What is this article supposed to be? A puffy, preening panegyric? An encomium to my euphonious-ity? Or… an obituary for an immortal? For the labels in a museum exhibit say nothing of the piece. And the preface to a novel can be about as far off as plastic fruit is from a real apple. I have become a preface to myself.
But enough waxing opaque. I graduated from Drake in 2023 when the fountain of my life was still aflow with ambrosiac inspiration and moved forthwith to Nashville to “pursue music” (which is a threadbare phrase, for music is always pursuing us in some sense) and became embattled by a horde of material-world Russalka and sorta kinda maybe definitely got lost in the emetic, venomous, Joker-chemical ball pit of “reality” (which is probably more illusory than illusion itself) and finally, after moving a centimeter forward on the football field, have— I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! — released my debut album. When I say, “it defies adjectives,” I don’t condescend to somehow nauseatingly elevate it to the ivory tower heights of ineffability. Rather I mean, if I simply said, “it’s about ‘the alienation of the spirit’; ‘the temporary displacement of the axis mundi’; ‘the omnitemporality of henosis’; ‘divining the diaphanous Dip-N-Dot’;” it would sort of vivisect the whole thing, wouldn’t it? If you want to know about the North Pole, don’t watch “Planet Earth.” Go to the bloody North Pole. I suppose I’m chafing at “infomercializing” the album. The salt shaker is already salty enough. Don’t need to salt it more. By George, I can’t escape metaphor and allegory. Must be why I was such a pisspoor journalist.
As a “prelude” to the album, a month prior I published a quasi-memoir of the same name on Amazon, written while at Drake, with the subtitle, “Adventitious Apophatic Apathy: One Cynic’s Circumambulation of the Cesspool of Contrition.” “Yeesh” is right. What the dickens kind of hallucinogen was he on. But this all points to something very profound: in prose, I can hide behind the parapet of deeming my life “apocryphal,” positioning myself a Great-Wall-of-China-sized spoon’s length away from the hearth of the Earth Mother, but music affords no such bulwark. Music is direct, naked emotion.
In a few words, the pentamorphic nature of the album is as follows: you’re born. Suddenly, you are “there.” Not “fully” there, though. What does it mean to be “fully” there? Have you always been there? Will you always be there? What is “there?” Though there are many “pros” to ignorance and stultified self-conception, the music bucks against that. It’s like a beloved tour guide who, in the middle of your journey, vanishes, and, while you are weeping, whispers from the incorporeal void, “I’m still here. Don’t you trust?” Per the album title, it’s about the fatuity of a stigmata on a ghost. Of a “love-hate relationship” with no one. Of a swordfight with a hologram.
“The Negation of Nobody.” The double negative affirms.
Affirms what? That’s up to you, dear listener…
The album is a soiree of Martin Heidegger, King David, John Lennon, the Apostle Thomas, et al.
Colin Frier
