Our New Single: We’re In This Together

On the heels of our psychedelic grunge rock go of Burn the Witch – a Radiohead song where we explored the 500+ year persecution of women, the sacred feminine, and practitioners of magick alike – we present a 2-part experimental rock reimagining of the Nine Inch Nails song, We’re In This Together. This is the second track that we’ve released from a forthcoming EP of covers, but more on that later…

Although the phrase, ‘we’re in this together’ and its variants has been a ubiquitous slogan since 2020, it is yet another extremely odd synchronicity in an ongoing series of such events surrounding our music that had their genesis well before any of the drama that has defined the last 2 years occurred. These odd synchronicities give each of the songs we’ve been releasing waaaaaaaaay more of a social commentary than we’d initially intended when we recorded them years ago – as if they were destined to be released exactly as we’ve been releasing them in 2022 and not years before, as we had planned. Either that, or we’re time travellers (which would explain our album, V ).

The synchronicities started over 3 years ago and have continued to this day – literally today – as you’ll read. It all began in 2019 at the dawn of the spring. We noticed something strange was afoot at the Circle K. After several years on hiatus, we had reformed as a live 4-piece band in order to release our forthcoming LP, Ultreya (which you’ll hear more about this autumn). Although that was our goal, we found ourselves working on an EP of new material instead, but more on that in a second. The takeaway here is that synchronously, the most triumphant band that was the literal inspiration for the creation of our band, 5th PROJEKT, announced that it was getting back together after decades on hiatus to save the world with song! Excellent! *cue air guitar *

Completing a holy trilogy, Bill and Ted Face the Music was announced in March 2019, which was totally bodacious, as we’d just finished recording a trilogy of songs for an EP inspired by a trilogy of esoteric sci-fi/fantasy films from the 1980’s that almost included a song inspired by the film, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Although we ended up choosing a different film in the end, there are nods to Bill and Ted in our EPs liner notes and its compliment, the 33-page Ancient Technology: Handbook for the Recently Released. Dude!

Months later in the dog days of summer, the synchronicities continued. Netflix had just announced their new series, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance as we were finishing up the mixing and mastering of our own aforementioned holy trilogy of songs which included – you guessed it – The Dark Crystal. We started writing and demoing this trilogy in 2017, so that was a strange alignment of creative interests in and of itself, as the Jim Henson camp must have done somethng similar. When The Dark Crystal series was announced we had some fun with it using our song, Dark Crystal, inspired by the film, which we had just got back from the mastering studio a month before we learned of the series. We made this short fan teaser…

As time flowed, the synchronicity of events continued aligning – literally – including the song cues of our song, Dark Crystal lining up eerily with the edit cuts in the Age of Resistance season trailer. Yes, we made our own fan trailer for that, too, complete with disclaimer as to our synchronous celebration of the film and non-involvement with the series. It all seemed so incredibly uncanny and unlikely to us which you can read all about here (and watch the trailer, too!).

But the synchronicities continued…

Just as we were preparing to release our EP, The Labyrinth, in 2020 featuring the title track inspired by the Bowie film Labyrinth, The Nothing began to sweep over the land in real life. Despair. It was everywhere. It started to seem like The NeverEnding Story which inspired our song, A Never Ending Story, had broken the 4th wall. People began to abandon all reason and nothing made sense anymore… As all of this began to unfold, the chilling words of Gmork, Emissary of The Nothing, echoed in our memory, taking on a deeper, sinister dimension in our present reality…

“People who have no hopes are easy to control. And whoever has the control, has the power!“

And just like that, the third film from our esoteric holy trilogy came to life and the Goblin King and all of his goblins from Labyrinth seemingly materialized to kidnap our collective childlike innocence. As the emissaries of The Nothing continued to spread fear and despair, Jareth proceeded to cancel our EP release and live music, civil discourse and free speech, science and the scientific method, critical thought, democracy, equality, free will, informed consent, bodily autonomy, metaphysical beliefs, gainful employment, and – no surprise here given its themes and message – cancel the masterful and wildly successful series, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.

Just like that, suddenly sovereignty, the sacred feminine, dispelling illusion, discerning the truth and trusting intuition, which were all positive lessons of personal agency that we learned as children from the trilogy of sci-fi/fantasy films that inspired our EP, The Labyrinth, were demonized. Back in 2017, when we started working on the EP, it seemed like the right time to revisit those roots although we didn’t understand how significant and ironically controversial they would become at the time. Just look at how the world has changed in the last couple of years…

And it’s been a few hundred years since the words of an independent teenage girl have threatened an entire empire, but it’s not surprising that witch burning co-incidentally came back into fashion at the same time, is it? We’ve seen this authoritarian playbook before. That’s why it’s no surprise to see ‘my body, my choice’ targeted in light of recent events. Women have been under continuous attack for centuries (we covered these topics in a previous entry, Our new single: Burn the Witch). And that brings us back to where we started…

“You have no power over me.”

Which leads us to now… We’re In This Together.

Many moons ago, we were commissioned by Tara’s cousin and her beau-to-be to cover the Nine Inch Nails track, We’re In This Together to be played for the first dance song at their wedding in 2014. This is the reason why – as some of you intrepid NIN fans may have noticed – lines from the original lyrics are missing. It was done so the first dance song at their wedding was a little more song-like and a little less prog odyssey.

To say the least, we were thrilled by the request as it was such a unique thing for them to have done and to have asked us to be a part of. PLUS there was the added bonus of being a couple of musicians/producers who are also Nine Inch Nails fans. Yes, we drew the NIN ambigram logo on our binders in high school. Did that inspire the ambigram logo of our first album, CiRCADiAN? We’ll leave that topic for another entry, but We’re In This Together did give us an excuse to creatively cover one of our favourite bands and play with some fun signature production techniques that are typical Trent Reznor song trademarks – which was pretty awesome.

The cover we recorded for the wedding is a paired down version of our new single – no drums, no menacing bowed guitar monster, no kazoo, and no part II. Want to hear the wedding version that was used for their first dance? Just click play…

A little different, right? This version has since been used by numerous couples for their own first dance song at their own weddings over the years. Can you imagine that?! We’ve received many messages of thanks from recent newlyweds that have used this cover as the unifying frequency in their new orbital rotation. A few of them have even posted about it in the video comments.

To this day, it brings us so much joy to have contributed to the symbolic union of Tara’s cousin and so many others on their special day in this oddly peculiar and ritualistic way. It’s a unique, unforgettable memory and moment in time that reminds us that we’re in this together – which is pretty awesome. Sometimes the world can feel pretty lonely, so it’s nice to know that there are other like-minded individuals out there to remind us of how we are all connected in this consensually generated reality of material illusion. Particularly when they are fellow weirdies like us.

We’ve always wanted to release the ‘non-wedding’ version of We’re In This Together, but the timing wasn’t right and eventually it got shelved until very recently. When the world started repeating that phrase ad nauseam – despite the general populace treating a significant percentage of the population like the witches in the dark ages – it was another synchronicity that we couldn’t help but notice (our Burn the Witch cover was recorded back in 2019, after The Labyrinth as a bridge between The Labyrinth and Ultreya). It was a reminder from the Uni-Verse to pick up We’re In This Together from the metaphorical shelf and release it into the wilds of the world. So thats exactly what we’ve done, following the synchronicities one at a time wherever they may lead us.

With our copy of a copy, we’ve visited a darker place than the ‘wedding version,’ leaving hope and happiness to explore the lost highway of fragile emotions surrounding the downward spiral of isolation and alienation in part I. As we said, the world can feel pretty lonely by times. These are feelings quite familiar to us personally as outsider artists who have spent our lifetime following our own frequency and marching to the beat of our own drum.

Perhaps you can relate to the feelings of loneliness, isolation and alienation after the shit show that’s been the last 2 years? All of those endless hours of screen time and mind numbing Zoom calls cutting us off from one another – from human connection – from our family, from our friends. All the glitches, the frozen screens and dropped wifi signals depriving us of physical contact, living in lockdown bubbles, like cosmonauts traversing the void of low earth orbit. Alone.

As we fool ourselves into accepting the digital divide of technology to fill that void, we drift further and further from nature into the engineered abyss of the end user license agreement. Into the vacuum of isolation from who we once were. The alluring Ahriman promise of progress and digital convenience slowly disarming our basic tendency towards community and family, subverting it one upgrade at a time into a transhumanist technocratic conformity of triggered sadness, madness, and medicated materialism seeking unattainable fulfillment. The evolution of the perfect consumers at the end of the ‘Century of the Self‘. We drink. We smoke. We consume.

We lose ourselves endlessly in the basic pleasures subverted by our shadow into device by devices. Addictions algorithmically emerge. Swipe left. Swipe right. We drift further into virtual space, the gravity of our planet fading until forgotten as we focus on anything but helping one another. We ignore the signs of society’s degrading mental health. We ignore the increasing amount of homeless people in the streets or tent cities in the park or at the underpasses. We ignore the historically unprecedented massive wealth transfer from tax payer to billionaires who seem to be above the law. We try not to think about anyone being segregated and discriminated in the workplace or prevented from travelling for exercising their unalienable right to bodily autonomy as a human being because… well, they’re the bad guys, right? If our Prime Minister is openly inciting hatred against them, shouldn’t we be doing the same?

Largely separated by fear and ideology of legacy media tell-a-vision programming, we ironically turn our focus to screens for salvation. We watch from our bubbles as billionaires race into “space” on phallic chariots of fire, united in the goal to colonize and drain another planet of its resources before anyone else can get there to lay claim and do the same. We drift into division during the darkness of the Age of Pisces only to turn towards a false reality created by a simulated light…

Fiona Apple said it best, “evil is a relay sport,” which we have seen demonstrated time and time again over the past 2 years. The masses have been taught to reactively hate by the so-called ‘experts’ who have been wrong for 2 years and counting – so when do we stop calling them ‘experts’ and start calling them paid shills and pushers? Out of fear, people have handed over critical thought to ‘authority’, parroting propaganda and mistaking repeated fiction for fact because it makes them feel better and psychologically safer, like any member of a cult of belief.

That’s why it’s so interesting that today – synchronously – on the day we released We’re In This Together, Canada announced a (temporary) ‘suspension’ to its politically motivated and ideological travel ban on the millions of citizens that it has been persecuting. For the last 8 months, the government and state sponsored media – without any scientific evidence to back up their divisive claims – have been intentionally turning public opinion against Canadians who stood up for their rights, treating them as second-class citizens, ignoring and violating their unalienable rights, and restricting their mobility by holding them hostage in their own country. All of this in an effort to create a scapegoat in order to take the focus off of the government’s titanic failures these past years, in addition to their connections, and complicity to supranational globalist entities and agendas.

Ironically, the pseudoscientific Trudeau travel ban had to be lifted because the actual science could no longer be censored and showed that “safe and effective” was a lie all along, nothing more than marketing propaganda. It can no longer be hidden that pharmakeia completely and utterly failed to do as advertised, while conveniently making the manufacturers and patent holders record profits. Is anyone surprised by this after the ‘warp speed’ delivery that cut a decade of essential R&D down to less than a year and quietly subjected the entire world to take part in Phase III of the clinical trials which are still ongoing? The faulty experimental products are also leaving a wake of injuries – we have one in our band – and fatalities – we know of 2 plus an additional case that caused a vegetative-state coma. These heartbreaking events aren’t rare, just rarely reported by mainstream legacy media who are coincidentally funded by the very profiteering manufacturers resulting in a massively corrupt conflict of interests that goes unreported.

As we slowly awaken to the illusions and horrors of our society, we are forced to learn how to transcend the consciousness and ontological paradigm that created our current predicaments. With the seemingly all-inclusive global rallying cry of ‘we’re in this together’ repeated endlessly for the past 2 years being entirely incongruent with reality, our 2-part cover song begs the long overdue question, we’re in this together?

Or, are we slowly falling under the addictive fear-based spell of intolerant groupthink?

Are we any better than the superstitious dark age dimwits who screamed, ‘burn the witch!’ back in the days of The Great Burn?

Are we not addicted to the corrupt, deceptive, and abusive ‘authority’ of our Goblin King oligarchs?

Are we not addicted to parroting the programmed propaganda of fear, and despair that only serves to spread The Nothing?

Are we not allowing central banks, billionaire CEOs and their unaccountable corporations to pillage our planet and persons by draining our life force just like The Skeksis?

Because if we’re honestly in this together, shouldn’t we stop pointing fingers at each other and start focusing our collective attention and action on the very few who personally profit from our discord, decline and dis-ease? Why are we allowing these parasitic profiteers to continually lie to us – to divide and conquer – only to lead us by the nose into yet another cycle of segregation and discrimination against one another?

If we’re in this together, shouldn’t we all stand as one and support each other’s right to our differences of opinions and beliefs, and our rights to express them instead of bullying others into mindless fear-based groupthink, gaslighting, and doublespeak?

Should we not stand together, regardless of political stripe, to defend the sovereignty of our bodily autonomy by confronting our collective goblin kings who seek to enslave us for their own manipulative panopticon of personal profit and power?

If we are all in this together, perhaps we can collectively awaken to the fact that we don’t need these vampiric parasites or their cleverly marketed snake oils anymore. They just don’t offer us anything meaningful or of any value, and they personally don’t contribute to the collective worth of society. They just take for themselves, like mooches at a party. So how about we get rid of these pests once and for all? The grift of authoritarianism is so old and beyond boring, but it is a product of our collective shadow that we’ll have to confront at some point. How about now?

We can willingly face this escalating problem caused by a greedy few and be the change we want to see in order to transform the world around us so that it benefits everyone – or we can be dragged through the mud and continue to be exploited in slow motion while the stars spin the cycle into existence and the darkest divisive aspects of the Age of Pisces, our society, and its addictions selfishly run amok. There’s a reason such prophecy exists in ancient lore that is reflected in the esoteric films of Labyrinth, The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal, and even, Bill and Ted. It is our most triumphant destiny. We showed up in this life to be part of the Great Awakening of consciousness that is transpiring around the globe. How about you?

We can learn from history or repeat it. The choice is ours. It’s an unavoidable choice though, as we slowly transit from the Age of Pisces into the Age of Aquarius. Turbulence is standard, but the amount of which we experience is really our choice. As alchemists, we all have the power to transmute the material and subtle bodies. Change happens on an individual level by first inspiring ourselves to take action and then inspiring those around us with that action. The Great Awakening is the realization that we’re in this together.

But this transition is much more than just the change of an Age, and that’s why it’s being called The Great Awakening. It is the change from the symbolic Kingdom of Earth and materialism of The Beast (Leo to Pisces), into the Kingdom of Heaven and the spiritual Higher Self (Aquarius to Virgo) where the veil to the upper astral realms of our multidimensional existence becomes thinner. At this stage in the cycle, the multiple dimensions of higher consciousness are more readily available to access by the masses, not just the esoteric practitioners, book nerds and those born into the bloodlines of occult families. Civilization and society are destined to flourish, but we will have to take out the trash in order to make room for what is to come. So, how about now?

It may sound Biblical, but apocalypse (not armageddon) is upon us. Toto has pulled back the curtain for all of us to see the few pulling the levers and pressing our buttons. Corruption that stretches back to Babylon and the Egyptian Cult of Amun, The Hidden One is on full display for everyone. It’s up to us if we let the ‘elite’ few who were lucky enough to be born on third base to continue to divide us or not. That is our collective hero’s journey.

Every day we see more and more people embracing their own inner child to call out the black magick propaganda influencing our Super Ego, turn off the tell-a-vision programming, and plainly state that the Emperor has no clothes. It’s inevitable for those who dare to look – or are forced to. This is the astrological conclusion of the end of an Age – The Great Revelation – to test our foundations and see what we’ve learned in the Age of Pisces. The infamous battle of the Christ consciousness of love versus the selfish hive minded consciousness of the anti-christ. Compassion in the heart of division. It’s an astrological test to see if we’re in this together. So, how are we doing so far?

Astrology, the mother of all science, is an oft overlooked acknowledgement and awareness of the prehistoric knowledge of the natural energetic cycles of our body, planet, solar system and galaxy that only a Golden Age could produce. Plato spoke about the same never ending story of energetic cycles that we presently refer to as the precession of the Equinoxes, although he called it The Great Year, a concept which he learned from the same body of knowledge of The Egyptian Mystery schools that Pythagoras and even Leonardo DaVinci, John Dee, Francis Bacon, and the mythic Bard, Shake-speare were all taught from, hiding their secrets in plain sight.

In part II of our ‘non-wedding’ version of We’re In This Together, we embrace the awareness of this transformative knowledge in a meditation that connects us to the cosmos via the heart. The alchemical transcendence out of the darkness of loneliness to wholeness allows hope, or the lack thereof, to be replaced with a pervasive all-knowing that the sun will rise. The darkest night must give way to the light. This sublime revelation, or personal gnosis, may even produce a physiological feeling in your heart chakra. Similar phenomenon is often experienced during or even after reaching the centre of a labyrinth – a tool used in prehistoric Egypt by initiates of The Mystery Schools – by either walking meditation or, as they did during the era of The Great Burn, tracing the ancient path with your finger – like the one on the cover art of our latest EP, The Labyrinth or in our Handbook for the Recently Released.

The Labyrinth 10″ EP
Collector’s Edition transparent vinyl

Ancient Technology:
Handbook for the Recently Released

The same experiences can occur during seated meditation sessions as well, like our 15 minute introduction to guided meditation, or our 10 minute introduction to vocal toning meditation.

Meditation allows us to cultivate the habits of our mind, ending negative chatter and bringing stillness to our mind and physical body. Mental health is just as important as physical health as the two are intertwined. Anyone who doomscrolls their black mirror feed, or turns on the tell-a-vision programming will see that our society is down in it, divided and entirely in the midst of confronting the darkest bullshit of our collective shadow. That’s why it’s so incredibly important to be mindful of our own mental wellbeing on a daily basis, especially as of late.

With all the gloom going on, it helps to take the time away from the distraction of screens to focus on tending to ourself, and meditation is the perfect tool to achieve internal harmony. If we are balanced and coherent individuals, we have a healthier and happier mindset. We can think objectively. We can ponder possibility. And we can learn to see things from multiple perspectives which allows us to cultivate tolerance. This practise helps us to understand the intricacies of how we’re all connected despite our various physical appearances, beliefs, or ontological viewpoints. It teaches that diversity is our strength and the acceptance of others is paramount. It’s a practice that reminds us that we’re in this together as the human race. Let’s not forget that, brothers and sisters as we face our collective shadow. We’re in this together. Love is the frequency.