Haunted & Sleepless

I finished writing/producing a song yesterday. After I completed, I slept that night still haunted by the feelings of desolation expressed within it. the tangibility of one's own inevitable destruction is thick at times. So thick that it torments & also calms, all at once. Submit to sleep. It is just a practice run. Be astonished when you wake on the morrow... For these days are numbered.

Most people never have this thought once. I exist wholly within this thought... now. Life has taken on a surreal level of tangibility. The first step in this direction was my recognition that I can only seem to remember backward to a certain point in time. How did I not exist before? Time is stupid and deceptive. A lie we tell ourselves to calm the soul. As incredible as the miracle of birth is the defect of death.

The ultimate acceptance of this fatal flaw is impossible.

the devious yet glorious condition of being fatally flawed

i compose music ultimately for fun. my desire is to create ideas that sound alive, uncompromised & uncensored. the thing is that i knew this before i properly understood the art as escapism thing. i knew it felt good, i just didn't know why. it took me a very long time to attain a rewarding result after very much practicing and dabbling with the process of experimentation and production. what kept me going was the fun factor. the initial works that i even remotely appreciate at this point are merely tolerable at best.

i've been following a largely process-over-product mentality. i like to work with the sound and see what kind of discoveries occur. when something is ready it comes to life in the music. with this, i've found that my work defies my desire to control it. i can't force it. all i can do is try and try, then suddenly i'm astonished when something works, and i feel it. i act as little more than a conduit for the origination of its existence. the songs are like offspring. i can see the pieces of me that were passed on, and also the new aspects that in turn influence and shape me a bit as time goes on. recently this has been very profound. my entire philosophy has flipped itself inside out once again recently, in a very interesting evolution that began in the 2nd half of this 6th year of my freedom when i started making breakthroughs in my music creation.

as for now i am not sure what else there is to say. through my music and large amounts of introspection over this past year, i have learned and for the first time fully understood the nature of what i am, and the nature of my finite existence. i fear death, as the true and final end. my existence has taken on this incredible quality of tangibility, as a result of this cognizance of my perishability. my ego is just a fading memory. my life is one second within an eternity of existence. i am constantly aware of the total insignificance of my actions. this state of mind actually makes every second immortally brilliant. i am not sure if this is exactly what the existentialists felt... it seems to be the exact balance between nihilism and pure "your life is yours to create" existentialism. art as 1 part escapism, 1 part naturalism. i am everything and nothing. this is the condition of being fatally flawed. the devious and glorious path to complete destruction

musical intro

allow me to attempt to present a biography of myself through the music of my history up to now.

i cannot really describe my actual origin. i lived a life of suppression & relative ignorance for most of my pre-adult years. the first music that i felt i enjoyed was some mainstream style shit i don't even want to name. just the music on the radio and you think you like it because its all you know. i also had a love for weird al from early on, mostly due to my social circumstances, but i can still appreciate it.

from there, i jumped into some rock/alternative types of music by my teenage years. i recall enjoying korn around the time of the release of issues, for example. from here i discovered more intense metal, in slipknot, then opeth. it was interesting how my interest in this music came to be long before i made my departure from the ultimate suppression that fully defined my life. i also discovered a bit of electronic music with trance nation, and a very passive interest in prodigy and propellerheads during my teenage years. my interest in creating electronic music began there. i must have been about 16 when i first began attempts to create music with the computer. now is also a good time to mention that my teenage years were largely defined by musical training (vocal, theory, piano -which I'd also had training on as a younger child-, and brass instruments) and computer hobbies (gaming, programming).

onward to the death of the old me.... my liberation from the grasp of the cult into which i was born and brainwashed toward subservience to god.

nine inch nails: sometimes called rock-industrial fusion. i cannot explain what it really is. this music provided me with something completely real, grounding me in a vital way. though i'd been aware of its existence at times throughout my life (as i was merely 5 when it all began), when i discovered it for myself, it set the stage for all i was to become over the next 6 years. the art pulsates with passion, fury, and inner desolation, all the ingredients present in me after 19 broken years of deception and resulting disconnection from reality & my own self in general.

khonnor/grandma: total indie electronica influenced by 8 bit and aphex twin. the first hardcore electronica i loved with all of my self. at the time i discovered it, the artist was a lowly middle school-aged fellow. this blew my mind. i stumbled on to it after some interest in trance music (staples were the trance nation collections, chicane, and the cynic project), and a resulting discovery of the netradio station epiphany, on which i first heard khonnor's work in the form of a few of his i, cactus works and a few from his initial grandma creations. the music is honest as hell while being innovative, captivating, and determined. Also not afraid to be light-hearted at times.

the knife: grandiose swedish music i can barely describe besides with the terms "soulful" & "synthy".

prog metal. see opeth and isis. indescribable juxtaposition of the essences of raw strength, determination, relentlessness, resilience, fragility, and pure beauty. prior to my discovery of these 2 brilliant collectives, i had some interest in metal for the pure aggression factor.. bands such as slipknot and killswitch engage fall into this more conventional metal category i've often enjoyed.

the death of the old me happened, but it took about 5 years for me to properly put it to rest. the final year was marked by attending 7 nine inch nails concerts. i felt this was the perfect punctuation to the process of my self re-invention, for which i don't think i would have found the strength to facilitate without nine inch nails.

there is no me, and there is no you either

imagine life as a plant or a micro organism. no senses, no choice, just riding the rails of chemical calculation, instinct the only thing you know. you know what feels good, you know what hurts, you just don't know why. your life is a series of calculations. It's essentially just a bunch of running programs. Linear functions with fixed responses to fixed sets of stimuli. Humans are essentially born this way, then slowly develop object permanance and the ability to make decisions BASED on incoming stimuli.

Still, follow all the facets of biological existence through to their natural conclusions, you still find death & decay the ultimate destiny. Free will or no free will, rot awaits us. Nothingness awaits us. Pure, unadulterated anti-existence awaits us.

So what is the purpose of free will? It seems that humanity collectively somehow saw the need to observe itself and have the option to OVERRIDE instinct, to sense the bigger picture and gain the element of choice in its existence. To go from a calculations with only a single variable to an infinity of variables which require evaluation and condition checking to determine ultimate action.

And still, our actions and thoughts only amount to single strands of calculation at a time.. somehow the neurons fire, unaware of each other, and we achieve consciousness. there is no such thing as multitasking. we obtain the illusion of sentience by calculating so fast that we feel we are participating in the process of existence in some critically special fashion. EGO--- we then invent the illusion, the lie of immortality. we think our choices can outsmart biology and defeat death itself.


What is the possible benefit of this? How did we go from the need to override instinct to the need to have a vital self. It seems evolution is turning itself around on this one. Humanity is now de-evolving thanks to the importance of individual identity. We accept lives of utter complacency. Unnatural, absurdly disconnected routines define daily life for most of humanity. Selling our existences off for literally nothing. Just wasting away in our passion-less squalor of assembly-line survival.

My own personal "Self" developed in a rather odd fashion. The best definition of myself that I could ever accept, was the question: "Because I exist now, how did I ever not exist like this [before]?"


The reason that our ego has become such a destructive force is that we fail to see that this world is what it is, and that this current life is probably all you get. Futility.. nihilism starts looking attractive. I did not ask for existence. But it is the prison cell I seem to have been given.


Pull back and look at the long view. Human history. Not a pretty picture. yet somehow, humanity continues to stumble upon certain values, common ideas driving innovation and development of societies. Are there ways to live that are better than others? yes. We didn't evolve alone. somehow, as a collective species, we decided that having some form of override, and further some form of communicating our decisions, would benefit us on the whole.

Now, it creates false wants. it has commercialized and divided us as a species. It drives us away from the very insticts we have honed over the course of this brutal and bloody evolution process. What can you do? You can't unplug. There are psychonauts out there who believe in transcendental ego death, but to me thats all stilll really unnatural. Humans were never meant to disconnect inward on a permanent basis, though we do have dreaming built into us I believe that's as far as it goes, for brain health.

Step back a paragraph.

We didn't evolve alone.

We somehow figured out that collaborating paired with decision making would better our species.

We decided to become social. In essence to replicate the process going on inside our minds into the process of comparing what we've each perceived, then using that as further basis for our actions.

As a human being, one is part of a big whole, and we don't want to see it. We can't fucking see it. We have created an almighty false self that blinds us to the reality of the necessity of our cooperation for survival. And as a result, we are killing our own fucking stupid selves off in a massive way.

The individual self is the definition of evil. The collective self is the definition of truth.
The consciousness of a single calculation lives and dies in a single instant.

The only consciousness that actually exists is through this collectivism. i truly feel i have no self. i've almost obtained a "constant ego death" state. every part of my being seems to be a stream of disconnected calculation strands I have to decipher, then choose how to respond.

Many "selves" then, observing each other together, then choosing action, is the definition of real consciousness. The idea of a single point, versus a plot of vast endless numbers of points defining a line, a plane, or a space, or a section of a specific space. it gains dimension as you add more observation points. One detail tells you virtually nothing. you need many stimuli to properly perceive.

The only way humanity can evolve is by re-embracing this. Collective perception and collective decisions & action. Assembly line existence leads to the ultimate and final death of the entire human race. Cooperation will lead to the establishment of an ultimate human nirvana, a collective, ongoing consciousness where anything is possible.