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Excited States of America
Year of the Beast (demos)

 

Shortly before the end of the last cycle of the Mayan calendar in 2012, a psychic energy healer and trance beatmaker (Eric Wardisko) collaborated with a psych rocker (Nick Blake) on some beats. While their wives chatted over wine, Nick showed Eric his studio and they started jamming together. They set up some recording dates, where Erik came by with his loop machines and interesting noise makers. Together they jammed out song trance beats, which inspired Nick to start work on an album celebrating the 2012 shift / unfolding of the apocalypse called "Year of the Beast". The explicit goal of the music was to create progressive music and soundscapes that could help guide humanity through the apocalypse, including several healing tracks.

A few months later Nick's family moved to LA, and Nick spent years grinding through the music industry. Years later he discovered he had signed a deeply exploitative contract by a prominent but nefarious music organization. When the contract was finally terminated and Nick was able to return to writing original music, he celebrated by expanding on some early album concepts, including a re-write of the Year of the Beast. He brought in an old collaborator, Tom Deis, to help craft a song specifically to help inspire harmony and a return to compassionate, ethical behavior. The result was "Shanti Aum", a classical Indian-inspired track that incorporates words from the Bhagavad Gita in the chorus.

The album begins with "Rise Up", a call to artists around the world to get creative and make music. Next, "The Weasel and the Dove" is a musical fairy tale inspired by Modest Mouses' "Whale Song". The third track, "The Fifth Extinction", takes us back to a previous exinction event 65 million years ago, using bird calls for the long-lost dinosaurs. The fourth track, "All your love", is a dystopian love song.

The next third of the album goes deep into the animal theme with "Macon Bacon", "The Monkey" and a whistful song about raising children called "Progeny". These tracks are followed with a call for healing with "Shanti Om", then a collage soundscape called "A Brief History of Time" that reminds us of the historical repitition of the mechanisms of war and destruction, followed by long periods of darkness.

Finally the album launches into an epic 3-movement piece called "The Sixth Extinction I-III" that starts with the disaster at Fukushima and charts the unfolding destruction of a habitable Earth. The album ends with an ear cleanser, "Afterparty Musics". As a bonus, we tacked a demo called "American Animal Farm", one of many unreleased recordings from Excited States of America.

The vt community voted for this album in our recent feature vote, so we're featuring it even though it's still mostly in the demo phase. There are some singles ready for public release (Rise Up, Shanti Om, Afterparty Musics), but the rest of the album is still a work in progress, so we're doing an early release feature on the vt. And we get to throw in the American Animal Farm track as a bonus, so that's fun, too.

Since the artists own all the rights to the music, they are empowered to do whatever they like & what feels best for their creative process.

 

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