#1 – Music Announcement
Weekly Review #1 – Music announcement: Train Harder and Rebirth EP, Osamu Dazai and Yukio Mishima, Books bought over the New Year, Nietzsche and Sils Maria
Music Announcement
On New Year’s Eve I finished the next song that we will release. It is called Train Harder and is a savage satire on blokes competing in women’s sports. The main vocal had its finishing touches applied, I edited the acapella and sent the stems to Left Axis, the producer, to work on.
It will be our first release for quite some time. Both our situations changed at the start of last year. Neither of us had access to studio equipment. But by mid-year, we were both back up and running, and have been recording new songs.
We are putting things together for two forthcoming EPs, and also a full-length LP for the end of 2023. The next tune fits thematically with the three songs we have released so far. We will release it in February.
The 3 songs you’ve heard were recently censored by the rainbow-haired gender jihadist department at DistroKid, and so were axed from all streaming sites. I wrote about it on the thread below. They will be back up, as ‘The Problematic EP’ now with this extra track.
Those who bought any of the previous 3 songs on Gumroad will be sent a complementary copy of the EP via email upon release.
The track-listing for ‘The Problematic EP’ will be:
Train Harder
The full-length demo version of Train Harder is out now on my Patreon for subscribers to pre-listen to.
There will be more song previews available in coming weeks.
The Rebirth EP
Following this release, we are finishing off 4 songs for an EP of a completely different nature. They are based on Nietzsche’s philosophy, and reflect themes in his work: overcoming, the transformation of sickness into health, acknowledging the necessity of pain, fossilising the past and harnessing it as fuel.
They will all be accompanied by lyric videos and we want to shoot a proper music video for one. We will be releasing these from Easter onwards, and they will be collected as ‘The Rebirth EP.’
My main music goal for this year will be the completion and release of a full-length LP by December 2023. It will be called ‘The Problematic LP’ – unless I come up with a better name – and will be in the style of the songs you’ve already heard, addressing contentious ‘culture war’ issues. Videos will be released throughout the year.
Thank you for your continued support, and despite the wait, we hope you’ll like the new tunes.
Books
I finished two books this week. I highly recommend both.
The first was Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human.
It is the story of a man crawling through the void. From the very first page the scent of Dostoyevsky can be smelt. Like House of the Dead, the book begins with some notebooks being found, outpourings penned by a ‘madman’ called Yozo.
‘Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.’
A cauldron of nausea has hissed within him since childhood.
‘All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest.’
Human rituals perplex him. Human behaviours carry a falseness about them. Behind all the silhouettes of affection he sees only self-interest and deception. Life takes on a character of unreality. He clamours for a costume, camouflage, a mask that will allow his anguish to pass unheeded. He invents a persona, The Clown, and expends excruciating effort on activities as simple as learning to smile.
Backstage, behind the act, he conceals a bleak secret: a sexual abuse perpetrated upon him as a child by the servants in his father’s household.
‘To perpetrate such a thing on a small child is the ugliest, vilest, cruelest crime a human being can commit.’
He tells no one. Believing it his burden to bear, he buries his agony, cloaks his angst, and takes refuge in his role as The Buffoon, his one bulwark against the onslaught of human deceit.
‘As long as I can make them laugh, I’ll be alright.’
But his veil is pierced by a puny, scrofulous, little runt in his class called Takeichi. A dumb boy, a dullard, he too was an Outsider, an ‘onlooker’, shunted by the mass, and it was this quality that allowed him to identify a pretender.
As he matures, Yozo is tossed to-and-fro. He joins a Marxist sect, but privately regards its revolutionary pretensions as a farce. He befriends Horiki, a drunkard who leads him further astray down the road of drugs, alcohol and prostitutes. He scrapes by drawing cartoons for paltry pay.
Deeper he delves into the abyss, and as his spirit is vanquished and a wretched sadness festers in his breast, he meets an exhausted, poverty-stricken woman who offers a way out for the both of them: double suicide by drowning. She dies, he is saved.
The book belongs to the Outsider genre, alongside Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Camus’s The Outsider, Sartre’s Nausea, Ellison’s Invisible Man. Like the characters in each of these, Yozo is divorced from human society, yet utterly unable to detach from its confines.
He holds what Colin Wilson called ‘the Outsider’s fundamental attitude: non-acceptance of life, of human life lived by human beings in a human society.’ He ends up in a mental institution, where his disqualification as a human being is rendered complete.
In spite of its bleak, existential themes, No Longer Human is not a completely depressing read. Beneath the morbid rumination, there runs a searching current, a desire to escape the streams of nihilism and despair. The book speaks of trends more prevalent now than ever: mass isolation in the face of technology, the lure of delusion, disembodiment and self-destruction, and the attempt to gain control by any means necessary.
I also finished Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.
It is a beautiful short book with bursts of powerful prose. It tells the story of a sailor who is torn between land and sea, who feels at home in neither. He is unanchored, alienated by the earth and cast adrift by the waves.
Since childhood, he has harboured dreams of glory, of scaling the heights of personal excellence, but now at 33 he has still been unable to imagine what that even means. He meets a woman whom he swiftly falls in love with. Now he must choose whether he stays on land with her, and her son, or return to the ocean and continue his quest for greatness.
The woman’s son is besotted with him. His small gang of school rejects, Raskolnikovs, and Outsiders pedestalise the sailor. They see him as a Nietzschean superman, someone who might show them how to rise above the rabble.
But he does not live up to their estimations. Rather than a man of decisive action, he is gradually revealed to be naught more than a mere dreamer. And so, he must be punished. The book is about human decisions and their consequences.
Feeding the addiction
I went to London just before New Year, which is always an excuse to buy a batch of new books. This was my hoard.
My first stop was the big Waterstones, not far from Euston Square station, near the UCL campuses. I didn’t spend long in here as the place is a giant vortex. I went straight to the fiction section and bought Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask. I decided I will read all of his books; this had been recommended to me as one of his earlier works. I also bought Houellebecq’s Lanzarote – acidic commentary on European holidaying behaviours.
Next: Judd Books in Bloomsbury, a 10-minute walk away from the Waterstones.
This place has tons of cheap remainders, books that suppliers want to get rid of because they’re clogging up warehouse space, all brand new but at second-hand prices. Its ground floor section features fiction, music, literature, and art. It has a basement area crammed with tons of politics, history, philosophy, etc. both new and second-hand.
The last time I was here I spent a fair bit of money buying the first three volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History. This time I got Hemingway, McCarthy, and two lecture compendiums by Foucault.
The two Hemingway books were missing from my collection. The McCarthy books I haven’t read. And the Foucault books I bought because I’d previously got his ‘Punitive Society’ here which had a ton of interesting commentary in it relevant to ‘the culture war.’
The zebra crossings outside have been commandeered and transformed into trans crossings, splotched with the baby blue and pink flag of transgenderism, (which definitely doesn’t reflect any child-like stereotypes whatsoever). Here are photos I took a while back.
Down the road near the Brunswick centre is Skoob Books. You walk down a flight of stairs and reach another basement rammed with rows of wooden shelves. I saw a set of Karl Jaspers books on Philosophy in a display case but didn’t fancy forking out £75 for them. I came specifically to buy a book I saw last time but regretted not getting at the time: Guicciardini’s Dialogue on the Government of Florence.
Guicciardini was a diplomat for the Republic of Florence during the Renaissance, and was writing at the same time as Machiavelli.
I met up with my mate in Russell Square. We trekked past the British Museum, weaving through backstreets to evade the garrulous herds.
We walked past the London Review Bookshop, where I bought Houellebecq’s first novel, Whatever, another piece missing from my collection.
The next day I went to a shop called Any Amount of Books near Leicester Square on my way through the centre, and found two items I’ve wanted for a while: Plotinus – The Enneads, and Eatwell’s history of Fascism.
Plotinus established a school in Rome in the 3rd century. This book is a collection of his seminar notes, compiled by one of his students. He became the bridge between Platonism and Medieval Christianity, in that he proposed the fundamental “Oneness” of all being.
The Eatwell book is a general history of Fascism, from Mussolini to Mosley to MSI.
I also bought the Tate Modern’s book about Cezanne after having been to see the exhibition on him earlier that day.
I am writing a piece on the Cezanne exhibition, but for now here are two of the paintings I liked from it.
Nietzsche and Sils Maria
Nietzsche called Sils Maria and its surrounding landscape "this wonderful place upon which my gratitude wants to bestow an immortal name." Between 1879 and 1888, he spent nearly every summer here. It was where important parts of his most famous works were forged.
I highly recommend this beautiful piece on Nietzsche and Sils Maria by Lorelei. She has gathered a ream of stunning pictures, and woven it all into a virtual tour of this Swiss mountain treasure. I plan to finally visit it at some point this year.
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
– Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 341
Awesome news.
Can’t wait to hear the new track - will it be available on YouTube?