I recently presented this conundrum to a few skeptical friends at a dinner party: 'Where is pop music located?' 'Obviously in the song,' a sympathetic friend replied. 'Yes and no,' I said, mystifying the riddle further. 'The song is one piece within a complex matrix,' I explained, adding, 'If you go back, there are examples where the song and its composition are the highest, most absolute determinant factors of its reception; think ABBA.' 'But isn’t that the whole point?' a friend chimed in, 'that pop music occurs in the songwriting and the studio?' 'Absolutely not,' I shot back. ‘Pop music occurs in the body, where formlessness creates an illusion that is nothing except the fact that I am hearing this, I am seeing this, and I am feeling this.’

In chaos magic, a sigil is a graphic symbol you use to control someone or the outcome of something. They typically look like occult emblems, often hexagrammic in shape, with a person’s name or other information translated into a numerical code or similar system. 20th century uses of sigils developed by the likes of Austin Osman Spare, and then Brion Gysin, derive from the ancient use of sigils as symbolic representations of demons and deities. In essence, sigils are logos used for summoning and conjuring.

In the 21st century, some have noted that memes function like modern sigils; graphic referents that compress image and text to invoke the will of their creators to change reality. Yet, in an increasingly indecipherable world where no single media holds significance over any other, the subject is actively dissolving into many synthetic associations, each as unsteady as the next. Moreover, we are forced to feel our way through a reality that is increasingly difficult to substantiate visually. There are many hidden charms, talismans, lamen, spells, geomantic figures, sigils, etc.

What is the dominant media of our age? Even when we learn that the Pop song, by a serious and exact study of the music, yields mysterious arcana of cosmic scope and importance, we are often too slow to locate where the magic exactly occurs. The recipient hallucinates meaning between storage mediums and distribution channels. Media theorist Friedrick Kittler wrote that, "what remains of people is what media can store and communicate.” The song is a node in a complex matrix of visual, sonic, and affective relations; strange effects are thereby produced.

Media and communications theorists often neglect to guide their attention to the latent magical implications of their research. I cannot deny the objective reality of magical phenomena conjured through the distribution and invocation of human presence through this complex pop cultural web. Even if what we speak of are illusions, are they not the evidence of some cause? Is this causation not the flattening of many elements into a sigil like storage medium - song, video, performance, editorial, sped up tik tok? Is the meaning we hallucinate between these sigils not what activates us as the recipients? Going before them are many trumpets sounding. They know all things hidden, and tell all things past, present, and to come.

Everything is compressed: data, audio, bandwidth, images, video, etc. Compression is counter to formlessness, yet we must flatten in order to manifest our will to change reality. Are codecs not sigils? Encoding and decoding may as well translate to conjuring and summoning. If we are to understand ourselves on the other end of data streams, how can we deny seeing spirits in the triangle of art? Compression is a struggle, a process of sifting through the data to unearth and excise statistical redundancies; modern spellcasting.

We live in a Babylonian confusion, with magical shadows cast between the points of a surface that we can barely prove. It is between those points that the spirits gather, the ones we can feel.