New KEKAL song "Sanity Away From Sanity" Available for Stream and Free Download

May 2017 KEKAL newsletter

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"Sanity Away From Sanity", the 2nd track for upcoming 2018 Kekal album "Deeper Underground" is now released! It is available in digital audio platforms for download and streaming. More tracks will be released this year and until 2018, one at a time, as they become available.

First published on Earth Day, April 22, 2017, the song talks about the topic of abrupt climate change and its devastating effects on Earth, our habitat. The music provides the dark, raw and angry atmosphere, again with straight-forward lyrics.

HOW TO DOWNLOAD the track::

Free Download - Extract audio from YouTube (320 kbps mp3)

Go to this link on YouTube. While you listen the track on YouTube, copy the YouTube URL address. Open Listen to YouTube audio downloader and paste the link to extract and download the audio. Please note, this is the 'backdoor option' and it is not an official way to download any music unless it carries a freely distributed license (CC-BY-NC-ND) like this Kekal track. Please ID3 tag the audio file if you know how to do that, so that it can be scrobbled correctly on Last fm.

Buy from BandCamp (many choices of audio formats incl. lossless FLAC/ALAC)

Go to this Bandcamp link and buy the track for USD 0.7. This option is ideal if you are planning to download all the next tracks and automatically, the entire album in 2018 in lossless quality audio (FLAC, ALAC) or hi-bitrate mp3. In the future, after you purchase the first 5 tracks of Deeper Underground (as they become available), you will be given the code to download the entire album at no additional cost, once the album is released.

Stream on SoundCloud

You can also stream the entire track on SoundCloud anytime you want. Click this link.

Feel free to re-distribute the downloaded track anywhere you want. The track is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial + NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND), means that it is free to download, free to use and free to re-distribute as-is.

Spread the message! Share the SoundCloud or YouTube link to your friends. If you prefer to stream the song instead of download, you can stream as often as possible on both SoundCloud and YouTube.

LYRICS::

the planet's tipping point has been passed

this generation shall experience catastrophe as an outcome of irresponsible abuse of earth so bleak we no longer foresee a livable habitat for so long, those in power reign with deceptions concealing truth for maximum exploitation profiting from death and human suffering while the most vulnerable witness their lands destroyed speaks like the dragon, acts like god denying climate science to justify greed a normalized sanity is formed, away from sanity woe to you, woe to me, we doom ourselves to death global warming accelerates in turbocharged torque polar ice shelves are melting fast and furious sea level rising with pace we have never seen before many species face extinction and homo sapiens is next into large-scale destruction, we brace ourselves for calamitous aftertaste of hyperconsumption superstorms, drought, wildfires, arctic methane release before our eyes, our world has come to an end

Features voice sample taken from the documentary movie "Disruption". Recorded, mixed and mastered by Jeff Arwadi at Ideation Station for Kekal.

Deeper Underground album PROGRESS TRACK LISTING::

1. Root of All Evil [soundcloud] [youtube] [bandcamp] 2. Sanity Away from Sanity [soundcloud] [youtube] [bandcamp] 3. untitled [to be released June 2017] 4. untitled [to be released August 2017] 5. Deeper Underground [to be released October 2017] ...and more tracks to be announced. The album will have up to 10 tracks total.

DISCUSSION::

Below is a small chat with producer/songwriter/lyricist Jeff and artwork illustrator Levi.

Listening to "Sanity Away from Sanity", we can really capture the atmosphere of anger and sadness but delivered in a fast-paced music. It is probably the most angsty song released by Kekal in more than 15 years, since "The Painful Experience" album in 2001. Can you explain more about the lyrics?

Jeff: The song is about the so-called 'abrupt climate change' that we are facing today. It is an angry song, yes, and also it is a sad one. But it's not a dark music, it's not depressive, there's a tone of hope.. Not the kind of hope that we will reverse the calamity in the short-term period, I think that is already too late.. But even to take a personal action, to take a stand, is a hope in itself: like recycling, use less amount of plastic bags, drive more fuel-efficient vehicle or take public transportation.. Those little stuff we often take for granted.. The lyrics describe a lot of details, I've read and watched quite amount of published articles, models, and even some science reports regarding this abrupt climate change issue. They come up with projections based on the data, from the more conservative models that say that human life may become threatened in the next few hundred years or so because the of sea level rise and drought that would possibly bring famine, to the much more dire and alarming models that predict the near-term extinction (NTE) of human species within the next 10 to 20 years. Yes, that's not far from now. But one thing that is certain, is that we are heading for a global catastrophe, looking back the year 2014, 2015 and 2016 all broke records for the hottest years, and we can already see the escalation of freak weather patterns, drought, storms and other things.

So according to the more extreme theories, human will extinct in our generation, that's it? The end of life as we know it?

Jeff: Well, I don't see death as something to be feared of, but instead we need to spend time caring and loving others more. It is certainly an existential threat, so we need to see this issue from the existentialist point of view. Give our life a meaning, knowing that death is near. That's the whole message. It's like the watching the movie scene where, let's say, a family got trapped in a rubble and knowing that they will going to die sooner or later, they just tell one another "I love you", "will you forgive me", those kinds of words. There's no gloom and doom. This is the moment that we need to see ourselves in the mirror, and treat others what we wish others to treat us. Personally I'm still skeptical about the 10-year human extinction timeframe from some of the models, which is a bit too fast I think, even 20 years is still too fast, maybe because I don't want to suffer and die too early, ha! But I do believe that we're heading to global mass deaths because of the effects of climate change. For how long we could survive as a species, we don't know. It depends on what will come next. We know that arctic old ice, the permafrost, is melting very fast, and there will be a time, in the near future, when all the ice is melted and it will bring the sea level rise and with that it would release the methane gas currently trapped beneath the arctic permafrost. Methane gas is said to generate more greenhouse gas than even carbon dioxide, so that would create destructive feedback loop (pretty much like the noise/sound signal, the feedback loop on the sound brings up the decibel higher than the normal amplification would do). Also take the freak weather patterns into account, because of the imbalances within the elements. We will see more cyclones, more extreme drought that leads to the lack of fresh water, more extreme hot summers that would generate more wildfires. With that, we would later see failure of crops, and farms won't be able to produce food, also the level of oxygen in the atmosphere will be reduced significantly.

It's recommended to read the book A Farewell to Ice, by Professor Peter Wadhams. There are many books that tell us about abrupt climate change and the melting of arctic ice, but I think "A Farewell to Ice" is a really good one to start with, if you haven't really paid attention to what's going on and what will happen to this planet, our habitat. And this is the YouTube video about the aforementioned book.

Let's move to the subject about human responsibility to the planet's well-being. Is human responsible in destroying Earth? How big, do you think, is human contribution to the path of destruction? And even with overwhelming proof, we still see climate change deniers. Why is that?

Jeff: Of course, human is responsible in creating the nature's instability, it won't destroy the earth itself, but its inhabitants including human species. Science discovered that there were a number of mass extinctions in the distant past, and we're now heading to another one. This time, human contribution plays a significant role in enhancing the speed toward destruction. That's why there is a term "abrupt climate change", because within the past 10 years or so, we have seen the same amount of change equals to maybe hundred thousand years if this cycle was completely natural, without human intervention.

The global corporate elite, in this case mostly players in the energy industry (oil & gas, coal mining) and palm oil industry, use their 'marketing strategy' to create propaganda, or the so-called 'alternative view' so people would deny the climate change, or deny the human contribution to climate change. All these propaganda are just part of their so-called public-relation, to influence public perceptions so that they don't see the industry negatively. You may want to read Noam Chomsky's popular book Manufacturing Consent. The book really dig into these propaganda: why and how these propaganda work for the benefit of the corporate elite. Here's the interesting point: actually this climate denialism has shifted over time. It was once complete denial, in the sense of they did not (want to) recognize any change to the climate at all. But in recent years, because they could not hide the effects, as you said, the proof is overwhelming right now, it has been shifting towards the natural cause of the climate change itself, not the human cause. But it is still a denial, because they would still deny the human contribution to the destruction of the livable habitat.

Levi, can you tell us about the artwork you made for the song? It looks sinister, but yet shows a very familiar reflection of the human condition.

Levi: The idea when I started the drawing was the release of (Bali) Kintamani coffee I roasted and this Leak (or Leyak, ed.) thing came up. It was started with its head first and I spent weeks after that figuring out what gestures would be fit following it. And I don't think I knew where I was heading when I drew lines from its head. It's a process of building the image one stroke at a time. I rarely am able or chose to convey a certain message through the drawing I made and it applied to this too. The feeling was out once it's done. Like I, the drawing now gives more than just a Leak and I hope it enrich the lyrics, the music or the whole song it tries to represent.

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