When I was originally doing research to develop an esoteric musical framework for the Pegataur Working, my initial line of questioning was primarily concerned with finding a way to map musical theory to hermetic or occult philosophy.  While it wasn't ultimately detailed enough in the low-level way I was looking for, I did stumble across an interesting bit of old world thinking about the Music of the Spheres.

If you're not familiar with the Music of the Spheres, this is a concept closely tied to the Old School pre-heliocentric worldview.  Basically, the heavenly hiearchy, with Earth at the center, of course, was thought of as a divine symphony that actually created a harmonius soundtrack for the universe.  As the Greeks had discovered some time ago, there were mathematical formulae underlying the divisions of tones into scales, and calculations about fret-spacing on the neck of stringed instruments that could be used to develop tonally accurate instruments.  It isn't a far stretch to take Pythagorean mysticism and combine it with a Western religious and scientific worldview and superimpose this earthly knowledge onto the heavens.  This is literally consistent with the old Hermetic axiom "As above, so below."    More...

After being out of town for the holidays and off the grid for several days, I came home to see some excited e-mails from friends about this awesome record review from Aquarius Records in San Francisco about the new Pegataur album, Eternal Flight.  This was particularly refreshing because some metal snob with a blog and a penchant for super obscure black metal killed us a week ago (why bother reviewing something that you hate unless you're Pitchfork?)... 

I think my favorite quotes from the review may be:

Any of you out there who perhaps found Boyjazz too jokey (you shoulda given them a chance anyway, what an entertaining band they were!), should have less of an issue with this, in fact, Pegataur not only shut up and play but really go off the deep end in terms of seriousness if you delve into their, um, mythology...Pegataur probably could have scored bagfuls of gold pieces (or weed) from The Sword or High On Fire in exchange for some of the best of these riffs and still had plenty of good ones left over.

Sweet....

888, y'all!  PGTR will be bringing some hot musick to your loving and eager ears.  We're playing this Friday with our friends The Chop at the Hotel Utah in SF.  

According to my gematria database, the number 888 is associated with the following:

• revelry, debauchery, riotousness, rant, jinks, skylarking; boisterousness;
• to diaper, swaddle; wrap up
• egg, ovum
• be scorched, singed, burnt
• to terrify, scare, alarm, frighten

I interpret this oracle to predict the following about the show, mark my words: The rock that we are bringing this Friday night will get you totally worked up and incite you to offer your drink unto Bacchus.  Some of you will become pregnant, and some may need to change their diapers because we will put a fresh poop in them.  Since we are going on first, we will leave the stage a smoldering heap, and inspire fear in those at the club who are afraid of the blitzkrieg spearheaded by two men with the three amps.  We may never be asked back to the Hotel Utah, so be the first and probably last group of people to witness the spectacle.

We're going on first, and are pretty different from the rest of the bands, so you can either look at it as "Diversity is a good thing, I like all kinds of music" or "Who would win in a streetfight between King Diamond and Elvis Costello?  I'm leaving once the still-beating heart is removed from the ribcage." 

We're going on first, here are the standard details:

Friday August 8th, 2008 Hotel Utah 500 4th Street, SF CA

9PM, 21+

The Chop + Goodbye Nautilus + Pegataur

Hope to see you there!

So, it's been almost a couple weeks since the show at the Hemlock, but for those of you who missed it, it was a great first show!  I'm trying to be objective, here, which is hard.  My own subjective experience of it would be to say that I feel we were a little out of control initially but rapidly seized the reigns and locked in after a few songs - I don't think anyone else would've noticed (except my friend Tim who suggested we were perhaps "stiffer" at the beginning).  Otherwise, I am totally proud of the set, energy, and execution, plus there was a great turnout (70 people, according to the club) and the other two bands, Black Budget and Floating Goat, were awesome, loud, tight, and heavy.  And, as evidenced from this photo, the ruling spirits of the tunes were effectively evoked and released from our musick and floated above my head for most of the set.  Thanks, guys.  More...

We're about to release our first Pegataur album, titled Eternal Flight.  We decided that we wanted to do something a little more special than your standard CD packaging.  Basically, it is a 13.5" diameter circular image, and it folds up into a square to hold the CD inside and fits snugly in a nice vinyl sleeve.  This was a good idea at the time, but pretty difficult to execute due to the custom nature of the project.  Finding vendors who could do the custom die cutting and folding of the print was quite a chore, but well worth the leg work, because we made it happen!  In time for our show this Friday, no less.

When you remove the CD from the sleeve and unfold the artwork, the front panel looks like this:

And the rear or inside panel (with the track listing) looks like this:

So when you open it up and unfold it, you remove the CD and the track list is revealed.  When its folded up and put back in its sleeve, you see the Pegataur seal.

We're very pleased with this design, which was executed flawlessly against our vision for the artwork by our good friend James Kafader.  The design is inspired by a classic Eliphas Levi image that represents the Hermetic axiom "As Above, So Below."  The 12 sigils that you notice placed near the outside of the circle are actual sigils that were created by analyzing the songs qabalistically as mentioned in my other post about analyzing music esoterically.

Update

You can download the artwork from For Once Records, here. 

In the early days of Pegataur, we weren't sure if we were going to have vocals or not.  We came up with the idea that, to stay true to the esoteric conceptual basis of the band, we should come up with a way to analyze the music, on a song-by-song basis, using Qabalistic techniques.  The challenge was to come up with a way to translate musical notes into Hebrew letters, and to let our songs tell their stories by spelling Hebrew "words" and "sentences" which could then be studied using gematria to figure out what the songs were telling us.  We could then use these jumbles of words and numbers to help us write lyrics and choose titles for our songs.  This presented a series of puzzles to solve and questions to answer and decisions to make, let me assure you!  More...

I've already mentioned that the impetus for this site is Pegataur.  But did I mention the impetus for forming Pegataur?  More...

This is our first show and I'm super excited about it.  We're opening and it should be awesome.  The other bands, Black Budget and Floating Goat, sound pretty rad.  It's also looking like we'll have CDs and stickers at the show, too.  Hope you can make it!  It will be a night of great rawk.

By the way, the album art is totally amazing and was executed by our good friend James Kafader of The Chop.  I will be posting about this separately soon.