WHATISTHEOPIATEMASS
The name is a nod both to the Christian liturgical form and to Karl Marx's assessment that religion is the opiate for the masses. Perhaps it is. Or perhaps the common desire for comfort, rest, escape, or relief are more complicated and mysterious than we know.
In our pursuit of creating spaces of beauty and awe, we find ourselves partial to cathedrals, subwoofers, antiquity, spiritual eroticism, ambience, pipe organs, samplers, synthesizers, incense, tongues, Latin, silence, joy, meditation, ambiguity, dissonance, the abstract. We strive to avoid pretense, hype, cliche, certainty, celebrity, greed, noise.
We encourage and believe in non-commercial performing, remixing, sharing, appropriating, and sampling of all our music (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial). Let us know if you have other uses in mind; we'll most likely be very cool about it.
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We are a performing arts group made up of musicians, songwriters, visual artists, liturgists, audio engineers, light designers, and authors. While this endeavor is certainly a labor of love, the quality and quantity is dependent on reasonable community support. Supporters over $75 are credited as an Executive Producer on our next album and receive a print of the cover art.
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Press
"Not festive." - Christianity Today
"It might be hyperbolic to say that The Opiate Mass is making the most innovative and sincere religious music in the country right now." - The Image Journal
"Hey friends. I know that since The Opiate Mass is a worship event you aren't supposed to receive any praise or thanks or compliments, those should of course solely be directed to God since you really had nothing to do with any of it. Hah, sorry... now that's out of the way... IT WAS BRILLIANT. Seriously. I can't say enough how great the whole experience was last night. We all wanted more. The thought that came to mind as things were really kicking in was 'wow, this is like the pinnacle of these peoples lives...' in the sense that you have been training and growing and learning for all these years and it all came to a point last night. The vocals, the band, the arrangements, the flow, the buildup... I've never seen anything like it. I'll stop now. When's the next one? At St. Mark's once more?" - Nathan Marion (2005), Events Curator