"Inside the fantastical cave lives a loner princess who lazily lives everyday dragging her feet. She eats in bed, play by herself, reads books, looks at pictures, thinks about what the outside world is like.... looks at picture postcards given to her by others.... and there are gifts from people thrown around on the floor."
-Chie Fukao

"Fear the global monster that devours ancient tribes, cultures, sub-cultures and entire continents," preach the puritanical critics of the post-modern. This they label as the "banalization of art," ..."of culture" ... " of humanity." Intellectual entropy is our ineluctable fate, or so they claim. This, orthodoxy, over the years, has fucked with the creative detail of the global brain so severely that most alleged artists have never made any art at all but have only talked about it -- the rise of theory. They're minds are still spinning from the speed of the modern world. Like victims of vertigo, they're desperately trying to focus on familiar form, struggling just to hold on, even after total dissolution. Despite these bogus claims Little Cakes believe identity (= form + content) can still be created through magick and mystery. All men and women need to do is get off their asses, accept and live fully within the modern world, no matter how bleak it feels, and shape it using both body and mind. Unearth new myth.
Horselover Fat explained with detail how humanity could accomplish this
in his Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura:

"Entry 48. ON OUR NATURE. It is proper to say; we appear to be memory
coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system
which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction- a failure- of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular sub circuit. "Salvation" through gnosis- more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia) - although it has individual significance for each of us- a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world- and
self-experience, including immortality- it has greater and further importance for the system as a whole, inasmuch as these memories are data needed by it and valuable to it, to its overall functioning.

Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our sub circuit via linear and orthogonal time changes, as well as continual signaling to us to stimulate blocked memory banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there. The external information or gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting instructions, with the core content actually intrinsic to us- that is, already there (first observed by Plato; viz: that learning is a form of remembering).

The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of restorative value to the individuals; the Gnostics, however, correctly saw the ontological value to what they called "the Godhead Itself, the total entity."

Physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, addressed this most fundamental human "malfunction," using a more traditional expository style, in his collection of lectures, Mind and Matter:

"The individual has not the slightest influence on the hereditary treasure it receives from its parents, nor on the one it leaves to its offspring. Mutations that occur are acted on by "natural selection of the fittest". This again seems to mean pure chance, since it means that a favourable mutation increases the prospect for the individual of survival and of begetting offspring, to which it transmits the mutation in question. Apart from this, its activity during its lifetime seems to be biologically irrelevant. For nothing of it has an influence on the offspring: acquired properties are not inherited. Any skill or training attained is lost, it leaves no trace, it dies with the individual, it is not transmitted. An intelligent being in this situation would find nature, as it were, refuses his collaboration - she does all herself, dooms the individual to inactivity, indeed to nihilism."

Schrödinger's "nihilism" is the end result of the aforementioned post-modern fear. The world is exclusively information, and we are but empty vessels incessantly filled with pointless 1's and 0's until the day we die. However, structure, meaning and beauty can be created from the paste of the modern global world despite the fact that all information floats free, violently pried, of all the ancient anchors, boundaries and despots that once granted us personal identity. The key is to become the information through this process of gnosis, the loss of amnesia, and reacquaint yourself with long lost civilizations, fantasy realms and ages yet to exist. Very heavy shit here.

*And don't think for a split-second that Little Cakes are merely talking up the joys of web surfing, the Burning Man festival, cyber-shamanism, rave culture, happenings, the Situationists, Peter Gabriel's One World label, or the Matrix trilogy. This isn't merely the modern nerd's ability to fuse hip-hop beats to droning sitars and tablas.

Little Cakes demand a sweaty and grime-caked re-discovery of the eternal self. (Do not die-hard pimply D&D gamers make Warhol-ian performance artists look like amateurish dilettantes?) We're thinking of the Arts and Crafts movement, Swedish pyschedelia, dada, Smegma, home sewing kits, Folkways, J.G. Ballard, Sun Ra, D&D, Sun City Girls, Fort Thunder, The Easy Bake Oven, Albert Ayler, "The Great Beast" Aleister Crowley, and Throbbing Gristle.

One of the great things about human beings, the most recent and novel form of L-if-E here, is that they impulsively, reactively and intuitively predict by "free" expression what will happen next in terms social and cultural evolution.
-Genesis P-Orridge, "Breathing Sex"

The two visual artists and two bands that have contributed to the second Little Cakes Little Gallery exhibition, Inside the Fantastical Cave, are (unintentionally?) complicit in our attempt to build the first chamber for inducing the gnosis process. (Maybe not the first -- hedge mazes actually came first.) Each artist brings their work and all the infinite universes within, together to create yet another universe inside the urban dwelling de rigueur: the really fucking small city apartment. There we all will become each other or others of others or others of the other of yet another, simultaneously. Real true MAGICK.

Artists:

1) Chie Fukao. Home: Tokyo. She has traveled deep into world of animated creatures, practicing surgical disembowelment to discover exactly what they consume.

2) Leif Ritchey. Home: New York. Ritchey's gnarled web-nests initially come on as slippery squid corpses tangled in giant fishing nets with old brown shoes and hypodermics scattered about. But their logic is as intricate and as a pigeon's nest. What's the difference between a frayed Michelob bottle label and a Maple leaf to a pigeon when building a nest for her eggs?

3) Sightings. Home: New York. They are a three piece who have made the sounds of early Einstürzende Neubauten, The Ex and Confusion is Sex-era Sonic Youth sound like melted field recordings from the steppes of Zaire.

4) Sunburned Hand of the Man. Home: from Boston to New York. A loose but tight-knit collective of musicians who travel to distant reservations, the boiler rooms of federally funded housing and to unknown solar systems, through their violently meditative jams. (A contradiction to some but not to us.)

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."