This is the first music Ascended Masters played. It was written in the 3 or 4 month period following the inception of the group. I played keyboards, sang, and wrote, Micah Martin played guitar and wrote, and in those early days we had a rhythm section that better ought not be spoken of. They didn't contribute to the beat. Anyway, the first five minutes or so of music were written by Micah, which just happened to be the first material he presented to me. I remember editing and arranging it to the specifications you hear in my little apartment in Decatur, and then much to Micah's amazement, writing the bass and drum parts on the spot when the rhythm section didn't show up to the first scheduled rehearsal and I wanted a demo of the material anyhow. I wrote all of I-ii with the exception of the section with the guitar solo, which was collaborative. I wrote all of I-iii, with the exceptions of bits that were rearranged from I-i (which I rearranged.)

I wrote the second movement in Micah's mom's basement while he was konked on on Xanax in the other room, except for this one part that I had written in high school and never found a home for. On that same night, I came up with the idea of making the whole piece a big palindrome, and as a result the third movement wrote itself. Everything in it is a pretty obvious transformation of material from the first movement, only backwards.

The second and third movements had been finished for months before we ever got to rehearse them. It basically took all that time to get rid of the original rhythm section, and replace them with Grant Muller and my left hand.

I wrote all of the lyrics, but they don't mean anything. Maria helped me out with the spanish in the third movement. In the immortal words of Frank Zappa, "This is basically an instrumental album."

We only played this piece a very few times live. Maybe twice. There might have been one more, but those are the only times I can remember. The first time (which was also our first show,) was opening for perennial avant favorite Bob Drake, much to Bob's chagrin. The performances were perhaps just shy of utter disasters.

Sorry about the fidelity of this recording. These are the demos we made as we finished learning each movement. The third movement sounds particularly shitty. We did actually go into a real studio to record a proper album, but the engineer we were working with stopped taking our calls halfway into the sessions, and having been working on the same material for just shy of a year, the decision was made to abandon ship and start working on new material. That new material became "megaproject THEME."
-Bill