The Kingdom of Taboo
Maine’s most notorious band storms the heavens
by Carl Davulis
Friday
“Hilary’s brother is having this thing at the place where he lives,” I explain as I leave work early, not wishing to attempt to say “Isogloss Gala Ideo-Glossilalia & Symbolist Colloquy.” Asa plays in this weird band, Taboo, and they are hosting a festival at the Montville campus of Waterfall Arts, where Asa rents a rustic cabin.
On this afternoon, Route 3 is a fantasy-heaven of leaf color. As I drive, I attempt to collate the many rumors I’ve heard about Taboo, whom I’ve never seen or met. Perhaps as a tactical choice on their part, there are more stories about them than established facts: ritual bloodletting in the woods; their peculiar private language; the cancellation of a spate of West Coast shows when word of the band’s fascist imagery got out; the singer Crissy Puccire’s early career as a freestyle rapper. Everyone who saw Taboo play at the Apohadion has a different account of what happened, but most agree that folding chairs were thrown at the audience. “Is Ace still playing in that Viking white-supremacist band?” one friend asked me.
“Crissy’s organizing a sort of literary conference,” Asa said when he invited me to the IGIG&SC. Crissy had been working on a “30-point program” that would lay bare the metaphysics behind the strange practices of Taboo: a manifesto for the coming post-technological era, demanding a return to earth, blood, clans, and symbols. He was now ready to present his theses in liturgical form, during a festival weekend of readings, performances, and feasting.
Just a mile past the 10-4 Store, a flag bearing Taboo’s crest — sort of an arrowhead of intersecting lines — marks the dirt road leading to the Kingdom, the sylvan idyll that is home to Waterfall Arts.
I park by a garden in resplendent autumnal decay and walk up a little hillock or hummock to Asa’s cabin. A polyhedron sits at the foot of his driveway. A longhaired young man in a white suit hops out of a Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible and walks over to me, lazily swinging a dark bottle whose label I cannot read. Each component of his outfit is an unfashionable women’s garment. He takes off his shades, and I stand transfixed by his green eyes, which seem to promise the answer to some deep question I’ve never been able to articulate. Clearly this is Crissy.
“Welcome,” he says with a broad gesture that seems to indicate ownership of the entire landscape. “This is going to be grand.” His drawl suggests pleasures available only to the truly tired.
Asa is sitting on the steps of his cabin, kibitzing with his friend, Allie, about the fate of rattlesnakes in Northern New England.
“All day I’ve been wanting to make a dress with those trees,” says Bonnie, who plays drums in Taboo, gazing at spectra of maple reflected in the pond behind the cabin. “The trees on top, and their reflection on the bottom, going down a long trailing hem.”
“Those colors don’t exist in Rhode Island,” says Christopher, an artist from Providence. He will be performing tonight with his partner, Emily, who is stalking around backstage with a yellow five-gallon bucket and a spade.
“We were actually thinking of filming a Vietnam movie here,” Crissy says, admiring the silhouette of sumacs behind the open-air stage. The stage is framed by cables like a da Vinci diagram of a wing.
Crissy and Christopher set off into the woods to look for chanterelles. Ace and I take a different path, to find a place for me to pitch my tent. I ask if there are bears.
“Fack no. They’re all hiding—it’s bear season. Listen, I heard the best sentence evah at the dental clinic I go to in Bangor. This woman’s getting into her car, and she’s shouting into her phone, Fifty bucks for bear bait, fifty bucks for rent—I don’t see no fackin’ problem with that! God bless Bangor.”
The sun sets as I struggle with my borrowed tent, and I make my way back to the little campus in the dark, following a white nylon rope installed to prevent people from plummeting from the ridge trail.
A small audience has gathered by the stage. A young man named Joey is hunched over a cheap keyboard dialed to an aggressive “chimes” setting, playing Bach out of a book entitled “Piano Classics for the Right Hand.”
Stefan, Taboo’s bassist, is sitting in the grass with a man wearing lumberjack clothes. He explains the standards that hang above the stage, black canvasses emblazoned with mysterious orange symbols woven in a symmetrical script.
“That’s a bind-rune,” Stefan says, pointing to one of the glyphs. “We painted it for this event, as a transmitter for the people we wanted to call here. That rune is ‘Ocean,’ and the top one is ‘Coyote.’ It’s a very vocal symbol.”
“I saw something — something that’s under things all the time,” says a woman in an unrelated conversation.
“That’s what bad mushroom trips do,” her friend replies.
“That says ‘Taboo,’” Stefan continues. “The first symbol is ‘Cattle,’ the next one is ‘Fruit.’ Kind of testicular, if you think about it, ‘cattlefruit.’ It also invokes Pan. The great god.”
I want to ask Stefan about his swastika tattoo, which without staring overmuch appears to be sort of a fractal network of smaller swastikas, like a root system branching in endless right angles.
“Do you know what kind of keyboard that guy’s playing?” I ask instead.
“It’s a Casio. They weigh like two pounds. You feel like you could break it in half in a fit of anger.”
A small bonfire is tended incompetently but lovingly by Ted, a former “number-cruncher” who hails from “SF.”
“Ha, ha, ‘forging tools,’” a wooly-faced man says to the woman by the fire. “I thought you said, ‘foraging tools,’ and I was like, a basket? A red-checkered tea towel?”
Twelve-string troubadour Micah Blue Smaldone sits on the edge of the stage and sings to a dozen or so people who have gathered on the lawn. His unamplified voice is partly lost in the noise of the waterfall nearby. When he finishes, almost no one claps, as though we’re collectively wishing to live forever in the space of each complete song.
“I love the universe!” declares a woman laying in the grass with her arms outstretched. “I just want to live! I love to live! Living!”
Criminy the Dog takes the stage with Taboo and stands sentry the entire set, scanning the audience as though looking out from the prow of a ship. Bonnie pounds out a tribal rhythm, and Stefan chugs along on bass, stomping his moonboot as though crushing skulls to the beat. Reverb engulfs the notes of Asa’s guitar in colorful blorbs that are both rockabilly and abstract. Before the band’s final number, Crissy ties on a black armband bearing the Crest. “TAKE A SWIG OF THIS!” he screams into the microphone, shredding not just his voice but seemingly his humanity in a primal tantrum.
I open my notebook to jot a line about Crissy’s pants and look up to see him falling from the stage as the band clangs their final chord.
Time Ghost, a shaven-headed man in a trenchcoat and black leather pants, gives the kind of DJ performance in which the artist twiddles some knobs, takes the occasional poignant sip from his beer, and nods to the beat in satisfaction, as if to say, “I did that.” Two luminescent globes at the front of the stage pulse to match the flux of sound. When cascades of sampled laughter begin to threaten my well-being, I walk back to the cabin to check in with Asa.
“Euro-fuckin-trance,” he says, as vibrations visibly ripple leaves of grass. He shows me a book of photographs by Edward Curtis, whose portraits document Native Americans at the time of their extermination by the U.S. Government.
“He saw the writing on the wall,” Ace says. “He saved hundreds of tribes in memory.”
Emily and Christopher perform as SIRF 88. She places halved pomegranates in a semicircle on the grass, marking out a stage; he pounds a stake through each one with a rustic mallet. Their ripstop lab coats have blast marks, like Doc’s in Back to the Future. Christopher sits on a chair as Emily runs a string of pearls across his teeth, evenly ratcheting in time with the prerecorded soundtrack. The couple forms a fountain: one drinks from a pitcher while the other spits in an arc. Christopher draws a string of apples out of a Hefty bag and ties it between two trees. With his hands behind his back he bends forward and bites into an apple. He nods as he chews as a sort of wordless invitation, and members of the audience cautiously join him at the string. I ponder my squareness as I watch, longing for a fourth wall. I walk up and attempt to bite the fruit, but my teeth can get no purchase; the apple spins away.
Saturday
Asa and Micah are debating the best way to construct a watertight barrel. We are standing in back of the studio building, where an improvisatory kitchen is taking shape. Haley, who ran a secret restaurant in Providence, is heading up a ragtag band of chefs who will produce an eight-course banquet from food donated by a local farm.
“Nice gum,” Crissy says to Micah, who’s chewing gum, then tears off down the hill in the Cabriolet, driving a hundred yards to the cabin.
Next to the studio, a temporary shelter like a wedding tent has been erected over a stone stage, the site of this evening’s performances. Taboo has constructed an altar of skulls, pelts and feathers. The Crest hangs at the back, this one rendered in the colors of the rainbow.
I visit Crissy at his lectern as he writes last-minute notes for the liturgy. Tonight he is wearing a black suit, with a black felt trident on the lapel, such as Neptune might have worn. I give him a postcard of an Assyrian bas-relief, the “Winged Figure with Embroidered Tunic and Shawl,” who stands before a field of wedge-like cuneiform scratchings.
“When my friend was in Egypt, he went to all these pyramids,” he tells me. “You’d read translations of the hieroglyphics, expecting these ancient secrets, and they were like, ‘I am the greatest king, the richest king, the most fertile king. I whack my slaves when they do not please me.’ Straight-up pharaoh-ego.”
Stefan ushers idlers into the tent to bear witness to V-Manuscript, an MFA candidate at Brown. (Imagine a young Peter Sellers dressed as a steampunk Hamlet.) He ties a string across the tent-space, and when he tugs it down, the playback of his pre-recorded spoken-word performance slows to a satanic crunk crawl. V-Manuscript strips down to his athletic boxer briefs and attaches a small microphone to a pocket knife, with which he scratches letters into his chest: S I G L. The inscriptions bead up with blood, and he stands before us like a man on fire.
The audience is small when Taboo begins their liturgy. A keyboard drones while the band members drink from an ox horn. “There’s still some left,” Stefan whispers as he hands it back to Crissy.
“All traditions talk of a time before… a primordial time… before the First Mover,” Crissy intones dreamily, as though blissfully possessed. He tells the story of the universe: void, desire, creation, stuff, life.
“Our flesh-and-blood selves, then, are perhaps not the organism, but only the fruiting bodies of a higher being, as mushrooms are only the reproductive organs of mycelium. Who, then, rules us? Have these Others dwelt in the before-time? There is interaction with these netherplaces and –personae, but only through the gateways of paradox and mystery, and then expressed only through abstraction. We reach beyond the realm of time, genetics, and sentient information with language. And symbols.”
The band begins a musical interlude. Asa noodles in a mysterious scale; Bonnie sings in a humorless monotone that evokes a Weimar cabaret of the undead; Stefan dwells above a synthesizer. When Crissy rings a cowbell, the band stops, and he begins the next recitation.
Over the next two hours, human history is recast within Crissy’s cosmology; the gods, consciousness, language and art are defined; the band’s crest and symbolic alphabet are explained. I know what a polytheistic terrestrial archetypist is now, and begin to suspect I’ve always been one. I feel ready to smash the many false gods Crissy has condemned. Yet at the liturgy’s conclusion, when the band joins Crissy in singing a single note, and Stefan, with a desperate gesture, exhorts the few remaining in the audience to join the drone, I am unable. Something about adding my voice to a chorus uniting under a flag with a strange symbol.
We adjourn to the studio’s long gallery, where plate after plate of strange and gorgeous food is passed around the giant oak table. Our servers slosh Crissy’s homebrew honey mead generously into our glasses. Vaguely arty videos play simultaneously on three TVs. (Television during dinner: the ultimate taboo.)
The Jimmy Buffett Band plays “Hotel California” on the stone stage. Someone named Rachel unwraps a mummified alarm clock. A burlesque striptease culminates in the presentation of a garish lobster-shaped cake. VISZK enwraps the audience in a string, and though I can’t quite see through the web of people, I believe that she, too, is cutting herself with an amplified knife. When Stefan summons us to the studio for another screening, I seize the opportunity to retreat to my tent, where my sleep is instant, dark, and dreamless.
Sunday
Ace makes me an espresso on his propane stove. Time Ghost writes Crissy a thank-you in purple highlighter—“this weekend has been truly grand”—and leaves for the Berkshires in a rusted Toyota Chinook.
I, too, must step outside the magic circle of the Kingdom. I reverse my drive down Route 3, stopping at a state park to stall my return to the metropolis.
“Did you go to that cult thing?” my friend Mitchell texts me. I don’t want to label where I’ve been. Plus, you don’t call it a cult if you’ve come to believe. But how to explain all this to Mitch?
“Yes,” I reply.
