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A fish like Daemon swims vigorously
Through the aches in my body,
A product of unintegrated aspects
Of my psyche,
Segregated elements of the Self
In unlit, clammy rooms,
This shadow was begotten by an upbringing
Of existential doom.
Unwelcomed, unloved, chagrined,
The child is closed off
And constricted in an airtight box.
What was once fluid and free
Transmutes and condenses into something I've called
Stability.
Repressed emotions
Smothered like birds and insects
Trapped inside of a house
With too much insulation.
Their talons scratch,
And their beaks beat
At the walls in desperation.
They have no choice but to become
The Daemon fish,
The unnamed, the unvoiced and marginalized,
The ineffable (and inevitable) anguish.
And I feel them trying to escape
From the crown of my head,
The tension evaporating
Like water into the clouds.
The monster born
From my sense of madness
Has finally caught up with me.
The only thing that I can do
Is to let it devour me.
I let it devour me.
I let it devour me.
I am consumed.
I let myself be consumed.
I let myself give up.
I finally let myself give up.
Like a buzzsaw ripping
And slicing me into bleeding pieces,
It finally sets me free
From Stability.
The love comes pouring into me
Like thousands of years of dried up oceans
Being refilled.
Everything is reborn,
And more vibrant than the last time.
I finally let myself die,
And everything is reborn.
Everything is reborn.
Everything is reborn.
“You have noticed that truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs, but it is the same face, laughing or weeping. When people are already in despair, maybe the laughing is better for them, and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better."
-Black Elk (1863-1950)
Tracked and engineered throughout 2022 by the Red Haired Stranger. Second mix engineered and mixed summer 2022 by Benjamin Mendez (BendeZ) and released July 4th, 2022. Third mix edited and engineered by the Red Haired Stranger January 2023.
This song was inspired by various mystical experiences and the everyday and mundane alike, both waking and dreaming; it is also inspired by many other things, such as but not limited to: autism and the stigma that encircles it like possessed court jesters and ravens mocking and devouring it, the never-ending journey of integration and self acceptance, the fat grey clouds swelling in my skull until every thought and feeling is clogged with black bile, tesseracts, hyperspheres, and other biological, extradimensional matter, fellow patients at a psychiatric hospital, my great-great maternal grandmother and the sight I inherited from her, and much, much more!
That was a lot to read and to write as well. Babylon is falling again. The apocalypse is as inevitable and cyclical as time. In Hinduism, the process of time is associated with Lord Shiva. I am endlessly and deeply fascinated with historical mythology throughout the entire world and how it relates to the human brain and extradimensional physics.
The human brain is not confined to the skull; it is the central nervous system, the unconscious, the total body, and is even physically interconnected to all of existence. Human psychology is therefore not excluded from this complex, ubiquitous relationship of events. The intuition is perhaps one of the most primordial, most tangible elements in this universal and biological process. In years passed, I have experienced an unquestionable sense of it when I had the visions inspiring this song.
The first was a dream; I had found a small, translucent, cubic box with, inside it, a coagulated, solidified, mineral like substance which was somehow self evident to have been fluid in its original form. This was a piece of art named Child Stability. I already knew upon looking at it, that it was my intuition using its own lexicon to express how being conditioned to repress myself in childhood has affected my current psychological complexes.
In another vision, a sensation like a great and mighty fish swimming through the aching, crashing, somatic sea of fibromyalgia eventually reached the top of my head, multiplying and transfiguring into insects and birds trying to fight their way out. When I gave in to this overwhelming feeling, it occured to me that it had the same exact significance of the aforementioned dream, and I felt as though all of the archetypal creatures within me had been set free, still a part of me but at last able to breathe, uncontained by any trapped energy in my nervous system and its chronic pain.
The latter experience also repeated the phrase, "Child Stability" and assisted more directly to the writing of this song. Like the great first fire rescued by the water spider in Aniyunwiya storytelling tradition, the quiet and patient voice of the intuition brought back an ember of my life, and I experienced the feeling of rebirth. This is not the end of it, of course. Healing, like anything else, is a complicated and lifelong integration.
credits
released January 7, 2023
Xavier, "The Red Haired Stranger" - voice, high range PVC flute, middle range Navajo "wildcat" flute, 3 string bass guitar, drum programming, samples & loops
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