Geoforms

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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.

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Related Music:

Geoforms

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Marc

https://stereothesis.bandcamp.com/

Black Hole Creativity

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The immense gravity pull within a dead or dying star is so strong that it's capable of holding light. Where light would normally travel away from its source, within or near a black hole, light circles and gets pulled back into the center of the dead star.

Creativity and light possess many similar qualities in that they flow when expressed from a central source and that they illuminate objects when they surround them in their energies. In other articles, I've also discussed how creativity is also like water in that it flows, fills a space or activity, and overflows into other areas of conquest or expression.

The person who possesses creative impulses in such extreme quantities, but who fails to express them to a sufficient degree fails to live up to their potential and wastes the reserve of artistic force with they were born.

Celebrities who’ve built their careers on an immense output of artistic production, but who die during the course of that process of discovery and unfolding of their abilities to become like black holes of creativity that pull in and do not release the light from those gifted minds. The industry, fans, and collaborators with which such an individual shared their vision and work not only lose a person, but also less tangible qualities like hope, sympathy, understanding and enjoyment.

Even non-celebrities who chose to stay away from fame or were left undiscovered by the mainstream can also become black holes of creativity within their own spheres of influence. The friends, family, and colleagues of such individuals who benefited from their energy, inspiration, and stood in awe of their incredible talent lose something very rare and special by losing a part of themselves when an artist they know dies.

When such rare talents depart the world, life losing something of its lustre and the question remains as to how it will be possible to fill the void. It’s from the existence of this void of creative talent and artistic output that a black hole of creativity is generated by leaving a vacuum in the wake of the death of an artist.

Prince was such a person, as was Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, Elliot Smith, David Bowie and many others. Artists in all categories of production and at whatever level of talent belong to this classification of humanity.

Their existence in this world is necessary and very important because they add beauty and imagination to human life and in them we differentiate ourselves from other life forms. Through them we experience how it might be to live in heaven, where our thoughts can be expressed into pure forms of creative energy amongst souls irrespective of time and space.

The world as a whole mourns the death of artists, both small and large, whose creative output might range from a few songs, poems, a film, paintings or a single dance performance to a career and lifetime of such artistic productions, because no matter the volume of their output whenever an artist dies, the world loses more of the light of creativity by reducing the amount of vision, beauty, and imagination that exists on our planet.

Black hole creativity is just one way to refer to the death of the irreplaceable artist who leaves a massive vacuum in human life by their departing. In fact, the impact of such a loss is palatable and borders on the disastrous.

Even greater than flash flooding, snowstorms, tornadoes and earthquakes is the death of an artist since humanity’s collective creative mind, which makes human life possible, is damaged. The vacuum from the black hole that is left from this loss cannot easily be filled or totally replaced, but eventually humanity recovers by the emergence of new talent or the reincarnation of old talent that can provide us with a fresh infusion of beauty, hope, creativity, and imagination.

“Man does not live by bread alone,” but instead on the work of the imagination that fills us all with a certain degree of creative energy that sustains us throughout our lives. Our very souls are made up of creativity and is what provides our minds with a foundation on which to base its activities in the world. Artists give humanity its soul, so when an artist dies humanity loses a little bit of its soul, but when a massive talent like Price dies, humanity loses a huge part of its soul and the loss requires a much longer time for recovery.

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Related Music:

Creative Flows

Lonely King

Homecoming

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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

Remember to join our mailing list.

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

Live Music Recordings and the Element of Surprise

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“Subtle material like those which exist in recordings of jazz and other improvisational music becomes more interesting and meaningful upon relistening.”

– Brian Eno, The Studio as a Compositional Tool

"Live music recordings" are simply a music recording approach that harnesses the ease and immensity of digital recording equipment with the freedom of improvisational music. The basic idea is that you'd improvise a new composition from the beginning of the recording process, track by track, until you achieve completion. 

The purposes of recording live music or of recording improvised music are to improve the sensitivity of the musicians or composer and to exploit the element of surprise. Recordings of live concerts and classical music clearly illustrate this principle in action.
 
What's wonderful about digital recording equipment is that it allows the solo musician, composer, or unstable band to  transcend time by freezing music in a digital universe. This is extremely useful because any new musician can come in at a later time and fill in the missing parts in a piece of music. The solo artist can also perform this function by creating the illusion of multiple players by multi-tracking.
 
The way in which he would achieve this is whenever a new track is going to be added to the piece he, in effect, acts in the capacity of a new player coming into the recorded ensemble with his own perception of what the piece should sound like or with what he would like to add to it. This psychological approach will increase the chances for another layer of the element of surprise. 
 
The new player infuses an existing piece of music with his unique signature of creative energy, technical skill, and emotional expression (style). All of these factors are injected into the music he adds to and the surprises manifest as he reacts to the twists and turns of rhythm and melody. In my music, I don't worry as much about getting each part just right, rather I'm concerned with capturing an energy or solidifying an idea. That's the only thing worth recording.

Recording live music includes the idea that chance events and musical accidents might stay in the recording as a way of authenticating the actual "live-ness" of the music recording. The advent of affordable digital music recording equipment leveled the playing field in terms of sound quality. That means for good or bad all music can be recorded at more or less the same quality. On some systems and software the mixing and mastering process can be completed with the touch of a button. So what's going to determine what's good or bad about a song will only be the strength of the composition and the level of musicianship.

Another way to think of the studio is as an environment where music recording is done as opposed to a place that determines what music will be made. The difference between these two viewpoints is one of quality - freedom vs. restriction. The element of surprise must be preserved at all costs. So when producing live music recordings you have to balance spontaneous performance and rehearsals. Rehearsing should only be used as a way of determining the possibilities within a song, while the recording process should unleash the live energy of the musician that allows him to spontaneously arrange the material he discovered during the rehearsals.

The field for digital distribution and marketing of music has also leveled a barrier that stood between the composer / musician and the consumer. Now the lines of communication are direct and open to all. With this barrier gone too, the quality of the composition and musicianship must be stressed on any recording that gets made. Average songs and mediocre musicianship can become popular, but they don't last and are easily replaced by other average songs and mediocre musicians.  A vicious artistic cycle.

Live music recordings can bring the living energy of an artist through the music to the consumer. The little imperfections, outtakes, and minor variances all give a digital recording a "live" feel. And when they are permitted to remain in a studio recording, all those little things a composer didn’t intend to be in a recording take on an added significance when listened to over and over again. No consumer listens to music they like only once. Instead, they listen to it many times over a period of years, so the music grows more meaningful as they change from their experience of living. As they grow, the music they listen to also changes and takes on deeper significances.

Now if you do decide to edit or erase little imperfections or musical accidents be very selective and only remove those that interfere with sound quality and not those that reduce technical skill or emotional expression. Sometimes it’s the chance events and musical accidents that become the reason why an audience falls in love with a recording. Good music is always used as an essential part of life to highlight meaningful events and important moments in a person's life.

  

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Related Music:

Creative Flows

Rear View Mirror
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Related Articles:

The Computer Music Man: Top 10 Arrangement Tips for Home Recording Artists

Art and The Emotional Rollercoaster
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Marc
http://stereothesis.com/

Remember to join our mailing list.


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

Ayn Rand on Music and Composition

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“Single musical tones are not percepts, but pure sensations; they become percepts only when integrated. Sensations are man’s first contact with reality; when integrated into percepts, they are given, the self-evident, the not-to-be-doubted.”

Introduction

In 1971, Ayn Rand wrote a book called the The Romantic Manifesto. After years of writing highly successful works of fiction such as Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she turned to writing non-fiction in order to further develop the ideas she expounded in her fiction. In The Romantic Manifesto she discusses her ideas about the fifth branch of philosophy, which is aesthetics (art or beauty). The Romantic Manifesto consists of several essays about various topics regarding the creation, interpretation, and “objective” standards of art. In one of these essays called “Art and Cognition,” she says many interesting things concerning the subject of music and indirectly composition.

Interestingly, in her most popular works of fiction the subject of music receives some attention, but not as much as in this essay. In The Fountainhead, the protagonist Howard Roark compares music with his work as an architect and in Atlas Shrugged, she gives prominence to the character Richard Halley, a great composer, to show how important music is in her world where the mind is on strike. For those of you familiar with the plot in Atlas Shrugged, you’ll remember how Ayn Rand shares some of her views concerning the nature of composition and the relationship between the composer and his audience, which alone as moral ideas should be of deep interest to all creative people.

So what I’d like to do today is briefly examine what AR’s philosophical analysis of music can teach us about composition, learn how this can illuminate your own approach to composition, and perhaps even change the way you make music.

[Note: AR = Ayn Rand]

The Basic Equation of Musical Expression

‘X’ concrete evokes ‘x’ emotion in the composer and the composer attempts to communicate ‘x’ emotion by transforming the sensations of musical tones into the percepts of a musical composition.

Or

Composition <> world view <> emotional state

Therefore, the composer must attempt to communicate with an audience in music like a mathematician must communicate through numbers and the writer must communicate with words.

Here’s a short video clip from a movie called “A Song to Remember,” a movie AR praised for its basic attitude about the nature and needs of the artist as expressed by the character of George Sand.

A Song to Remember

If you have any problems viewing this video, click here.

In Western music, we all more or less understand that there are basically 2 flavors of sound: major and minor scales along with their variations. Now in regard to the major and minor modes or scales she observes that a joyous mood sharpens, accelerates, and energizes one’s mind, while sadness tends to blur, burden, and slow it down. Keep this in mind as you write your next piece and ask yourself whether or not you’re prepared to evoke the exact response you’d like to elicit in your listener’s.

AR goes a step further and draws a correlation to the way certain emotions affect a mind’s operation in contrast with the kind of music that will produce emotions which resembles that state of mind. In other words, certain emotions cause the mind to act a specific way. Likewise, certain types of music can also either produce specific emotions or cause the mind to act in a particular way thereby producing corresponding emotions that resemble that state of mind. What this shows is that there are 3 parts to this process of designing a strong musical experience: a) the music, b) the activity of the mind, and c) the corresponding emotions. Each of these 3 parts are entry points for the composer and should considered at some time during the compositional or recording process.

Mind-Emotion Musical Experience

One point AR brings up has to do with the musical experience, which she says has to flow because the mind needs a succession of images from our mental reserve to unify the meaning of the work. In order to clarify this point she tells us that music by its very nature does communicate emotions, but not concretes (or specific existential information, facts) like a sunny day or the location of a city. The reason she says is attributed to these things being too specific to be expressed in music.

Remember AR noticed that our mental reserve is what unifies the meaning of the work and that the unification is almost entirely an emotional experience. So what we know then is that a musical experience is something largely individual and pertaining to the past. It could also pertain to an individual’s future as they dream or imagine it to be, but not usually.

Why does music make us experience emotions? Let’s first understand that what we’re talking about is music and not necessarily songs. So what we’re referring to is a succession of tones placed in an organized structure and not a melodic lyrical structure containing a message in addition to this definition of music. So why does music make us experience emotions? Music connects us to 2 essential aspects of existence and they are the passage of time and the quality or tone of an event or series of events. Music conjures up emotional experiences from our mental reserve by approximating these 2 elements from a specific event or a large quantity of similar events.

The next step AR takes is by examining how music conveys emotion and by what musical means or method. In trying to discover what some of the factors are or would be in the conceptual analysis of music, she concludes that music is different from the other arts because as a field it is lacking in a common vocabulary and an objective criterion of aesthetic judgment. She believes that the key to the discovery of an “objective criterion” lies in the distinction of object from subject in the field of musical perception. This is so important for our understanding of how music works because it precludes analysis. This is because separation of object from subject is the work which must occur before thinkers, intellectuals, and even scientists can begin dissecting music rationally.

For example, the way she shows us how the separation works in relation to musical perception is when a man listens to music it’s not clear what aspects of his experience are inherent in the music and which are contributed by his own consciousness. Her observation is everyone experiences music as an indivisible whole, as if the emotion were there in the music. As anyone who’s ever tried to share a piece of music with an acquaintance has found out, not everyone feels the same thing from the same piece of music, so it’s clear that the emotion doesn’t  transfer from the music to the individual, rather the individual brings something to the musical experience which resonates with the music itself.

Another important point AR makes is in regard to the meaning of a composition which lies in the kind of work it requires to integrate by a listener’s ear and brain. Accordingly, a composition may demand more or less activity or alertness of mind so that the listener experiences a sense of understanding, boredom, or frustration with their attempts to mentally integrate the piece into an intelligible whole. Whatever a person’s reaction to any given piece of music, his reaction will be dictated by the type of work his mind feels most at home with. In other words, a person either accepts or rejects music if or if it does not contradict his mind’s way of working.

Some people will seek out music that is complex or challenging and be excited about making it intelligible even if in their own minds. Others might seek simplicity in musical structures and harmony, if their cognitive habits are limited by mental lethargy. This partly explains why the same piece of music evokes different reactions in a variety of people. For a man whose mind is conditioned to perform complex calculations a simple piece of music will annoy and bore him, while a person whose mentally lazy will strain to grasp the musical structures and melodic configurations of a complex Classical symphony. According to AR, the difference in reaction is not solely a matter of taste, but primarily of world views.

Here are many more music quotes provided for you from the on-line version of the Ayn Rand Lexicon, courtesy of the Ayn Rand Institute. To begin reading more about music from the essay “Art and Cognition” in The Romantic Manifesto, click here.

Or click here to purchase your own copy of The Romantic Manifesto.

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Related Music:

Geoforms

The Possibility of Joy
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Related Articles:

Hooks and Earworms

The Essence of Music: Frequency, Timbre, and the Organization of Sound

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P.S. To support Stereo Thesis with a financial donation, click here.

Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

Edgar Varese - The Liberation of Sound (PDF)

 

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Several years ago during an intense period of research I came across an essay called "The Liberation of Sound" by Edgar Varese. Varese is sometimes referred to as "The Father of Electronic Music." The primary reason he is known in this way is because of his experimentation with timbre, new instruments, and electronic resources. 

When I was first exposed to his ideas I immediately recognized them in my own thoughts and music, since so many of the composers and CD's I enjoyed listening to brought his ideas to life in music. Without realizing it I was actually practicing his approach to music and sound creation inadvertently via osmosis. I absorbed his ideas through the music I loved and they become part of my musical thought processes. 

I wanted to share these ideas with you, especially those of you who love ideas and to learn about music. Edgar Varese's influence is so immense you may discover that you actually don't like his music, but you will recognize his ideas in the music you do love. Moreover, you'll also find that without his influence the music you love might not even exist today. To learn more about Edgar Varese, click here.

And to learn more about his ideas here are a few samples from "The Liberation of Sound":

"As far back as the twenties, I decided to call my music "organized sound" and myself, not a musician, but "a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities."

"We should also remember that no machine is a wizard, as we are beginning to think, and we must not expect our electronic devices to compose for us. Good music and bad music will be composed by electronic means, just as good and bad music have been composed for instruments. The computing machine is a marvelous invention and seems almost superhuman. But, in reality, it is as limited as the mind of the individual who feeds it."

"And here are the advantages I anticipate from such a machine: liberation from the arbitrary, paralyzing tempered system; the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles or if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low and high registers; new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of sub-harmonic combinations now impossible; the possibility of obtaining any differentiation of timbre, of sound-combinations; new dynamics far beyond the present human-powered orchestra; a sense of sound-projection in space by means of the emission of sound in any part or in many parts of the hall as may be required by the score; cross rhythms unrelated to each other, treated simultaneously, or to use the old word, "contrapuntally" (since the machine would be able to beat any number of desired notes, any subdivision of them, omission or fraction of them) - all these in a given unit of measure or time which is humanly impossible to attain." 

Click here to get a copy of the "The Liberation of Sound" as a PDF file. 


Marc

http://stereothesis.bandcamp.com/

Artists in the Limelight: How to Detect Attention Addicts and Psychic Vampires

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“Beware of people who are suddenly thrown into the limelight through no talent of their own. They develop this ghastly drive to cuddle with stars and artists, and therefore reflect rather than generate light.”

- David Bowie, May 2008 edition of W Magazine

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Introduction

Who are these people who are suddenly thrown into the limelight? Where are they found, who finds them, and why are they put into the limelight? Moreover, why is it that they weren’t able to arrive in the limelight on their own talent? While these questions will not be directly addressed in this article they are important questions to ask in order to gain some insight into what kind of person we are talking about. There are two kinds of people that I will talk about in order to establish a basis for conversation with you and they are: the attention addict and the psychic vampire.

The Attention Addict and the Psychic Vampire

Obviously the kind of person who would want to be thrown into the limelight despite a non-existent or lack of talent is a person desperate for attention from others. Crowds of adoring fans lining up to see you in a performance would be a great temptation for someone who craves attention. And the temptation will be worst for an attention addict, which is a person who seeks a steady stream of attention from others regardless who those others are. 

Aside from the attention addict, the psychic vampire (of all varieties) goes a step further by attempting to live off the life force of others. Instead of thriving on the attention of others, the psychic vampire drains energy or vitality from those they surround themselves with. In the case of the attention addict the effect on others is usually minimal.

 However, with people who enjoy living vicariously (spectators) through others, they generally benefit from a relationship with an attention addict. For example, some movie stars and celebrities are major attention addicts and spectators love to see them in films playing roles that the general audience can relate to. You also find spectators and attention addicts pairing up as friends, so that you find a group of girls where one is wild and often the center of attention, while the others are subdued and pale by comparison. Often you’ll also find an attention addict or psychic vampire in a crowd of spectators seeking out opportunities to exploit a new victim.

With the psychic vampire though the essential quality of the relationship is one of give, give, give and take, take, take where only one party benefits from the exchange. Other varieties of psychic vampires include the emotional vampire, the sexual vampire, and the energy vampire. Therefore, the effect the psychic vampire has on others is leaving them with a feeling of being drained, exhausted, unfocused, or depressed.

Artists in the Limelight

Dealing with the attention addict and the psychic vampire is such an important problem for artists and other talented individuals to beware of. These two types of individuals seek out opportunities to be near them, so there’s a hidden, and sometimes not so hidden, danger when it comes to allowing others to enter into your circle of influence. What is it that they want from you? What are they offering in the form of their friendship? Is there an ulterior motive? If so, what is it? Although each case is unique, in almost every instance I would say that what they desire is either money or admiration. Money is self-explanatory, but admiration is vaguer.

As far as money is concerned, the parasite that comes for your money will do so with a lawsuit, an offering of drugs, sexual gratification, threats of violence, and blackmail. But when it comes to admiration, the attention addict and the psychic vampire want you to send them admiration. Part of the underlying idea for them is take greatness from the one whom others consider great. The attention addict and the psychic vampire both want to reduce the artist, the talented, and the star into a slave or prisoner. When they use an admiration trap to capture your affections your experience of these people is usually in the context of criminal activities, drug use, suppressive friendships, violence, petty disagreements, and dysfunctional relationships.  All of this occurs because of vulnerability on your part to trust others from the get-go.

One basic mechanism you can put in place to counteract this vulnerability is to learn how to screen everyone who comes into your circle of influence. You must learn this skill and know it cold, teach others this skill, or hire someone to perform the screening process for you. The essence of the screening process is to set standards of behavior for those you associate with and to enforce those standards by establishing a kind of moral code for your group. The fastest way to put this process to work immediately is to create a battery of interview questions for your screeners. The list of questions can be short, long, or tailored to a specific time and context. Whatever the case may be your screeners must know 2 things about you and the people you are willing to bring into your sphere of influence and that is: what it is you want and what it is you don’t want. In other words, what qualities of character are you looking for and what flaws in character do you want to avoid.

To help you learn the screening process and its associated skills, check out these 3 interviews and 3 books by using the links provided:

Interviews 

Frame Control & Subcommunications – listen to the first 10 minutes for FREE.

Qualification – listen to the first 10 minutes for FREE.

Direct Game – listen to the first 10 minutes for FREE.

Books

Who’s Pulling Your Strings?

Science of Survival

Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why 

[Note: This book is written from the perspective of the female, but if you simply reorient the focus of this book to the male point of view then much of the material will also apply to men in their relationships with women.]

 

Reflect or Absorption of Light? 

By definition, “to reflect” means to give or send something back. So do the attention addict and psychic vampire reflect or absorb the light of artists and other creative professionals? Since the nature of the relationship with them is always one of give, give, give and take, take, take the bottom line then is that they absorb or consume the light of others.  

The difficulty with generating light is that one must carefully cultivate it from a small creative spark within and grow it. But the problem with possessing the light of a creative professional is that others attempt to remove it from you on the basis that it can be acquired or absorbed by them via proximity or osmosis. They feel on some level that creativity, talent, fame, and fortune can rub off on them, but only if they can get close enough to you and in some cases inside you. In many ways this belief is similar to that of the primitive man who kills an animal for food and believes that the qualities, characteristics, or power of the animal that he’s eating will somehow transfer over into him. Essentially, the attention addict and the psychic vampire practice a cannibalistic idea that drives their very existence.

Conclusion 

Beware of those who seek to cuddle with artists. Learn to screen and detect the attention addict and psychic vampire among your people. Prevent them from entering your circle of influence or root them out and abolish them once detected. Preserve and nurture your creative spark by choosing talented like-minded people as associates who reflect the light you’re generating and give something back to you from the light they possess within themselves.

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Related Music:

They Make Zombies

Psychic Vampire in Love
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Related Articles: 

Using the 5 Magic Emotions in Your Songwriting 

An Artist's View and Commentary of "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson: What Self-Reliance Really Means and How One Achieves It 

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Marc 
http://stereothesis.bandcamp.com/