My dear, dear friend Michael Matton just moved on to other realms of consciousness/existence. It is with deep sadness that I write this, but at least this means the end of a long and troublesome period of hardship and illness for him.
We first met in 1986. We both worked at a printshop in Stockholm, and Matton was so incredibly helpful in my manic fanzine work at the time: feed-backing, printing, copying, driving boxes of paper back and forth. It developed into a friendship that took us through TOPYSCAN, The Fenris Wolf, Psychick Release, Cinematick and many other projects, too.
Between 1994 and 1998, Matton and I ran Looking Glass Press (together with Jens Näsström), which took our occult publishing to a whole new level (including publishing Crowley and LaVey in Swedish, plus an assortment of books in English). We also branched out into part-ownership of American publishing company Spirit Vision/93 Publishing, temporarily owning the literary copyrights of Jack Parsons.
Matton was instrumental in the work of “building” TOPY in Scandinavia, as well as the O.T.O. in Sweden. Without his loyal friendship and dedicated hard work, it would have been a very different story. Matton was completely integrated in all these processes of planning, construction, development and execution, working tirelessly and unselfishly to make great and interesting things happen.
Anyone who had the good fortune to be in Matton’s sardonically mercurial company quickly realised what a good-natured being he was; always freely sharing his experiences (and opinions!) and displaying a genuine sense of curiosity.
His massive appetite for great movies and books became part of my own formative fodder attitude, and I can only hope it was mutual. A genuine appreciation of macabre and cosmic horror fiction à la Lovecraft was always present in Matton’s mind, as well as a psychedelic sensibility and sense of humour in dealing with the bizarre absurdities of the norm-core world. As all friends do, we shared a language of silent understanding, in which details from our own particular occultures bloomed into dark flowers of wisdom and resonance.
Now this resonance moves on into the dreamworld of weird cosmic beings and sensual sentiences, swirling like multi-coloured hookah-smoke in the dark forests of primeval witchcraft. In the sacred grove, a newly arrived wizard dances ecstatically with the alluring witches of eternity. Home, at last.
Carl Abrahamsson, Stockholm, November 21st, 2020
