The Esoteric Visions the sounds of altered states project has been my best guitar work to date. Mark Bell, the project founder gave me complete control of any guitar parts that I wanted to add to his acid jazz soundtrack. The interesting thing about this CD was that it was recorded in two countries. Mark was living in Norway and I was in the United States.

Mark mailed me all the music and allowed me the freedom to add anything I wanted. This increased my creative freedoms while keeping costs down because we didn't have to mail music across the altantic to get approval or opinions. When this CD was being made high speed internet was just getting started and it was not possible to simply e-mail tracks back and forth so Mark took a big risk allowing me total control (I've always appreciated this).

In addition to the music, Mark Bell was a master at creating a fan base interested in the works of people like H.P. Lovecraft and he combined great music along with an unbelievable story to attract interest in this project. The story behind the CD was based on the fact that a group of scientists discovered a sequence of random sounds that when properly sequenced could cause an instant out of body experience.

Mark began the Esoteric Visions story like it was a mystery noval unfolding before the readers eyes. Every couple days he would post new information to the Quad-Cranium website on EvO:R about the issues facing Obi-Font, Triskelion M and Eilrahc Noslerrah. Then Mark would follow this up with a huge email campaign to organizations that believe in the wierd and unusual. Many of the page additions where hard to get to because Mark wanted to make people seek out this information as if it was really hidden from the general public. Some new links would reveal themselves within long flash animation sequences while other links where hidden behind graphic art or text on another page. Mark made navigation almost impossible for the random viewer but it was like bears to honey for the informed.

Part of the story line was the fact that the music would store hidden information about the secret discovery and if songs where played in the correct order the out of body experience could be enjoyed by the listener. Visitors to the Q.C. section on EvO:R where in the thousands daily (this was 1999 when the Internet was young). At that time this web traffic represented about half of all visitors that visited the young EvO:R website. The combination of an interesting story and and some pretty exciting music that played in the correct order could give the listener an instant out of body experience was a formula for success.

Requests for the CD came in daily and we printed bootlegs just to give the fans something to listen to. We uploaded MP3 files to popular websites and told fans to download all the songs, not just a couple because the out of body experience was impossible without ALL the songs. This gave us a more favorable rating with the download websites and our rankings went off the charts for a couple months. Part of that was because we posted a rock/trance tune called 2.0.0.0. dedicated to the computer world not being ready for the Y2K transformation. Many computer programmers hummed along to this song while working tirelessly getting thier companies computer systems up to speed.

The actual CD was not released until 2006. Six years after the smoke cleared and people finally realized that this out of body experience was just another internet hoax. To my surprise, most of the people that fell for this internet hoax actually congratulated us on doing such a great job. After getting Mark Bell to agree to release the CD we contacted Peacework Music Network about distribution. Jef Peace at Peacework was very excited about having the exclusive distribution rights to this collection of songs. We have yet to get a report of anyone having an out of body experience while listening to this CD but I did get a speeding ticket while driving I-75 with a group of friends listening to it.

The Quad-Cranium CD is a tribute to an experiment gone drastically wrong with grave effects. Some of Orbi Foto's frequency work was used in creating a few of these songs. Altered States of Consciousness can be expected after listening to certain songs in a certain order. This CD marked the return of TL2 and Mark Bell as they played together for the first time in over 20 years. The results where simply amazing!
Reviewed as a "major move in a return to music story telling"....Carrera Reviews