I bought Angelic Music on a whim because I liked the cover and fell down a rabbit hole. I love this man’s music, and it has opened me up to a whole world of music I’d overlooked.
His thoughts on heavy metal music are sound. For the listener, a release, but also a reinforcing anger-release-anger-release cycle. Perhaps a better idea would be to address the cause of those stresses and negative feelings rather than focus on expressing the response to them. Maybe then the listener could express the base emotion underneath the anger-invariably, hurt from childhood, adult life or both. The first choice is a cycle. The second, an opportunity for progression and ultimately peace of mind. One may wonder what such peace might look like and perhaps wouldn't risk achieving it for fear of losing the anger they assume they need and believe defines them. Hence why these full-on forms of music are so popular. People have these feelings and rather than address and heal them they chose the all too tempting option to express the response to them over and over and over.
His thoughts on heavy metal are pure and unadulterated poppycock (just like his "higher dimensions" bullshit). Metal is not about "anger" and metal heads are the most chill people. Also, my plants thrive, and they get to hear quite a bit of metal :-))
Sounds similar to how repetitious thought behavior strengthens it, or how a person who hears the same messages over and over again have those messages impressed in them. If a person is used to listening to music that is full of screeching and screaming and encouraged to think it is good it may have beneficial effect to them and negative effects to people who haven't been made to think that, even if at first it was bad or didn't sound good, meanwhile contributing to side effects they may learn or have learned to find comfort in as it's familiar and they're used to it. And if it's unfamiliar, or a lot different, it produces negative side affects that could be otherwise if a person never had listened to or been used to "discordant" music as is called by those who find it repulsive or jarring or something Music is just like food, and air. Depends on how it is consumed and/or processed I would say. Never believe or accept it off-hand - look to the evidence
The ecstatic quality of heavy metal is that it is loud and distorted and fast. It is beautiful that way. There are some amazing bands that combine loudness and distortion with healing chord progressions and these bands are even more excellent
Very interesting. Not sure if I'm getting a proper impression here, but he seems like a person in denial of the full bandwidth of humanity (or the bandwidth of life in general). I wonder where this compulsion for harmonic consonance and intolerance towards tension derive from. It's like he's pressing to escape reality (to a "higher dimension"), trying to jump off the ground towards heaven, but inable to escape the reality of gravity. Is he into psychedelics? I can imagine that emotional or mental injury and the lack of understanding what effects psychedelics have on our brain at that time can quite easily imply simple solutions for complex issues that in reality are quite labour intensive to process. I think that living out music and sound that deal with the full range of emotions can help to process injuries like that very effectively. Hopefully he will be able to experience this at some point.
