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.

This is the obligatory "welcome" post for my new website. 

The impetus for the creation of this site is somewhat crazy (well, to some it may seem that way).  To make a long story short, I have a rock band, Pegataur, that is heavily rooted in conceptual mayhem inspired by Western hermetic and occult principles (mostly Qabala, or Kabbalah, if you prefer).  Most of the early symbolism came from dreams from Aaron, and then I got the crazy idea that I should write some software that could analyze the music that we were writing along qabalistic lines.  A year later, I had a pretty solid code base written in C#.NET that allows me to enter in song "data" and churn out qabalistic-derived points of analysis using gematria, notarikon, and temura techniques.  This also necessitated that I create my own gematria database, which was a wild ride in and of itself.  After a year of this I felt like I was going to be sucked into the movie Pi.  It should be noted that I am not Jewish, although one friend who teaches Hebrew school suggested that I may in fact be an honorary Jew at this point.

I've been wanting to get the code out here for people, but I'm a little weary of having to support it.  However, I will be making the database and other functionality available via web services, which I will be hosting off of this site.  When I find the time, I'm going to try to make posts to this site about how I did this stuff and how you can use my stuff for anyone who is interested.  I may also be trying to get help building and cleaning up the gematria database.