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Mystic Tape Deck is the musical archive of the Nazilic Library—an evolving collection of songs, recovered manuscripts, impossible artifacts, and disputed histories surrounding the Cloak of Nazili.

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“But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.”

- Lord Byron

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Existence is absurd.

For many, the only armor against that, the means by which they discover and create real meaning in their lives, is through making music and art. That process, for them, serves as a type of existential validation. For many, it is the only lens through which they can look at this rotten beautiful world and make any kind of sense of it. The process surfaces meaning and from that meaning, purpose is derived.

When you take that process and dash it against jagged rocks of artificiality, reducing this process to something purely transactional, you expect those who value it as a real source of meaning in their lives to remain passively silent?

For others, it seems the end product somehow justifies the means, because you only experience the finished product, or the "artifact." The pretty picture, the catchy song you like to sing along to in the car.

These things obscure the underlying, more valuable portion - the process. So yes, it threatens people's livelihood monetarily, but much MORE importantly, it threatens the very means through which meaning is imparted upon their lives.

"I want to make pretty pictures" is not the urge an artist taps into to make art. It was not what drove the masters, and it is not what drives any authentic artist today. Similarly, producing "pretty pictures" is not what makes them an artist. It is their engagement with the process, which exposes them, lets them feel vulnerable for a moment, and enables the capture of a fleeting feeling or idea that haunts them, giving themselves a sense of real meaning because it can be shared and acknowledged by others.

The value of art and music is not located in the artifact. Sometimes the artifact is simply the evidence that the act occurred. The TRUE value is in the human being who BRAVELY confronted the absurdity of existence and chose, for a moment, to struggle with it - to turn an otherwise fleeting experience into something that could be expressed, understood, and shared. If we reduce that act to the transactional production of an aesthetically pleasing object, we haven't merely changed the tool. We have changed what the activity means.

We MUST imagine Sisyphus happy.