Interview: Catching Up With Prismatic Mantis + Stream “Return to Sender”

Rising up out of the Bay Area, multi-talented artist Mark Reynolds folds his primary talents in music to explore an overall deeper understanding. He records as Prismatic Mantis, a name that imparts the seemingly limitless scope of Reynolds’ vision, reacting less to what’s there at surface level and more to the light, dark, between and beyond.

Prismatic Mantis has just dropped a new single entitled “Return to Sender,” a jazzy, proggy piece of electro-soul for any fan of acts like Flying Lotus to sink their teeth into. To celebrate, we sent Reynolds some interview questions to dig even deeper into his own Sacred Geometry.

Check out our interview with Prismatic Mantis and stream “Return to Sender.”

Hi, Prismatic Mantis! Congrats on your new single. Can you tell us a little more on who you are and how you first got into making music?

Hey GroundSounds, thanks! Sure, where do I begin? I’m a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer originally from upstate New York. As of late, I am an East to West Coast transplant, now living in California in the SF/Bay Area. I first became interested in music around 5 years old and was drawn to the worlds it could instantly teleport me to. I started learning piano when I was 7 and after a few years I decided to study classical/flamenco guitar.

Music always felt like a forbidden fruit to me. I didn’t come from a musical family at all. I had to seek to learn about it in any way I could. I didn’t always feel understood but I was innately driven to uncover, what felt like to me, a sonic mystery.

Once high school hit, I started getting into a wide range of Indie/Alternative, Prog/Math Rock and fringe experimental music (examples would be The Mars Volta, Bjork, Radiohead, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, MF Doom, Mice Parade, Django Reinhardt, Felt Kuti, Sigur Ros, Jaga Jazzist, Tortoise, Glen Velez, Omar Rodriguez Lopez, and many more…) which I drew inspiration from for my album “Umbrella” released in 2008. This album was all recorded with a Logitech USB mic in “Cool Edit Pro” with no prior experience with recording, production, or using any DAW. From meditation music to grind core, I thought I had been exposed to a wide variety of styles at that point. I was wrong.

It was not until I heard “The Mahavishnu Orchestra” and John McLaughlin’s “Shakti”, was I then catapulted into a whole other world of how the creation of music could be approached. The album “Visions of the Emerald Beyond” basically rendered everything I had heard up to that point as only half the picture. My friends an I would jam for hours at a time in a dimly lit basement, but upon hearing this music, I soon realized I was nowhere close to being prepared for spontaneous improvisation.

It was then that I decided to take private jazz guitar lessons and ultimately enroll at University for Contemporary Music and Jazz Guitar.

What’s your songwriting process like? Who are some of your biggest influences?

To be honest, my songwriting process is pretty abstract at times. Rhythms come to me in dreams and I record them on voice memos (DreaMania from my album Swords of Truth). Other times a vocal melody will come to me while strolling through the Redwoods and I’ll come home and compose a supporting harmony on guitar for it (Canopy Trail from Elixir).

I used to make music in a pretty experimental fashion, for example, Dreaming of Fountains from my debut album, began with wine glasses. The first thing I recorded was a a cabinet of wineglasses clinking together for 6 straight minutes. I remember feeling completely satisfied after the take, felt a full-on success for the foundation of the track, which then become a 10 minute song with over 100 audio files of strange sounds that were experimentally captured.

Yet another example would be from Geplah, where I made a 15/8 beat in Fruity Loops with samples of natural sounds like branches brushing together, rocks smashing, and stones dropped into a nearby stream captured on a Hi-8 camcorder.

More recently, my song process may begin with a rhythm that my subconscious will present to me (a common thread from then to now). It becomes like a sort of “ear-worm” that will only be released if I record it or put it into written notation. I’ll get it into Logic Pro X and build it from there. Guitar, keys, and bass are later added, and if there are vocals, I will record the voice last (or close to the end). Sometimes I work in loops or “scenes” but usually I work in a chronological timeline, composing the piece from start to finish.

My recent influences are definitely more on the side of Neo-Soul, Prog-Rock, Electronica, R&B, Prog-Jazz, etc. Artists like Hiatus Kaiyote, Galimatias, John McLaughlin, Chris Dave, Thundercat, Flying Lotus, Darshan Ambient, Glen Velez, Jacob Collier, Gliad Hekselman, Jaga Jazzist, Jordan Rakei, Pat Metheny, Ravi Shankar, Robert Glasper, Lapalux, The Mars Volta, Hiromi Uehara, and so many more. These artists have had a profound effect on me and my melodic, harmonic, production and composition styles.

For example, Sandhya Raga, off Ravi Shankar’s “In Celebration [Disc2]” really brought to my attention the use of unison melodies of complimentary instruments in a call-and-response pattern. Hiromi Uehara’s approach to composition in Labyrinth using expansive dynamics, mixed-meter, and melodic craft not only on her solos but the melody over the harmonic structure of the tune.

I love listening to music but sometimes I find that I simply gets in the way of my own creative process. My music is influenced by many things outside of music. Music comes from life, so I try to experience as much life as I can.

I love studying Sacred Geometry, learning about the Universe out there, and the Universe within my own being. I find that Silence, being in Nature, and simply just listening to nothing and “doing nothing” is a profound influence of mine (and fantastic use of my time). Seriously, there are numerous studies that “boredom” is the key to creativity and originality. And this isn’t anything new either, it has just been forgotten.

The great philosopher of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell made his case for why “fruitful monotony is essential for happiness, almost 150 years after Kierkegaard praised the “creative value of unbusied hours”. In our present day, with so many distractions and devices to keep us far from boredom (the doorway to creativity), I wonder if it will be a dying art to simply “Be” and see what one can create from that profound space. As strange as it may sound, I find that complete disengagement from the creative process allows me to relax into more of who I truly am without trying to DO something or BE someone, and thus be even MORE creative. From this space I have heard entire albums inside my mind, and compositions that I’ve had to completely let go of, and just enjoy them in real time without trying to capture them (which is my biggest tendency).

I have found that offering my mind Peace and relaxation is the ultimate playground for my Creativity. I’ve always gone with the adage, “Everything that isn’t like anything, is real.” And in a certain way, I feel that to be very true.

Were there any specific experiences from your life that influenced “Return to Sender”? How did you arrive at the themes of life, death and beyond for your next cycles of releases?

I have had two near death experiences in my life. One was when I drank lye as a 2 year old boy. The other was when I was in a car accident and nearly exploded into flames. The shear shock of the latter propelled me into music even deeper during those coming years and was a wake up call to me to be in more gratitude for the life I have been given. Not only that, but to show up and do what I came on this planet to do.

Neither of these experiences were actually the direct catalyst to the creation of “Return to Sender” however. It’s inception began at a Holistic Health retreat center in Upstate NY called “Omega Institute”. A tarot reader and good friend of mine, “MetaMarcy” was creating a podcast and needed a theme song for it. I went to the submission page online and read about her experience with Tarot and Spirituality. I proceeded to discover the name of the podcast was entitled “You’re Definitely Gonna Die.” I loved it and went to town on creating an intentional track around befriending Death as an ally, a teacher, and a guide. This theme can be interpreted in a variety of ways (there is an interview with her on my YouTube channel that goes into depth about this).

It can be taken very lightly, as in “dying” to old limiting beliefs about ourselves and others, dispelling old relationships or patterns that no longer serve us. We can consciously die to these things. This type of self-growth is powerful. A deeper meaning of the song it that we seem to avoid the obvious about our certain death; especially in the Western world. We become inoculated with this idea of never being forced into tighter spaces within ourselves to find out who we truly are, and what we are here to do in this world. We end up living a sort of “half life”.

The lyrics of the song are a message for us to wake up from that. In addition, one of the more “meta” perspectives (are you ready?) is known throughout the Vedas, and many other Spiritual texts, is Unity Consciousness or the manifestation of the Impersonal into the Personal. Powerful spiritual teachers like Ram Dass, Moojiji, and Dr. Wayne Dyer have all spoken of this. Who we TRULY are is beyond form. We are not human beings have a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. From this awareness, you actually were never born, and you will never die. Which is simply astonishing to the mechanism of mind to what we’ve been entrained to believe. Once you get past that, profound relief of the “human condition” sets in.

As Dr. Wayne Dyer says (you can hear this quote of him sampled in the song), “Your life Here is a parenthesis in Eternity, it is something that can never be taken away”. As part of my Music with Purpose Series, it is these deeper topics I wanted to speak to in the creation of “Return to Sender” and furthermore, my upcoming 2 new singles that will soon be released.

Any new Bay Area-based artists/venues/purveyors of the arts you could turn our readers onto?

ARTISTS

Bells Atlas

One of my favorite Bay Area bands.

Luminscent Grand

You’ll also definitely want to check out my good friend, William Cenote’s project out.
The World’s First Synesthesia Piano.

Tahüm

My buddy Tyler, multi-instrumentalist and producer who creates deeply creative sonic journeys.

SONIC EXPERIENCES in the BAY AREA

Envelop SF is a next-generation immersive audio venue located within The Midway in San Francisco. The space amplifies the social and emotional impact of music through intimate listening events, live performances, immersive wellness, and music production education.

Audium is the first theater of its kind in the world, pioneering the exploration of space in music. Listeners are bathed in “sound sculptures” performed through 176 speakers in total darkness.

Globe Institute Sound Healing Center
Sound Healing and Audio Recording Classes

GOOD EATS in SF

Stable Cafe in the Mission for an epic brunch spot with a lush plant-filled outdoor patio.

Esprepento also in the Mission is a great Spanish Tapas restaurant filled with Surrealist Dali paintings.

Where can we follow you and where can our readers catch you live next?

Follow for upcoming releases and shows:
Instagram
Spotify
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Soundcloud
Youtube

Any parting thoughts? Open platform!

Thanks for taking the dive with me in this interview. Music is a powerful way for us to come together and awaken to our innate gifts. Become part of the Prismatic Mantis movement and join us on the journey!