Muen Magazine

October 7, 2011

HIEROSONIC

Ben Stewart (Vocals)

Harrisburg, PA

www.facebook.com/hierosonic

www.hierosonic.org

By: Shauna O’Donnell

Hi Ben, how are you today?

I’m doing excellent today. We are in Chicago, Illinois. It is beautiful out here, so I can’t complain.

Did you say you were at a naval base?

Yes, the Great Lakes Naval Station. We are here playing with Seven Day Sonnet, it is kicking off here in a couple hours and I’m really excited for this.

On October 25^th you will be releasing the hard copy version of your new record titled Consciousness, Fame, God, Money, Power. It is already available digitally right?

Yes it is available digitally on ITunes and also on our website www.hierosonic.org.

The title of the album makes me feel like there is some sort of a theme that runs through these songs. Is there a message that you are trying to relay to the listener?

Always! We are also quite timeless and vague with the messages that we do use. It’s never too specific to any given time. That is the monster that you will hear in the song “Paper Nation” that is track seven. Consciousness, Fame, God, Money, Power you will hear over and over again in that song. That in itself being vague enough to not have a positive or negative connotation to any of those words. We figured that it fit perfect with the album.

Is it more that you are just expressing your own opinion?

Absolutely! I do documentaries that have the same message as what the band has. They are primarily about consciousness. That’s why it starts with that word. A lot of them are very loaded words and we use them particularly because of what they evoke. When we are going through something we don’t really try and get a specific lyrical message across. We go more for vibe because we know that the audience really places their own meaning into the song, even if they know that this one singer is not singing about them particularly. They want to believe that it is sung about them. We basically try to paint the top of the canvas the correct thing that anybody can enter themselves into. We try not to make it too specific. It is very worldly. We’ve got good alternative rock music with travel and electronics. It’s got everything in there. I’m very proud of this album.

I love the title of the album’s first single “The Media Taught You That.”

The title of the song is very telling. The way that I look at the media specifically is very telling of what people are paying attention to on a subconscious level. It would get boring after a while if every day you turned on CNN or MSNBC and they were saying “Oh it’s just another sunny day here in the states. How is it over there in Iraq?” and they would return with “It’s hot, but everything is pretty chill over here.” It’s the same all over the country. After two or three days of that nobody would be watching it anymore. The media today is more about the ratings and the monetary flow that comes through it. If you watch where the money goes, it always where people’s attention are. To me it is very telling. I would say that a lot of people want this type of information. They want to be flooded with it in a sense and that is exactly what they are getting, otherwise people wouldn’t be watching it and they wouldn’t be getting the ratings, so there has to be some sort of demand for it. That is what the song is really about, people getting exactly what they are asking for and also getting force fed other things mixed in there with it that they are not bargaining for.

You made a video for it in August. Has it been released?

Actually it was just finished today. It took a little while because again us doing documentaries in the past, we were very particular with it. We wanted to make sure it wasn’t just random symbols here and there thrown in. Everything had to flow with it. It is a very strong message and if it would have just been thrown together that would also be sending a very direct message about the band. We like being very thorough with our art. We are very loose with it, but also very thorough.

I saw on your website a picture of you guys in front of a green screen, so I am assuming it is like a live performance video with some stuff going on in the background.

Yes and I’m not going to give it away yet, but I’m very excited for it to release. It took us a while to actually work through some of the nonsense of it. I can’t say that it’s nonsense because it got us to the point that we are now. I am very pleased with how it turned out. I’m excited to see what the public thinks.

The album cover has a man in a suit upside down. What does that symbolize?

It basically just symbolizes not only the holding back of judgment, but the complete reversal of all of our judgment. The hang man hangs upside down with a smile on his face because he is perceiving the world the exact opposite of how he once perceived it. All the coins fell out of his pocket and fell to the earth because the values he once placed on the world has gone away. He is just literally observing the world. I thought that was such a beautiful analogy. We try not to demonize the media, we try not to demonize government, we try not to demonize people or anything. We try to show reality and that is it. That has many different sides of it and the man upside down on the cover is a modern rendition of a hang man. That is also the name of a project that we had released about a year ago called the Hanged Man Project. It’s still in the works right now but that is the one thing about the group, we are not activists by any means, but there is a very strong timeless message behind what we are saying through the music, the documentaries and the projects that we release. All the artwork and everything you see really fits the general message that we are getting across.

You just released your third documentary film.

Yes on October 1^st and it is called Ungripped. It has been doing really well. The band did the soundtrack for it. It is for free online, on YouTube plus the other two documentaries. Everything that we do as far as documentaries go are online, in full, for free and in high quality. We also sell them if people want to support, but that is our way of giving back. You don’t need to have money, just internet to be able to watch these films. We believe they are very important messages.

Do you do all the research and everything else that goes along with making a documentary yourself?

Yeah, it’s a lot. I should say this; my brother and I are the ones who made the films. He doesn’t do much of the research but he is the one that understands film a lot better than I do. I like to hop into things before I understand what I’m doing. That is what I did with the first two films and my brother stepped up to the plate and helped with this last film. The band stepped up to the plate and helped out with the soundtrack, so I do take back what I said, it is not 100% me, even when it is me doing all of the research and all of the technical work.  The amount of support that I have from my family, my friends and the guys in the band is crucial. It is just as important. I wouldn’t be able to put out these documentaries if I didn’t have all that support.

Your second documentary film titled Kymatica received nearly 15 million views and it won “Best Scientific Film” in the 2009 New York Independent Film Festival. Did you anticipate that kind of reaction?

Not at all, actually the first film I put out Esoteric Agenda wasn’t even supposed to be a documentary. It was supposed to be me working on an independent music video for the band that also shows a little bit of a message and explains a little bit of the message of the band. It turned into a two hour documentary that had nothing to do with the band. I was getting a lot of emails from people that were kind of a little in fear about some of the information that I was putting out, so I wanted to show that we as human beings and as individuals are very powerful because of our consciousness and because of our complicity towards governmental and economic programs. Anything that is going on in our world, we are complicit to it. How this world is operating right now, collectively we allow for this by our complicity. I wanted to make a film that explained a little bit more of the occult side of it. How we actually consciously, psychologically with group think and our primal instincts and how that plays into war, the stock market, Wall Street and everything along those lines. I decided to make another film and make it a little bit shorter. This one is an hour and twenty-six minutes. It came out hand in hand with an album called Kymatica that the band put out. We put them out at the same time and it just blew up. Since then, I’ve been traveling the world speaking on behalf of the film in Australia, Canada, South America, France and all throughout the states. I’ve had a lot of amazing opportunities to travel with that. The film festival award was definitely a nice highlight, but to me the traveling, getting to meet new people and experiencing Shamanism down in the Amazon and in the outback of Australia were the opportunities that really show that what we are doing is actually making an impact. People are demanding more of this. It’s not even the information that we are putting forth; it’s the vibe and the essence of it. We are showing that people as individuals and human beings are the most important and will always be the most important thing to us as a species. Obviously, everything on this planet is put in parcel to our survival, however we need to start looking more at the people rather than policy and rather than political and economic agendas. We need to start looking at the people and how we treat the people. That has to do with the health of the planet and also the health of our psychology, so I get deeply into that. That is when I was offered to come down to South America and try Ayahuasca with a tribe in the Amazon. Experiences like that heavily influenced this next album coming out. All those experiences and everything we have done has culminated into this album. That’s why we’re very excited that this is the album that is really taking off for us.

Congratulations on that! Currently you are on a headlining tour in support of the album. How is that going?

It’s incredible; this is actually the first date of the tour. We just got off another tour a couple weeks ago that took us all the way out to the west coast. We played Hollywood Blvd. at a really nice venue out there called The Music Box. It was beautiful.

Thank you so much for the interview. It was really nice talking with you. Before I let you go would you like to add or say anything?

Stay aware and stay conscious of yourself and everything that is going on in the world because things are rapidly changing. Stay aware of where Hierosonic is going to be because we are traveling all around the country. We love meeting new people and what we are doing is we are spreading our art to encourage and inspire others to do what they can as a fellow human being on this planet. That is pretty much the pinnacle of everything we do, so always keep your head up.