Monday, November 29, 2010

The Core issue 66 release event and Iao Core: “Live on the Pharm” CD Listening Party



Metaversal Media presents on Friday December 3
The Core issue 66 release event and
Iao Core: “Live on the Pharm” CD Listening Party


They are here. The Winter 2010 copies of the 66th issue of The Core. These gorgeous, hand made, investment quality art zines are limited to 200 copies of each issue. Each mag has a painting of an Enochian Angel by yours truly, Johannes Ayres, as it's back cover, so this will be the last time all 200 paintings can be viewed at the same time and anyone interested in picking out the painting they want gracing the back of their copy can do so.. This issue features : the Coming Insurrection (the infamous manifesto in it’s entirety, The Secret History of Oil, interviews with Siouxsie Sioux , Peter Carrol, and Alejandro Jawdorosky, Iao Core News, as well as a free CD of Iao Core’s live performance at Heather Farms Park in Walnut Creek this summer.

Friday evening, I will show you the process of production of the Enochian Angel Paintings, and you can view all 200 before they catch the four winds, and be the first to hear the new Iao Core CD (it's awesome). Celebrity guests will read excerpts from this issue, and Cash Hose will give a slide presentation/lecture on his recent trip to the Abyss …Will there be fireworks? No, there will not be fireworks, but there’s a young Christian girl (a bastard daughter of yours, if Reverend Glitch is to be believed) who will read from the Core for tips and cheese. You needn’t dress in any but the most perfunctory manner nor bring any crickets (there will be plenty of those!) and I myself will be wearing but a thin military camisole from the pelvic region upwards and may be toting a gecko or two.

This event is free of charge and will take place from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom of the Historic Merritt Lodge, 2332 Harrisson in Oakland, California, which may or may not be the arsehole of the universe, but one thing is certain: Art of this almost other-worldly nature could not be created within the confines of the civilized world. It is Art that pleads a kind of lost divine madness a its guiding inspiration. the center will make itself known to those who will be a part of it there and who will find their way there and those who are to be a part of it in another location will also respond to the gravitational pull of Love in evolution, embracing the death of the false, for the endless perpetuation of the real, via the mysterious process of change, which is the dance performed by that which is immortal in us …and is the perceptible part of the divine in demonstration of it.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Core #44 available August 13 (where ever fine art rags are sold)



Each mag has a painting of an Enochian Angel by Johannes Ayres as it's back cover, as well as a free CD of Iao Core’s live performance at the Sonar Festival in Barcellona this summer. These gorgeous hand made investment quality art zines are limited to 250 copies of each issue. This issue features articles on the Coming Insurrection, The Secret History of Oil, interviews with Peter Murphy and Alejandro Jawdorosky, Iao Core News, Blonde Redhead, Amber Asylum, Enochian Sex Magick, and much more..

Download Iao Core's 2002 CD "FUNKTIONLUST"


Iao Core – “Funktionlust” « Sector 2814

The praise and ballyhoo that was showered upon Funktionlust was encouraging…..here is one of the more flattering reviews from Wire (UK)

Oakland, California may or may not be the arsehole of the universe, but one thing is certain: music of this almost other-worldly nature could not be created within the confines of the civilized world It is music that pleads a kind of lost madness a its guiding inspiration. The Iao Core are a Bay Area cell of post-industrial musicians whose Metaversal Musick CD. of last year, "Funktionlust," struck me as a record of almost impossible innovation. For them, there is no possible category. The group take such obvious irreverent delight in so various a panoply of sources that they stake their limits outside the frame of influence itself. A 14-track assault on the history of rock and roll, "Funktionlust" is music of such excessive abandon it leaves the major part of the pop musickal hierarchy looking limp and lost for words. The secret of the Iao Cores is that they are near-virtuosos, the most inspired musicians living under the sun. Guitarist/Vocalist Johannes Ayres is transparently the incarnation of some violent, subliminal force of ecstasy, while Phylean (bass) and noise kitten Nikki (Doomfox) Pesoa are, even hurtling along at breakneck- tempo, as calm and uncluttered as the greatest jazz propeller. Spluttering, electrocuted and creamy, the group are not just on the edge of the industry but on the edge of time itself. From the distance of Europe, of course, this music may seem chaotic. But through it's waves of excess, it discretely drags a swamp of buried myths and frustrations; as an art it is highly controlled. The 13 bursts of noise sound like snippets from an anthology extracted and remixed to bring out their hidden implications of disturbance. The band turn obscure relics of acid rock- psychedlica, like Black Sabbaths' '"War Pigs" into spectral incantations, weird and wistful drifts through the saloon bars of a ghost town. At the same time they sing with a reckless barbarity which all but chokes on its own grotesque appeal to adolescence. The very lack of subtlety in this area becomes a kind of self-defeating aggression, as though the lyrics (printed on a handsheet) were sung intelligibly because only the new Californian street rebels understand such slogans. The lyrics are in fact superb: out of such pockets light pours. In fact, while playing as frenziedly as the hardest, most desperate hardcore, they are simultaneously as loose as the best Californian groups of the late '60s. Conjuring spirits of an America that is both mysterious and obscene, the Iao Core at the same time preserve an essential skepticism. They are highly aware of their audience, its conditioning and its assumptions, and never allow their instruments to form a triumphirate platform for chesty rhetoric. They're as much a part of an antique barroom tradition as the oldest bluesman in Mississippi. Somewhere between Muddy Waters and Throbbing Gristle then, lie Iao Core. They will probably never leave.

Monday, July 19, 2010

British Scholar Claims to Have Unlocked Plato's Musical and Mathematical Code

British Scholar Claims to Have Unlocked Plato's Musical and Mathematical Code

If you’ve seen the Iao Core movie “Magickal Media Terrorism Tour”* you know that the character Johnny (who is supposed to be me, but in the film is portrayed by Crispin Glover) believes himself to be the re-incarnation of the Greek musician/mathematition Pythagoras. The society which he led, half religious and half scientific, followed a code of secrecy, which certainly means today Pythagoras is a mysterious figure (accounts of his physical appearance are likely fictitious, except the description of a striking birthmark Pythagoras had on his thigh, which, like the birthmark on my own thigh, is shaped like a Fender Stratocaster) So anywho, recently a British scholar claims to have unlocked the Pythagoras mathmatical/ musical code, having discovered it in the works of Plato, but as anyone familiar with Iao Core’s M.M.T.T. will know, this is what Johnny claims to have done in a film we released 3 years ago. Life imitating Art (imitating Life) hmmmmmmmmmmm....

*We showed "Iao Core's Magickal Media Terrorism Tour" in a large revival style tent outside each venue we played on our 2003 tour. I suppose it's due for a re-release... By the way, all of Crispin Glover's shots/scenes/dialogue where lifted from his other movies including "Willard" "Bartelby" and "ChARLIES aNGELS 2" and cleverly (if I do say so myself) edited into the film. He came to the LA show and was quit impressed and said it was his best performance in a film he wasn't in......

Sunday, July 11, 2010

"In every dreamhome a heartache", Sonar Festival, Barcelona ...



How I Spent my Summer Vacation by Johannes Ayres Esq.
One of the Three Songs i sat in on with my heroes
Roxy Music at Sonar this year... also played on Virginia Plain,
and The Strand..as well as a stellar set with my own band, Iao Core
earlier that afternoon... before you go thinking how prestigious to
be filling the shoes of Brian Eno, let me just say.. Mr. Ferry and Mr. Eno
hate each other passionately.. In Eno's song "Dead Finks Don't Talk"
the "headless chicken who's teeth take so much kickin'" is a reference
to you know who. I believe the idea this time round (2010 tour) was to use a different
"nobody" at every show to play the Eno parts in the songs recorded during
Eno's tenure in R.M. as a way of showing how insignificant the 801 was....
If they could have found a chimp that could twiddle the knobs on a synthesiser
while wearing a blonde wig, they surely would have gone with that over me....
Did I care? What do you think?

SONAR 2010 _ JOHANNES JAMS WITH ROXY MUSIC



Virginia Plain

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Iao Core-Live in Barcellona-Out on July 7th



Iao Core-Live in Barcellona
(Canciones para escuchar mientras mierda)
will be available for download on July 7th
limited edition hand made CD packages will also be available
I can't wait for ya'll to hear it...a musical adventure where composition and performance are whatever geometry (geometrodynamics) connects the fields: A chemical fountain flooding the parlour of grace, all of them. The idea of a Metaversal (or zero point, background) substance which flows into all of form, is not only championed by Einstein, but also by every religion that ever stood the test of time. Even cloistered nuns must know what I'm talking about. The "songs" newly formed in atom smashers, are like albino dachshunds charging out from the catacombs into the brilliant embrace of the sky which stands for a moment on a guitar string, strung out on the background of something very continuous. ("String theory" need not be altogether esoteric.) which sets the morphic resonant key code sites on or off in the DNA ladder... which is not a single twist, but a helix on a helix on a helix (Sobbing and laughing from the fjord to the whorehouse),... like the industrialized anthems of some tuned in, tweaked out Tibetian horn blasting it’s call out the left nostril of our Lord. Even oystered buns must know what I'm spreadin on 'em. Several songs are about an if not glorified then harmonical-romantic helical coil spring like axis of quartz which makes it piezoelectric (coupling phonon/sonic waves to electrical waves).

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Iao Core recta hasta el culo de la noche Sónar Festival, por favor.


Ah, Barcelona
Abre tus pliegues Gaudí y llevarme a tu seno..
Voy a estar tomando el Iao Core recta hasta el culo de la noche Sónar Festival ...
Estoy ansioso por jugar esta noche con Emilie Autumn. Archivo de mi burro en la alquimia Violindustrial. Parece un poco como de California, Tunas y llanuras onduladas, es un lugar que puedo volar mi bandera hoy. Yo solía pensar
estaba fresco se utilizó el mismo software como Front 242 y Depeche
Modo!) Santo Toledo, mírame a correr los toros en mi Speedo
emborrachándose con sangría es neato
Creo que tal vez nunca voy a volver a casa!
Donde esta la biblioteca?

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Dreams do come true.. Iao Core in Barcellona in June, with Roxy Music!


As has been mentioned here now and again, I am a believer in better living through chemistry. I am also a believer in the obvious truth that we should always be ready to cut things loose and open ourselves up to new ways of being that are improvements upon the old. I am only bringing this up because it has something to do with the next example which follows:

Sónar: a dimensional shift is coming. I think of it as a really enormous holographic flying saucer that will be lowering a ramp once it gets close to the Earth. You can think of the ramp as being composed of sound, vibrating at a certain frequency. If your frequency is sympathetic to or resonating with it, then you can glide right up the ramp into this saucer of consciousness. Sónar is Spain's mashup of music and film and video, all rolled into one big multimedia festival. The 2010 Sónar is set for June 17th - 19th, in Barcelona, Spain. Roxy Music (UK) is the stellar new addition to the line-up of the Barcelona festival. Bryan Ferry, Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay the original Roxy drummer, Paul Thompson, and sitting in for original synth god Brian Eno, will be yours truely, playing this one off concert in Spain, almost three decades after their last show in Barcelona. The British band, a paradigm of art rock, glam and the experimental pop of the 70s and early 80s, will be performing their hits On Saturday June 19th. This of course is a dream come true for me, as I have been a fan of Roxy Music for as long as I can remember, and to be filling the shoes(giant, but beautiful shoes, covered in sequins and rhinestones) of my hero, Brian Eno, is more than a guy could ever wish. My own group Iao Core will be performing earlier that afternoon. Wow. There’s karma involved and some of us have been working at certain things for more than one lifetime; all of us have, in fact. That’s where you get 12 year old concert violinists from.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Iao Core Dome-coming Jamboree Bop in Walnut Creek!


Iao Core are amused, proud, excited to announce that the second in a series of monthly bay area outdoor live performances by our infinitely entertaining band will take place April 18th at .... maybe you should sit down for this...Heather Farms Park in Walnut Creek CA! We will be playing 4 sets at 4 different locations in the park (4 songs at each location) starting at 4:00 p.m. The set lists include lots of material from "Armadillidium Vulgare" and choice tasty tidbits from our entire illustrious catalog, from "Musick for the Lifeboat" (released in 1987 when Walnut Creek was still our mailing address) through to the current "Presence". Count on
suprise alumni appearances and possible hassles from the always militant WCPD!

Many have asked if this homecoming jamboree-bop will be broadcast live and i am happy to say yes, kind of....During the four hour performance YOU! can participate by calling... 925 582 0780 ....Not only will you hear the live performance
but you will be able to go live in the mix. 3 minutes per call. As always feel free to improvise, but don't say "Hello"........what a kick!

Sunday, March 28, 2010

the First Nine copies of The Core # 43




these are the First Nine copies of The Core #43 available
April 1 where ever fine Art rags are found.




Each mag has a painting of an Enochian Angel by johannes ayres on it's back page
as well as a CD of cool Musick.

Friday, March 26, 2010


What’s that? You say you smell popcorn popping? It might just be the world’s greatest rock band coming to your town. Iao Core is reducing their carbon footprint by fitting the Metaversal Mobile Unit with a new bio-diesel engine and solar panels and batteries which will power our PA system for outside gigs (which we plan to do a lot of this summer). That way, we can all feel good about feeling good, as we bring the ultimate chakra workout to an open field, muddy meadow, or rocky out-cropping near you!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

and yet another review of Funktionlust

here's part of another review from Electronic Cottage…

Everybody always says Iao Core sound like they're on drugs, but I wouldn't know about that kinda thing. To me, they sound like guys who've somehow managed to retain the wide-awake naivety we're all born with. They absorb the fog and dust and snow and thunder-- the simple things that grown-up hands can tarnish -- then turn this scenery into songs that stand on their own, like nature. The band can make you notice virtue and strength in a rotten world, and if they achieve this only by ignoring the forest for the trees, so be it. Any band that can connect crazed bebop-skronk to "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Shes lost control" (like in their live shows) is privy to beautiful truths of which cynics should take heed. My favorite Iao Core CD is pretty much whichever one I'm listening to. Like Armadillidium Vulgare (98) and Doomsday Passes (01), the new Funktionlust is some sideways brand of art rock propelled by Gizmos prickly diamonds -rust guitar and Rimi's jagged hyperfunk bass, with Johannes staking his breathtaking claim to post-industrial -harmony. Funktionlust strikes me as tougher than Doomsday Passes less disjointed than Armadillidium Vulgare and catchier and more intricate than either.The title track kicks off the CD with heavy guitar figures that swirl like rainbows in curved air; "Liquified" ends the disc with a riff-swaggering space-blues that I suppose is the Iao Core's idea of Led Zep (sort of "Out On The Tiles" as done with Faust and Hawkwind). On the desolate plains between the extremes, the Iao Cores stand around staring at the stars, asking questions that have no answers. This music is private, hungry, reassuring, daring, and (despite aforementioned accusations otherwise) never dopey

The Wire reviews Iao Core's Funktionlust CD

The praise and ballyhoo that has been showered upon Funktionlust was encouraging…..here is one of the more flattering reviews from Wire (UK)

Oakland, California may or may not be the arsehole of the universe, but one thing is certain: music of this almost other-worldly nature could not be created within the confines of the civilized world It is music that pleads a kind of lost madness a its guiding inspiration. The Iao Core are a Bay Area cell of post-industrial musicians whose Metaversal Musick CD of last year, "Funktionlust," struck me as a record of almost impossible innovation. For them, there is no possible category. The group take such obvious irreverent delight in so various a panoply of sources that they stake their limits outside the frame of influence itself. A 14-track assault on the history of rock and roll, "Funktionlust" is music of such excessive abandon it leaves the major part of the pop musickal hierarchy looking limp and lost for words. The secret of the Iao Cores is that they are near-virtuosos, the most inspired musicians living under the sun. Guitarist/Vocalist Johannes Ayres is transparently the incarnation of some violent, subliminal force of ecstasy, while Rimi (bass) and noise kitten Nikki (Doomfox) Pesoa are, even hurtling along at breakneck- tempo, as calm and uncluttered as the greatest jazz propeller. Spluttering, electrocuted and creamy, the group are not just on the edge of the industry but on the edge of time itself. From the distance of Europe, of course, this music may seem chaotic. But through it's waves of excess, it discretely drags a swamp of buried myths and frustrations; as an art it is highly controlled. The 14 bursts of noise sound like snippets from an anthology extracted and remixed to bring out their hidden implications of disturbance. The band turn obscure relics of acid rock- psychedlica, like Black Sabbaths' '"War Pigs" into spectral incantations, weird and wistful drifts through the saloon bars of a ghost town. At the same time they sing with a reckless barbarity which all but chokes on its own grotesque appeal to adolescence. The very lack of subtlety in this area becomes a kind of self-defeating aggression, as though the lyrics (printed on a handsheet) were sung intelligibly because only the new Californian street rebels understand such slogans. The lyrics are in fact superb: out of such pockets light pours. In fact, while playing as frenziedly as the hardest, most desperate hardcore, they are simultaneously as loose as the best Californian groups of the late '60s. Conjuring spirits of an America that is both mysterious and obscene, the Iao Core at the same time preserve an essential skepticism. They are highly aware of their audience, its conditioning and its assumptions, and never allow their instruments to form a triumphirate platform for chesty rhetoric. They're as much a part of an antique barroom tradition as the oldest bluesman in Mississippi. Somewhere between Muddy Waters and Throbbing Gristle then, lie Iao Core. They will probably never leave.

Monday, March 22, 2010

What do you mean "Iao Core" ?

The story behind the band's name is a source of
speculation because Johannes has given multiple
explanations behind its origins. Some of the
Acronyms that have appeared in print are:

Is Apocalypse Over-rated? Consult Our Resident Ectoplasma.
Is Artiface Ours? Consider Our Recorded Evidence.
It’s Absurdly Obvious, Converted Occultists Relapse Eventually
I’ve Amplifed Our Carnival Organ’s Resonant Echo
In Assuming Our Collusion, Obsolete Regimes Err.
Invisible Armed Opratives Converge Over Ruined Embassies

also from a review of the "Musick for the Lifeboat" album which appeared in Spun magazine in 1994 comes this possible meaning.........

These last two tracks demonstrate for the first time the formula for which the iao core will use continously throughout their music making career, particularly during the last set of every live show, and that is this; After a rousing rhythmic jam comes the chaotic space improvisation section followed finally and epically with the rebirthing of the Core through rich harmonies and melody laden classics, either covers of others or their own “Hits”.replicating the classic stages of an LSD “trip”, (or sexual release, or spiritual rebirth) it is rumoured that this represnts the “occult” meaning of the word IAO, the unspeakable name of the god of the gnostics.

thoughts on the Automatic Bluepearl Festival

...still on a natural high from Saturdays Iao Core performance at the Automatic Bluepearl Festival...thanks to all of you who showed up...
I love playing outside to happy people on a beautiful spring day (especially my B-Day)

..the set list:

Jackass (Beck)
Allied Wave Donuts (from Iao Core "Presence")...
Magick Orgasm (new, yet to be recorded)
Vargtimmon (from "Armadillidium Vulgare")
Sequence 333 (new, yet to be recorded)
Solar Angelic (new, y.t.b.r.)
Encanta Pt 1 (from "Armadillidium Vulgare")
Encanta Pt 2 (from "Armadillidium Vulgare")
Pachebel's Canon in D

1st song is in D
2nd in A
3rd in B
4th in Fsharp
5th in G...
6th in D
7th in G
8th in A
finale: Pachebell's Canon in D (which goes D,A,B,Fsharp,G,D,G,A
thus repeating the whole set in one song... )

performing this finale was, I think, one of the most beautiful moments of my life and it brought me to tears in a way which only music can do!
My Gibson's neck broke the day before ("Man, that's your instrument!") I felt so ashamed! So I performed the whole gig with my faithful Stratocaster....and now that i think about it... it was straight into the amp, no digital effects, and it still sounded great.... used the e-bow for Vargtimmon, Sequence 333, and Pachebel.....