Ceremony

____________________________________________________________

GET “SONIC WEAPONS: The Official Stereo Thesis Music Sampler” FOR FREE. To get your FREE full-length album…click here. ____________________________________________________________

The words of the secret book are sacred symbols that only have their meanings activated when the mind of the practitioner awakens to their truths. Thus, when the words are understood and can be ably be put into practice then their reality can be brought into this world and turned into a transformative and magical experience. The secret book is opened, a verse chosen, and a candle stands lit, symbolizing the desire to receive or pass on illumination (knowledge), upon the altar to signal the start of something magical.

The call of a wild animal in the distance invokes the beginning of Ceremony and announces the start of the ritual that will unfold as the music continues. A low note drone is revealed and acts as a backdrop to the guitar strings playing a dirge to concentrate supernatural forces into the mind of the sorceress so as to electrify their tools which are placed before them on the altar. The wild animal calls out again as if aware of the power the magician is conjuring in their secret ritual chamber.

As the intensity of the practitioner’s attention focuses ever more greatly on the meanings of the words as sacred symbols revealing a deeper truth, the spell begins to work. Ceremony highlights this fact with a cue from an electric guitar with a single note, with string bent, to signify the altering of a natural event with forces capable of changing their course. With this, there’s a quickening of magical power infusing with the sorceress’s props giving them a usefulness beyond acting as an aid for focus and instead becoming tools with which to channel specialized forms of energy in whatever direction according to the owner’s will and whim.

Along with the right ingredients, combined and assembled by her own hands, collected as an offering, the sacred words and carefully selected tools in which to infuse power, the practitioner as a person must be worthy to receive and act as a vessel for doing the Will of the Great Work. Rather than only using the power with which they’ve been entrusted for their own purposes, they must also be willing to allow that Power to work through them, to act as Its agent in the world for good or evil. So that Its Will shall be done and not always his or her own will, for their own purposes.

The low note begins to rise, up a short melodic scale, as the influx of forces into the ritual chamber increase more strongly evoking an ominous tone. Then at last, the magical words are mimicked by being intoned with the guitar solo. Through the guitar melody the sorceress speaks the sacred utterances that only those who have ears can hear and those who have minds alert to the work of spiritual matters in our world can understand. The words, through these crafty tones, repeat the spell and repeat it again until the intensity of the Ceremony is increased and reaches its full fruition by becoming realized in the person of the sorceress. Through her the power which was waiting to be harnessed from the other side has passed into our world by means of this Ceremony. And with her props, by being shrouded in magical power can now act as a tool in the hands of the sorceress. Moreover, the Ceremony was a knock that opened a door to provide her with a gift which she came to receive, prepared in advance and showing how she was worthy.

Now in exhaustion, the sorceress collapses on the altar, faint from the influx of energy from another realm, and from communing with the energy of a higher power. Rest in very much necessary as a time for reflection and to meditate on the lessons learned. This is the time when the practitioner can integrate their experiences through the Ceremony into their very being, since the act of being chosen means also being transformed. For when it comes to power, there are no rights without responsibility. The exhaustion beckons a time for recovery through meditation and the state of meditation leads to sleep wherein dreams can assist the dreamer to explore the use of their newly acquired powers in the environment of the imagination. The dream provides the magician with a unique environment similar to but not the same as when awake, which is why through dreams the sorceress’s powers can come alive and through the imagination life is nothing more than a dream.

____________________________________

Related Music:

Ceremony

____________________________________

Marc

https://stereothesis.bandcamp.com/

Engine no. 28

____________________________________________________________

GET “SONIC WEAPONS: The Official Stereo Thesis Music Sampler” FOR FREE. To get your FREE full-length album…click here. ____________________________________________________________

A child’s toy, a token of their youth, encapsulates the spirit of what it means to be a kid. Before the duties of becoming an honorable or dysfunctional adult sink into a child’s frame of mind, they can live free and carelessly, since there is little to no liability to the mistakes we make and the time we waste in play. At the outset, our lives can be lived between a wide margin of error with time to recover from our mistakes. But as we have less time to use as we age, that margin of error shrinks and demands that we perform with far less error than we had when we were young.

Our imaginations can run wild and pursue every whim and fancy with wild abandon when we’re kids. No toy is just an object for play but rather a prop in a massive parade or great adventure. As children we are only limited by our imagination, but as adults the imagination is restricted by social norms, the law, and the responsibilities of adulthood. Liabilities become real and all of our actions become measured and cautious.

The essence of what this piece of music, Engine no. 28, has captured is the spirit of fun and fantasy. The speed of the tempo, like a child’s heartbeat, is moving at a quick pace to mimic the pulse of a kid in constant motion. The bass line, low and bouncey, dances like a giant, but friendly teddy bear. The melody has a nursery rhyme quality to it, being simple and repetitive, and easy to remember after just a few iterations. You can even grasp the sensation of turning the big steering wheel of the large tires with twirling bass line arpeggios. Plus, synthesized fire engine noises provide a perfect environment for a fire engine fantasy.

Engine no. 28 is also about that time in all of our lives when we stole pleasure moments for ourselves and invested them in play and imagination. We believed we possessed the power to endow objects with life and did by animating them for our amusement and to impress others. During that time we populated whole cities and fantasized about doing things until the day came when we really could.

____________________________________

Related Music:

Engine no. 28

____________________________________

Marc

https://stereothesis.bandcamp.com/

Geoforms

____________________________________________________________

GET “SONIC WEAPONS: The Official Stereo Thesis Music Sampler” FOR FREE. To get your FREE full-length album…click here. ____________________________________________________________

An impulse to create outlined the space in which a universe was to be built and so it was. Defined and solidified. This was followed by an intent to form things and implant in them a persistence, an enduring state of existence. This universe was then filled with clouds of radioactive dust, a malleable form of energy with which to bring to shape the hallucination of a creative impulse from an image formed in the mind of an intelligent being. A dream was then projected from the mind of a Maker and many other cooperating minds so that by it began the process of creation. For by this dream alone, a desire for images to become mobile, the universe began to take shape.

Geoforms, begins with a syncopated overlaid set of drum tracks that form a brief intro. They will be the backbone for the entire duration of the song. It sets the stage for a sparse melodic drone of mid-range notes that playfully counterpoint with another short line of bass notes, in call and response format. The rhythm guitar holds a splashy chord with shimmering effect that sustains itself throughout the intro until it releases the tension by flowing into the next section of music that rises and pulls you up with it.

The compression of the gravitic pull of this piece represents the built up pressure with which planets started to form. Within one critical moment, an ignition takes place, and thus the core of a planet was lit. Geoforms too ignites with an explosion of energy into the second section of the song and shows how a process slowly forms by building up energy and unleashing it in a magnified release.

The great ball of energy upon which the Earth grew and its enormous pull gave it its eventual size. The pull of other large masses and their interaction with the laws of the forces which govern their motions placed them all, each in their own orbits and positions. The extensive magnetic field of the Sun and the numerous magnetic fields of what would become the other planets all interacting put everything in its place and thus the universe was set.

In Geoforms, this idea comes to life when just a few musical elements center around a simple idea and rhythmic structure that eventually expand and release the energy that was being concentrated in the intro. But like all forms of energy, whether creative or astrophysical, when it reaches a critical mass of compression, the energy must be released and dispersed into the environment, particles blown out of an explosion.

Over millions of years, all of the planets cooled and became rocky or gaseous balls circling the Sun at differing rates of orbit. A day on Earth was defined as a rotation of the Earth on its axis, with a year referring to a completion of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The illusion for us is of the Sun rising and falling, when in actuality all that occurs is that the Earth turns, while the Sun remains motionless.

Originally, as one mass of radioactive energy, the Earth formed a crust over a ball of molten rock, mostly composed of iron. Gigantic plates of rock, the continents, move about the surface of the planet and perform minute movements by grinding against each other to form mountains, shores, and rifts causing an endless arrangement in landscapes I call Geoforms. The movement of these tectonic plates are what make and re-make the look of our world over time. The slow and persistent motion of these plates build oceans, generate earthquakes, erode coasts, and sink entire continents.

Geoforms captures this element of slow and persistent tectonic motion with a smooth melody in the second section as it contrasts against the jaggedness of rock from the guitar strumming, which gives the illusion of a staggered mountainous region rising out of a plain. The low notes in the main theme speak as if they were a great command proclaiming the eternity of life and existence, back of everything we see, feel, and hear. Moreover, the tones of the melody have a courageous, almost triumphant quality that illustrate a motive power underlying the process of forming and remaking the Earth for eons.

On Earth, evolution would follow its own unique planetary blueprint in geology and biology, environment and life forms. Not only would the environment cool and harden, but it would also become the landscape we now know, inhabited by plants, animals, and more importantly, water. But whether here on Earth, or on other planets, Geoforms really tells the story of all planets and the way they develop according to the blueprint by which they were designed - in chance formations governed by universal laws coded into the fabric of the cosmos.

The third section of Geoforms reveals this fact about Earth and in sound shows us several scenes of oasis. One is a refreshing area of land irrigated by water diverted from a nearby river to help fertilize fields and their crops, another is a gorgeous waterfall filling a large pool at its base where the myriad life forms can gather to drink, frolic, or bathe, and lastly, a vast ocean spreading out into a seeming infinity where there is no end to the horizon. Fish, plant, and man all benefit from the bounty that is provided by the Earth as it evolved from a creative impulse to build a dream and to give it form.

____________________________________

Related Music:

Geoforms

____________________________________

Marc

https://stereothesis.bandcamp.com/

Ask Yourself

____________________________________________________________

GET “SONIC WEAPONS: The Official Stereo Thesis Music Sampler” FOR FREE. To get your FREE full-length album…click here. ____________________________________________________________

Ask Yourself begins with a choir of angels, a whirlwind of strumming and electronic breezes to evoke an ethereal vibe. It unravels and dissipates into the opening lyrics of the song with statements pointing back to the beginning of life in our universe, perhaps even the origin of all existence. While not an overtly religious piece of music it is spiritual and addresses a sincere curiosity about serious questions. It also expresses a viewpoint that hints at possible answers to these concerns.

“Where do we come from?

Where are we going?

So many questions and nobody knowing.”

These lines represent the basis of the lyrical motif underlying all of the thoughts and poetic phrases expressed in Ask Yourself. Everything else revolves around and refers to these fundamental frustrations with standard or even traditional responses to these philosophical questions. Along with so many questions we all face too many answers. For any serious minded individual, truth is unified and not a multiplicity of fragments forced together from different sources to create a cohesive picture of what may or may not be truth.

So how do we resolve the conflict between our questions and the answers we’re given or find through our own searching? Experience is the teacher and it is crucial we develop the sensitivity to be open to the way experience can help us learn. The results of our actions provide clues by giving us feedback. Life is a laboratory where we are conducting the experiment of our lives. Answers are revealed when the right questions are asked.

“It’s all about you and that’s all there is.”

Who else can teach us to see what is before us? Who else is there when we’re confronted with the reality of our lives and the themes that occur repeatedly? No one else but ourselves. Alone, we witness the evolution of circumstances that develop out of a combination of our decisions and actions. The impact of our choices and deeds produces the experience that we consider our lives. Everything responds to the quality of our character, which is formed from the kind of people we are really.

We broadcast who we are with the energy of our being and the most sensitive of people can detect who we are easily, but for others they are deceived by our false fronts and many masks of personality. The soul, if such a things exists, is a mirror into which we can practice viewing our reflection in private. Our experience of life is a reflection of who we are really. To learn and eventually know the truth, we must also be truthful with ourselves. The universe is a mirror and we reflect in it what’s in our soul. Just Ask Yourself.

“You are what it is. The light is within,

Underneath your skin. You are a star.”

As souls, we maintain eternality. A star is the only symbol of near eternality in our universe and yet a brief study of the life of stars in this universe reveals that even they can die. Eternality as an idea is different from immortality in that it refers to the fact of being eternal or unending, instead of immortality which is merely the condition of not experiencing death or without death. There are only three things in our universe which we conceive of as possessing eternality and they are the universe itself, souls, and God. Everything else that is alive or that exists in this universe can be imagined to somehow or in some way be able to achieve the state of immortality, but this is folly.

“Just ask yourself.”

Anything affected by change in time must of necessity age and therefore experiences decay and dissolution. Even the universe itself may one day come to an end, thus souls and God remain as the only things we can think of that might have eternality as one of their fundamental characteristics. We are what constitutes life, by animating, directing, and initiating our purposes through living, but while we are involved in this experience, we are also free, unaffected and far removed from the consequences of aging and death. We go on and some of us even come back.

____________________________________

Related Music:

Ask Yourself

____________________________________

Marc

https://stereothesis.bandcamp.com/

Price Per Play

____________________________________________________________

GET “SONIC WEAPONS: The Official Stereo Thesis Music Sampler” FOR FREE. To get your FREE full-length album…click here. ____________________________________________________________

What is the value of the music experience to the consumer?

In the past, the value of the music experience might have been more connected to the community as music was likely one of very few entertainments the people could enjoy together. Moreover, the value of music and the music experience itself was more allied with live performance rather than selling volume units of CD's, records, or mP3 downloads.

The question here today is not whether or not music was better in the past compared to now, but whether or not the price of music is correct relative to other artforms?

When measured by each unit, by far, photographs, paintings, sketches, sculptures, DVD's, and any other kind of art you can think of is worth far more per unit than music. The only rivals to music in terms of art or entertainment are T.V. and film. Even though more people spend more of their time listening to music or attending a live music performance, music still receives far less monetary appreciation than do other art forms. 

Let's look at this issue another way. If a photograph or painting by a famous artist is valued at $5,000 or $15,000,000 and thousands of people flock to see either one of them at a museum, their values don't change or they might actually go up. But what happens when you buy a digital download or a musician releases a new album?

First of all, the price of a digital download is automatically priced at $.99 no matter what demand is like. Also, the label prices the entire album where it thinks demand will help them to recoup their cost from the production, promotion, and marketing costs related to the project.

But here are some essential differences between other art forms and music. In general, no part of the public ever gets to touch or own the original copies of an artist work unless they buy it. In other words, the general public never gets to own a Picasso painting, unless they can outbid another buyer. However, the general public can buy a poster size print or an art book full of samples of Picasso paintings along with biographical information concerning his development as a person and artist over time.

But with music, the general population almost always gets to have the thing itself. The music is the thing. The master copies of songs produced by a musician or composer are the equivalent items to original paintings by master artists. The master copies are what the labels and producers want to own, but the general public just wants the experience.

But if music is art then it should be prices accordingly in similar terms as art other art forms. A copy of an original photograph by a highly-acclaimed photographer will cost the consumer less than the original. Same thing goes when it comes to copies or prints of original paintings.

With music, though, many people mistakenly believe that composers and musicians are selling a performance when really they're selling ideas or a shared emotional experience. Music is a means of communicating ideas and emotions with sound waves made by instruments and/or voices.

In basic economics, we learn that the price of something goes up when demand increases, and that the price of something goes down when demand goes down. So in theory, as demand goes up, price goes up and when demand goes down, price also goes down.

So then why is the price of a song or piece of music stuck at about $.99 per track? Even if the music is in demand, the price never changes unless the artist wants it to, but under no other circumstances. 

Even though we live in a period of time where master paintings are selling for millions of dollars, the price of music is stable at $.99 per download. Looking around for digital music on Amazon you'll occasionally notice downloads selling for $1.50 or $2, but not often. 

The point here is: more plays = lower cost per play.

100 plays of a $.99 download = .01 per play

10 plays = $.09 per play

In my estimation, there's just no way that $.99 is the value or true price of the music experience that the audience receives when they listen to music they really connect with and enjoy often. Instead, the value of that experience is what the artist or consumer says it is. Therefore, price, when it comes to music, is an agreement made between the artist and consumer about the value of the experience they both think they are giving and receiving through the music.

____________________________________________________________________________

Related Music:

Lucky Ducky

Mystery Meat

The Zealot

____________________________________________________________________________

Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

Remember to join our mailing list.

To support Stereo Thesis with a financial donation securely through PayPal, click here.