NEU World Order Thoughts

Working on NWO 1 really took it out of me and I needed a big break from taking huge amounts of information in to recover. I don't know how any of these journalists/researchers deal with the weight of this information on a day to day basis. Discovering the awful truth is a very painful and tiring process, although I think as you break through new layers of conditioning it does start to get easier.

I took some time off and worked on the Astral Pedestrian (Shining) and Stumble (Whirlpool) albums, and eventually got around to coming back to NEU World Order in the Summer of 2006 to think about ways to promote it. I spent a lot of energy on this by emailing many sites, setting up the myspace page, putting out the press release etc... I have to say that it was pretty much a failure on the whole, even though I have had some great feedback from many of the people who have downloaded it, there seems to be some kind of resistance to the idea of the project which has me quite perplexed. The reason I have put so much energy and time into it is because we are in a globally desperate situation, and to me nothing much else seems to matter anymore. The most frightening aspect of it all is the blind ignorance that most people live in (well in my experience here in the UK anyhow). Subjects such as globalization, political corruption, the price of inflation etc are almost forbidden subjects and invoke either anger and/or strange looks. As I have mentioned before, trying to get people to take an interest or pass on information has been something that I have had to stop doing. It even resulted in the end of a lifelong friendship. There is no way around it, people have been conditioned to such an extent that they will defend their own slavery and the conditioning is very strong...

I then had to think about ways that I could get around this because as I mentioned earlier I have to do something, there is no way of living with the knowledge I have gained without some positive action for my own sanity. I thought about the entertainment frenzied culture we live in, and the way that TV is mostly a shocking 'dumming down' tool. Most programs treat the viewer like a child with a 5 minute catch up after every commercial break in a program which doesn't actually deliver any information in the first place. So for some reason it appears that the programme makers believe that we have lost the ability to hold information, especially through the ever increasing bombardment of commercial breaks. I suspect that the main reason however is to provide cheap & lazy programming with the main priority being profit from the commercial breaks. The more that Capitalism reaches Fever Pitch the more the restrictions on advertisers is relaxed. It is nothing less than a war against true creativity.

So being a musician, the most obvious thing for me to do was music. People still listen to music (although the music industry is another subject). I figured that if there is any point to doing an album, it needs to be as accessible to as many music tastes as possible. I wanted to create an album which could be enjoyed as an art form, where the factual messages are not overloading the listener. There is much music around like that, where it is necessary to be 'in the knowledge' already to get into the music. I'm not saying this does not have its place, its just not what I was trying to do. I am a fan of 'Citizen Fish' and I've always found the wisdom in the lyrics to be astounding, but the shame of it is that you know in your heart that it is unfortunately preaching to the converted. I am also a fan of God Speed and the way they use speeches is fascinating, they use speeches which are full of humanity and passion and it is engaging to the listener. You are drawn into somebody else's world and the information aspect comes secondary. That is what I am aiming for with NEU World Order. A listener who has never heard of globalization etc../ can be intrigued by the passion, which will then hopefully lead to a growing interest in the subject matter over repeated listening, and begin to break the conditioning.

The major problem with this is how do you get to this audience? This has been a major headache for me I think I am still firmly entrenched in the 'preaching to the converted' realm. I have now come to the conclusion that the only way this can work is for this audience to spread the albums to people. They are intended as a tool to be used instead of falling out/arguing with people. I now firmly believe that the only way many people wake up and break their conditioning is to discover it for themselves, this is an essential ingredient. People hate being lectured and dictated to (myself included!). I hope that this is how the albums are used.