dark longing.

And I do think that people who are attracted-- It's a misunderstanding to say we're attracted to the dark side of things. It's actually this abuse that we suffered at the hands of these imposters that are blocking the light. They're trying to eclipse and put their own ownership stamp on the divine. So our negative emotions from that end up informing all of our early angsty years. I think that that's just it.

And some of us really have a profound need to quench that thirst. Some of us don't. Some of us just needed to get out of the-- to say our piece and say "screw you" to those jerks and that's it. We can live our lives as agnostics or whatever. Some of us continue seeking past that threshold. I think that's what explains it.

MATTHEW DILLON: Excellent. Yeah, that's really well put. That's probably the best answer I've heard to that. Thank you. All right. So from "Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny," and then from there, up until the second Mr. Bungle record, there is this huge spike in experimentalism, in creativity.

I just want to step back and ask, what happened there? What were you listening to? What were you studying? Where does your interest in hardcore music theory come from? What was happening over those years that landed you in that place of Disco Volante?

TREY SPRUANCE: OK. Yeah, it's actually a pretty long period. It's about 10 years. I have two-- one very succinct answer, and then a more deeper answer. The succinct answer is what happened was San Francisco happened. We all moved to San Francisco. And where there's-- everything that we were looking for was available. This is just like a playground, an infinite playground of information we had been seeking and we didn't have access to. Let's put it that way.

But that's also kind of not true because Trevor and I were both university students. We had access to the library. There were brilliant teachers in high school, too, but also at the university campus. And they saw us. We were hungry, and we were going after stuff. So we're tearing through Ligeti scores, tearing through Xenakis scores, learning everything about dissonance-- because this is still a very angsty period-- but voraciously, just voraciously going after all the things that you can do with tonality.

We had a teacher, Professor Moon was his name, who was a student of Messiaen, and an absolutely brilliant educator. Oh, we were so lucky to have him. Taught us ear training and all this stuff. So essentially what happened is we were already doing this stuff while we were still living in Eureka. So that's university years would be, for me, '87, '88, '89, '90. Then we moved to San Francisco.

And so the first record that we put out, it's our old stuff. There was really nothing new on that record. It was really our history, our Eureka history. Disco Volante is five years then in San Francisco, just voraciously each going down our own paths and then reconvening as Mr. Bungle. That was a huge change, for sure.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. It's amazing to watch that sort of progression. So we were talking about these figures blocking the light and the progression, so while Mr. Bungle has songs like "Chemical Wedding," it's not saturated with the esoteric in the same way. So where does the idea for Secret Chiefs come from? When does that get-- It gets hatched, like, '95-ish. So what was behind that?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, so in that period from moving to San Francisco, 1990, '91, up until '95, I'm doing my own reading. This is not about Mr. Bungle. And I'm taking in everything-- Robert Anton Wilson, reading the Hakim Bey and all of that stuff, really interested in that kind of-- what do you call it-- poetic terrorism. Just this thing of how to go past nihilism and to embrace something bigger and more encompassing, but filled with passion and explosive energy, that kind of stuff. I was really into that.

But that led kind of naturally to Corbin. It was in the footnotes of Peter Lamborn Wilson books that I discovered Corbin. So I had this very kind of psychedelic period, I guess you would say, for about two years, and then got very focused and grounded with Corbin somewhere around '93, '94. And so, yeah, in Disco Volante, there's the "Desert Search for Techno Allah song," which is filled with quotes from Hafez that I got from Hakim Bey at the time.

But I'm reading Corbin already, so it's getting more getting a little bit more serious, a little bit more grounded in the real shit.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. What was it that spoke to you about Corbin, at first?

TREY SPRUANCE: What it is is that it's really the role of the imagination, being able to see somebody speak about the imaginal, make a distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal, and to talk about real and profound and deep immersion in, I guess, something beyond psychological landscapes, something beyond the projections of the mind, something that is fundamentally real, more real than the world of ordinary consciousness.

I guess it's leading away from this explosive, I'd say, sort of psychedelic interpretation of things and taking it into this more profound and meditative sense of things, that they're not necessarily at war with each other, but I really needed, at the time, to focus all of my energies that were going on with my imagination, because my imagination is very powerful and active and it needs to be harnessed. And Corbin really gave me a focal point and a way to step through what were very really crazy times. I mean, the word is right. It's crazy. It was very crazy times. Very explosive, crazy times.

MATTHEW DILLON: Can I ask how so?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, there-- Should I even get into this? I'll put it this way. I had been reading the Robert Anton Wilson Cosmic Trigger stuff. There's a potency with that. As goofy as some of it is, there's a potency there where, OK, if I step out my door and I started experimenting with some of this stuff that he's talking about, see for myself, see if I can manifest the way people talk about that stuff now. And then this is going hand in hand with reading Crowley on similar subjects.

And it was '93, I think, and it's the dog days. It's July 23, all of those Robert Anton Wilson sort of things aligning. And I'm just walking around town, just looking in people's eyes and seeing if I can, connect in some weird, psychic way with people, totally insane.

And, yeah, you can. In San Francisco, there's other people doing that, too. So there's this weird feedback loop that you're establishing all over the place. Like, holy crap, this stuff is real. But what does that mean? I mean, I kind of learned what it meant. One of maybe the most important experience I had from all of that was late that night, on July 23, I saw-- I was kind of, OK, I'm done with this. I got to put this away. This is a little bit too nuts.

And I'm going to a sushi restaurant, and I see this guy, and he's screaming, kind of speaking in tongues-- blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah-- standing in the middle of the street. Like, OK, San Francisco, guy screaming in the middle of the street. But I also noticed-- I knew where Sirius was in the sky, and he's like looking right at Sirius, and he's going, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, at Sirius, because I minored in astronomy in college and I'm aware of the Sirius situation.

And I'm like, OK, that's weird. I go eat, come out, he's still doing it. It's nighttime. He's still out in the middle of the street. It's on Geary Street. He could get hit by a car.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, my gosh.

TREY SPRUANCE: It's pretty gnarly. I'm like, this is so weird. I still hadn't seen his face. I'm with my girlfriend at the time. I get in my car. I'm like, we just got to see this guy's face. Let's go around and circle. And as soon as-- this was a really weird convergence-- I'm in his line of sight, towards Sirius, just coming underneath it, and right when I crossed that line, he gets nailed by a car. His head goes right into the windshield.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, my goodness.

TREY SPRUANCE: Back to reality. Let's-- You know. We circle around, because actually the hospital is like two blocks away. So paramedics were there like boom. And it gives me chills even bringing this up again. We're walking up, and-- actually, we had been sitting there, but we hadn't gone near the guy. But the paramedics are working on him. There was glass broken everywhere and he's laying there.

And a paramedic is talking to him, and I'm talking to a cop because I saw it, telling him what I witnessed. But I hear the guy kind of gurgling, talking, really creepy and sad. And then I hear "Crowley." It was like a joke. He says "Crowley." And I'm like, OK, I'm imagining things now. This is ridiculous. And the paramedic is like, what was that? Is that your name, "Crowley"? Crowley?

Like, no, I wasn't imagining it. Too weird.

MATTHEW DILLON: That's way too weird, yeah.

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, and not positive.

MATTHEW DILLON: No, no, no.

TREY SPRUANCE: This is where-- I'm very sensitive to the dark side of expanded consciousness stuff, because I've watched tons of people, tons of people that I know, go totally crazy. And that's as far as I went. I turned away at that point.

MATTHEW DILLON: Well, I mean, if anybody's going to have a scared straight moment, that's one of them. That'll do it. But yeah, I don't want to get too far off on this tangent, but Robert Anton Wilson, he opens so many interesting doors for people, but not all of those doors are good.

TREY SPRUANCE: I consider him extremely irresponsible, to be honest. It goes with that libertarian way of looking at the world. Reality is what you can get away with. Yeah, fuck everyone else. I'm smarter than everybody. I don't know, there's something wrong with that shit. I don't know.

MATTHEW DILLON: We'll get into your religious progression as we go, which is also super interesting. But yeah, the--

TREY SPRUANCE: I went to his wake, actually, because he lived in Santa Cruz and I was living in Santa Cruz at the time.

MATTHEW DILLON: When did he pass?

TREY SPRUANCE: It was like 2000-- I want to say 2004 or something? Somewhere around there.

MATTHEW DILLON: Interesting. Got it.

TREY SPRUANCE: I mean, I have ambivalent feelings. I feel like I owe him something, but yeah, I generally have-- nobody ever wants to look at the bad stuff. They don't want to look at the bad stuff about Leary, either, but Leary's a disaster. There's so many problems. It's like, oh, man, we're just going to cover all that stuff up? All right. Sexist, racist, horrible.

MATTHEW DILLON: No, and I know you're fairly vocal about anti Theosophical Society stuff because they have this huge eugenics and racism problem.

TREY SPRUANCE: \[INAUDIBLE\]

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. Yeah, so no, it's well put. And so this is going to be a weird transition, but that's one of the things that's really great about these later-- and by "later," I just mean after the first two-- Secret Chiefs records, so starting with Book M. They're just so disciplined and they're so careful and so complex. You can feel that in everything that it does.

And so there's a lot of different ways of going about Book M, and we just talked about Corbin, but I figured I'd just set up this idea that came out in the talk that you gave about it here, at Harvard Divinity School. So you talked about Book M as a way you were trying to, quote, "invoke a theophany of the Grail," and you're very much bringing in Corbin. So what did you mean by that?

TREY SPRUANCE: I think I had been doing my own sort of intertextual hermeneutic analysis of the Grail mythos. And in a way, it might be another example of parallelomania, or something like that, where you're just finding too many things that fit together, and they're fitting together in such a resonant and powerful way, and you're wondering, I can't be the only person who sees this or who would be affected by this.

But, it's not like I can get people to read 700 pages of a bunch of different books. So for me, the project became about evoking that, trying to bring the sense of awe and wonder and sort of encompassing feelings together in a musical sense to try to provide that exhilaration or that sense that I was getting from weaving all that stuff together and tightly package it for a listener, try to make it intelligible.

And, well, music is weird. It's not just emotional. It's not just intellectual. And if those two things are working together, they can go beyond both. So I was really trying to provide that for listeners. So you spoke to the sort of intertexts and the parallelisms. The word that comes to mind is "correspondences." Going through your liner notes and hearing you talk, there's this incredible system of correspondences that's coming through in all these different ways.

MATTHEW DILLON: So it seems prudent to just set a sort of example out there and start to unpack one, just to give-- If people are listening who haven't listened to Secret Chiefs already, just press pause right now, go and just like, listen to Book M and come back because it'll make more sense. But here we go.

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, this is all background material here. We're talking about my sordid beginnings.

MATTHEW DILLON: We all start there. All right, so let's start with-- I don't want to go numerology, but 7 and 12. 7 and 12, let's star with the numbers so I know. And we don't have to get into 3 and 4 and 19. Just 7 and 12. What are 7 and 12 doing in Book M? What are the ways in which those are resonating across intertexts and in rhythm?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, great question. I mean, I can start with music. Everybody who's a musician is dealing with 7 and 12 all the time, because we have 12 chromatic notes in Western music theory and 7 diatonic notes that make a scale. So everybody knows the scales, they know seven-note scales, and there's 12 of them. I mean, this is fundamental to all musicians.

But in the ancient world, you also have the understanding that there's seven planets, seven observable planets, moving around across a zodiac of 12 signs. And you read Pythagoras, and Pythagoras is telling you why we have seven-note diatonic scales and why that works. He's giving harmonic justification for a system of imposing seven corresponding with the planets against that 12 background.

It kind of justifies Western music in a way. It justifies Western chromatic equal temperament by dividing the stations of the sky into 12 equal parts. It's something that can be controversial when you're looking at music from a non-western point of view. Why do you divide everything into 12 equal parts? I mean, there is an answer. It's the sky is divided into 12 equal parts, and we call three of them a season. It does work. There is reason for it.

But there's a strong, strong, strong Iranian influence in Book M because of-- first and foremost because of Corbin and reading all of these Iranian sages and their take, whether Neoplatonic or straight Shiite take. I mean, after all, you have Twelve-Imam Shi'ism. You have Seven-Imam Isma'ili Shi'ism. These things, they all kind of fit together.

So with the Liturgy of the Grail, actually, that's the Corbin work, "The Shiite Liturgy of the Grail," really does bring together, well, his notion of Templarism, the encounter of the Western world in the Middle East during the crusades, and a chivalric liaisoning between fighters of the crusades on the other side. And he does that in a very rich, symbolic, narrative way, and he brings in a lot of the-- I don't know that he's making the point that the Grail romance was a result of that contact in the Crusades, like if Wolfram von Eschenbach was somehow privy to some information that came from the Shiites.

I don't know that he really says that. But the question is open, and it's open because the name "Flegetanis" in the Wolfram von Eschenbach stuff. There's a lot of very deep reasoning that you could attempt to apply to say that this encounter of the Crusades resulted in the Grail mythos. I don't know.

I think that \[INAUDIBLE\] plays a role. And I now, from an Orthodox perspective, see it very differently because you have a kingdom in Persia, a Sasanian kingdom that is kind of actively absorbing Christian emigres from the Byzantine Empire. This is more recent information, so I wouldn't have known this during Book M. Book M kind of holds up. The thesis of the Book M of holds up, that there is a lot of intercourse between Iranian and, at the time, sort of Greco-Roman world that then manifests in the Grail romances in the Western Europe.

So I mean, what I tried to do is evoke a kind of Middle Ages idea. The music is rooted very primitive in-- I erased chord changes. It took all of my training as a kind of classical musician, stripped it of chords. There's no chord changes on that record. I dabbled a little bit in non-equal temperament stuff, and I was just trying to find that middle ground where the Western Middle Ages kind of overlaps with what's going on in the Arabic and Persian world.

I had married an Iranian woman at the time. This definitely played a role, being with her family all the time, too. So yeah, I mean, I'm just sort of in this kind of Phildickian two worlds at the same time thing.

\[LAUGHTER\]

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, wonderful. OK. Let's take another step here. Barzakh, right? So a harmonic and rhythmic mirroring technique, which as I understand it, you're absorbing from Corbin. So how does that sort of feed into your musical language at this point?

TREY SPRUANCE: I mean, it's such a huge thing that Corbin gave us, really, just to unpack the image and the reflection, even give us a deeper understanding of how a two-dimensional image can be a window into a four-dimensional universe, whereas the third-dimensional is something that we can get kind of caught up in all of our senses go there and sort of deprive ourselves of the contemplative part of the image-making faculty.

For musical instruments, I apply barzakh to how I come up with some-- at least in Book M, it's really very primitive beginnings of what is called microtonality for me. We call it "microtonality" because it's non-Western notes. I knew a little bit about Persian dastgah systems, a little bit about maqam, mostly the Persian stuff, and I just began dividing intervals, like a minor third, normal Western intervals, and divide them in half.

And when you divide them in half, that's a minor third in half. It's two three-quarter tones, rather than three half-tones. And we don't have three-quarter tones on our instruments that have frets or keys. And with the subject of the tetrachord, four strings or four fingers playing the first four notes of a scale, and then starting over and doing the same pitch relationship before the octave, you have what's called a key center. We call it a key center, and it's so funny because we start at the bottom of the scale. Why is that the key center? The center is the center.

So a diatonic tetrachord is four notes on the bottom that lead up to the next four notes that repeat at the octave. If you make a barzakh-- that in itself is kind of a barzakh. It's a key center. It's not a square root of two harmonic center. It's not the tritone, the musica diablo that splits the octave in half, the satanic interval, it's the perfect fifth, but it's still the same pattern of notes in a diatonic scale, usually. We have all kinds of variations of these scales, but this is the fundamental idea.

All I did was alter some of those notes by imposing yet another barzakh, by mirroring inside of those notes and then reapplying it. Really primitive stuff all over Book M. But that's really just the instrumental part of it. I tend to shortchange myself when I'm thinking that way because I really wanted to go deep into the barzakh terrain, and I started doing compositional experiments. And the best one, the thing that resulted in a piece was turned into "Hagia Sophia," and that was an experiment.

I wanted to see if I could make, if I could portray the barzakh, the line where time, recognizable, incremental time, could be seen and felt on one side of the mirror of the isthmus, and then on the other side, that time itself would disappear. I wanted to see if I could have time and timelessness exist in the same composition without anybody noticing.

MATTHEW DILLON: That's a trick. Yeah.

TREY SPRUANCE: Just to see if I could transpose the listener from structured, linear time into complete lack of time. And in "Hagia Sophia," that's what happens. It starts with a very syncopated-- it sounds like really complicated odd meter kind of stuff, but it isn't. It's pretty strictly 4/4 just dance music. It's really straightforward.

And at what I call the "Simurgh cry," it kind of announces that this pandimensional thing is happening because it also comes out of this weird spatialized universe. Comes from you're in this narrow stereo field and all of a sudden, stuff kind of starts coming from the fourth dimension or something. But then the music, the rhythm gets stricter, more squared off, kind of more stupid, just going \[MIMICKING BEAT\].

And what's happening is I'm just submitting a duduk melody at this point. A duduk melody from Armenia or Turkmenistan-- I'm not sure where the melody actually comes from, but it's played on a duduk. When that enters, that's the annunciation that we're about to take this journey, and that's when the music gets really dumb and straightforward. But then when the beats stop, when those beats come back in, they're completely subservient to the melody now, because before that, the melody was following along the blocks. The melody was playing along with Kronos, playing along with chronological time.

But at that mid point in the piece, all of those relationships are completely reversed. The melody, which is totally fluid, takes over, and there's all these beats and all this crazy syncopation under it. But I assure you, there is no time there at all. None of those beats make sense. They have no pattern. They don't repeat. They're not really syncopated. Somebody's listening carefully would say, that's all wrong. It's just a mess. It's total, absolute chaos.

But really, nobody until I came out with this at the conference, nobody in whatever, 20 years, ever mentioned, hey, that's a big mess because it sounds like dance music.

MATTHEW DILLON: It does, yeah.

TREY SPRUANCE: There's people who've done choreography to that piece. Nobody ever said, there's no time here. But believe me, a musician sitting down and analyzing it will know, will tell you, yeah that's true. There is no time here at all. None. It's gone.

\[SECRET CHIEFS 3, "HAGIA SOPHIA"\]

MATTHEW DILLON: That's amazing. I mean, when you brought that up at the Corbin conference back in 2022, I've listened to "Book M" like-- I can't even count the number of times. It's way over dozens. Never noticed that. I'm just like, oh, this is a really interesting-- the total disappearance of time.

TREY SPRUANCE: It's just one of these things. It's a compositional urge, though. You can see how this doesn't come from sitting down with an instrument and saying, oh, look-- I mean, Secret Chiefs began to transform into more of a compositional vehicle for these large ideas that are not my own. They come from Islamic sages. They come from Corbin. They come from Kabbalism. They come from Christian mysticism. I'm just trying to find ways to transcribe these enormous, powerful things into music.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, that's so cool. All right. That's wonderful. I want to-- I don't necessarily want to put Book M to the side, but this feels, when we're going back and forth like this, like a good time to bring up Secret Chiefs is becoming a band of bands. So instead of Secret Chiefs being a band, it's 7 satellite bands.

And so you have Holy Vehm, this sort of pulverizing death metal group. You have UR. Is it UR? Right? It's just UR.

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, or "uhr," however you want to say your "U."

MATTHEW DILLON: Traditionalists, FORMS, Ishraqiyun, et cetera. Electromagnetic Azazoth, there we go. So first--

TREY SPRUANCE: Well done.

MATTHEW DILLON: There we go. And then there's the one that's not named, and so I didn't know what to do with that.

TREY SPRUANCE: I'm glad you left it out.

MATTHEW DILLON: Thank you. That's what we go for here. So basically, where does that come from? Where does the idea for taking these bands and putting them together under one umbrella, where does it come from? And if you want to take it in this direction already, that's cool, the cube. Each one of them occupies a corner of the cube. So do with what you will with that.

TREY SPRUANCE: Well, you led yourself right to it because the cube, I mean, I don't know that Corbin goes into this part of it in the "Imago Templi" and "The Configuration of the Ka'bah" essay of his. I think I got this from the fifth chapter of the Sefer Yetzirah, actually, which is really important to a lot of Secret Chiefs stuff, Chapter 5 and 6.

But yeah, there are six faces of the cube and a center. And a cube, almost like magic, because before, maybe between Book M and Book of Horizons, I really discovered the cube, let's put it this way, and the importance of the cube. And dimensionally speaking, the cube, it has 12 lines-- four horizontals, four, and four. You have 12. So here we have the 7 and 12 again, because the way it works in the Sefer Yetzirah is you have six faces of the cube in the center, and those are associated with what are called the double letters.

And then the rest of the letters, the single letters, are associated with the 12 lines that make up the cube. And then the three axes of creation-- aleph, mem, and shin-- they're called the mother letters, are what give us our three dimensions. So in the Jewish tradition, that's all wrapped up in the 22 letters. You have the mother letters on the outside, in the middle, you have your double letters, which take up the faces, and then you have your single letters, so-called, that are on all of the vertices.

One of the things I did is I started playing, as hand exercises, on a kinnor, which is like a lyre, you have four fingers, this thing again, how many permutations of the Tetragrammaton are there? What if you play them? What if you play them in every possible permutation? This is a great finger exercise.

Doing this, kind of just playing the Sefer Yetzirah, kind of opened up the infinite possibilities to me of this, of thinking of music this way, with tetrachords, four \[INAUDIBLE\]. And this is where my idea of tessellations came from, which we can get into on a subsequent thing. But ultimately, I started really focusing on the cube, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention I'm also familiar with the Golden Dawn tradition of the cube, specifically through Paul Foster Case.

And he has a whole system that's-- it's different than the Sefer Yetzirah is. There's a very fancy way to reconcile that difference, which I won't get into. But essentially, the association of different planets with the different faces of the cube and the way he distributes the different cards of the tarot all around the cube. All of those things, once again, it became this kind of synergistic thing where, wow, I can really ground a bunch of stuff in this.

Because here, we also have the Corbin and the Ka'bah and all of that rich information from Haydar Amuli and all these great sages. I really started to see this as a "Harmonia Abrahamica" thing, where maybe these sort of esoteric knowledge from all of these traditions could have a musical, at least a musical edifice built upon it to try to weave it all together.

This is where the 7 satellite bands came from-- one band for each face of the cube. Because Secret Chiefs already had tons of stuff going on. We have so many-- It was schizophrenic, and I needed a way to-- Was I doing that the whole time? I think I was, actually. I had already sort of been putting things mentally into these different categories that are in relationship with each other, and it was just perfect to put them in a cube.

MATTHEW DILLON: Excellent. OK, OK. And I don't know if we want to-- the reason for each one of the bands being on the particular face. They seem to be in a certain sort of geometric relationship. Is that something that you'd want to unpack?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah. I mean, so I mentioned the Golden Dawn versus the Sefer Yetzirah thing. And I kind of played both sides of that. I'm more faithful to the Sefer Yetzirah sense of orientation on it, but the planetary attributions are really what give the category of music in my mind.

I can make-- For me Ishraqiyun makes sense as Mars or makes sense as Mercury. These are just sort of intuitive decisions that I made about it. It's clear where Saturn belongs, the one that we don't talk about. But the moon as a reflection of that makes sense as Holy Vhem, and it's also as foundation on the Tree of Life. Like if it's a Yesod, which it is in my conception of it, it's, again, where it's grounding. It's where all of this energy is grounding. If it's a central pillar thing, this is where Electromagnetic Azoth is. It's right there in the central pillar on the Tree of Life because it distributes. It doesn't really have a color of its own.

As we said, it distributes the light into all of these different colors, and each of the band takes on a different hue, a different kind of genre project, a different kind of concept of rhythm. Or it's all completely straight. It's just hammering surf music or it's Krautrock. It's something that has continuous kind of 8 notes going.

This is going to contrast greatly with Ishraqiyun, which uses ratios for rhythm. It doesn't do anything blocky. It doesn't use a grid system for its tonal sensibility. Its tonal stuff also comes from ratios. So you have all of these amazing ways to organize all of these different things in a harmonious way. Electromagnetic Azoth is the link that connects all of them as a central pillar.

MATTHEW DILLON: You're the composer listed by name in all the other bands, and then in Holy Vhem you're "The Enemy."

TREY SPRUANCE: \[LAUGHS\]

MATTHEW DILLON: \[CHUCKLES\] What's behind that? Is it like an alternate persona? Like what are you trying to come through by being "The Enemy" on those tracks?

TREY SPRUANCE: I mean, even back then-- this is before the Orthodox stuff and everything-- even back then, my conception of the Holy Vhem was that it was very much a exaggerated Gnostic kind of Manichaean clergy type of thing, that the band was like that. And really, the original formulation of it was if metal bands are so evil and they're so into the devil and all of that, I don't understand why they would be so furious about the Inquisition and torture devices and all of that terrible stuff that you always hear about.

Shouldn't they be celebrating that? If you're into the abuse and the humiliation of humanity, since that's what being a satanist is all about, then you should be applauding the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. Like, what the hell is your problem? So that was the idea, was we'll be in support of this monstrous religious institution that intends all this harm for humanity. And I thought that was a cool idea for an evil band.

But I've since-- that's for somebody else to develop that idea, because it would be just too weird for me to do that.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, it would feel weird now? Yeah, OK.

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah. It's a good idea. I still think it's a good idea. And there are bands that have flirted with it, but they just can't-- The metal bands are too-- They're too timid because their thing, they always have to be about Satan or evil things or whatever, and they just can't be like-- They can't put on a cross. It has to be upside down.

Like, we'll put on a cross and be evil inquisitors. That's way scarier. That had way more of a dark impact on humanity. If you want to be scary, you should do that. That's what I was kind of trying to do, but again, I'm Orthodox. It's not for me. That's for some other metal band. They should do that stuff. I don't know why they haven't yet.

\[MUSIC PLAYING\]

MATTHEW DILLON: So I was going to ask this towards the end, but this feels like a good time to ask it. So all of these records are so well constructed and so produced and so meticulous, and you have this huge arrangement-- oh, pardon me-- of correspondences. What is the creative process like with that? Because it's so thoughtful.

Do you start with the thought of what it is you're envisioning a record to be, and then start to construct it and work through these correspondences? Is it a sort of intuitive, inspirational thing? Do you noodle? How do these records come together?

TREY SPRUANCE: You know, it's funny. Yeah, it has to be all of those things because, in a way, the argument could be made that I did all of this, created this mental edifice, in order to organize all of these creative urges that I have. But that would be bullshit, because half the time, it is coming from the inspiration that created the edifice to begin with.

Half the time, the music is coming from, my god, I got to find a way to make this happen through these instruments. But half the time, I'm just playing on the instrument and being spontaneous like a normal musician, and ideas come and you're like, oh, my god, where am I going to put this? And then it takes shape as an UR song, or it takes shape as one of the categories. It's just a very natural process, but it's alchemical. It takes time. All this stuff needs time to marinate.

This is a place where Secret Chiefs differs from other bands a lot, is-- even fans will often be shocked to hear that, OK, well, that drum part was recorded in 2003, and then this part was recorded in 2015, and then he just got done mixing it now. Like, what the hell? It's not about capturing a momentary feeling, where the band is all vibing together and let's make a record. It's just so fundamentally not that.

Ideas take so much time sometimes, like aging wine. If you have the grapes, you pick them, you harvested them. It took 10 years to learn how to distill that correctly. Most of that stuff is garbage, but look at this stuff that came out of it. It's that. It's a distillation process. It just takes a long time to marinate.

Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the idea is there, it's complete, and it's done. But most of the time, the distillation process, it's a combination of everything you mentioned. It really, truly is. I feel like if it wasn't that, it wouldn't work for me. It has to encompass all of my creative urges or else it just falls apart.

MATTHEW DILLON: No, that makes perfect sense. So we're talking about the music, but there's also this whole imagistic component to Secret Chiefs. You're very careful about what ends up going into the liner notes and working with the artist and making sure it's saturated with these sort of esoteric symbols.

So we could do like 12 shows just on this, but one of the ones--

TREY SPRUANCE: I sound like a crazy ranter, because actually trying to talk about this stuff is hard. And yeah, you're right. It could take years, maybe. I don't know.

MATTHEW DILLON: So I just want to pick one because it strikes me. So in Book Horizons, most of the images are correlated to one of the bands. And then there's this Mithraic one. I see this as a sort of Mithraic, but in a nice suit, with the eclipse head, a man who's just hit a-- like Mithras, sort of stabbed a bull in the side and is riding it down. So what is going on there? How does that tie into the musical statement that is Book Horizons?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, this is a panel for the Traditionalists, actually.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, got it. OK.

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, yeah. I mean, not officially, but in my mind it is because Traditionalists has their own panel on the inside of it. Yeah, there's something about that-- It's so funny. I was just talking about this with my wife. This idea that this exaggeratedly Manichaean idea of where the organic forces have to be completely obliterated in order for us to be spiritual beings, where sexuality has to go away completely and we have to be cleansed of all of that animal stuff in order to be pure light beings kind of stuff. I think I just have a lifetime of objecting to this exaggeration. And I think that image, it's funny. It's been mysterious to me, too. Like, why was I obsessed about putting that in there? And I think, for me, it is like when you're harnessing all of the energy as an artist, you need all of this energy to pull a big idea off that you're taking seriously. That relationship is problematic, being up on top of the animal, and you have to have a knife in it. You have to be killing it to master it. Yeah, it's not really right. There's something wrong with that. And that's actually why the text, which is enciphered on the top. Can I see that real quick?

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, let me \[INAUDIBLE\].

TREY SPRUANCE: Wow.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, OK. Oh, boy. You picked a hard one, man.

MATTHEW DILLON: Sorry, dude.

TREY SPRUANCE: This is really me making a case for Emanationist philosophy. That's really what that stands for.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, wow. OK.

TREY SPRUANCE: I'm not actually really an Emanationist at this point. I've sort of changed my mind on some of that, but not all of it. Not all of it. It's really about wisdom being a matter of having-- the model that the Emanationists use helps resolve this weird dichotomy between man and animal and between nature and God and all of that. I felt that I had discovered like a-- which I still do agree with that. I felt that I had found a graceful resolution to that for myself.

Yeah, so it's really just about the wisdom of how you handle energy as an artist versus being super foolish about it. I think it's kind of a note to self, more than anything.

MATTHEW DILLON: So this is-- What is-- 2004-ish? And so doing some reading, is it around 2005 and after that start doing your travels to go visit Greek Orthodox monasteries and going through stuff like that? Or was Greek orthodoxy already part of your life by the time you were doing these records?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, so it's another one-- It's just weird things happen, because I have "Hagia Sophia" on Book M. I didn't know what Orthodox really was. I had just located that convergence there. Corbin has located a certain convergence there. It's a little later that I-- It's like 2006, somewhere. Yeah, just maybe a year later.

I think the first time I went to Turkey was maybe 2005. But yeah, I mean, I started seeing the monastic cave complexes that are-- they're empty because the Greeks were kicked out of Turkey. And I was just experiencing firsthand that kind of weird situation, where people are suspicious of you. People are cool with you as long as you're just a tourist, if you're just going to be-- like evangelicals going to visit the Seven Churches or whatever, that's great. Go to Ephesus, go see where Paul talked.

If you're this Western vagabond straggler going out into the hinterlands of Cappadocia and not sticking to Göreme, and where everybody goes, there's a lot of suspicion what the hell you're up to. And you have to know how to deal with people. And the person that I was with didn't know how to deal with people very well. Maybe they were a little hyper-Orthodox type and it caused a lot of problems. It was not good, not good.

My first trip to Turkey, it was great. I mean, I'm not saying it wasn't a good trip. It was the best trip ever. It was the first time I saw, what the depth of what a monastic cave complex really is and why would anybody live that way. I started asking myself a lot of questions about it. So then I started asking other people a lot of questions about it. And that's kind of what led to my deeper inquiry into orthodoxy and all of that, was-- I wouldn't say it started there, but probably the most profound part of it did start by going out there.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. And this is going to be a really heady question. Feel free to just toss it aside and we'll do an edit. But how do you see this quest that brought you to orthodoxy in this sort of increasingly complex and deep sort of musical search? How are those two things intertwined for you?

TREY SPRUANCE: I know it makes no sense because like Orthodox music, there's no musical instruments. You know what I'm saying? I torture myself with that question, actually. In the beginning, I tortured myself with it a lot. But you talk to clergy, you go talk to monks, and they're like, what are you freaking yourself out about? Is somebody telling you not to do secular music? Of course they're not.

There's secular music the whole time, there has been secular music. You're not writing church music. What's your problem? So finally, with some good guidance, I got past that urge to hyper-Orthodox crap, which it takes hold of everyone who joins-- a new convert to any religion, believe me, you're going to go through that stuff.

I'm happy to be just an Orthodox lay person. Essentially, it's really just about that. Again, with the music, I was looking to music to ground me spiritually. Music can't ground you spiritually, but I'm really glad I went through this fiery episode so that it led me to a place where I could be grounded spiritually and actually continue to do my work and do it with more precision and do it with more-- being more conscious doing it type of thing, a little more even-handedly, I would say. But sometimes the chaos has to be there. You have to let the spirit speak, and sometimes the spirit just wants to go a little bananas.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. So speaking of which, Holy Vehm wasn't on Book of Souls. What's the story behind that?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yes. That wasn't to do with any of that. That's actually in the script, so to speak, for the whole "Book of" thing. I'll just answer by saying, if it seems imbalanced now that there's no Holy Vehm, there's coming so much Holy Vehm that it's going to be further balancing. Yeah, it's the next phase. I call it Act 3.

To me, Secrets Chiefs Act 2 is over. It ended a couple of years ago, and Act 3 is beginning with a-- well, I don't if it will start with Holy Vehm, but there's an awful lot of Holy Vehm in Act 3. Yeah, there's tons.

MATTHEW DILLON: OK.

TREY SPRUANCE: And that's because that balance, Book of Souls is Folio A, Folio B. The Holy Vehm stuff is going to happen to the side of all of that. It actually isn't going to be tilting that balance. I was sort of misleading. It's not really tilting the balance because it's not part of Book of Souls, this next part of act 3. But Holy Vehm already has the music that will be present on Folio B. So its little part will rebalance that once I'm done with Act 3.

MATTHEW DILLON: Got it. OK. I'm waiting. Love me some Holy Vehm. I enjoy Ishraqiyun, et cetera, but Holy Vehm--

TREY SPRUANCE: Holy Vehm is-- the Renaissance is coming. You're going to be a very happy man.

MATTHEW DILLON: The thing I was going to ask you is the diagrams in Book of Souls, what I-- So as I'm hearing you talk, I'm able to start to piece these things together. Some of it's familiar to me-- anagrams, diagrams, et cetera. My question is, what are some of the-- I'll just make one. What's the weirdest response you've gotten from a fan who's been like, I understand what this is.

TREY SPRUANCE: Oh, man. Yeah, I mean, that and-- that thing you just held up, It's me sort of giving up because I had very lofty aspirations for the artwork on that record, like with Book of Horizons, and it's just not possible to do. It's just too much going on, too busy with all of life.

And I debated, should I put this out there because there's crazy people out there? We already had lots of crazy, crazy people listening, which is fine. I don't mind the crazy people. But kind of opening up your diary like that, I made sure, OK, there's nothing really informative here. They can't get too much out of it.

I'll tell you a story. This was actually back in Mr. Bungle '90s period. The weirdest one of these. It's not the weirdest, but it's the easiest for the public. Let's put it this way. Our tour manager kept getting calls from Japan, and it was some girl. And she's like, she just keeps saying she needs to talk to you. She keeps harassing me.

This is before real cell phones, but he had a cell phone. I don't know where she got my number, but she keeps calling, calling. Will you just talk to her? I'm like, no, I don't want I don't some random person. No. And finally, he's like, two weeks into this, he's like, you have to just fucking talk to her. And he gives me the phone, and it's this woman.

She's speaking English OK, and she's like-- she goes through this whole thing, nothing too crazy sounding at first. She's just saying, I have a dog and my dog died. It was a very beautiful dog. I love my dog very much. I love this dog. And it died. And I was looking at your artwork for the "Ma Meeshka Mow Skwoz" song in Disco Volante, and I saw that you understand about my dog. And I want to know, If my dog died, and you know my dog, I want you to tell me how to die.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, my goodness.

TREY SPRUANCE: What would you say?

MATTHEW DILLON: I guess you kind of have to do the--

that's a great question. I think it's a really, really rich, important question. I don't feel like I'm in a place.

TREY SPRUANCE: I've been in this situation. I wasn't in a place, either. Yeah, I just tried to explain to her, oh, no, no, no. It doesn't mean that. I had to just tell her, here's what it means. Here's what this part means. OK, the dog part of it, you're like, oh, I can see how you would think that, but actually it means this. You just try to redirect it a little bit. And she seemed satisfied by that, but you don't know. I don't know what happened with any of that.

MATTHEW DILLON: Really?

TREY SPRUANCE: But this is the kind of stuff-- you do deal with this kind of stuff a lot, a lot.

MATTHEW DILLON: So around I guess it's 2008, you start recording for John Zorn. So you do the-- the Xaphan comes first.

TREY SPRUANCE: Xaphan, yeah.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. And then you end up doing Malkuth later. So, I mean, this is super fascinating as just a nerd, that John Zorn is as into esoteric correspondences and theory and all the way those things work as you are. So how did you guys meet? How did you come together? What is the electricity like when you two are talking about stuff like this?

TREY SPRUANCE: It's been an amazing friendship. I met him in '91 because he produced the first Mr. Bungle record. He helped us mix that record. And then on and off since then, I would participate in some of his game pieces and stuff. And that's like being one of the musicians, one of the many musicians, in John Zorn's remarkable orbit. He has the best players, period, and he knows how to get people to play nice together and everything. He's so good at all that stuff.

I hadn't ever put out a record on his Tzadik label or anything like that. And it's not that we've drifted apart. I didn't really see him very much 1999 until 2005 or so, maybe a little longer. But he came to see Secret Chiefs. We did a stripped down version of the band at The Stone. And he hadn't heard it before and he was stoked. He was really psyched about it.

And he ran home-- I could grab it for you. He ran home and gave me a box, this gilded gold box filled with 300 compositions. Maybe not that many. But yeah, 100-something compositions. He's like, pick an album's worth of music, whatever you want, and do a record for me. I'm like, hell yeah, OK.

And I took the box and I went home and I started going through the pieces. And, oh, it's so cool because my first-- I would just write down what my first impression, like, oh, this should be like Lalo Schifrin. This part could be-- well, this is like the theme from Exodus. Let's do it that way. This should be a metal thing. Fit into my, without imposing the seven bands on it, just the way my brain works. I'm interpreting his stuff that way.

And when I gave him my selections, he was happy and I started recording. And he was so happy about that record. Something about that, the experience of that record, making that record for him, really took our friendship to another level. It was really nice because, again, he works with people who are players. And I'm not really a player. I play, but I'm OK. But there's these giants all around. I'm an arranger.

For him, what I'm really good at is arranging his music. I'm a composer and arranger and producer. Those are the hats that I wear. Player? Yeah, I guess I have to be here, so I'll play something. So it was cool. He saw me, at that point. It's not that he didn't see me before, but once that happened, it was like, oh, I know what to do with this guy, and we could communicate on that level after that. So it was amazing.

And when we did Malkuth, it was so weird because he's like, yeah, this one, the last one, it's Book of Angels, so it's Yetzirah. We hadn't talked about it. I hadn't even told you this, but all of the satellite bands are Yetzirah. There's nothing Malkuth. There's nothing in Beri'ah. There's nothing Atziluth. It's all Yetzirah. And he's like, my next book for the Masada is Book Beri'ah. I'm like, cool, OK. And he's like, but I'm going to assign each of the groups one of the Sefirot.

And he just somehow knew. He's like, and I'm assigning you Malkuth. And I'm like, whoa. I don't want to let too many cats out of the bag here, because Book M means a lot of things, the "M," but really the primary meaning is that. It's outside of Yetzirah, where the satellite bands are. It is the kingdom. It's a place of great distinction, if you understand the significance of it.

Everybody wants to be Atziluth, right? Everybody wants to be Da'at. But no, Malkuth. Malkuth is the place. It was, to me, the hugest honor, the hugest honor. So I worked my ass off on that record, and then he had all those problems putting it out and everything. It's kind of the hidden Secret Chiefs record. Fewer people know about that record because it had-- he had a problem with Pledge Music when it was supposed to come out, and it didn't come out for like a year or something. Oh, he lost tons of money. They ripped him off. Yeah, it was bad.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, what a bummer, because it's an amazing record. One of my favorite.

TREY SPRUANCE: I feel like I had the best Secret Chiefs band that has ever been assembled for that record. And we toured with that record, and it was the greatest. It was the greatest. The best Secret Chiefs band ever was for that.

MATTHEW DILLON: So before the episode ends, I do want to talk about Tessellations. So I just want to cede the floor to you. How would you illustrate Tessellations for people, especially for those who are outside music theory, although speaking to musicians as well?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, I mean, it's another one of these enormous undertakings. It really came from sitting with a lyre or "leer", \[INAUDIBLE\] kinnor, but just a harp-like instrument and doing finger exercises. You use four fingers on that instrument, if you're just using your right hand, and that goes back to this tetrachord thing, the four strings.

And those finger exercises, if you do the same pattern over and over again, it's something you do when you're a kid and you're tapping on your desk. I wanted to formalize some of these exercises because after all, really what inspired me to pick the thing up to begin with was Chapter 5 of the Sefer Yetzirah. And I'm looking at the vertices of the cube. And I'm seeing the way the four-letter name, the Tetragrammaton, is being distributed to the vertices, to the 4 up down, the 4 top square, the bottom top, the bottom square. And it has these different permutations of that name.

I'm like, well, that's a tetrachord-- four notes. Let me practice this. Each of those are, because they're on the vertices, they're associated with a different astrological signs and all of that. So you know, theoretically, you could speak, you could do the astrological signs in order, or you could do them in-- start with a cardinal point. You could do all these-- You could speak intelligibly through this instrument just with these four notes. So I started trying to get good at that, but I was lacking a rhythmic concept.

So the tapping, to think back when you were a kid and you're just kind of nervously tapping, I started doing a seven note pattern. You do a seven note pattern, you only have four fingers, it's going to get weird really fast. And it starts to spin around. And basically what happened is like I had to retrain myself. This took a couple of years. Like, I'm really-- you get this vertigo when you start doing these patterns, and then you flip them a little bit, and you flip them another way. It's really hard. It's really hard.

So as I'm doing it, I'm like, wow, these are riffs. And I started coming up with music, and the first-- I had been kind of doing-- I had touched upon this idea before, but the first real serious composition I did with Tessellation was called "Perichoresis." And that one, it's like-- one of the things about this technique, that ended up being like in 7/4. It's three bars of 7, which is 28-- or 21 beats, so to speak, not to get too technical about all this stuff.

But OK, so 21 is-- It arrived at that because it's a pattern that is-- How can I say this?

I have a visual. I can send it to you. Maybe you can put it up on the screen. I'll send it to you.

MATTHEW DILLON: Perfect. OK.

TREY SPRUANCE: So if this is 1, 2, 3, and 4, the pattern is simple. It repeats the first two times. It goes long, long, long, short, long, long, long. That's easy. One, long, long, long, short, long, long, long, short, long. And then it gets weird on the third time through. So long, long, long, short, long, long, long, short, long, short, short, long is the pattern.

But now, since you went long, short, short, long, now you're going to start-- you started on one. The second time through, you're going to now start with this finger and go long, long, long, short, long, long, long, short, long, short, long, long, short, short, long. So since you have four fingers, this whole pattern cycles four times. It's the same 21 beats, but every time, it's a different arrangement of the four notes.

It's 4 different fingers doing the same pattern, but it's totally weird and totally hard, harder than just learning something. Like, for a musician, this is really disorienting and it's very interesting because then you can emphasize every time I just use my first finger and my thumb, maybe that'll be the base line. And every time it turns, it changes. It seems like this repetitive pattern, but it isn't. And again, for the bass players, I got to just pick out those notes. It's really, really, really hard. Like, really the hardest thing ever.

So it took years to develop this. And also, just doing math isn't music. So you're developing a compositional idea. And so "Perichoresis" just kind of grew and grew and grew into a lot of different permutations. And then the other beautiful thing about Tessellations, like this particular one, since it's a 7 divided by 3, you can do a 3 polymeter underneath it. You can do a 4 polymeter underneath it if you go for two cycles. You have all these really kind of funky rhythms that come out of it. There's just all these amazing things that just come from where you emphasize an accent with your finger.

So that's another thing on the lyre. You're like, oh, if I accent this note, and then this one, and this one, in these patterns, all these crazy rhythms emerge. So it's really like it becomes extremely fascinating and spellbinding as a player to do it. But really, as a composer, it's very challenging because you are also turning it into music. And then there's the pedagogy of teaching it to people, which is very steep. It's a very steep--

MATTHEW DILLON: I would imagine. And I think you mentioned before, or I might have read something about this, it relates somewhere to Arabic tiles. So the way that we've talked about the imagination and relationship to Barzakh. It has a visual component, or at least that correspondences in the same way.

TREY SPRUANCE: Most definitely. And "Perichoresis" is a good example because it does just turn four times. So that's literally tiling tessellations with rotating a quarter turn and a quarter turn and a quarter turn. So each time the pattern happens, your finger goes through the whole 21-beat cycle and then does a quarter turn. And it really it actually feels like a turn for a musician, and also for the listener, because now it's this way, and now it's this way. And you're close up to it, you're thinking that way, but you step back from it a little bit and you start to see these deeper relationships between these nodes, like those accents I was talking about.

If you do the accent, it's a dot that gets connected by a line to another, a whole other part of the tessellating pattern that's emerging. Step back another layer, and you see this beautiful geometric shape or arrangement array, let's call it. That's what happens with the music, too. These relationships are cognizable, and the average listener comes in and just goes, oh, this is cool. They don't hear like all this crazy intricacy, all this detailed work that the musicians went through, like the tiling.

They just walk into it and go, wow, this is a beautiful harmonic scene here. And that's what you're going for. As a composer, I'm not going for math. I don't want people to deal with this empty math experience. I want them to walk into a three-dimensional temple and be able to move their mind around inside of it.

And the other thing about "Perichoresis" is also you're trying to write this piece, the title occurred to me just because of the natural things that are happening when you approach the rhythms this way, because frankly, with this tessellating pattern, there are easily-- Well, there are three distinct time signatures happening simultaneously, depending on how you accent. So it's all in the emphasis. It's all in what you decide to do with the bass drum or with the bass.

How the listener hears that, there's a lot of ambiguity in the piece. You're going to hear it almost shift gears or transition into one sort of sense of time. But that might not catch you. You might still be in the one that was there before. That's intentional because there really are three different layers of simultaneous time taking place that you can take your pick of which one you orient to, really, at any time.

And that very much-- That was intentional because I'm trying to illustrate the, well, the term "perichoresis," which is a Trinitarian. It refers to a dance, literally dance of the persons of the Trinity, that there's a mutual indwelling where they are in relationship and never ceaselessly in motion, in dynamic motion or dynamic relationship without ever like touching, essentially. I don't know if that's really the right way to say it, but they are in this harmonic relationship, let's say, that is ever-present.

And not to divide them up into completely different entities, but "Perichoresis" the song kind of doesn't divide them up into separate entities either. The different senses of time are all mutually indwelling and they are present at all times. You can kind of choose which one to focus on.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, that's so cool. I never knew that.

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah. The definition of the word "perichoresis," if you look it up, it applies. It applies to the piece. Absolutely does.

MATTHEW DILLON: Your first piece for Kronos was also very tessellation-oriented, right? The "Seraphita" one?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yes the second, the "Baphomet," is all based on a tessellation. And it has some of those exact things. It's a different time signature and everything, but some of those relationships. I explained about, if you just pick certain notes and make that the bass part, all of that is in that piece. It's a very challenging, unbelievably hard piece.

And actually, I can say they worked with a LINES ballet in San Francisco, and they did-- Alonzo King wanted that piece. He wanted the "Seraphita" piece, which was amazing because I have to say that Kronos, once they were playing with the ballet, which this is movement, movement in space, it kind of clicked. I felt like they played the piece so much better after they played with the ballet because, yeah, it's not \[MIMICKING BEAT\]. It's all these gestures that imply movement, and Alonzo got that and his dancers totally understood the larger gestural shapes of the piece, and it really helped-- having that visual like helped to congeal the performance a lot.

MATTHEW DILLON: So cool. And you did another thing with Kronos, the "St. Cyprian" one?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yes, yes. Actually, this is interesting. This is something we're going to go into a rabbit trail here, but the second piece that I wrote for Kronos Quartet was on the figure-- It's called the Black Arts Book of St. Cyprian the Mage, and it's about-- Anyway, I won't go into the whole story, but it's interesting because St. Cyprian is essentially the saint-- It's like King Solomon-type of person who is very well-versed in magic.

The story is he went to school in Egypt and Babylon, studied with all the masters, also studied \[? titanic ?\] magic in Athens, and then came back and was plying his trade during the Christian era, early Christian area, like third century. Anyway, it's a long story, but essentially the thing is like he renounces his magical career, mainly because he can't get demons to do a certain thing that he wants them to do, which is to corrupt this young girl. And he's pissed because whatever the power is that's enabling her to not be affected is stronger than the devil. Like, this is bullshit.

So he summons the devil, and the devil is-- basically, he gets in a fight with all the demons, and the devil, is like, you guys are full of shit. You're not powerful \[LAUGHS\] because I'm enjoying the real power here. It's unbelievable. So throughout the last, after that, for 1,000 years, Armenians and Arab Christians, they carry little scrolls and stuff inside their amulets. They do this kind of Christian magic stuff with St. Cyprian.

But that tradition then somehow came into Europe much later, end of the Middle Ages, end of the Inquisition, and there started being references to St. Cyprian in grimoire tradition. So then, OK, then it becomes historically visible in the Iberian Peninsula. You start seeing in Portugal and Spain all this talk about St. Cyprian and all this kind of sorcery, divination stuff. It's all about finding treasure, liberating basically stuff that moors and Jewish people left behind when they were kicked out of Spain and Portugal. It was all about finding their treasure kind of thing. Typical like black magic bullshit.

But what's so weird--

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, weird.

TREY SPRUANCE: Look at how thick this book is.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, that's quite a tome. Yeah.

TREY SPRUANCE: This is Cyprianic magic from Norway and Sweden. Just endless, endless. It's not even grimoires. This stuff passed hand-to-hand, and it's all this magic invocations, the usual stuff. But so far out of context, so far away from even the Latin absorption of the Cyprian grimoires. Where did the hell did they get this? Nobody knows, actually.

MATTHEW DILLON: Really?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah.

MATTHEW DILLON: So they're not, in terms of dating on the material--

TREY SPRUANCE: They know when the stuff was-- Yeah, they know when it's from. They just don't know where it came from. Like, why are you guys talking about Cyprian? Look, I mean, it has all this stuff.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, my goodness. Oh, that is so cool.

TREY SPRUANCE: It's really interesting, the whole story of it. It's just absolutely, absolutely mind blowing. The reason I bring all this up, not one black metal band has talked about this. None. This is their tradition, black magic tradition. Never. They never even brought it up.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, that needs to be brought more public in some sort of neo-black metal thing. I want to see this happen.

TREY SPRUANCE: It's because now the scene changed, and it's all about dressing up in furs and spurting blood all over the place and calling that paganism. The thing that was so interesting and why I felt it was so appropriate for this string quartet piece, is that I started seeing-- I knew about Cyprian from Orthodox. My spiritual father was considering that maybe I should use that as my Orthodox name because I come from a kind of occult background, which made sense.

But I wasn't like-- He was also like, well, you're not really renouncing all that stuff, and to be honest, it seems like it's the latter you came walking in the window on, so maybe we shouldn't shit all over it like that, which is true.

MATTHEW DILLON: That's great, yeah.

TREY SPRUANCE: So then that was the end of it. I didn't really-- And then I started seeing it. I started seeing his name in weird occult, very deep into this kind of-- that shelf, that really Scarlet Imprint kind of super occultist stuff, post-Crowley stuff. Like, why are they talking about St. Cyprian? This is so weird.

And then I realized, because I'm married to a Brazilian, that there's a reason. In Quimbanda, which is like a version of Macumba that's very much black magic-oriented, they have two different interpretations-- and this has been going on for a long time-- of St. Cyprian. They used Cyprian in their magic practice because he's considered-- There's an old phrase in Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, about lighting a candle to God and a candle to the devil. And that's what-- It's a phrase like, you can't light to God and the devil at the same time.

MATTHEW DILLON: OK, OK.

TREY SPRUANCE: But that's what they do in Quimbanda, essentially. They do it in a lot of Macumba also. Syncretic, post-Catholic religions, it happens all the time. And their basic philosophy about it is that he is-- you ever get yourself into trouble and there's too much demonic activity around, you call upon St. Cyprian because he's an eshu. St. Cyprian is actually an eshu. I don't know if--

MATTHEW DILLON: I don't know the term.

TREY SPRUANCE: Well, "eshu" is-- in voodoo, it would be Legba. It is a threshold spirit that grants access to and from the divine and human realms.

MATTHEW DILLON: OK, OK.

TREY SPRUANCE: And is usually like the trickster, classic trickster figure. He's a very heavy eshu because he's there to get you out of trouble if you've been invoking too many demons and they're asking for too much stuff from you kind of thing. And in Quimbanda, they're very, very serious about their weird black magic stuff.

So I started looking into that part of it, and there's a pretty good writer on that subject, too. But this is a totally well-developed tradition. Its roots go back at least to when Portuguese witches were expelled to Morocco from Portugal, along with all of the Jews. And then they ended up in Angola, and that's why it became a syncretic religion that got imported and became Macumba. And that's why he was part of that whole package. It's so interesting.

MATTHEW DILLON: That is fascinating. Holy smokes.

TREY SPRUANCE: So yeah, one of Quimbanda movements is called Bruxa de Évora, and we've been to Évora, and the "bruxa" just means "witch." This is a real person, the Bruxa of Évora. But there's all these hagiographical stories about her and her witchcraft and all that. So I'm looking at this, OK, I'm seeing this from the Brazilian perspective. I know about it from the Orthodox perspective. Now it seems like there's this crazy, Crowleyan kind of Renaissance among the occult people.

But they don't the Orthodox stuff. They don't know-- They don't know anything. What the hell are these people doing? They don't even know their own traditions.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, I was going to say.

TREY SPRUANCE: So I just wanted to open the discussion on this subject and, OK, let's do a piece about-- and let's not forget the most important part of the story, which is always left out by the occultists, which is it's always Cyprian and Justina, the woman. They always leave her out because they don't like that part of the story, which is that she remains steadfast in the face of all the games of the black magic, and ultimately, her remaining steadfast is what changes Cyprian from a mage to a saint. They edit that part out.

In Quimbanda, they leave that part in. In the real black magic, that part is the most important part. So, I mean, there's a part of me that's calling them out, saying you guys are total posers because you don't like the most important part of this story, is he has access to both heaven and hell. Access to heaven, that's pretty heavy.

MATTHEW DILLON: So you mentioned that one of the main hats you now wear is producer. And you have huge background in all these ideas. So I'm curious how that works as a producer, with certain bands. So Imperial Triumphant is one of my favorite bands right now. I had no idea, just was completely off my radar that you've produced their last two records. It makes perfect sense.

But what is it like, having so many ideas like that and working with somebody like them? Do you get to toss or sort of sneak them ideas, or are you more laid back?

TREY SPRUANCE: I'm background with that stuff because they already have-- they have a kind of an impenetrably dense world going on already. There's really no need to get in there, as a producer. And also, they have very capable engineer, Colin Marston, who's a great musician, absolutely great musician.

So when they asked me to do it, it's really about providing. I felt like what their music needed was just little things that would bring out some of the ideas a little bit more, because there's a tendency for things to just get lost in the cloud. Instead of turning things up, there are techniques that you can do that are more arrangement, actually, than production. Emphasize these chords with a background of these instruments doing those same kind of clusters, and the listener won't even hear that there's another instrument going. They'll just hear it.

Just little sneaky stuff. I do very sleight-of-hand production stuff. It's just meant to comb through some of the mud so that the listener actually hears the musical ideas that are happening there.

MATTHEW DILLON: Very cool.

TREY SPRUANCE: I've learned these techniques because there's so much mud. I pack so much crap into my music that you just have to figure out ways to make it more articulate, which is an evolving science wave. 2004, when probably my most ambitious record is the Book of Horizons, I hear it now and I'm like, god, if I had only known then. I mean, I still think it's a-- I still can't top that record, but production-wise, yeah, I could totally do it.

So production is really the art of intelligibility. It is the art of being courteous to the listener. It's inviting the listener into your home and saying, look what we're doing. You're not trying to bash them in the face with too much stuff. You're trying to seduce them into being interested in what you have going on. It needs an outside perspective.

That's also probably why it takes me so long to do my records, because I have to forget a certain amount of stuff before I can really produce it.

MATTHEW DILLON: Which brings me to a closing question. I know you've been touring with Mr. Bungle for, what, a couple-- two, three years right now?

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. And the supergroup with Dave Lombardo and Scott Ian, oh, my goodness. But now you're back and you're doing Secret Chief stuff. But as you put forth, it takes a while to do these things. So where do you see it headed? Because you said you're in act three. There's something new that's going on here.

Is there a little taste that you can give to Secret Chiefs heads that are listening to this? Where's this headed?

TREY SPRUANCE: I can say it this way. What I learned from all of the activity before is that it's just better to have-- it's good to have a lot of music ready to go. I never had that. I was always chasing-- do a tour, do a tour, do a tour, put out another record. Well, that's going to take some time, so you lose all your momentum, then you come back a couple years later and then I never had time to promote anything. It's just like everything's a clusterfuck.

So what I've learned is like, no, no, no, no. Let's have a lot of music, a lot of music ready. And then when we go out there, whatever it happens, whatever momentum we generate, we have more stuff ready to go. That's what I've been doing these last years, quite a few years now. Just preparing, just plucking the ideas off the vine and getting them ripe and ready, and then being close enough to pull the trigger that I can get spend a month or something on any of these records and be done with them.

I'm not quite there yet, but I do have three records that are close. They basically need things that are very costly, like choirs and stuff like that.

MATTHEW DILLON: Don't come cheap. That makes sense. OK.

TREY SPRUANCE: I might do a crowdfunding campaign. I wasn't going to do it before because I don't want people to wait around for another two or three years, do a crowdfunding, and then they're waiting for three years. But now that all the pieces of the puzzle are really there, that expensive last little bit, I might crowdfund to be able to finish some of this stuff off. But we're getting there. We're close.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. Well, I guess that sort of answers my question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. I see that you are playing in Philly in early February with Secret Chiefs 3, so it sounds like you're building the reservoir of new tunes. This isn't like the launch of a new Secret Chiefs on the road.

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah. It's, in my mind, everything with Secret Chiefs came to an end at the Big Ears Festival this last year. That was the end of act two. So everything that's been happening since then-- We did UR stuff in New York. That's all new stuff. We didn't play any old stuff. But every once in a while, good gig offers come along.

And so what I'm doing is I have an East Coast band and a West Coast band. And generally, the East Coast band, they're all super busy, booked for like a year and a half in advance so they can't do stuff. The West Coast band are kind of raring to go, and they play kind of heavy music really well. So I'm like, all right, let's just keep adding to this, even though it's not-- The plan is to reinvent everything.

I already have the bands kind of in place, for the most part. But if good gigs come along in the meantime, hell, we'll throw a few of the new songs in the mix and we'll take this West Coast band and smash them. It's a pretty damn good band. I like the West Coast band a lot.

MATTHEW DILLON: Excellent. Yeah. And so what you're saying is all of the Secret Chiefs fans need to have a Hunger Games for the tickets to the Philly show, because it might not be-- It'll be a while. So all right.

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, yeah. You'll know when it's time to-- when we're launching the new Secret Chiefs stuff. This is not that. This is just kind of limbo period. But we've been revving the engines a little bit, and it's been going great. So yeah, things are moving.

MATTHEW DILLON: So excited to hear that. All right. Well, Trey Spruance, thank you so much for your time, for all your thoughts. It's been a joy to have you on the podcast.

TREY SPRUANCE: This has been a lot of fun. We went just kind of crazy. We didn't stay on-script for anything, man. Sorry about that.

MATTHEW DILLON: No, that's me. I try to steer, but sometimes it's more fun to keep going off the tracks. So sometimes you just got to go off the track.

TREY SPRUANCE: You're probably the right guy for that. Jesus.

MATTHEW DILLON: Well, you're like this encyclopedia of cool shit, so I just want to put questions out there and see where it goes. So yeah, super fun, and just such a sort of nourishing experience to hear the ways in which this stuff that a lot of us who are listening and me, myself, study for a living, how that's enriched your work.

And it was also-- so sorry, I'm off on another tangent. But you at the Corbin conference, knowing that you're reading Hanegraaff, and Kripal, and Wolfson, and just seeing the way in which that works. We think a lot, as academics, like, oh, does anybody actually read this? Are we just writing for each other? So to know that it is helping infuse stuff like your music is one of the highest compliments possible.

TREY SPRUANCE: Oh, man. Wolfson, his book on Alef, Mem, Tau, this book completely-- I mean, it's in the DNA of Secret Chiefs 3. Totally, totally in the DNA. That's why I was intimidated when he was there. I think at first I didn't know he was going to be there, and out of everyone there, I'm like, god, this guy.

But he's exactly how I would expect. You can't walk around with all that information in your head and be like, hi, nice to meet you. He's exactly how I thought he'd be. He's like, oh, man, this guy is cool.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. Yeah. I say about Wolfson, I think people are going to be reading his books in 200, 300 years. I think it's going to be part of Kabbalah going forward, not just scholarship. I think what he's doing is offering something very important to that mystical tradition.

And he's just this super genius. There's some evolutionary leap that not all of us have gotten to go through yet. Very few have. He's just one of them.

TREY SPRUANCE: Yeah, absolutely. Totally, totally.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. It's intimidating, but he's brilliant. And he's so smart-- so sweet, too. He's a good person to talk to. So yeah, well, if you get out to Cambridge between now and May, he's here, like all the time.

TREY SPRUANCE: I will remember that. That's cool.

MATTHEW DILLON: But he also normally lives in Santa Barbara, which would be closer to Phoenix, so.

All right, Trey, thank you again so much. Really appreciate your time.

TREY SPRUANCE: This was a blast, man. Anytime.

MATTHEW DILLON: All right. Take care.

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