I am an average guy, well educated, kind of a loner. Pretty common, for sure. My brain though is a bit weird. It has the tendency to visualize sensory stimulation. As a kid, this had an effect in my life. But me, being me, had to make something about it. I did not like being a victim of this curse. I can say now, after a long struggle through my twenties and the profound realizations that came to my consciousness, that this ‘mutation’ is a gift. I actually enjoy the visualizations whenever they happen and I am trying to make the most of it.
From writing short fictional stories and essays on meditation and consciousness (it is not what you think it is. It never is.) to writing reviews for metal albums that I enjoy. At times I embed my reviews in a story, other times I just write a few hundred words about my experience listening to an album. Almost always it results into something uncommon or even unhelpful to the reader. It is my belief that since everyone is able to listen to an album immediately, the common review is mostly obsolete. I don’t have to explain the music, since the reader can listen to it (worst case scenario, just a song or two) while reading the review. Isn’t that awesome?
Enter Phobocosm with this warning. If any of you think that death metal is decaying as a form of art you are absolutely wrong. I have seen in the recent years a slow but specific rise of storytelling through death metal. What was once swirling riffs and thick dark production is now a whole universe being expressed through the artists. Specifically, everything in this album works in favor of the listener if he/she allows his/her mind to sink into this ‘deprived’ creation.
This is musical architecture. Moving pillars of carved marble oscillate in semicircular foundations. They are built in stone trenches, standing on steel rails, rising high, up to a hundred meters into the dark, cloud bearing night. The ground was shaking with the pillars’s movement making the dust dance around my feet. A voice, from deep within the center of the grey palace was spreading around unto the heath. What is now before me may not be welcoming but it is attracting my decadent soul.
I approached the trenches and made a leap towards the inner circle. My foot got trapped under a small boulder and I fell with my face unto the dry gravel. I reached back and grabbed the boulder to release my leg. I saw that it was made of marble, a piece that probably fell off from one of the pillars after their eternal oscillation. The inscription on it was written in Latin, but I, being a scholar and an adventurer, could translate it.
The inscription was inconclusive, but it was enough for me to feel excitement. I found ideas that were not thought to be that old, at least not here, in the far south east of Macrochronus. The inscription read: ‘In a quest to find the first thought, the origin of intelligence, I had to bypass my primitive impulse, the circuitry of my own mind.’ I could not find a signature or a sign that could help me identify who wrote this.
It is known that the philosophy developed in Macrochronus had little to no connection with our values and our modern way of thinking. Skepticism was driven to an extreme, resulting in a holistic denial of everything known to man. That was the primal reason for the decay of this civilization. They were lost, forever in doubt.
I stood up and walked straight to the center, where the voice could be heard clearly. Through the short, in comparison, cubic stone structures behind the pillars I found my way walking on paved hallways. After a few hundred meters I reached an open circular center where the floor was steep. No roof above, just the night. The floor was enigmatically constructed into a perfect hemisphere and the deepest point was a dark hole. I wanted to reach down but I saw no other way than to try to climb down carefully, sticking my boots and my fingers into the joints between the polished stone. That was clearly a bad idea.
27 days I was trapped in darkness listening to devastating sounds. I had no other option other than just focus on them. Leading melodies were echoing to the walls beneath me and around me, creating a disciplined dance with the movement of the pillars. Repetitive and ritualistic, these melodies entranced my spirit with the great collisions of ancient gray riffs, pounding unto my body. And the voice? The voice was next to me, preaching with utter conviction: ‘There is no escape from this rotten state.’
I may be a free man now that I am writing these words, but my days of deprivation changed my perception of life. I find it difficult to concentrate on my work and my body is aching for this experience again. This great, gray, rasped ground of music made me fear people and their company. I think I am one with Phobocosm.
