Synthetic Sadhus Flyers and Photos
Updated 2/22/22: All photos have been resampled by AI for greater pixel detail, resolution, and color correction.
Background art by Oliver Benson. Photos from that period are very hard to come by. Most of those here are taken from the Wayback Machine from 2000-2001, after Marc Ballroom and before Cinema World Studios, so we are missing a lot of early and later photos. The Wayback images were so small I had to double their original size. All photos on this main page are duplicated in folders sorted by event date if you are so inclined. Also be sure to check out flyers from the 1990s and 2000-2004 and also Krisztina Végh’s memorial with Gilles’ long farewell speech. I may combine everything Synthetic at some point if more material demands it. There are rumours of footage from a Japanese film crew, and Rocky Kenworthy presumably took a lot. And one of these days I will track down the elusive Gary Toro. (Edit: Missed him.) As always, send me any you see missing or have better copies to machinelf at tranceam dot org. The music is Tim Schuldt vs Spacecat, “Something Weird” from 1998’s Destination Goa Vol. 8, which I used for my old trance page on brainmachines.
Click images to view captions – Chronological Events
BONUS READING
Why did I wear the Viking getup? And why were there two versions?
Like many great pieces of art, such as when Larry Harvey burned some guy who was banging his ex in effigy on a beach in San Francisco, and it eventually snowballed into Burning Man, it was all inspired by a girl.
I am a quarter Swedish. I was always into Vikings. Before I smartened up after taking a hard look into racial genetics, I was super into Ayn Rand and had toyed with Scandinavian white supremacy, even looking at Brits as mongrels. Still, even after I wizened up, in the 90s I was still on some Nordic-psychedelic warrior trip, envisioning the Viking spirit as an explorer of the final frontier, the mind. I was even into the Bock Saga.
So when I started hanging out with Swedish Astrid in Puerto Rico, where we did a whole ritual dance thing with a shaman outfit and voodoo dolls with people’s pictures on them, and LSD in coconuts, we became friends and she moved in with me in my Midtown studio on 51st street. It was nice, in a restaurant district, and had a balcony. I brought her into the offices of The Economist, where I worked.
Once when we were galavanting in Central Park, it began to rain. I had a fake knife and was dressed pretty techno-bohemian. We found a bridge to stand while the rain finished. Stefan was with us. We were probably high.
There was a small group of people with us under the bridge. I looked over and froze. 20 yards from us was my boss at the Economist, along with his wife and 2 girls. he was a burly blonde Australian who had been in some elite unit in the military. He was holding their bike. I quickly turned around 180 degrees.
To this day I don’t know if he saw me.
We had many adventures, which probably demands another story, but one of them is me getting kicked out of a party in Chelsea for selling acid. Astrid and I went back and I changed clothes, and she cut up a mop and made me a mustache. I put on spectacles. We took a limo back and walked right in. Much later, after the party was over, and we were all in the street, as we were wont to do, I shook the bouncer’s hand and in midsentence ripped off my stash and ran.
Life was good, and I thought I was going to get her.
So this is when you see the happy bright optimistic Viking, with shiny armor and a laptop around my neck playing late 90s Swedish visuals – this one from Stash:
We had taken a limo with Daniel and Carolyn all the way out to Amazura. A film crew was with us, from CBS 48 Hours, filming a segment on Ecstacy:
I, of course, had greater designs on Astrid, but my wish to make it more than friends ran head-on into the insane amount of drugs we were doing (K and LSD for me, MDMA for her) and the fact she brought in her sister Stina to live with us.
At some point, one of the local characters who had run off from a circus with a rabbit van, Bunny, told me she had HIV, as a way of explaining why she was so physically distant. I actually was so delusional that I believed it, and it was shattering. Of course, I was wrong.
I ultimately peg it on us being so high. I never even tried anything.
She eventually drifted away with some other guy, Michael Wanderlust, and had a similar platonic relationship with a lot of hand-holding. Even though I was delusional from all the drug use, deep down the human need for connection still burned in me and I wanted to be the hand that was held. Not him.
I was devastated, so I responded with the only way I knew how.
So for the next Synthetic Sadhus, I designed a brooding Death Metal Viking outfit, with a gun that mechanically said DROP YOUR WEAPON, rubber ammo, rubber bone gloves, a beating rubber heart, a fake syringe labeled “Ketamine” with a retractable plastic needle, that I would inject into the beating heart, and a dark rusty plastic scimitar. I carried the only money that mattered, stacks of million-dollar bills. I had pointed ears and a Terminator-style steel skull face and a silver cape with dark purple robe trim. And glued to the helmet on the front was an image of a DMT elf from Erowid. The accents of everything, from my eyebrows to LSD water pistol, was fluoro.
This was all in addition to the computer and set of 10 brain machines on lawn chairs and a huge supply of breath mint bottles, and also LSD dropped onto Pez candies.
I was adrift then. I did manage to get some sympathy booty from the blonde dreaded junkie girl who worked at the Halloween Adventure store downtown in SoHo where I went every week to stock up.
And then, after a year, and after squatting and almost going to prison for 25 years, I eventually found a dark mate, Lisa, the “Anti Astrid,” but that is another story for another time.
But know that it ended darkly and violently, of course.
So there you have it. As in all else in that era, everything boiled down to sex, drugs and rock & roll. And even though I only have the last of those three, I still marvel at the internal logic of that period.
