I'm in a little chock here..and very confused. Astral and arcane is a song that I wrote in ´1994-1999 and I've never heard of the mentioned band(or whatever it is) I don't know what you mean with the similarity(or theft as you call it) do you mean the intro for the song with the weired monk choirs and keys, or the riff that opens the track, the twin vocal thing in the begining? The first riff is actually a very old riff from the Varagatron days back in '94 and it came back to me in '99 as I started to write Cosmic... it was never used in Varagtron, as we didn't do any official recording.
Even if I had wrote the riff today I don't see the very bad thing about it......the western music is based upon a twelve tone system,(while for example chinese on five tones) that people twists and bends, changes harmonies and and chords within. The same patterns with diffrent structuring and rhytms, the same tones but changed sequence. It's all mathematics, and have been forever, the music we listen too are just the third state of music, if we see it through a philisophical perspective.
It's even present in some astronomical diagrams and systems, where Jupiter is the tierce, Mars the fifth..etc it's all mathematics. and of course from time to time you stumble across something that have been expressed before without knowing it. Every single song written now adays will always carry the mark of another song, but of course theese things aren't something that the composer think of or are aware of when composing, but the limitation of the system narrows it down to that.
And why should I copy someone else when I have myriads of melodies and harmonies, disharmonies and arrangement inside me? And by the way I've never heard of the band mentioned. So if you want to hear virgin tones we must create a vaster system.
mr V