Music
Beyond the Known ~ Album
This first mytho-poetic offering of our duo, Keepers of the Flame, is an album of calling songs, magical underworld soul weavings and blessings for the future ones. With beauty, allurement and fierce love, we invite you off the beaten path into the mythic forest out beyond the village. There, you will meet magical, beautiful and shy creatures- including your own wild Soul.
Sara McFarland (Hologram Heart) and Tracey Forest (KeyTurner) have each been catching songs for decades -- gifts from the places we live with and pilgrimage to. Following Mystery's call, we met in our training to become Soul Initiation Guides. While traveling in the depths of psyche, soul and the Wild Earth, we began to write songs together.
Why a crowdfunding campaign?
As Soul Guide Souul Carriers, we lean in to composting modernity and we also want to lift up and honor artists who are independent and self-employed, like ourselves. With our songs, we not only want to get a message of transformation and a spell of healing into the world, we want to share visibility with the incredible aritsts we are privileged to work with. We also want to create grass roots cultural change where artists earn money from their work directly from supporters and fans, rather than keep feeding the starving artist archetype (which only feeds class system exploitation and funded support for those that give the message of the ruling class). We want to support artits to make a living from their art, rather than having to donate their free time to making music and earning money another way. We are not trying to get rich by selling our music- not really possible at $5 a song! However, we want to at least not lose money in paying the musicians and the studio and recording engineer. It costs about $2000 per song. Plus branding, websites, platforms, etc that we have to pay to host our music so it can be streamed for free to listeners.
In the "old days", one bought an album for $20 which helped pay for studio time and musicians, promo and artists. Now, there are no albums being bought! And albums were produced by big studios who paid the artists very little. Now, songs are streamed and are “free”, which means the artist gets even less. You have to be streaming on spotify in the 10000s to see any money for a song.
Therefore, our request is from solidarity, from the risk of vulnerability and the love of what we do being how we work and who we are. We strive for integrity and alignment with our values and the world we want to help bring into being. And, money is something we will have to contend with for a while longer in this time of transition.
Therefore, we humbly ask you to help us fund our album and donate to our GoFundMe campaign to support us, the other musicians, the engineer magician and all of the artists and tech support we need to being our songs into the world on this journey of transformation, we need voices of Earth to guide us!
this ~ vocal sketches
I am honored to sing my dear friend Steve Hyde's poems - that already throb with so much life and fire and seership - into life's frequencies. This collaboration is one that has 15 years of friendship, shared ceremony and zen meditation, countless cups of tea and hours of conversation feeding it. The alchemy of the shared passion for transformation, Soul, this, all encompassing love, honoring the old gods and goddesses of Earth and the unseen, speaking soul truth... All of this are present and echoing in the collaboration. He sends me poems, I improvise melody and rhythm, like a sketch. The ones I like may someday become an album. For now, it is a soul friendship birthed into the creative act of song. What a blessing.
From Steve
"what is time to the singer in the fragile dark before dawn?... does the darkness have a feel to it, an audible or palpable texture, that this early bird divines, or is it patient and painstaking study of the stars that foretells the breaking of the not-yet broken day?... who or what (if other than a bursting heart) signals that it is the right moment for song?... or does the singer simply follow some old faith in relationship, an ancient and irrevocable collaboration with beauty?... with night, with dawn, with day?... those times when I have truly sung, was there anything more than the singing being, the being singing, any separate awareness that could or did precede song as universe, universe as song?... as measure, rhythm, beat, and being?… and the antiphony of silence, the song of non-being that integrates it all…
… time is not money, a friend once said; time is music… if so, we must be here to sing…
… hope that, wherever you are, however your world looks, you are singing with the whole of your hearts"
Here are three vocal sketches from the album this...