Why I Call My Music Ceremony
By Matthew O’Neill
I do not approach music as entertainment — but as a living relationship. For me, music is a form of prayer, a way of listening, a way of remembering an active form of deeply committed reciprocity. It is how I honor land, spirit, ancestors, and the more-than-human world.
When I create, I’m not composing in isolation — I’m in dialogue with place, with memory, with those who came before and those yet to come. Sounds arrive as teachings. Tones emerge like breathing. What results is not a song in the conventional sense, but a field of feeling — a vessel for presence, activation, relationship.
This is why I call my music ceremony. Because it is not mine alone. It is a participatory act of reciprocity. It is how I give thanks. It is how I mourn. It is how I listen. It is how I engage with the multidimensional nature of life.
In calling music ceremony, I am also resisting the extractive logics that sever us from the sacred. I am working to re-indigenize the act of creation — to return sound to its rightful place as a spiritual and ecological practice. To remember music not as content, but as context: a practice rooted in kinship, reverence, and care.
These songs are not just recordings. They are offerings. They are medicines. They are invitations to listen deeper — to each other, to the Earth, and to what still lives beneath the anthro noise.