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6/26/26
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Abstract electroacoustic fever-dreamscapes – harsh noise clanging against orchestral tone and timbre – ambient noir ritualisms for a dark experimentalist sound world
Feat. vocal skills of @gena_sometimes and @ladyuraniummusic. Produced by CMNewman and Snotty Trash Babay at Parallax Pines c. 2026
LISTEN TO MITHRAS:
https://christian-m-newman.bandcamp.com/album/mithras
MITHRAS – a collection of soundscape-based, electro-acoustic noise compositions, and post-tonal harmonic evolutions, created for a specific, imagined empty space…
…resonating across time to the shrouded world of the Mithras religious sects of ancient Rome, a group who left a rich lexicon of symbols, yet no written text to offer specific guidance or explanation for the uninitiated…
Mithra was an ancient Persian Deity who personified the wisdom and knowledge given by the Sun: who, in iconography, slayed The Bull and fed the snake beside the dog
Some distortion or adaptation of this deity grew in popularity across the Roman Empire from the 1st to the 4th Centuries, C.E. Thousands of underground chambers simulating caves (the birthplace of Mithraism), and other sites near mountaintops give evidence of a religious lineage spread throughout the empire.
In light of the Zodiac symbolism surrounding this scene- which in later Ancient Rome’s 1st Century was called The Tauroctony…
…this scene depicts the light of human knowledge which directed the efforts of Spring (culminating in the sign of Taurus, ie, “The Bull”) to fulfill The Harvest, where the snakes wove amongst the drooping stalks of wheat, chasing away the mice…
…where the dogs herd the cattle and sheep back to the closer fields as the grass dies away in the diminishing sunlight.
In ancient Rome, this clandestine religion took on a dark and specifically misogynistic form where Mithras became a deity born from rocks instead of a human woman, and this mythology underpinned the structure of a religious practice available only to men. The Roman practice involved feasts alongside numerous forms of clandestine rituals included simulated drowning and execution, humiliation rituals, personal (sexual and other physiological) violations of personal autonomy, and other mysterious practices that created a secretive, stratification and power structuring of the participants, many of whom were amongst the highest positions in the Roman government.
From this perspective, one finds an historical parallel between this ancient religion, and the distortion of a religious concept within the modern west, and especially the United States, where the concept of Lutheranism has been twisted towards a religion glorifying in the accumulation of material wealth, and the words of Christ have been disregarded or twisted to accommodate policies enabling the persecution of immigrants, specific racial groups, and suppression of individual voices. Like the clandestine groups of Illuminati elites famously holding bizarre rituals in the woods near major universities in the modern US, the all-male, ritualistic nature of these ancient Roman individuals entangled in the highest echelons of government directed the actions of the individual members, and had ripple effects across the unknowing government and society.
MITHRAS is about that dark space where a collective human imagination forms fantastical distortions from simple, conceptual structures, where the evolution of an experience is beyond the explanation of words alone and evident to the observer, and where the simple, organic element is distorted into fantastical, terrifying and beautiful progressions and unfoldings in a new complex paradigm.
TRACK LIST:
1., AIRIES – Montis Apicem (Mountain Peak)
2. TAURUS – Prati Semitae (Meadow Paths)
3. GEMINI – Timpana Laudis (Drums of Praise)
4. CANCER – Incessu (Marching)
5. LEO – Taurus Sacrificialis (Sacrificial Bull)
6. VIRGO – Holocausta (Burnt Offerings)
7. LIBRA – Elegia (“Elegia”)
8. SCORPIO – Hymnus Gratiarum (Hymn of Thanks)
9. SAGITTARIUS – Noctis Orandi (Nighttime Prayer)
10. CAPRICORN – Monumentalis et Mortis (Monumental and Towards Death)
11. Aquarius (fons montanus)
12. Pisces (piscis vitae)
Produced by Parallax Pines 2026
Christian M. Newman 