The night is dark and the hour is late. To keep your promises, you must trudge the well-worn road homewards. Yet you cannot. Your limbs seem to fail you, to disobey you. Your conscious mind reviles their petulance but no protestations can divert your treacherous soul from its errant course. Staggering off from the pathway, you enter the wild woods. No signpost or lamplight guides the way here. In this dark realm, you can never know the route that leads to sanctuary. There is no use in trying to find your way, indeed it is only in abandoning that false sense of control that will reveal your deep and mysterious connection to this place. In each step a leap of faith driven by a restive itch that plots your dissociative course.
The woods are hazy, obscured by a sinister essence looming in the air like a nightmarish, suffocating plume of fog. Bated breath and trepidation, a guise created by intuition’s guidance. Trembling hands outstretched through the mist of the woods in a struggle to sustain an anxious balance. Pensive steps form a rhythm. Rhythm becomes a more vital pulsation, an organic momentum that somehow soothes the intensity of the unknown.
Keeping composure is no easy task while stumbling over roots and vines, through thorns and winds and all the while, blind. Head down, eyes to the ground, mustn't look up, mustn't let the all-pervading anxiety creep in and overwhelm you as you wander aimlessly in the gloom. As steps become stomps, anxiety transmutes into a tentative curiosity - what dark beauty may be glimpsed with a peek at the flora and fauna that scurry and slither about your determined march?
Temptation snares your eye for the briefest of moments and suddenly you find yourself gazing directly into the monotonous fog, and it too gazes back into you – something is ignited. It starts as a glimmering, shimmering spark that refines your focus with delicate art. Then before you know it your entire field of vision is radiating, vibrating a psychic otherness emanating. Dancing giddily with reckless abandon, the fog swirls lusciously in sophisticated swirls, waltzing with the wanderer who dared to go up against it, now in blissful rapture happy never to leave, the lost has been found in a fleeting reprieve.
Being too sure of your place leading this dance, you lose your footing on an unruly root, snapping out of the beauty to a scene more serene. The fog is clearing and in the new morning dew a sense of fresh purpose is communing with you, from the spores in the soil to the tips of the leaves, a vital enigma now shines through the trees. Home can be seen through a curtain of mist, the home fire burning a welcome bright light, looking back you can smirk at the intense ordeal, a reality humbled and a new path revealed.
released September 11, 2023
Emme Phyzema, bare bones 'songwriting' & acoustic instrumentation
Zenden Greenpurp, all psychedelic, ambient & atmospheric delights ( zendengreenpurp.bandcamp.com/album/quadrillionth )
Kozmoz Korfluxia, drums & percussive items (who is in band Zenden Greenpurp, linked above)
Ben Spees, all mixing & mastering (who just released this ridiculously stunning album with his band Mercury Tree: themercurytree.bandcamp.com/album/self-similar )
Bridgette Barnes, album art (who has a top secret avant noise project that shall remain unlisted, but also loads of captivating art here: bridgettebarnes.com )
experimental avant-folk avant-prog folk prog rock rock in opposition Columbus
.jpg)
