Even more Andrew WK: I'm In Heaven

A new video, a new song from God Is Partying, more esoteric weirdness from Frater AWK

This is the latest in an ongoing series about musician, magician, and God of Partying Incarnate, Andrew WK. Be sure to read the others to come up to speed because man alive, things are stranger than ever with Andrew.

• The Transcendent Power of Partying

• Andrew WK Revisited: Babalon

I must admit that I was a little let down by this video for reasons having nothing to do with the song. The song is a killer. Andrew’s new record, God Is Partying, is going in a whole new direction. The songs are heavier. The subject matter is darker. The videos are weirder. In a way, it’s like Beck’s record, Sea Change, which was a profoundly sad and heartbreaking record that flew in the face of everything he’d done before. That record came on the heels of a breakup with his girlfriend of nine years and felt like Beck had been listening to nothing but Nick Drake for a year. Meanwhile, a floodgate of promotions dropped with this Andrew WK video that, along with revealing the cover art and track list, also showed us that Andrew and his wife, Cherie Lilly, broke up not long after the end of the You’re Not Alone tour. Come to think of it, she was conspicuously absent from the Boston tour stop that I was at.

I was hoping for video dense with symbolism like the video for Babalon, something I could spend hours breaking down and decoding. But this video is actually a fairly simple performance video with some peculiar qualities. That said, I can still afford to get esoteric because in the run up to this, over on the AWK subreddit, I’ve been using the comments section to try out some new ideas orbiting the mystical party quest of Frater AWK.

First off, I’m In Heaven has the NAEQ value of 160 and so do the following phrases from The Book of the Law:

• the house of god

• i yearn to you

• the magician

• prophet of Had

• follow thee he shall

• to tremble

• on the throne

• weave my spell

• the word abrahadabra

The magician, weave my spell, the word abrahadabra all strike me as significant since everything about this project so far seems to indicate a larger magical working. Then I got another idea. Let’s do the album title in the UFOnaut cipher: God Is Partying comes to a value of 178. See also:

• Thelemites

• better than all

• in the circle

• feast for life

• there is death

• double-wanded one

• from the skies

• each for himself

The fact that God Is Partying and Thelemites have the same value struck me as a deliberate act, or maybe it just works out that way but if you’ve ever wondered if doing what thou wilt is partying, now you know. The Double-Wanded one refers to Hrumachis in Liber AL. Hrumachis being the one to rise to the throne after Horus in Aleister Crowley’s aeonic cosmology. See, at the time of the writing of Liber AL, Crowley was handed a prophecy that mankind was leaving the Aeon of Osiris, a time of patriarchal religions and sun gods. Prior to that was a time in mankind’s history that Crowley called the Aeon of Isis, indicating a time of religion centered around the sacred feminine. The new age dawning on the reception of the Book of the Law was the Aeon of Horus, a time dedicated to the magical child, a sort of end times where mankind has endured the extremes of a purely feminine spiritual aeon and a purely masculine spirituality and was coming into a time where the two qualities combine, alchemically, the produce mankind’s perfection in the middle pillar. This is the time when enlightenment would be most easily come by and humanity, as a whole, would ascend to its proper place in the cosmos.

The Aeon of Hrumachis, then, is a time of spiritual perfection. It’s the absolute end of all things. Horus, himself, transforms into Hrumachis at the height of his maturity symbolizing mankind’s ascendancy to the stars like the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Childhood’s End. Hence the phrase from the skies, which also shares the NAEQ value of 178.

Do I think Crowley’s prophecy was right? Fuckin’ A, I do. Dude was an absolute garbage person and I think that he was truly diagnosable as a sociopath. When you get into magic, you sometimes have to make peace with the shittiest people in the world in order to suss out the mysteries. Crowley’s occult philosophy is, unfortunately, always on the money and sure as hell, as soon as Liber AL was published, new waves of spirituality began to rise up. They were either completely agnostic to the spiritual principle of gender or they were Hermetically balanced. Patriarchal monotheism, still a potent force in the world, began to crumble under the weight of hypocrisy as the two dominant organized religions that came to characterize the struggle of the modern west, Christianity and Islam, were revealed to be nothing more than vehicles for tribal savagery and fascism. Those of us who carry on the torch of gnosis are viewed as heretics, satanists, and apostates but here’s the rub: We’re winning.

Even the Gardnerian twist on Wicca took care to include the male Cernunnos in its heavily Goddess-flavored philosophy. This was the quality of humanity’s spiritual evolution that Crowley prophesied and shit has taken root, son! Every social media platform is saturated in baby witches and young sorcerers offering genuinely insightful commentary and analysis of the western esoteric tradition. The Aeon of Horus is happening all around us more than ever before, just as The Great Beast 666 told us it would be. I mean, look at what you’re reading right now! It’s an exhaustive breakdown of the spirituality of Andrew “PARTY HARD” Wilkes-Krier as he seeds a rock album heavily with the Thelemic current and even the folks over on the subreddit who wouldn’t ordinarily give one flying fuck about Hebrew gematria are reading my long-winded stroke-fests about symbolism and commenting, “Damn. That’s actually interesting as hell.”

I suppose that I should actually address the video, though. AWK is entering an entirely new territory and I suspect that among all the in-your-face Thelema of the two leading singles from God Is Partying is all tangled up in the bad vibes that come with the break up of a long relationship. Andrew and Cherie were married in 2008 and who knows (WK) how long they were dating before that? That’s eleven years of marriage and an unknown number of years as a power rock couple come to an end. It’s honestly no wonder that Babalon and I’m In Heaven are both dripping with menace. I’m In Heaven’s core lick reminds me a lot of Fear Factory. It’s a lot of hard, chugga chugga guitars layered over an acid synth. The video’s imagery, which its director, Phem C. Palmer, describes as non-diegetic in a recent NME article, is more of the same that we saw in the Babalon video. I get pretty flowery with the language around these parts but I admit that even I had to look up diegesis because what the fuck is that guy even talking about? As it turns out, diegesis means:

a narrative or plot, typically in a movie.

Its opposite, as Palmer is suggesting, is mimesis, the literary equivalent to abstract art. They’re using the imagery to represent something else. The two videos, thus far, are feeling a lot like a Kenneth Anger project, complete with the homoeroticism since Andrew and Dummy Andrew (or is it Steev Mike and Andrew? Or is it ANDREW AND STEEV MIKE?) are always beating off or humping.

I’ll get to the imagery in a second but there’s an overarching theme of reflection in these videos. There’s a mirror in both and themes of reversal. Andrew comes in off the street and then proceeds to direct himself and the band but the Andrew on the mic is the old Andrew, the one who wore the dirty white everywhere. Then there’s the dummy again. And the other dummy. Now there’s three? In the shot at the top of the article, Andrew is reflected in the mirror looking forward, but the person in the foreground is also facing forward and so, the question remains: Which side of the mirror do you think you’re on? Or is Andrew turning his back on himself or something to that effect? Self-negation and ego death is everywhere in these two videos!

Years back, when the Steev Mike conspiracy rose to the attention of astute fans, there was a narrative thread going around that put forth the idea that Andrew was a creation of a sort of music industry think-tank and that the real creative force behind Andrew WK was this guy credited as the producer of I Get Wet, Steev Mike. Old audio recordings surfaced of what seemed to be a pre-Andrew WK promotional recording (a recording that I can’t seem to find) of alternate takes of AWK songs with Andrew shouting in hype man style, that it was the upcoming album from an artist named Steev Mike. An old indie label called Bulb released some of Andrew’s early recordings and also sold for a time, and then deleted, a 7” credited to Steev Mike before anyone could buy it.

The whole situation is weird as hell and then in that liminal period when Andrew only seemed to tour Asia and released records in Korea and Japan, the Steev Mike thing died down but now he’s back with a bang. He’s on the website footer. He’s credited in both videos. His name appears as producer on the clapboard in the video and once again I’m looking at the current state of the Andrew WK project with a suspicious eye. If you look at the credits for the video on Youtube it’s full of names of people who may not even exist. I looked up Phem C. Palmer and his only traces on the internet are in relation to work done with Andrew WK. I looked up the creative visionary who claims a lot of the credit for Andrew’s creative directions, Frank Vierti, and once again, the only thing he seems to be associated with is Andrew WK projects. I looked up the film production company, no dice. Michael RC, mentioned in the last AWK article as likely not a real person, is once again credited with the creative vision but is only associated with an outfit called RCU Audio, ltd whose only associated artist is Andrew WK.

Edit: Phem C. Palmer is an acrostic for PCP and so is Personally Caused Psychological, as seen in the Babalon video.

Precisely what the fuck is going on, Andrew?

A break up, which is said to have been amicable, themes of self-annihilation, the return of the uncertainty of self in the form of Steev Mike, it’s all pointing to something personally dark and nasty for Andrew, himself. But on the bright side, he seems to have found a new boo in actress, Kat Dennings, who I hope will make my dream come true one day and make Andrew a member of the Avengers, somehow. Dude’s built like a super hero and I want to know what his workout looks like because you don’t get arms like that eating nothing but pizza.

But even this series of photos that popped up in the hours leading up to the release of I’m In Heaven came with a dark vibe. Yes, they’re cute together and that is one hell of a weird team up, but pretend you’re me for a second and explore the details of that photo. See anything weird? Do you recognize that house? That’s the John Snowden House in Los Angeles. It’s one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs but is probably best known for being the home of George Hodel. That name ring a bell?

By the case made against him by his own son, a homicide detective for the LAPD, George Hodel was the likely murderer of Elizabeth Short, the woman best known as The Black Dahlia. Raped, murdered, and mutilated, her body was dumped in the middle of the suburbs and the crime remains unsolved to this day but even if Hodel was not the killer, her life likely ended in the house pictured in the background of that photo of Kat and Andrew. Why are they there? Tourism? It’s not unusual, I suppose. I’m into a lot of morbid shit and would go there. But when it comes to AWK, nothing is ever as it seems and everything holds meaning.

I need to tread lightly because I don’t want it to sound like AWK is involved in some kind of human sacrifice outfit. That’s not what I’m implying. Steve Hodel, who accused his father of murder, seems to walk through life with a chip on his shoulder, so you have to bear this in mind when you read his case but even though it seems to be the product of revenge, Hodel’s case is not without merit and there are some really spooky connections in the story which link the elder Hodel to a sort of synarchy of Ba’al worshippers whose practice hinges on ritual murder. The magic of Crowley involves none of this, mind you. People in his orbit sometimes died or went completely insane but that has nothing to do with the magic and everything to do with Aleister Crowley being a terrible person to admit into your life.

But like I said: Andrew never just does something. Everything has meaning. Everything has symbolism. The address on that house is 5121, which reduces to 9 and I’ll just leave it at that, lest I start to sound like some conspiracy-obsessed maniac.

I’ll close with this. Steev Mike’s NAEQ value is 167. See also:

• ye from all pain

• my colour is black

• eat them up

• that is filthy

• shalt long for death

• terrible god

• another soul of god

• tribulation

my colour is black, terrible god, shalt long for death.