Excellent Music Articles at RealitySandwich.com

After a intensifying series of visionary experiences, author Daniel Pinchbeck decided that he needed to take a more active role in the cultivation of our emerging noosphere, to give more intent to forming a community who can collectively help steer humanity in the right direction during these next few crucial years.  So of course I feel a strong sense of fraternity with him.  His first step in this direction is a community blog called Reality Sandwich (slogan:  "You are what you eat."), which features some of my favorite writers (including Erik Davis, Paul Levy, and of course, Daniel Pinchbeck) expounding on everything from the re-integration of shamanism into rational culture to the exploration of new forms of romantic relationship to the collapse of the American economy viewed through the lens of the Zodiac.  With such an eclectic collection of writings, we can expect at least a few really good articles on music, and Reality Sandwich delivers.  Here are a few of my favorite menu items, with excerpts to whet your appetite:

Digital Archeology and New Mythologies
Derek Bares

    "Issues like war, genocide and human rights need to be constantly addressed. Yet these must not exclusively dominate the media. Underlying global artistic movements is a silent revolution that used to require oceans and years to embrace. This is not to imply that the cold keys of computers can replace the intimacy and necessity of human contact. Yet, within the unfolding and remixing of a global culture, musicians and producers are redefining modern identity through sound."

Music of the Quantum Lattice
Richard Merrick

    "Within the quantum lattice, when ripples of energy align in the center of the cubes, stable matter called fermions are said to form. These particles include protons, electrons, quarks and leptons - all spinning in a locked cubic structure. But when ripples align with the damping points of the lattice itself, energy particles called bosons continue to travel outward in waves spinning off the vortices that propel them through the lattice. This includes photons of light, radio waves, x-rays, gamma waves, cosmic waves and gravity – all potentially traveling between particles of matter. Throughout the entire lattice, a constant reverberation of zero-point boson energy is believed to be the force that keeps electrons spinning in their orbits and nuclear particles bound together. Without it, everything would simply fall apart.
    It is in this idea of a continuously vibrating space lattice that the ancient idea of a musical universe – Robert Fludd’s mythical celestial monochord – is reborn, maintaining a balance between harmonic resonance and damping."

The Artist as Healer of the World
Paul Levy

    "The figure of the artist is 'not free,' however, in the sense that he is subordinate to and in the service of his impulse to create. A genuine artist has the utmost loyalty to the inner voice, which is a real, full-time vocation, not unlike a religious calling. The artist's path is truly spiritual; they have offered their life in service to something beyond and greater than themselves. The artist has an "inner necessity" to create new forms that express what he is experiencing.
    Just like a child in a family is a natural-born shaman and intuitively 'picks-up' and unwittingly embodies the unresolved energies in the family system by unconsciously acting them out, we, as 'members' of the greater human family, are all potential shamans, healers and artists, as we are conduits for internalizing, metabolizing, and channeling the deeper unconscious shadow that is in the collective family system of our species."

That Music You Like - What Brand Is That?
Derek Bares

    "Perhaps I'm being romantic when I think of the writings of Sufi master Hazarat Inayat Khan: 'Music is not only life's greatest object, but music is life itself.' He talks about music one day becoming the 'religion of humanity,' yet I think he knew it already is. Poets of his country, India, had created the idea of Nada Brahma millennia ago: sound is the ever-present force expressing itself through the universe and linking the cosmos with humanity. The classical systems of North and South India were cyclically timed to tune into the patterns of nature, of winds and monsoons, star-rises and sun-falls. Music was played because it was an expression of life, not the salability of it.
    Yet artists should be paid for their craft, in every medium. The notion that selling your art to a corporate entity or label is an awful but necessary means to a successful end might be a psychological truth, but it's not reality. What's good about psychologies is that they can, and do, change."

Big Label Letdowns
Tristan Gulliford

    "I must confess I feel a guilty pleasure when imagining those RIAA executives nervously fidgeting in their expensive seats as yet another threat to their media monopoly presents itself loud and clear on the Internet. After years of price-fixing and suing their own customers, perhaps this new trend in user-priced digital downloads represents a sort of technological karma."

Hollywood:  The Next Record Industry
Douglas Rushkoff

    "Just as the music industry collapsed, so, too, is the film industry collapsing under its own weight and the chronic inability to see opportunities as anything but threats (or chances to bilk labor).
    Get out your camcorders, kids. Fire up your Final Cut. And most of all, think of some good stories to tell. There a lot of people out there who will be awfully hungry for your content before too long. And - unlike the corporate producers - they might even pay you for it."