Released 25th December 2020

Lyrics coming soon to genius.com

All songs composed, performed, programmed & produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars

Mix 1:
1. A Cup of Tea Bereft
2. The Makings of a Knight
3. Enough Sterling in the Pocket
4. A Boshack for the Girl

Mix 2:
1. A Cup of Contrapuntal Tea
2. Mars For My Shadowban
3. Cabbie's Shelter
4. No One But Me

Mix 3:
1. A Cup of Largely Rational Tea
2. San Theodoros
3. How Many Times Must We Say Goo'bye?
4. Of the Same Stardust Made

Verseus

Composed, performed, programmed & produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars

Lyrics reproduced by the artist:

The ovaries of San Theo’
Are hardly a woodstock of the great

London’s a city of contrapuntalism. To navigate it, you need be capable of contrapuntal thinking. Best way of acquiring that capability is to listen to contrapuntal music, like Marsy Mars’ music. Contrapuntal is the adjective used to describe the phenomenon of counterpoint. In music, as in any other context to which it might be applied, counterpoint is a relationship between musical voices in which the voices themselves are rhythmically and melodically independent of one another, but which are harmonically interdependent.

It’s hard to write one beautiful song – the rules of counterpoint demand that you write two, three, four beautiful songs that are able to coexist within the space of one composition, given at once a certain free reign of development, all the while serving the greater purpose of the whole.  That kind of music, the kind of music you’ll find on this very record and all Marsian records, as such mirrors an ideal conception of the greater society, in which neither individual development nor a glad willingness towards wider goal is utterly subordinated.

[Bar 23] That’s why, in a society like this one, in order for it to grow less miserable, counterpoint, in thought and, yes, maybe in song too, need be embraced. It requires a certain lavishness of musical facility, a charitable good-nature against adversity, an ability to delight in the sense of a cosmos interdependent, one in which “every chord of human destiny arouses a multitude of voices to both parallel and contrary motion”. 

That’s a whole new economy we’re talking about, but we’ve begun minting the currency. That’s a whole new culture incipient, but we’ve begun sketching out the plans for this quietest of long-unfolding revolutions. Or, no, in fact, perhaps not a quiet revolution at all, but a songful one, a revolution truly musical.

And if then, instead of a bullet, we must let fly with thought and note, then here’s the next volley, from old Zvezdolikiy, Marsy Mars.

A Cup of Contrapuntal Tea

Composed, performed, programmed & produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars

Lyrics reproduced by the artist:

She asked “do [I] typically use my guitar
To complete seductions?”; I said “Not this time.
I don’t tend to like playing two loves off 
Against one another, except in rhyme."
A tease by eye and ear parades,
Delights in tension, benignly aggravates,
That we rally so well, the rally can’t fail,
The only kind of tennis that plays in a Night Tale.
So long and gorgeous that mane, if a lady’s rivery
Locks even be fain called a mane; and yet, see all those
Washerwomen of thought, who are borne over with filthy
Linen, washing that linen in such a beautiful stream.
Yeah, I always talk like this, for what worth is living
Without some handicap for disciplining?
I rhyme like this, regale like this, dine
Electresses’ love-starved mind like this.
And I let you wind like this, climb like this,
No other time am I so singular of mind like this.
I forget the tenderness pricking our cynical touch;
That like a lyric this sweet tryst will come mean both
More and less than it seems, more than you think, less than it is;
And that we’re both pursed with wordslinger’s tricks to make it so writ.
But tonight, the entendres; and we free see free as being  
Free to act like damn animals, albeit ones with
A well-developed nose for the trophy; DJ Sniffter,
Sniff your tear now and play a little boshack for the girls.

Will free her
What frees her will free me;
Will free me and free her

Every time I think that it would be 
Too vulgar and too arrogant to imagine 
Someone like you, touch proves you true 
Once again; but,

In love ain’t it true that you took your cue
From Knightsbridge in the summertime? More
Resplendent in what’s gold and fine than Timbuktu, but
Revealing nothing of how your goings come;
Among these noble fridges, club-floor-picked radishes, 
These maniches of blockhead and boulder you choose,
Am I primary stakeholder? That’s to say, am I of pride of place
In the folio in which such tales, cut and un-, are told?
We metropols are all given passports of the free,
Bought with promise of our contentment,
With only all the riches of dispassion, ignorance, intemperance
If you are happy that freedom hold no more value than this,
Then, yes, go free, free forth and spend.
Seems to me you’re slave to your every appetite, instinct
And fear; and that seems to me not freedom, not happiness,
But why would you, slave, listen to such words uttered
From one who looks such a slave to you? If not slave to a slave?
Perhaps if I ever win acclaim on these works
You will sort through their folds for your song; given the love
That was withheld, it would simply be a song that decries
That its writer has nothing with which, or about, to write.
But I will pen something of the culture that placed us so,
That redefined love as the art of the using and the used,
That pleasured ‘til happiness by pleasure’s abused,
And call it “A Boshack for the girl”.

Every time I think I'm at my wits end with you 
My wit extends just enough that a week later 
I find myself at its ends again

A Boshack for the Girl

Composed, performed, programmed & produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars

Lyrics reproduced by the artist:

And now we present, as they
Stand in contemplation before some
Dutch painting in the National Gallery,
Thoughts of a farmer of London’s preferred crop:
Sterling.

Verse 1
Without alarm I spend, through the vales of a label
Whose peace my uneasiness tends,
Buy mink as a favour to the wolf,
And something in a print of leopard for the shepherd;
Without charm I spend, Hermes for love’s casing,
The ‘main for the girl whose love I’m wasting
Alienated from the principle that’d make me
Conspicuous spending’s own Roger Casement.
Without aim I spend, except maybe the simulation
Of well-dressed fame that’s freedom’s approximation;
But only its approximation – applaud a revolutionary’s stand
And then buy the revolutionary’s trainers.
Principles, they once would’ve died for ‘em– 
Now they beg a sweat shop stitch in time for them.
I always fancied myself incorruptible
Before I saw how you made corrupting fun,
Before you showed me how what I take’s what I’m worth,
But then that somewhere in the sterling murk lurks
Some untold relation of the fact of our consumption,
And the rapidly diminishing inheritance that is this Earth,
And that anyway, the sterling don’t stop a man,
From putting his abuse on me, based on the shade of blue on my back,
The melanin he has or he lacks,
The sterling don’t pop the whip’s crack.
But the Sterling don’t care,

The Sterling goes ch-ching-ch-ching-ching;
I try to clip the spending dove’s wings,
But its songs of excess grounded still sings,
We’re mated for life by register’s rings.

Premonitions of my end arriving high on a pitiless
Horizon, like I were a Dutch Isis fighter
With a Dutch painter’s finer sensibilities
I will not beg ‘em like Shamima
But face my end with the depth and taste of Dutch paint
And the Queens pon my riches bear no tears admiring in
Their eyes at my heroic sacrifice, if anything their smile more beguiles,
Like I must be a hero to be so rich.
You see, the fault, my friend, is within ourselves; we spend,
Treat all ends as means to their own end,
In a madness of the very fortunate, importunate
Within all those once shamed to be poor.
Innit a shame that only gated in excess
Can our sense of security securely reside?
That I feel dirty enough to die without
Enough sterling in the pocket to clutch?

In a madness of the very fortunate, I’m extorted
By the force of my own fantasia,
I’m not so rich as I paint myself, though I must
Say, I paint myself very well.
I pay only for entry into the state of ignorance, and
Maybe ignorance is the one blessed state – set it high on foresight
And life becomes the slow matter of the unlivable,
Much like the Dutch Isis fighter.

It’s not about gold, it’s about souls;
And deep down, everybody knows.

Enough Sterling in the Pocket

Composed, performed, programmed & produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars

Lyrics Reproduced by the Artist:

“How many times have you
Woken up upon a horse?” the beggar
Cried, his Force 1s lifting from the ground
In visionary delight, when I asked him
Where in this town, that is its own world, could I find
Those with the unswerving determination to serve,
And not submit to immoral wills or abusive regimes?
Who hurt and heal as the path of what’s right demands?
“Well, my Mickey Mouse de Sade,” said he,
“If you’re looking to catch a cache of those
Who might break your youthful hide in useful ways,
Down E1 moonlit lanes congregate those
From whom you might learn something:
These millennial-perspective-dyspeptic 
Analect expressing 
Crocodile-of-balkanised-opinion wr-wrestling kinds of girls n guys,
Looking to the future with history’s eyes of ripe-world brown”

This was no club for those enticed by
The sign on the door saying “Come for muffins,
Stay to become a god by participation” nor if in your estimation
This town waiting outside’s a harbour of honours.
Now, for role-call
If you would just
Maintain your silence
Til I read your name out
What are knights without horseplay?
And who are they if not those
Who give lost causes hope?
Pledging by this pledge universal:
“Whether we’re Inuit, Korean in scope or Ethiopian
Ivory, onyx or heliotropian
Manly, womanly, of neither, of both
We swear to chase the makings of a knight”

We swear to chase the makings of a knight
We swear to embrace what we don’t yet understand

We all know what brought us here: loneliness,
The crop this burgh’s second most fond of,
Or else the steed we ride through its fields
Full of the first

So what’s a knight? And then what makes one?
Is it all these vast conceptions that seethe in the mind?
Is it to clank at dance, crusade and piss ale?
Is it getting to the point like me in your life, where
You’ve survived four, five proverbial trials for
Forgoing what’s easy, what dulce et facilis est,
To do what’s right; to say “comfort be forgone;
Under my eye, all life will be dignified”?
If to risk ridicule’s to risk a bullet peace permits,
Then I’m doing as a revolutionary should,
Riding out for my beliefs, seeing how many times
I can get myself hit; I am my time against. (From my wounds, your blood)
To live in unreason, rent-of-responsibility free in a duplex of sentiment,
To live in the most fashionable modern ignorance
This ain’t enough, it ain’t enough, it ain’t enough for me,
There must be more to come than life of the mirror born.
A man that looks into that world, a Grammified mirror
For the mysterious self, and figures that the only
Way to see his reflection is to look away from it;
That’s the one and only making of a knight

We all know what brought us here: loneliness,
The crop this city second most fond of,
Or else the steed we ride through its fields
Full of the first – money;
I’d like to invite our esteemed listener 
Who is our honoured guest, now to open
The book of Londonium, peep the survey,
See precisely what philosophy the burgh lives by; 
In other words, play the Perseus within our Verseus.

The Makings of a Knight

Composed, performed, programmed & produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars

Lyrics Reproduced by the Artist:

Few people heard this artist’s previous record,
Those who did, may have understood it was about two things:
The nature of migration, not merely
Of the body but of the mind and spirit;
And the moment of epiphany, more
Specifically, the one which causes one
To realise that, in fact, one was wrong,
A concession which sends one back to the
Customs queue awaiting the border official
Of the spirit.

This one, on the other hand, if it were
To be said to be about anything, is of
The struggle to belong when one is so
Keen to self-actualise; the struggle that comes when
In order to belong, one need voluntarily limit the self;
When to belong is corrupt, when to
Belong is abject; when to belong requires
You to be persecutory, more narrow of mind,
To perform virtue and invoke it without
Exemplifying it; to play at rationality
Or enlightenment as a cover for prejudice.
It is a portrait, in other words, for those
Both great and sweet of mind and soul,
Whose essence of being, because they
Cannot both freely be themselves, and belong,
For they confound too many lines
And in doing so come to know too much,
Is loss; and yet who from this loss bask
In a character unified and deep where others’
Are shallow. This album is about the fact
That this was the sentence for true
Actualisation for the self in London at such a time,
And that in such pervasive gloom,
Isolation was common.

A Cup of Tea Bereft

"Like a Dostoyevsky novel you can dance to..."

Baroque-hop, London blend

^)^