katharineeastman
glad you're back and you're safe, I follow about a million musicians but there's only about two I ever really visit and pay attention to and who have anything worth saying, and you're one of them
mario1984
After a long silence, this extraordinary and versatile musician is back with a new beautiful album. An engaging mixture of various styles, from classical music to pop and jazz. Beautiful poetry and artwork. Thanks for this gem.
Steve Vance
The most versatile, skilled and musical ambient-composer in the world is back! Hard to believe one person could do all of this and then add poetry and artwork to the score of a mental movie.
The cockroach split at the seams, not with the crunch of chitin, but with the mutter of yellowed paper. Its pages, once filled with Karamazovian contortions of guilt and faith, now spilled like entrails from a philosopher's dissected soul. They littered the floor, a mosaic of cracked Cyrillic, sheer lunacy in miniature script.
Raskolnikov wasn't there to pawn his axe this time. His eyes bulged in his face, mirroring the bulbous sockets of the cockroach-book. Overhead, a single light swung, casting monstrous outlines that stretched and pulsed like the confessions of a dying man. He was the pawn now, the haggard king on a chessboard warped by fever dreams.
"Confess!" screamed the samovar, steaming a tortured specter against the peeling yellow wallpaper. "Confess the emptiness, the absurdity, the cruel irony echoing in the metaphysical precipice where God used to be!"
From the window, not the ghostly pallor of Petersburg, but the harsh glare of Beirut sun, merciless and indifferent. The minaret's call was an alien wail, an inconsonant melody in Raskolnikov's crumbling mind. He was Underground Man unearthed in the dank cellar of the old world.
"Porfiry Petrovich is a pigeon," he croaked, words tasting of rust and stale bread. The pigeon, fat and smug, perched on the cracked sill, one eye gleaming like polished onyx. "He circles, waiting for the scraps of my soul."
The cockroach twitched a single page fluttering. Not an insect any longer, but a grotesque origami bird, folded from the existential angst of a dead Russian. It took flight, a clumsy, papery thing, and soared straight at Raskolnikov's gaping mouth. He choked, swallowed the confession whole, felt it shredding his sanity from the inside out.
He was not redeemed. He was not punished. He was merely unmade, a smear of blood and ink on the cracked concrete, a footnote scribbled in the margins of a world going gloriously, horribly mad.
The paper bird dissolved in his throat, leaving the aftertaste of old churches and a lingering sense of dread. Every surface in the room now seemed alive, the cracked plaster throbbing with a pulse unseen, the warped floorboards whispering names he refused to recognize. The air thickened, not with dust and heat, but with the weight of untold crimes, sins carried over centuries, settling like a shroud.
"Is it enough?" Raskolnikov groaned, not at the pigeon, nor the samovar, nor the disembodied voices seething from the walls. He was addressing the ghost of Dostoyevsky himself, the specter now looming large, a crooked silhouette scribbled in the fading light.
The specter's laughter was a dry rattle, like bones clattering in a pauper's grave. "Enough? My dear boy, this is merely the overture!".
The room warped and stretched. Beirut bled away, replaced by a weird-looking street, slick with winter rain, a tavern spilling its warmth into the frozen night. A sad-eyed horse was lashed to a post, its ragged breaths plumes of despair in the icy air.
Raskolnikov was no longer himself, but a blur of impressions. He was the sweat-slicked brow of the pawnbroker, the glint of the axe blade, the splash of blood that stained forever. He was Sonya, weeping in a corner, her faith a tattered flag against the storm. He was the horse, ribs straining beneath the whip of a universe that cared nothing for suffering.
"I don't understand," he rasped, the words belonging to him and a hundred others.
"Understanding is overrated," the specter-Dostoyevsky cackled, a hand combing through his beard. "It's the visceral that matters – the terror, the hunger, the relentless crush of being against non-being. Embrace the exquisite torment, for it is the only truth we have!"
The room swirled again, this time a dizzying mandala of faces and places. The Devichkin girl, eyes wide with a terror that echoed through time. The Marmeladov family huddled in their fetid hovel, their hollowed eyes mirrors reflecting his own hollowed soul. And himself, over and over, reflected endlessly, a grotesque matryoshka doll of guilt.
He screamed, but the scream was not his own. It belonged to an infant, a soldier, a saint, a monster. It was the primal shriek of humanity, raw and unceasing, tearing its way out of history itself. And then, silence. Blessed, merciful silence.
When Raskolnikov blinked again, he was alone in his room, the cockroach a smear on the floor, the sun a muted ache through the grimy window. The specter was gone, the visions retreated, leaving him shivering, a hollowed-out shell filled with the doubling effect of a primordial chasm he dared not name.
He dared not sleep. Sleep meant dreams, and the dreams were worse than any waking torment. They were guilt-stained memories and outlandish prophecies - himself, chained in a Siberian wasteland, Sonya beckoning from the tundra's edge, Porfiry morphing into a vulture, circling endlessly over his emaciated form.
He stumbled through his day on autopilot. The streets of Beirut were a blur of traffic and voices meshing into a meaningless hum. He found himself in a mosque, drawn by the promise of some abstract peace. The coolness of the marble floor beneath his feet, the intricate geometric patterns on the walls, should have soothed but served only to amplify the chaotic scribbles gouged into his soul.
"You cannot pray away madness," rasped a voice from behind him. It was an old man, hunched in the dark, his eyes deep wells reflecting the flickering oil lamps. "Especially not the madness of a world without God."
Raskolnikov recoiled, but the words clung to him like cobwebs. "He did exist... once," he choked out, the confession sour on his tongue.
The old man smiled, a mirage of something close to pity. "Perhaps. But what is a God who allows a world like ours? A tyrant, playing with lives as a bored child torments ants. Is that the faith you crave?".
The question hung in the air, heavy as incense. Raskolnikov had no answer. His faith, like everything else, had been pulverized, leaving only a fine dust of despair.
Night fell again, a suffocating blanket of heat and dread. In his room, the cracked ceiling seemed to writhe, coalescing into monstrous shapes. He barricaded the door as if a flimsy obstacle of wood could keep out the horrors that lurked in his own mind.
The cockroach was back. Not a smear, not a paper bird, but a living, scuttling thing. An impossible thing, the size of his fist, eyes gleaming with malevolent intelligence. He shrieked, swatting at it, but it seemed to pass through his hand, a crawling, chittering ghost.
"Insanity," it whispered, its clicking voice a thousand fingernails on a chalkboard. "It has always been there, a writhing worm in the apple of your existence. You just didn't want to see".
He screamed until his throat bled, until the walls seemed to vibrate in sympathy, until the cockroach and the psychedelic mirages dissolved into a single, whirling void.
When dawn crept through the cracks in the shutters, Raskolnikov was still huddled in the corner, eyes wild, muttering nonsense rhymes about animal reincarnation and the best-kept secrets of the Druze faith. Something vital had broken within him, leaving him adrift in a sea of his own abysmal reflections, like a poet who's no longer able to coherently express himself.
Soon, the days blurred into a continuous delirium. He ate scraps scavenged from bins, drank murky water from puddles in the street. He spoke to pigeons, argued with apparitions that manifested on crumbling walls, screamed at the uncaring world around him. The Russian madman they would call him. He didn't mind the name, but would rather prefer the anonymity of the asylum.
How long did this fiasco last? apparently, not for too long.
They found him three days later. The fetid stench of his neglected body drew complaints from the neighbors, brought the buzzing flies and the indifferent authorities. He was still whimpering, nonsensical words slithering out from between cracked lips. The cockroach, a fat and monstrous thing, skittered away in the sudden burst of light.
The room was a testament to his descent – food wrappers, unidentifiable stains on the floor, walls a gobelin of frantic scratches he could no longer decipher. But something shifted in the overworked doctor's eyes when he saw the glint of something beneath the mattress – a worn book, its pages dog-eared and tear-stained. Dostoevsky. Perhaps the authorities were mistaken, the doctor thought. Perhaps this wasn't an asylum case at all. Perhaps this was a man who saw too much, a soul too sensitive for the monstrous beauty of the world.
Raskolnikov was never fully sane again. There were moments of lucidity, of a piercing gaze that seemed to cut through the banalities of the asylum, but mostly, he retreated into his private world. He spoke in fragments of scripture and pseudo-philosophical ramblings, his eyes mirroring some unseen horror.
The cockroach stayed with him. It became his confidant, his tormentor, his only connection to a world now viewed through the cracked lens of official madness.
One day, he was gone. Not escaped, not dead – simply not there. The bed was neatly made, the cell empty except for a single smudge on the wall and a solitary book lying open in the center of the room. The book, of course, was Dostoevsky. On a highlighted page, in Raskolnikov's jagged scrawl, a single phrase stood out, an epitaph of sorts:
And even if one had to live at the bottom of a hollow tree, just so one could see the sky, one would live.
credits
released April 19, 2024
Envisioned and Brought into life using www.udio.com
Fantastically versatile, uniquely fascinating and all-around exciting avant-garde music that reflects genuine outsider art aesthetics at its finest. Very recommended! Wings Of An Angel
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