Lis­ten: Ancient Lasers — The Wheel Of Time 

The Wheel Of Time is a song I wrote in 2009 while I was rent­ing out a stu­dio by LAX, under­neath the flight path of land­ing 747’s. The stu­dio was your stan­dard 12x10 con­crete cell that we out­fit­ted with some tacky green car­pet, a couch, and a makeshift desk for my record­ing gear. It was a great place to escape from every­thing, and sink into my music.

The Good Ol’ Days

I soon fell into a very pro­duc­tive rou­tine. I usu­ally got to the stu­dio around 8pm to jam with my band or chat with my friend GG for a bit. His brother is Drew God­dard, writer for Lost and Cabin In The Woods — so I usu­ally nagged him about the end­ing of Lost most of the time.  But GG is also an amaz­ing pro­ducer and sound engi­neer with repli­cas of every piece of gear Pink Floyd used…ever. (He even once flew to Italy to buy the actual rotary delay David Gilmour used in Live at Pom­peii). I learned alot from GG about mix­ing — which fre­quen­cies go where, how to make the per­fect kick drum sound, why tak­ing the 500Hz fre­quency out of a gui­tar mag­i­cally makes it sound bet­ter, etc.   I owe him big time for that.

After social time was over, I would get to work — often mov­ing from instru­ment to instru­ment record­ing ideas. I usu­ally started with a pro­grammed beat and a chord pro­gres­sion and built from there.  Once the music was done, I would walk through the vacant streets brain­storm­ing lyrics, and would often record the entire song before sun­rise — to avoid the thun­der­ing sound of land­ing air­craft.  At around 10am I would lay down on the couch and drift off to sleep, lis­ten­ing to an entirely new song I had just created.

Ancient Lasers — The Wheel Of Time (ft. Fuck You)

I should prob­a­bly take a moment to explain some­thing peo­ple have been ask­ing me about regard­ing the name change from Post Human Era to Ancient Lasers.  In April of 2010, I had just fin­ished an entire album that was to be the sec­ond chap­ter of a tril­ogy by Post Human Era.  The album was called Echo Cor­ri­dor, and I was lit­er­ally days away from releas­ing it. I had sent the sin­gle, Build­ing The Machine, to Daniel Ander­son of Idiot Pilot — one of my favorite bands of all time.  He decided to remix it, and after I heard the pos­si­bil­i­ties of what we could both do as a team, I asked if he wanted to do an entire album.  We used songs from both To Build A Fire and Echo Cor­ri­dor as start­ing points, but ended up with a much more vis­ceral sound. Together, we decided  it was too dif­fer­ent from Post Human Era to label it as such, and thus, Ancient Lasers was born.  Post Human Era, how­ever, is far from dead — I am cur­rently work­ing on some­thing that takes it into very dif­fer­ent terrain.

This song in par­tic­u­lar, The Wheel Of Time, deals with the insan­ity of reli­gion. I grew up with a mother that had started out with a Catholic fam­ily, but then con­verted to Judaism; and a Jew­ish father, so I went to both Church and Syn­a­gogue. I remem­ber dread­ing wednes­day night Hebrew school, where I prac­ticed writ­ing an ancient lan­guage that was both extremely con­fus­ing and down­right hard to learn. Yet, there was some­thing mys­ti­cal about it. When I walked into Beth Israel Syn­a­gogue in Belling­ham every Wednes­day and Sun­day, it felt like I was instantly trans­ported to some sacred, dis­tant past.   My rabbi was both a Star Trek fan and pale­on­tol­o­gist, which was pretty damn awe­some to a 10 year old boy — but hilar­i­ously ridicu­lous if you think about it. Nonethe­less, I enjoyed the early years I spent learn­ing about Israel, hav­ing Seder for Passover, and light­ing the can­dles for Hanukkah.

TL;DR

My mother’s side of the fam­ily was pretty faith­ful about get­ting together every Easter, Christ­mas (when we got the ‘good’ presents, as opposed to a book or some­thing for Han­nukah), and Thanks­giv­ing (which I con­sider a Chris­t­ian hol­i­day). Those hol­i­days, along with the Church expe­ri­ence, felt more com­mer­cial­ized — more ‘Amer­i­can’. They were alot of fun, and I wouldn’t trade those mem­o­ries for the world.

(Spoiler Alert) He dies in the end

Yet up until this point, I hadn’t really ques­tioned either reli­gion. Since I was learn­ing about two sep­a­rate schools of thought, I hadn’t fully sub­mit­ted myself to one par­tic­u­lar ide­ol­ogy. Every­thing was going as planned, until the moment arrived that would ulti­mately open my eyes to the world behind the world.

I was about to turn 13, and it was time for me to start prac­tic­ing for my Bar Mitz­vah. My father opened the study guide, which con­tained the Hebrew I would need to recite for the cer­e­mony. We both sat down on the couch in the liv­ing room, and started to prac­tice. After about twenty min­utes, I remem­ber look­ing up at him and ask­ing why we were doing this. Why are we mem­o­riz­ing words that were writ­ten thou­sands of years ago to recite at a cer­e­mony, just to prove that I was enter­ing adult­hood? And most impor­tantly, what if I decided I sim­ply didn’t want to?

In one life-changing sen­tence, he con­fessed: “We are doing this because my father wanted me to when I was your age.” We both real­ized that we were doing some­thing sim­ply because our ances­tors before us had. With­out ques­tion­ing why; with­out decid­ing for our­selves if it was right — what we truly believed in our hearts. He let me decide for myself, and ulti­mately I decided that I didn’t believe in what we were doing. And I am eter­nally grate­ful for his decision.

The next sun­day, instead of going to Syn­a­gogue, we went fish­ing together and expe­ri­enced real life in nature, unfil­tered by anti­quated dogma and human ide­olo­gies. It was lib­er­at­ing for our entire fam­ily, and though we haven’t really talked about it since, I think they are thank­ful I spoke up — because every­one else was afraid to.

Pope­Mo­bile

This is why we have Holy Wars, racism, and hate. Peo­ple some­times get scared to raise their hand in class when some­thing doesn’t make sense. “Keep your head down. Do as you are told. Fol­low the leader. Mem­o­rize this. Don’t ask why.”  When some­thing doesn’t make sense, scream at the top of your lungs so every­one can hear you.  We can’t change the world if we keep our­selves planted in the sands of the past.  Refuse to believe what peo­ple tell you — until you know it to be true from your own per­sonal expe­ri­ences.  No one knows any­thing more than you do, and that will never change.

The Wheel Of Time is about the con­tin­ual habit of recur­sion we can’t seem to escape from.  But I came here to throw a wrench in its gears. And every day thou­sands of peo­ple are wak­ing up, as I did, from the peace­ful sleep of herded sheep.

Lyrics

Ancient Lasers — The Wheel Of Time

The wheel of time repeats itself, it turns you into some­one else
You’ll fight a war you’ll never win, you’ll make the same mis­takes again
And now you finally see so many rea­sons behind the great con­fu­sion
You know the voices of the dead are really voices in your head

You won­der if you’ve lost your mind, you hope you get it back this time
They tell you what you want to hear, you wish they’d all just dis­ap­pear
And now you finally see so many rea­sons behind the great con­fu­sion
You know the voices of the dead, are really voices in your head

Maybe we are doomed to repeat this, maybe we still haven’t found the way
But no mat­ter what they say, the pattern’s here to stay
And every time you think you’ve reached the end, you watch it start itself again

Every time it repeats itself, it repeats itself, it repeats itself again