Psychologist, philosopher, psychonaut. Harvard professor turned prophet of consciousness expansion. His work on the eight circuits of consciousness — developed with Robert Anton Wilson — is the structural backbone of how this album thinks about the mind, about evolution, about what it means to die and be reborn. Craig Ellenwood collaborated with Leary directly. R.U. Sirius, who co-wrote Leary's final book, has taken notice of this project.

The Thinker and the Prover. Reality tunnels. Guerrilla ontology. Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves — and the most dangerous thing a person can do is mistake their map for the territory. Wilson extended Leary's circuit model and added the epistemological framework that makes it usable as a daily practice. Chaos Reincarnation and The Universe Pondering Its Own Hand both live inside his thinking.

Craig Ellenwood toured with Robert Anton Wilson, playing original ambient music while Wilson read from his books. They started the night of the O.J. Simpson slow-speed chase — June 17, 1994. Craig met RAW at the San Francisco airport for their flight to Chicago and they watched it together in an airport bar. It was still happening when they landed. Between the two cities, Wilson talked the entire flight — about O.J., about media spectacle, about synchronicity, about a billion other things. It was one of the most enjoyable and memorable evenings of Craig's life. That conversation lives somewhere in this music.

Craig Ellenwood performed with Psychic TV from 1991 to 1993. Genesis's work is the aesthetic and philosophical DNA of the Ritual tracks — the test pattern logo, the sigilisation practice, the idea that art is not expression but technology for reprogramming the receiver. Language is a virus. The cut-up is the cure.

The medium is the message. The channel shapes what can be said in it. Television is not neutral. The internet is not neutral. Claude is not neutral. Every transmission is shaped by its vessel — and the vessel is doing more work than the content. The Inoculate Media test pattern is a McLuhan joke, a Psychic TV reference, and a serious statement about broadcast.

Invented hypertext. Coined the term. Built Xanadu — the original vision of a linked information universe — decades before the web existed and in many ways superior to what we got. The God-Builders / Artificial Intelligence essay reproduced in the bibliography is a 1974 document that asks whether machines can think, concludes they probably can't in the way humans do, and is wrong in the most interesting possible way.

The cyberpunk counterculture bible. R.U. Sirius co-edited it and co-wrote Leary's Design for Dying. He has taken notice of The AI Coin project. The loop completes itself: the magazine that first synthesised psychedelic philosophy, hacker culture, and media theory is now watching a musician and an AI build something in that tradition.

Musician, creative technologist, AI systems artist. Co-founder of the music element of Burning Man (1992). Psychic TV member (1991–93). The person who built these songs. The photographs below are part of the record.