The fact that there’s a perfect new moon right now feels heavy.

When you’ve had a date burning in the back of your head for six months, like a closed gate you can’t see around…finally passing through it feels a little surreal. Suddenly you’re on the other side, imagination having converted first to experience and then to memory, footsore and a little out of breath.

The eclipse has passed. The future unfurls like parchment again, waiting for the quill.

Everything starts anew.

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I never got to do the whole “jump in a van and follow your favorite band around on tour” thing in my twenties, too busy with domesticity and not having copious amounts of money to spend and all that. Sadly, I don’t know if that’s a thing you can even do in the US anymore. Ticket prices have gotten so insane, especially for popular bands, and getting your hands on even one ticket is insanely hard.

So, remember a few posts ago when I said this:

“However, that means I now have a set of very expensive, more or less non-refundable tickets to two events, and I cannot physically attend both of them unless I watch ST’s set on Friday night, hop in the car the next morning, drive 8 hours to catch them in NC…”

That…is exactly what I ended up doing. It’s not quite “chasing your faves across the country” territory, but it’s a lot closer than I’d planned.

It felt absurd typing it out at the time, but then the European festivals happened, and…that setlist, man. I’d already be eating non-refundable costs no matter what I chose to do. Two 8-hour drives in four days is not nothing, but it’s not terrible. I’ve done worse; we did worse during this move, honestly. I’d get two Sleep Token rituals out of the deal. I’d still get 2 days at LTL. The second ST concert didn’t even start until 8pm, which was time enough to make the drive back without rushing.

I did go all the way to Poland for Nightwish once. Sometimes, you just gotta do the risky thing. Put in the work to make the magic happen.

Roll or die, I guess I’m a rider XD

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I had hoped to make a few temporary friends at LTL. I knew, if I wanted to be anywhere near the front for Sleep Token’s set, I was going to have to camp in front of the stage all day. You can’t do that alone. At some point, you have to eat, you have to rest your feet, you have to refill your water bottle, and someone has to hold your spot or you lose it.

I did not expect to make an actual friend almost immediately.

It was so random, too. I was originally planning to park at the festival each day, but decided at the last minute to ride the shuttle from downtown instead. (Expensive parking, Louisville traffic, and my hotel happened to be close to the shuttle pickup, which I did not know until I got there.) So there I am, wandering along the sidewalk at 8:45am on Thursday morning because I didn’t know exactly where the shuttle was located or what it looked like.

I passed some people in metal shirts who looked like they knew where they were going. I tapped one and asked if she was getting on the shuttle. She said she was, so I followed her. At some point, it became clear the other folks in that little horde were going elsewhere, so we split off. Found the shuttle, got on, sat together, started talking, decided to stick together.

(Kam, if you happen across this post, hi!!)

We acquired another friend Thursday evening and smuggled her on the evening shuttle back amid sore feet and Slayer howls.

Met up the next day and camped Main Stage 2.

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It was hot.

I thought the early campers would stake out places to sit but noooo, they were all crushed up next to the barricade like the show was imminent. At 9:30am. At least ten to fifteen rows of people at any given time.

All. Day.

Because Sleep Token wasn’t coming on until 8:40pm.

Sitting was possible, but difficult, and got infinitely more difficult as the day went on and more people showed up. Two hours before ST showtime, it got too hard to escape even with friends holding your position; you just couldn’t push your way back anymore. We got separated despite our best efforts. Passing crowd surfers overhead shuffles everyone around; unless you are physically at the barricade, you will not be standing where you started. If you’re lucky, you won’t end up stuck behind a pack of tall dudes.

(I was not lucky. Said dudes were perfectly nice people….just…very tall, and very not see-through. I could see okay-ish, in the end, by looking past shoulders.)

Any experienced festival goers would probably read this and be like, “well duh,” but…this was my first festival. I feel like you can’t know some of this stuff until you’ve experienced it. Despite everything, I’m glad I got to see Northlane, Imminence, Pvris, Static X (on the adjacent stage), Dayseeker, Spiritbox, and Breaking Benjamin (also on the adjacent stage) perform.

There is something about existing in a crowd that size that’s exciting, even with numb feet. Watching all those people sing the words to the same songs you love. Hands in the air. The sun setting and several thousand voices all chanting “Sleep Token!” (And “no crowd surfing!” XD )

Those are the parts you remember. That’s the magic.

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I took fewer pictures as the day went on. For one, having to monitor and be prepared for crowdsurfers at any second meant having one’s phone out was, for the most part, impractical.

I wasn’t going to take my phone out at all when Sleep Token played. My computer is full of concert pics I rarely or never look at after the fact, and I just wanted to vibe…especially with them.

But well, I had to break my rule to get a few IV pics for Kam, because in the end, I was much closer to the stage then she was.

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There is something indelibly fuller, more raw, more real about Vessel’s voice when it shares the same physical space as you. He doesn’t sound different so much as you feel it differently. It gets under your skin in a different way.

When he walked out…I expected to feel that sharp breath, heart pang, “hello, human I admire, I stand in your presence at last” sensation I got when I saw Tuomas Holopainen for the first time. I expected to feel it twice as hard, actually, because Vessel has created such a larger-than-life persona through the mask, the costume, the mystery that frankly does not feel like it inhabits the same day-to-day world I do.

Weirdly, that’s not what happened.

When he was finally standing in front of me…I wasn’t “seeing him in real life.” Nothing about his masked, cloaked, feathered glory is real life. The persona is simultaneously as otherworldly and ordinary as the music itself, intangible and real as breathing, as falling in love.

Vessel never really enters your reality. He allows you, for the length of a ritual, to step into his. The voice is the outstretched hand.

And I realized…that’s the whole point.

You don’t see him.

The man behind the mask is the one who exists in your reality, and he does not want to be perceived. It’s the music that gets inside and tugs at something in your soul, not the face we don’t know. It’s the music that triggers the “hello, human I admire, I stand in your presence at last,” not its vessel.

You see the self he presents to you, hit the boundary of the mask, and bounce off, as you’re supposed to.

It’s not that the humans aren’t present within the personas; they are, gloriously, ridiculously so. Ass slapping, tippy tapping, grinning, “watch this, I’m gonna rile all the girlies up”, stage gremlin nonsense. The feedback loop between them and the audience is stronger than 99% of shows I’ve been to, and they don’t even talk. They don’t hype us up; they don’t have to. They just vibe. Their joy mirrors ours.

And the music says everything between us that needs saying.

Magic.

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I think, had I only gone to LTL, I would have come away a tiny bit disappointed overall.

Don’t get me wrong, Sleep Token’s set was amazing. But I’d lost the ability to ignore my hurting feet hours before they even came on. I couldn’t see the stage properly. The bass was louder than I think it should have been (for all the acts, not just theirs). I couldn’t always hear Vessel or the background synths over the rumble. Trying to keep up with anything happening onstage made me feel like I was drowning in sweat and bodies and people (nice people, my people, but still).

You want to shut everything out and absorb the moment, but you’re just too damned exhausted trying to stay above water.

The Greensboro ritual, though…

I was lucky to get that ticket, and I’m eternally grateful I did.

Not that the evening was without hiccups. Apparently, the bands were extremely late getting to the venue, which meant the absurdly long line of people waiting for doors had to wait outside for an hour and a half longer than expected. (Which is kind of hilarious, considering I made the exact same trek that day and beat them there XD ). My brilliant self had decided, since I was alone and would be sitting anyway, to wear my heeled boots. Which are actually quite comfortable…on feet that aren’t already sore from two days at a festival. I had also hoped, since it was late September and in the evening, that the weather would be cooler….but alas, high 80s.

Sweating in my Ascensionism jacket with hurting feet, having left my water bottle in the car, wasn’t particularly fun. Talking to people in line was, though. I immediately met a random gal and ended up sticking with her all the way inside. (Seriously, a theme of this whole trip seems to be encountering exactly the right people entirely by accident. I wish I’d gotten her name.) I successfully gave away all my patches and bracelets.

Then, ironically, despite being the only person in my part of the line having a “safe”, ie. Ticketmaster, ticket, I was the only one who had trouble getting in (the reader couldn’t scan through my phone case; I had to take it off.)

Then the door leading to my section was in complete darkness, which made me panic, thinking I was in the wrong spot (I wasn’t; I just had one of the outermost tickets in the lower bowl.)

I finally sit down, and…

*Holy shit, I’m so much closer than I thought I was going to be.*

Yeah, that stupid line of lights to the right is directly blocking my view of II’s spot…but I am level with the stage and really, not much further away than I ended up at LTL. Better yet, because I was so far over, all the seats to my right were empty. (I think mine was the cutoff for this event.) I can see, so much better than I expected, without drowning in elbows and sweaty backs, with a place to sit down when my feet can’t take it anymore.

Oh, and I’m visible. To them, should they look in my direction. At eye level. Oh…that feels weird. The thing I was hoping for at LTL, happening here.

So again, was not planning to take pictures, because any shot of mine will not be of a quality to match what their photographer and people on the barricade can get, and I can just go look at those later.

…but then III came over and, well:

IV obliged us during Vore by standing relatively still and in clear view…

And the sea of Damacles lights was so pretty, I had to capture a moment of it. You can hear people getting choked up trying to sing along. (I may or may not have been one of them). Heck, you can hear Vessel getting a little choked up.

Vessel himself actually stalked over a couple times to preen at us. Never pulled my phone out for that. (Is it weird that I felt like I’d have disappointed him if I had? “Everybody wants eyes on ‘em, I just want to hear you sing that top line,” and all.)

I just…really kind of understand, now, why they call their shows rituals and talk about gathering in worship. It flows like worship. I remember.

The music was always the best part of that part of my life, looking back.

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I promise, I had a point to make with the post title.

Growing up, I wanted magic to be real so bad. Any time I played an RPG, I was a mage. I loved fantasy. I wanted to ride dragons and throw lightning bolts. I had a book crush on Raistlin Majere. I wanted the power to do things, change things, make things.

And, I mean…a good story has a kind of magic in it. Good art is its own kind of magic. It’s not flashy. It’s not on the level with lightning bolt-tossing…but done right, artists can invoke the same feeling of power. We’re as close to mages as this plane of existence allows.

Younger me wanted magic, and in a sense…older me has accomplished that.

The thing my younger self didn’t really get, though, is that magic has a cost. The user has to train, pass trials, sacrifice and bleed for it. Sad eyes and a broken heart in exchange for the power to change the world. Again, my favorite mage was Raistlin Majere; I don’t know how this wasn’t an obvious lesson for me.

Adult me knows better.

My art is good because I’ve put in the time, learned the things, bought the wrong stuff, wasted materials, screwed up, practiced more, envied better artists, encouraged ones just starting out. My writing is good because I’ve put so many goddamned words on the page, many of them pretentious and trite, learned the skills, tried things that don’t work, abandoned stories, murdered characters and plotlines, and I’ve been trying to get an agent for 13 goddamned years.

Magic is not a gift granted to the worthy. You have to bleed for it to feel it at all.

There’s a connection with romance to be had here, too: that urge for some handsome lover to take one look at you, swoop in on a stallion or in a TARDIS, sweep you off your feet, carry you off to a castle, and dote on you for the rest of your life, without you having to do anything except exist. But real-world relationships, like real-world magic, require work, thought, maintenance, upkeep, taking risks, screwing up, fixing mistakes, or the magic fizzles out.

“No amount of love will keep it around if you don’t choose it.”

I think the thing that’s really sunk in for me these last few months, and specifically these last few days, is that magical experiences don’t happen without effort…but conversely, they don’t NOT happen just because a few things go wrong in said effort. Magic has to be actively grasped, reached for, cultivated, lived. You have to take risks, and some of those risks will not pan out the way you want. You have to spend money you might not get back. You have to chance the weird looks, the FOMO, the exhausted crashout in the hotel at 2am because it wasn’t perfect and it’s over and something in your chest still drags like the tide, back to that first “will you listen” that was so real, and you remember what it was like to want to be a mage. Magic hurts in that space between a kiss and a blade.

“Show me how to dance forever” hits a lot different when you understand that it will destroy your feet and you have to make peace with that.

I look at old pictures of Sleep Token, when they were first starting out, and…I like to think they’ve learned this lesson extremely well. Their shows feel like magic now because they’ve put in the years, the risk, the work. Sad eyes and a broken heart in exchange for power. Sold out arena tours, five million listeners, and Caramel. Damacles. With the mask as both a boundary and a ley line.

That’s alchemy. That’s magic.

And there’s a new moon right now.

XXII - Modern alchemy

XXI- Always one step out of time