This is kind of cool.  It’s also kind of uncool humblebraggy stuff.  I know that.  I don’t care, but I thought I’d give those who object to that sort of thing an opportunity to stop reading.  I’m fair like that.

This week I learned that Point Of Ares is still getting airplay, or rather, Internet play.  Smiles, charms, dark blessings and blackened pennies for all.  My band mates and I humbly thank you, well, well, well for such remembrances redelivered.  (Don’t ask me why poor mad Hamlet comes jumbling to mind.  He just does.)

Anyway, how I learned about it is cooler.

Bill (POA’s guitarist and my long-suffering spouse) entered our practice space the other night with a tall tale of his own.  He announced that while he was absorbed with some arcane, heavy-duty robotics research, or something equally magical and attention-demanding, he had an Internet radio station playing in the background. “Pandora or iHeart or something.”  He then heard “something familiar” but wasn’t paying much attention until the end of the song when he realized – “That’s us! They’re playing ‘Threle’.”  And then they played Rush’s “Limelight.” 

As we are all Rush fans, we were of course all smiles.

Bill missed the irony of being so consumed with academic work that he didn’t immediately recognize his own guitar solo, or that he’d “entered Threle.”  But readers of Enemy Glory know that is exactly how one crosses into Threle – you don’t really know you’re there until you are.  Like when a dream suddenly goes lucid.

For the interested, Ryan (POA’s more pragmatic drummer) found the source.  It was iHeart Radio’s progressive rock station.  Ryan then posted this on my Facebook wall:

iHeartRadio  prog rock RushVery strange and cool when you hear a song you wrote pop up on iHeartRadio on the Prog Rock channel (especially since its over 10 years old!) and then have the next song on the playlist be “Limelight” from Rush . . . not bad company to have!

Someone owes me a nickel in royalties!

You can listen to “Threle” here.

Point Of Ares has become such a private, internalized, closed circle affair that it was odd and cool to find out somebody is still listening.  We always had a steady indie following of Pagans, fantasy aficionados, Enemy Glory readers, and progressive/theatrical rock fans.  I know we still sell CDs.  Thanks for remembering.

So what’s new?  We’ve written a set of new, thematically related songs tentatively called Afternoon Hero that all in some way explore the exquisite tension between self-image and what’s left of that image after a healthy dose of societal scarring. You see yourself one way, society bitch slaps you into pretending to be something so foreign you no longer know yourself.  Sometimes you get music out of that awful dissonance.  Sometimes you just go mad.  The songs are funny and odd and angry and sad and sweet and rock as hard as anybody has a right to rock.

Recording is done.  Mixing is in progress.  No release date yet, but we plan to make them available soon.

You are reading a post from Matter Notes, Karen Michalson’s blog on creativity as spirituality and the war on the humanities. Her most recent novel, The Maenad’s God, is available on Amazon.

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