A: Hello there folks. My name is Bood Samel and as of this interview I am 27 years of age.

Q: Give a brief history of where you got the idea come to create Oneiric Imperium ?

A: Well Oneiric Imperium is the culmination of multiple interests of mine, the roots of which goes back to my early adolescence. Specifically the ideas for this project came together in 2003 when I decided to leave Las Vegas were I was living and move back to Philly where I’m from. While I was away my friends started worldeater records and I knew that the things that I wanted to do with myself could only be done in Philly and with these people (King Gary, Justin Duerr, Kebin Riley, etc.).
I didn’t come directly back to Philly from Vegas though. I spent a few months in L.A. living with my friend Pojo in echo park and plotting out my next move. At the time I was reading lots of Julius Evola and re-reading Peter Lamborn Wilson’s shower of stars: initiatic dreaming in Sufism and Taoism . I was having crazy psychic dreams at the time. While painting in this gutted, abandoned, graffiti covered train station in echo park all the pieces in my head fell together.
I wanted to create the most appropriate thing for me. I like the idea of DIY, but I don’t like how and why those ideas are usually applied. I’m not a guilty rich kid who hates his parents and I don’t want to be bound by those expectations. I’ve created Oneiric Imperium with the goal in mind to on one hand create the situations that will maximize my life in the direction I wish it to take and to on the other hand to attack what prevents that. “The hand that strikes, is the hand that feeds, the hand cleanses is the hand that receives”.

Q: How and when did you get interested in this genre ?

A: I knew of noise music from my teens and on but I didn’t start really getting into it until 1997. Justin Duerr played me the current 93 song rosey star tears from heaven and made me a mix tape with that on it. At the time in my life I was surrounded by crust punk retards and was becoming increasingly resentful of the inconsistencies of that crowd. Noise has a strong sense of otherness to it and that really I think was the initial appeal. I was also really into the wu-tang clan at the time.

Q: How long have you been writing and doing art and what are your influences ?

A: I have never not drawn. It’s an instinctual drive. Graffiti I got into at age 12. I slowed down with the graffiti after turning 21, but still here and there bust out with it. I started doing more street art because of not doing conventional graffiti. As far as the art goes my influences are Gustav Klimpt, A.O. Spare, RPG illustrations, graffiti, art nouveau, surrealism, and a bit of Trevor Brown.

I started writing around 12 years of age. At the time I was really into horror, comics, RPG’s. etc, so I wrote about things along those lines. I would say as an adult my writing influences are H.P. Lovecraft, Hakim Bey, Kathy Acker, Robert E. Howard and W.S. Burroughs. Q: What type of musick do you consider Oneiric Imperium ?

A: It’s noise music more or less, but not quite dark ambient, not at all like that providence Rhode Island crap, and only sporadically does it have moments comparable to power electronics. The sound is evolving as it goes along. I had no idea what I was doing when with music when I first started this and now a bit down the line I have a better feel for it.
People should call it metrognostic noise.

Q: Have you played live and if so with who and where have you traveled?

A: I’m not that concerned with playing live and it’s difficult for Oneiric Imperium to do so because of the others being involved with other things. We’ve played three shows all together. All three times it was in Philadelphia. Twice we played at the C.O.D.E. Space with deliberately incongruent mixes of bands and once at bar noir with David E. Williams. I would like to play Baltimore this year and maybe somewhere else. I will only play DIY venues or clandestinely, unless the event is occulture related. The bar noir show was for germ books here in Philly, which is a local occult and conspiracy bookstore. I really hate bars and clubs. I’m not interested in being the background music to peoples socializing and drinking. This music is a spiritual sacrament, and if you have no need for something like that then don’t approach it.

Q: Describe Oneiric Imperium and what it means please ?

A: The sound varies, but usually it’s a mix of distorted pretty sounds mixed with dissonant harsh sounds. There are shifting elements of field recordings, samples, acoustic guitar, flutes, percussion, and metal moments. It depends on what I feel like doing and who of my pool of people is around at that moment. I’m wrapping up an album that’s going to be called “service the target” and the content of the album as far as the sounds go is fairly diverse, though its all certainly noise music. After that’s done I’m thinking that I’m going to record theme batches of songs. The name means ‘dream empire’ or ‘empire of dreams’.
The music is the sound track to my wheat pasting efforts. Each song has a drawing that goes with it. I wheat paste copies of these drawings places, then I list on myspace where I put them up at. This is so that one could get the songs from either www.boodsamel.com, my releases, or the myspace page and listen to them with their intended art all over the place. So part of Oneiric Imperium is the ritualistic interaction between location, art, music and the internet.

The ultimate aim of Oneiric Imperium is to create a following of dream over lap between groups of people working together in isolated cultures of DIY tactics and clandestine direct action. A sort of dream based 21st century version of the assassins. There is no where to hide anymore, the only secret space is in our heads. There is an obscure history, but an existing history none the less of dream over lap between people.

Q: What are some of your politics or religious beliefs ?

A: I have no political concerns what so ever. The west is dead and I am here to feast on its corpse. “Politics are impossible- no structure may raise the dead!”

As far as religious views I just consider myself left-hand path in a broad sense and in a way specific to me. I’ve been inspired by Aleister Crowley, Anton Lavey, A.O. Spare, Julius Evola, Hakim Bey and Stephen Flowers. To some extent Gnosticism and Sufi poetry as well. I am concerned first and foremost with the refinement of consciousness through an active dialog with the immanent aspect of divinity.

Q: What is behind the songs and imagery you choose ?

A: That varies greatly depending on what I was thinking at the time that the song was conceived, and weather or not the art or the song came first. Most of my art is at least semi-automatic. A great deal of the lyrics are automatic writings or are dream based some how. The song title “star hinged abyss” came from a dream I had where I walked down a latter into a basement. Kebin was there and we had a conversation in which he said that phrase. The lyrics to “dream train to a secret lair” are cut-ups from various dream texts of mine. The song “harpy harlot lament” was based around the drawing for it. “Evocation of the Hyena-Ghouls” is based off of a dream I had where I encountered a type of carrion-spirit that had a Hyena head. The more rhetorical sounding songs like “carrion culture”, “prayer”, “service the target” and “strike down your fellow man” are all consciously thought out. I like to bounce back and forth between rational, focused deliberation and irrational, instinctual automation.

Q: What are the some of the essays and artwork about ?

A: The essays are all geared towards creating the conditions needed to fulfill the maximum potential of Oneiric Imperium. The essays are for cultural engineering both in destructive and creative ways. The things that impair the goals of Oneiric Imperium are all conceptual and abstract. The people, places and material resources to make the goals of Oneiric Imperium happen all already exist. I think that if I use the art and music to cultivate a crowd of like minded folks interested in these ideas, that if we apply and adapt them as we go along, that we can create a new DIY infrastructure to destroy and replace the pre-existing anarchist and punk dominated one. Once this is created then we can maintain a private world for ourselves while the rest of the world kills itself.

Q: How many official releases does the Oneiric Imperium have ?

A: Until “service the target” is completed the only official release is our split with bitchslicer called “chthonic cat cult”, and songs on two comps. Most of the Oneiric Imperium songs can be downloaded from my website Bood Samel.com . I also e-mail songs out a lot to large lists of people. I want people to trade my music amongst themselves. People involved in these types of occult music like noise and neo-folk don’t have the support structure that more established genres like goth-industrial, punk and metal have. We also can’t rely on pre-existing structures, it doesn’t go over so well. Sense there aren’t tons of ‘zines, distros, etc. I say we should be pushing the use of various networking services (myspace, e-mails, AIM, file sharing, etc.) as far as we can.

Q: Are you involved in side projects?

A: I’ve contributed to the bands/projects bitchslicer, Nicky Ashaum love sex death and god choir, and Zocialist Zeitgeist . I may end up collaborating with EI Mole, and the Vivian girls band. I would like to collaborate with MFM (which could easily happen), dead girl history (whom I already re-mixed), and if they were still together doomsday cauldron. Famous people wise I’d love to work with Boyd Rice, Neurosis and the RZA.

Q: I notice you like to leave graffiti art, what are the meanings behind this ? What does it symbolize ?

A: It means I’m fucked. I’m obsessed with a core group of topics and ideas and graffiti and guerilla art happens to be one of them. I have created a personal way I work with the ideas of chaos magick (sigils, servitors, etc.) through graffiti and guerilla art. That is gone over in my essay- Terra incognita: Graffiti magick and the urban landscape. Graffiti Magic and the Urban Landscape

Q: Have you had any situations with the authorities because of your art, and writings?

A: I’ve been arrested before a few times for graffiti which is why I don’t do it that much anymore, and only in obscure neglected places. I’m too old to run from cops. These days I have no problems from or with authority. They don’t know I exist, I’m not important to them and I have no place with or make any threats to the status quo. Socially I’m protected by my uselessness to the spectacle. I’m only concerned with margins of culture and what situations I can create there in.

Q: What types of musick are your favorites ? Bands and genres?

A: I like a little bit from almost all of the different types of underground music, but I mostly follow anything pretty, any thing dark, and lots of noise and neo-folk. My consistent very most tastes are neurosis, NON, death in june, der blutarsch, coil, current 93, Nick Cave, misfits, joy division, amebix, Leonard Cohen, and current 93. This past year of so I’ve been listening to a lot of genocide organ, cage (the rapper, not John Cage), haus arafna, waldteufel, ladytron, kirlian camera, arcana, coco rosie, and Joanna Newsome. I listen to mix tapes a lot at work and these tapes cover an insane range of music. I like listening to my own music, the music of my friends and that of people I correspond with over the computer. I put music from myspace on mix tapes a lot.

Q: What are your favorite art, books (please include authors), & movies if any ?

A: With movies I’m into David Lynch who has popped up in Oneiric Imperium content wise. Blue velvet, dune, lost highway and twin peaks are my favorites of his. I like Fellini quite a bit with satyricon being my favorite of his. For rest I’ll say akira, suburbia, the lone wolf and cub series, the mad max trilogy, Caligula, fight club, Amelie, city of lost children, delicatessen, Baxter: Beware the dog who thinks, Man bites dog, El Topo, Holy Mountain, Titus, bladerunner, nightbreed, pulp fiction, hard boiled, metropolis, and communion. For writers of fiction I like HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Don Webb, WS Burroughs, Grant Morrison, and Kathy Acker. I grew up reading lots of sci-fi, comics, horror and fantasy but I have a hard time with fiction these days. I’ve appreciated some Clive Barker, Robert Chambers, Peter Sotos, and Arthur Macken in recent years. I read lots of cultural texts, scholarly works, conspiracy lore, and occult books. I like what Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson, Anton Lavey, Aleister Crowley, AO Spare, Camille Paglia, Desmond Morris, Howard Bloom, Stephen Flowers, Phil Hine, Peter Carrol, Julius Evola, William Cooper, Jim Marrs, Baudlaire, Robert Anton Wilson, Arkon Darul, Erik Davis, Rumi, Khalil Gabran, John Zerzan, Jim Goad, Stephen Mace, Nietzsche, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, PJ Proudhoun, Nathan McCall, Marquis de Sade, Annie Sprinkle, Oswald Spengler, FP Yockey, Stephen Sennitt, Christopher Hyatt, Max Stirner, and Graham Hancock have each had to say to large extents for one reason on another. Well with art let’s see…. Well obviously I like graffiti. I like os gemeos from Brazil. Those two are amazing. Philly classic writers I like XEROX, ESPO, BUSKI,TERROR, SO BAD, CREDIT, OZ, KAIR, RAKAN, and CAEM. I love that CAEM is still out doing shit. That guy has never stopped and he deals in heavy volume throw ups in crazy places. A few current Philly writers I like are SIRE, BMU, SIK, PERRO, AGUA, BOB, EL TORO, REME, SEUS, VATOE, CR NOT, ENCE, RELAX and MANGO to name a few off the top of my head. We have lots non-graffiti street art here in Philly. Lots of stickers, stencils and wheat pasting. I like the work of DISTRAUGHT , and I have to mention CORPO/CIPRO. Plus everyone out there putting hours in making the world more interesting for themselves. Yes I love Banksy and no I hate Shepard Farey. I follow the juxtapose low brow art crowd, though I only like half of it. Trevor Brown is a favorite of mine. I wish Miss Van and Fafi would roll through town, and TWIST is always welcome in my city. I like John-John Jesse but I’d like his work more with out the Catholic symbols mixed in with it. Around Philly I like Nick Boitos (who does a lot of art for neurot records and did art for the swans), Joe B, Moe Musa, Dave Fox, and Severino Verna.

For the art of my friends Justin Duerr, Abby Miller, Delia Gable, Kebin Riley, Tom Shinn, Mandy Katz, BROKEN, and Megan Marcy are my favorites. For the rest I’ll say AO Spare, Gustav Klimpt, Lenore Carrington, Gee Voucher, Natasha Merrit, Trevor Watson, Eric Kroll, Andrew King, Rev. Stephen Layba, Richard Kern, Hans Belmer, Derrick Riggs, Ramon Perez, Larry McDougal, Wayne Barlow, Paul Laffoley, Louis Wain, and Milo Minara. The Unpop art crowd makes me smile.

Q: What do we expect soon from you and your projects?

A: This year I’d like to focus more on disseminating DIY information presented in a simple, straight forward way and written in an accessible way. Teaching people how to do things is giving them to rope to hang themselves with. After they know how to do something with themselves they no longer have any excuses. I’m writing a d20 dark fantasy steam punk RPG setting for worldeater records, though don’t hold your breath quite yet. I’ve gotten more gear lately so this year there will be more music. Some split releases are being talked about so we’ll see how that goes. As for me personally I’ll be doing more of the usual but getting more ridiculous and over the top about it I’m sure. Depending on things beyond any ones control I will sooner or later have an event at germ books.

Q: Anything else you would like to add?

A: Stop worrying about what underground art, music and culture has been and how it’s been structured in the past. Start creating new forms of underground culture. Seek to cultivate as much of a personal, introverted and obsessive vision as possible. My own Mother was around early late 70’s punk and gay culture. We obsess over the concepts of that era still. Fuck everyone and every thing, come up with some thing new. Don’t worry about what things are or what they mean. Don’t let identity games ruin things. Pay more attention to how what you’re surrounded by works in practical application, on an immediate day to day level. Ask your self, “Is this what I want?” and “How can I use this to create to the situations I need to fulfill my life?”.