I’ve been writing here at TMT for at least a decade now,* and at times it’s appropriate to reminisce about the early days, about those first posts flung into the great digital void for five or six of you to read. In fact, now that my audience has grown by the thousands, I feel like it’s a good time to celebrate and reminisce about my VERY FIRST post for TMT,** for HOTT MT’s “Tranceforming” clip off their lovely AU (Alternate Universe) album. It’s doubly appropriate today, because HOTT MT — that is, Hour of the Time Majesty Twelve, for those of you who like your acronyms spelled out — has a brand spanking new tape out via the lovely and beguiling Doom Trip Records, a goshdarned favorite around these parts.
Earth on Heaven is a stunner.
Strip away some of the AU shoegaze haze for full-on fantasy melodies. In fact, if you want a visual representation of what this thing sounds like, look no further at that crazy cover up there! The mood is purple sky, the guitars and keyboards shimmer against enormous moons like rainbows, and the incomparable feeling of freedom one gets listening sometimes feels like soaring through clouds, other times like horses grazing in open fields. Hour of the Time Majesty Twelve doesn’t sound like some kind of Wiccan name for nothing — the musick needs that “k” to denote the “magick” (pagan or otherwise) that permeates the spellcasted delivery of this hypnotic hymnody.
Nope — not crazy at all that HOTT MT once collaborated with The Flaming Lips.
It’s “musick” but it’s a place, a fully realized magical land conjured out of the HOTT MT minds of Spooky and Ashi. The furthest reaches of this land are held together by spells, each particle of matter enchanted in perpetuity to hold its form. The rules governing the physics of this land are murky to all those untrained in these arts, leading to the discovery of surprise after surprise for anyone who happens to venture over the spectral boundary and into its charmed regions. Earth on Heaven holds you in its thrall, enacting a spiritually curative effect. In fact, I can’t even take credit for that idea…
Hott beats ✔
Groovy sounds ✔
Angelic voice ✔
Your HP is drastically low and this music is the Final Fanstasy cure sound effect. https://t.co/aY024UljYT— Houdini Mansions (@HoudiniMansions) February 26, 2019
Or maybe Earth on Heaven just plays like the incidental music at a mana spring. Wouldn’t surprise me at all.
*ED. NOTE: 1 year, 20 weeks, although I understand how that could SEEM like a decade.
**OK, so “Tranceforming” was actually my fourth published post, but it was the first one I wrote for TMT, my “writing sample” at the end of the hiring process.
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