Open Sorcery

Open Sorcery is the world of Lazarus Halliwell.

Excellence and batshittery, done on purpose.

I’m Lazarus. I make art, music, poems, plays, and magic for the quiet, brilliant, broken ones. If that is you, welcome home. I adopt your kind.

[Subscribe to my email list and I’ll send you a track I don’t remember recording.]

More about me here.

Please note that, with rare exceptions, any and all names mentioned in this blog are pseudonyms except our own. We want to be able to speak freely without doxxing anyone.

Blog

  • Apocalypse in a Folder: I’m making a percussion kit out of my bathroom

    I’m making a soundfont out of my bathroom.
    That’s the whole post. That’s the bit.

    Except it’s real and it’s happening. It’s called Apocalypse in a Folder (working title. Runners-up were Toilet Demon Pack and Final Flush, and honestly all three are true). A full percussion kit, built from hits I record around my place with my mic, plus a lot of bathroom ambient noise I’m going to mine for weird sounds like some kind of deranged audio prospector.

    This started, as all my best ideas do, by accident. I accidentally recorded a fan in Bandlab while making a bootleg soundfont of questionable quality out of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky”, and instead of deleting it like a sane person I thought: what if it was a whole kit?

    My best recordings have always been made in bathrooms, you can thank the acoustics and my unending audacity for that. I sing in the shower and the shower sings back. So the bulk of this kit is getting born in there.

    The plan: a HUGE all-percussion soundfont. For melodic stuff I like stretching a sample across ranges, but this percussive nightmare gets the royal treatment. Every hit, every clank, every unholy bathroom resonance will get its own sample.

    And because I can’t leave well enough alone, I also plan to make an earth-shattering bass soundfont from bathroom vocal takes. That low hum I do in the shower that wakes up my gut, stretched, chopped, pitched down to Hell and filtered to shit is going in the folder too. Will it be good? Unclear. Will it be fun? You bet your ass it will be. Will you get to play with it? If enough of you want it, it goes out as a freebie to the gorgeous people on my newsletter list. Tell me you want it. Peer pressure works on me and I CAN, in fact, be bought. (Subscribe below if you want in. I’ll send you a track I don’t remember recording to say thanks, no questions asked 💛)

    — Allēna

  • I Lost My Oracle Card Deck, So Now I Read With A Random Number Generator

    This site is called Open Sorcery, and I’ve somehow never written about my own oracle deck. Truly a bold branding choice for someone who’s been hiding the sorcery.

    I Made a 43 Card Oracle Deck in One Haunted Night

    I designed my own oracle deck of 56 cards. They spilled out of me during a very odd, very spooky Alaskan winter, the first 43 in one sleep-deprived night where I kind of blanked out. I think they were half channeled. They’re made from symbols that have haunted me my whole life and keep showing up. Many of these symbols also recur in my poetry and fiction.

    How I Lost It (The Lore ™️)


    And then Eight fled Texas like a bat outta hell with two backpacks and a standby ticket to Philly at ass o’clock in the morning, and the deck got lost in the shuffle (ha) and did not make the cut. (Read that whole saga here.) So now I read with a random number generator. Sue me. It’s effective.

    How I Read Oracle Cards With Random Numbers

    Every card lives in a living document, and every number from 1 to 56 points to an entry. But I don’t just hit a button. First: coffee. A smoke. Deep breaths until I drop into the empty gut decision space in my body. Then I put on the first song or playlist that speaks to me, and only then do I summon a string of randomly generated numbers, usually from random.com. Modern problems require modern solutions.

    My Cards Are Rude (and Other Reading Rules)

    How many numbers? However many my gut says. I keep readings short, usually, and I don’t like to read for the same person more than twice in one day. My cards are rude and have a lot to say (after all, I made them). Also, if we go too deep, we start sharing visions of the future. It’s happened before.

    Oracle Card Combinations, Also Known As Spiritual Diphthongs

    Here’s the weird part. Over time I noticed certain cards pulled together mean something neither means alone. Spiritual diphthongs, basically. Like how “o” and “i” slide into “oi” and suddenly you’ve got a new sound.

    Example: The Blackness + The Lantern

    Take #17, The Blackness: the duality of all things. Light without darkness is no light at all. Dark things are coming your way.

    And #18, The Lantern: be prepared. It can light the way. Seeing clearly.

    Pull them together and you get extreme strife, internal conflict.

    I’m very familiar with the duality of things. I’ve been holding contradictions in my head since I was 14. Joy without despair is nothing, and vice versa. You wouldn’t know either one exists without the tension and contrast. So I never wanted them to stand apart. They’re two sides of the same coin. They are neighbors on purpose. Every time I feel a pattern like this, it goes in the document. So it isn’t 56 entries anymore. It’s fifty-six (56) cards and the fascinating conversations they have with each other.

    What Comes Next

    Physical cards will come back eventually, with real art this time. I’ve had an artist in mind for them for years. Money remains a barrier. I also like the bridge between the technological and the metaphysical that reading with random numbers and the document has given me. Until I have a large enough disposable income to pay the artist I have in mind a king’s ransom and I can get my head out of my techno-spiritual ass, it’s me, dangerously overcaffeinated, hungry for answers from beyond, strings upon strings of randomly generated numbers, and a document that never ceases to grow and breathe.

    Want to know when the deck gets its art? Join our swanky new mailing list and you’ll know the second I get my shit together. It comes with a free track I don’t remember making…

    -Allēna

  • Who’s up pondering their orb?

    Me, apparently.

    And I made this BATSHIT crazy T shirt in honor of the Ponder Your Orb meme and everyone crawling out of the woodwork to troll me for being gender nonconforming on Instagram.

    You can grab it in the shop here.

    Brace yourselves for more magic and accursèd bullshit. I hope to move all of our zines and shit from Itch.io over to the shop here shortly.

    -Allēna

  • SURPRISE, BITCHES!

    I am NOT DEAD!

    I have simply felt like I’ve had…. nothing truly important to say for the past month or so. But I HAVE missed posting here dearly, so I hope to post here more. The operative word being hope.

    We’ll see what actually happens.

    THAT being said, opensorceryy dot co has a swanky new store page where you can order Wares from yours truly. There isn’t much on there yet, but I hope to add more over the coming days. Brace yourselves, because now we’ve got business..

    I’m also appearing on Riverwest Radio October 8th and things are shaping up to be pretty okay for the time being. I’ll do my best to keep y’all posted.

    -Allēna

  • The newest song diary playlist is HERE!

    Released to the public in the shadow period of the magnificent solar eclipse on August 12, 2026, this playlist represents a period of enormous change for us, but also further rooting and profound emotion.

    We hit a mental wall in early July shortly after a lucky financial windfall, coming out of survival mode for the first time in several years, or perhaps our entire life. This profound crash immediately followed a highly successful feature performance at Showcase Onstage in Milwaukee. One of the video clips from the performance went viral, and it was our last performance before entering into something of a hiatus for the next month or so.

    We are just now coming out of the crash period and getting our bearings and finding out what life means for us when we aren’t just surviving, and the songs in this playlist reflect that. We all hope you enjoy.

    However, our server members in the opensorceryy club 2.0 Discord always see creations like these first and get a say on when things drop. So be sure to join if you want a first look at and a hand in the badassery we’re cooking up.

    Listen here.

    -Allēna

    Fediverse reactions

  • I got to see Beany yesterday for the first time in over a year!

    I had missed her so much. She knows my chaos too well, lol

    -Allēna

  • nocturnal activities continue..

    My fucking brain has apparently decided that sleep before 5 AM (except for brief naps in extreme cases) is banned. Most of the time it’s not due to anything I’m doing, it’s just…spinning. And it refuses to shut the fuck up. That and I can’t get comfortable until I’m so exhausted my body gives out and I fall asleep in whatever crazy position I happen to be in. Moonie has taken it upon herself to shove her wet face into my everything at 4 AM exactly, as well, regardless of whether or not I am trying to sleep, so she’s contributing to the problem. Why it’s always 4 AM I have no idea. I have no problem giving her attention AT ANY OTHER TIME OF DAY. Yet this cat chooses EXACTLY WHEN I’M TRYING TO SLEEP to seek attention from me and QUITE LITERALLY STICK HER FACE IN MINE. This calico child has zero concept of personal space or boundaries and I love her dearly but this is an increasingly aggravating issue. So here I am at 1:40 AM, a better time to try and be in my everything, bitching about the sleep issues that plague me and she’ll likely try to insert herself into my skin in about an hour and a half. What the fuck.

    Yeah. Anyway, wish me luck.

    -Allēna

  • a post 2 days in a row? Holy fuckin shit?!

    Well it would seem that clearing out the spam comments may have helped fix whatever was breaking the site, or it cleared up on its own. I’m reminded of a meme where it’s like “can you lick the science? Programming: nothing else has made the code work, so you may as well try…”

    I am an absolute garbage programmer but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that over 2000 spam comments waiting in the queue will slow down your site’s processing time, lol. So that’s fixed, AND I have a spam blocker in place now, so hopefully that’s less of a problem going forward. Ugh. If I never have to see “503: no server is available to process your request” again, it’ll be too goddamn soon.

    Speaking of programming, and people far more skilled at it than I am, I am hoping to see my dear friend Beany this coming week, one of the smartest people and most gifted programmers I know. She also happens to be out of work and in search of a job, so if any of y’all know of an open position in programming, broadcast engineering, or audio, please let me know in the comments and I’ll pass it on to her.

    It’s been over a year since I’ve seen her and I miss her so badly…

    I don’t entirely know what I’m doing for the rest of the week. Perhaps a poetry thing tomorrow called Memory Café that happens monthly that a rad poet here puts on, and then workshop on Sunday. Saturday’s activities are TBD. Emerson also found a swimming hole that’s semi-local, so we might go to that sometime soon when it’s not pissing rain.

    Wish me luck and pray that I don’t die.

    I leave you with this photo of Véra baby that Emerson took:

    -Allēna

    Fediverse reactions

  • the moment hits you like a cannon blast

    // title taken from “vanish canvas” by erra

    Hi, all.

    I’m so sorry for my prolonged absence. This site has been down for an extended period of time and I’ve been unable to post. I’m making use of its uptime to post while I can, clean out spam comments, update plugins, what have you so that hopefully it’s down less frequently.

    It seems like nothing and everything has been happening all at once. I feel like I’ve been in a deep cocoon in my head since late June trying to make sense of who I am now after the last five years or so. I have been taking an extended hiatus from posting videos on social media due to burnout as well as explicit and detailed threats on my and my system’s life. Going viral like this in January was somewhat accidental, and I never truly intended to be a public figure of this magnitude, despite how inevitable it’s seemed since for pretty much our entire life.

    So we’ve been resting and trying to make sense of where our life has gone, as well as where as it’s going now. I love Milwaukee and I fully intend to stay here for as long as the city and its people will have me, something I would never have said back when we started this blog, and we have some interesting things in the works, like an interview on the radio on October, a workshop in November, and a feature already lined up around our birthday next year.

    I’m not sure when we’re going to get back into making short form content. When the time is right or we have something funny to say, we’ll jump back in. But now doesn’t feel like that time. I don’t feel funny anymore. I feel like a character in some lost Christopher Nolan footage, or something. (Hi, Mr. Nolan – if you read this, please consider setting and shooting a film in Milwaukee!!)

    Okay, maybe I feel darkly funny, at best – which is our specialty.

    Stay tuned for more magic, which is coming.

    -Allēna

    Fediverse reactions

  • MY BLOG! IT LIVES!!

    Have this performance of “Hurricane Lazarus” from Poet’s Monday this week to celebrate:

    -Allēna