Interview with Arcane Voidsplitter for Cthulhu Through Amplification, conducted by Cathal Rodgers
I recently picked up the Arcane Voidsplitter album from Aesthetic Death and it was a couple of listens before I managed to make the connection to Until Death Overtakes Me. I seem to remember that you had taken a sabbatical from music a couple of years ago.. so what can you tell me about the decision to step away from music and your return under the new moniker of Arcane Voidsplitter?
At the time the decision was taken in response to online feedback to what I was doing getting out of hand. There was a (in my mind) complete lack of respect towards my work, disguised as ‘criticism’ and there were increasing threats. At one point something related to game programming I was doing online was sabotaged and I connected that act to the same people who were sending all kinds of threats my way. The plan was to lay low for a couple weeks and then start making music again under a different name, but instead I ended up putting all my energy into my programming projects, which saw some success so I stuck with that for a couple years.
I spent a lot of time thinking about my music and realised that which made me take a break was just one small aspect. A lot of things weren’t working out and I was spending too much time and effort on music related matters that really didn’t help my own projects forwards. Looking back, it seems I was perpetually tired and angry back then. During 2015 I gradually began exploring the idea of making Until Death Overtakes Me (UDOM) material again. I had a good look at my old way of work and then spent a fair amount of time trying to come up with a more efficient workflow. It became apparent right away that my new way of working was a vast improvement. I now work in a more relaxed manner, spend less time than before yet am more productive. Best of all, I was enjoying creating music again. That gave me a boost and over a short period of time I went from spending all my time programming computer games back to making music.
Next to UDOM, I had several side-projects with varying degrees of importance. While I knew I’d miss some of them, I didn’t want to try reactivate them so I could focus on UDOM. As it tends to go, I experiment a lot with sounds and this gives rise to new projects. So again, I have a bunch of these. With UDOM I create more introspective material, and the subject matter of songs is to some extend personal. I’ve always had an interest in science-fiction, and during my break I managed to put a lot of that in these small games I built, but I also continued work (again) on a story set in a fictional futuristic universe. I wanted to have such elements my music as well, and the obvious idea at first was to incorporate them into UDOM but it didn’t work out. The next best obvious idea was to start a new project, which would give me the opportunity to also create a new sound from scratch to match the concepts rather than try to make them fit in the existing UDOM sound. While the name Arcane Voidsplitter (ARCV) is taken from a small arc within the story, the project deals with very broad concepts. Instead of for instance exploring a certain period of time or a character from the story, I wondered what the universe or reality as whole might sound like. I could imagine that sound in my mind easily, but it still took a bit to actually create it.
I tend to determine the level of success of a project or a song by how much I enjoy it myself. In the end, I primarily make this music for myself. ARCV is one of my favourite projects – I’ve listened to it a lot and no doubt will continue to do so. UDOM is still my main musical outlet, but ARCV allows expression of things that would never work under UDOM, at the same time it also adds a dimension to the story I’m working on.
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“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.” - George R.R. Martin
I'm intrigued by your suggestion that you can quite easily imagine how Arcane Voidsplitter should sound, but it takes a bit of time to actually create it; so I'm interested in learning a little more about your approach to making music. Many artists and musicians speak of how it can feel as if they are not in full control of their own creative endeavors. To quote David Bowie; “Strangely, some songs you really don't want to write. I didn't like writing 'Heathen'. There was something so ominous and final about it. It was early in the morning, the sun was rising and through the windows I could see two deer grazing down below in the field. In the distance a car was driving slowly past the reservoir and these words were just streaming out and there were tears running down my face. But I couldn't stop, they just flew out. It's an odd feeling, like something else is guiding you, although forcing your hand is more like it.”
Perhaps you could tell us a little more about your creative processes? How do you go about actualizing the sounds you hear in your head? Would you consider yourself an architect or a gardener? Are you doing all the work or do you ever feel as if something is guiding you / forcing your hand?
Over the years I’ve been creating music I’ve tried to better understand creativity. As it is the source of my work, or rather the seed, better understanding and controlling it should result in more output. I’ve only had a tiny bit of success in that, but it does help.
I like to think of creativity as a force similar to evolution. It’s chaotic, purely random. It combines all known elements randomly and the results that are stable persist and might become the building blocks of yet something else in the future. Whereas evolution has no filter since it’s a process without intelligent guiding, the own (subconscious) mind serves as a filter. It looks all the things this force in the back of my head has created and decides what is good and what isn’t. If something is deemed good, it gets pushed to the forefront and that’s when I become aware of it. This is how ideas form.
Before my hiatus, I had the habit on acting on such ideas right away, but I’ve come to develop a kind of sense that predicts whether I can let it simmer a bit longer so to say or not. At one point I might write a couple things down, create a short section of a song, then let it sit for a bit. Going back to it once in a while I find that this process in the back of my head has continued working on it and might have provided me with a few more ideas I could add to what I have so far. Then comes the point where I feel I’ve received everything, and then it’s up to me to put in the work to finish the song. This is usually how more complex songs, mainly for UDOM, come into existence. The length of this process, the number of steps in it, can vary a lot.
I feel that I’ve grown capable of influencing this process a bit – I don’t have to sit around and wait until ideas pop up. I think it has to do with turning creativity into a habit, rather that something that happens by accident. I also work in the same environment all the time, according to schedule of sorts and I believe that subconsciously, a part of me associates how I feel and where I am as a trigger to force the creative process to work harder. The result is that I know I can create music whenever I want. This confidence feels great, but also seems to further enhance the creative process.
This all works fine when creating songs for a project that already has a sound. Creating a new sound is different. I can imagine notes, melodies, texts clearly, but sound is far more difficult to define. Heavy, droning, atmospheric, cosmic, these things will be different for every person. A sound in my mind is a collection of feelings, images, scenes. I can feel the drones, the heaviness is such that I’m carried on its waves through a (mostly purple for some reason) nebula with a pulsing star as a heart at its centre. The star sends shock waves through the dust, creating complex interference patterns, changing the shape of the nebula. I’m witnessing something sacred, majestic (hence the choirs – I hear them, but don’t see them). Perhaps there’s a spaceship there (the Voidsplitter) who had pointed a device at the star causing it to pulse like that – it might go nova. Specific to ARCV, this scenery is influenced by a science-fiction story I’ve been working on, so it’s not something entirely new that suddenly appeared in my mind.
Only a few things in this image hint at sound (drones, heavy, choirs), so I started with that. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve made my workflow more efficient, and this is where it helps me the most. Creating a base with heavy guitars, droning synths and choirs takes almost no time. I can’t do much with it, but the next step in the process will build on this and might need more instruments or other sounds I’ve created before – being able to add these in automatically and almost instantly really helps since now I’ve reached the point where I have to sculpt the sound such that listening to it brings up the images and scenes I had in my mind to begin with. There’s a fair bit of trial and error in this, adding sounds I made before, or just instruments, removing them again, tweaking the balance between all the elements and on and on. Any sound has the power to evoke imagery of itself, perhaps even influence what I first saw. So the sound I’m creating evolves, but so does the original imagery, they grow towards each other until a point is reached where I know I’m as close as I’m going to get.
In this process I always end up creating songs, or sections of them, but sometimes I have no melodies to start with, so I might pick something that already exists (fair bit of a Bach chorale, BWV 1, was used in the creation of the ARCV sound, and some of that persisted in the first album). For the second album, since the sound existed, I could start exploring what was possible with it, what other imagery or ideas could be created with it, and so grew the idea of Voice of the Stars. In creating this album, I did tweak the sound a little – it’s something I do with all my projects, while the sound remains static within the scope of an album, between albums I do change it, even if only in tiny amounts.
So, I’m a gardener for the most part. It’s fun to dive in and see where you might end up. It’s also more relaxing and the process feels more natural and that makes it all the more enjoyable for me. But sometimes I have a clear idea of what I want to create and will not divert from it. If I set out to make an album for UDOM for instance, I know what it will be about and how many songs I’ll need and what each song’s concept will be. The individual songs might still grow in a more natural way, but they must stay within the bounds I’ve set up for the album. UDOM is also much older than ARCV, I know it better, so I might feel more confident knowing that setting up bounds will not hinder the creativity – it’s a different way of creating things, but it’s good to experiment not just with sounds and music, but also with how one creates them.
In a few cases I’ve also experienced what David Bowie describes. It feels as if some things just need to be created and I just happen to be the vessel through which that needs to happen. At that point, there’s not much else I can do than guide the process, let it happen. It can be incredibly productive – the base of the instrumental UDOM album ‘Flow of Infinity’ was created in a manner of days, but it still took more than a year of refining that base to finish it. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a fully external force driving me – I believe it’s the subconscious, and who knows how deep and far it goes, what is in there. Perhaps these were songs that existed in an advanced state and I simply wasn’t aware of them, and one day they where pushed to the forefront. I feel it’s important to keep an open mind for any avenue through which one’s own ideas might come.
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“We learn as much (and sometimes more that's useful) from our fictional role models as we do from the real people who share our lives. If we perpetually reinforce the notion that human beings are somehow unnatural aberrations adrift in the ever-encroaching Void, that story will take root in impressionable minds and inform the art, politics, and general discourse in anti-life, anti-creative, and potentially catastrophic ways. If we spin a tale of guilt and failure with an unhappy ending, we will live that story to its conclusion, and some benighted final generation not far down the line will pay the price.” - Grant Morrison
You've mentioned the science fiction story you have been working on, so I'm interested in learning a little more about your relationship with science fiction. I have been a fan for as long as I can remember; and I tend to find myself drawn more towards the dystopian end of the genre spectrum. I often attribute that with it aligning more with my deep-rooted propensity and proclivity towards a nihilistic disposition. But in recent years I have come to wonder whether that nihilistic disposition was not developed and nurtured by my early exposure to dystopian science fiction?
I'm here reminded of a quote from Tom Cheetham, from his discussion of the work of French philosopher and theologian Henry Corbin; "Your mode of being alters the mode of being of the world around you. Your mode of presence defines what can be present to you." So perhaps I have merely conditioned myself to the pessimism I feel towards the ultimate fate of the human race? Perhaps my consideration of the dystopian trajectory of modern culture is merely an erroneous narrative I have fallen into rather than an objective observation of what the world is really like? Neal Stephenson has spoken of his growing tiredness with the whole dystopian futures element of science fiction; "I don't think it's serving the same kind of the social purpose it might have served at one point - to be depicting dystopias all the time - and I think that it might be more functional and more useful to think about ways that we don't end up with a dystopia."
In a world which sees differing beliefs and ideologies constantly engages in verbal warfare, it has become obvious that we have become enmeshed in a toxic and virulent narrative, and what is needed is for a simple edit or re-write of the story. Jeffrey Kripal believes that our modern world needs better science fiction: "We’re all, kind of, arguing about what the narrative is, and I’m just like saying, “Hey, okay, let’s wake up. Let’s admit we’re arguing about the story and let’s tell a better story.” That’s the source of the quote you put up there earlier. This is the ‘better sci-fi’ line. We need better science fiction, not because one’s true and one’s false, but because we’re living in a set of stories that are pretty nasty."
So what can you tell us about your own preferences within science fiction. And what is it you are attempting to say with your own work? What are your views here of the ideas put forward by Morrison, Corbin, Stephenson and Kripal? Do you think that better stories and better science fiction might lead to better cultures and societies; or do you see anything of that sort of social purpose, function or use for science fiction?
It’s been a good while since I’ve read anything science-fiction. First of all, the time generally isn’t there to read, and secondly I seem to end up reading more fantasy over science-fiction, probably because I haven’t really found much that appeals to me. I’ve been collecting a list of interesting books for a while now, but am yet to get to the point to actually find those books and read them.
Those I’ve read are mostly hard science-fiction, primarily by Larry Niven and Arthur C. Clarke. I think it began with me having an interest in astrophysics while still in school, reading about various exotic theories, then wondering what it might be like to live in a reality where such theories were true and mankind had the capabilities to go out into space and discover even more exotic stuff.
The appeal to me of science-fiction in general over fantasy lies in it being something that’s yet to happen. Fantasy often takes place in times similar to the middle ages (or past times in general). No matter how immersed I become in a fantasy novel, the fact it’s fiction is inescapable. When I finish a science-fiction novel, there’s the idea that what I read might still come to pass (no matter in how small a part). Perhaps because of that I never cared much for dystopian or apocalyptic stories. Reading is still a form of escapism, and I actively avoid works that are too much like present-day society and the way I think society will evolve in the near future. I don’t need to read about it because I’m exposed to it already and I don’t like it very much.
In my own work I don’t set out to dictate some or other moral lesson. At the base it’s quite simple : I just want to create an interesting story. Something one can get immersed in, where one can step away from real life for a bit and take part in an alternative reality that’s not as grim, but also not too overly optimistic. There’s some subtle criticism on current-day society, kept low-key so that it doesn’t distract or become an element that could overshadow the story itself.
Mass media in any form has often been a tool for those that control them to put messages out. If something becomes popular enough, the main reason why it attracts attention often ends up being copied by others in an attempt to catch some of the exposure for themselves. You can sometimes clearly see these trends come and go in more commercial oriented media, like a subgenre of novel suddenly getting popular and various writers putting out stories in that genre. And in that blind pursuit of fame and money, messages get copied along unintentionally and that can really influence the targeted audience on a specific subject. Sometimes I get the feeling people are putting things like this in motion just to see what kind of fallout they can generate. Release a rumour on some social media platform, targeting this or that group, see how people respond.
In sense you could say an artist should pay more attention to the contents of their work, but artists are people too and occupy every shade of the moral spectrum. What one might find morally apprehensive could be considered the norm by another. Art and those that create it don’t stand above non-artists – they’re regular people, too, with the same faults and virtues. To imply that one genre of one type of medium could influence society seems a bit much, and as long as money continues to dominate every aspect of society, I doubt many would risk what they have for career to attempt to change society.
I don’t read enough to have seen a focus on dystopian science-fiction, but if I look at political evolutions I can’t but see a dystopian future lying in wait. A lot of people seem to worry about where we’re headed, but also seem convinced they’re incapable of influencing the near future. An author writing about the matter might show off his worries, subconsciously perhaps, or they might actively be trying to warn people. I find it difficult to believe that science-fiction by itself might be reinforcing some kind of fatalism in people at large, though I can imagine some people being influenced to varying degrees. Perhaps people seek out such stories to validate their own views without anyone challenging them. News media or anything on TV and social media, controlled by political or capitalistic interests are far bigger dangers in my mind than one genre of literature.
That doesn’t meant artists should stop trying to produce works displaying a better future, or creating heroes with positive traits. Art does influence people, perhaps on a larger scale than I’m convinced it does, perhaps enough to make a difference either way. On the other hand, I’m not convinced it’s art’s purpose to do this. It’s a noble idea to stop displaying or glorifying certain things in popular media. As an example, these days protagonists are far less likely to be smokers as some creators worry that they might entice young people to pick up smoking, mimicking their fictional heroes. Such a decision might come subconsciously as well when a creator learns about the dangers of smoking. But it’s a decision each artist should make for themselves. Going as far as saying that an entire medium should no longer talk about this or that subject imposes a potentially significant limitation on the art form itself.
I guess it depends on how an individual artist sees oneself regarding their value within society or humanity. Someone setting out to create a character with the idea that they’ll influence their audience in some or other way feels to me like going past noble and towards arrogance, making it seem as if the author thinks their audience is of low intelligence and malleable. That could have the opposite effect, if the audience catches on to what the creator is trying to do.
We have a lot of scepticism towards the science surrounding climate change these days. What if one medium as a whole was to focus on scientist protagonists working hard to find solutions, glorifying the idea of doing the right things for this specific problem? I think people would grow tired of the preaching soon enough. A more subtle approach might work, letting ideas enter the audience’s subconscious, but that takes time. And since artists are still regular people, you’d have deniers amongst them. On top of that it’s my impression those on the darker end of the moral scale are generally more motivated to attempt to influence others to their line of thinking.
While I’m convinced the entire body of art created over mankind’s history shaped what we are today to an extend, and influenced the point where we’re at now in our mental evolution, I don’t see any subset of contemporary artists strong enough to influence society in a significant way and within a reasonable time frame.
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“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.” - Elizabeth Gilbert
Despite all the differing projects you have put your name to over the years, most of them seem to share a heritage or tradition tied to the funeral doom / drone end of the spectrum. So I'm interested in what it is that attracts you to that particular form of musical expression? I have long been intrigued by the insight of Carl Jung that people don't have ideas, ideas have people. Elizabeth Gilbert takes flight with this concept in her book Big Magic: “I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”
Do you have any insights into why you seem to be particularly drawn to funeral doom / drone, or why funeral doom / drone seems to be attracted to you? What do you think it is about SVC that has the idea of funeral doom /drone attempting to make itself manifest through you?
I’ve never been attracted much to psychology and much less to a spiritual way of looking at matters, which is the impression I get from Elizabeth Gilbert’s quote. Science doesn’t explain everything, though (perhaps one day), but I’ve often found a simple logic in explanations it does provide. When it comes to ideas or creativity, many people seem to be looking for ways to make it work for them. Books like Big Magic, while I haven’t read it, appears to provide the author’s way of dealing with or acting upon ideas. There’s always a challenge in trying to put into words something as abstract as ideas or creativity. I think any creative person has to get to know themselves to better understand where their own ideas come from or how to influence the flow of ideas, recognise them for what they are, and so on. This is a process that takes time. Big Magic could provide someone with a starting point, but they’d have to be open towards its spiritual approach. I’m a sceptic, so the book would never resonate with me.
I like how Stephen King approaches it. He likens stories to artefacts or relics, they exist with a certain substance and aren’t created from scratch by the artist, but it’s then up to the artist to excavate with care to preserve or uncover as much detail as possible. When an idea comes up in my mind, it’s never a single note or word, it already has a certain substance, but to me it’s nothing more than a starting point, and it’s also the only thing I get for free, the rest of the work I have to do myself. This sudden appearance of ideas, especially when they’re great or already full of substance and details, is often a thing of magic almost. Chances are good any song or story created is something entirely new, something that didn’t exist before, and that is an amazing thing to consider. To put that into words however, isn’t easy. You could say it’s magic, or something on another level of being. Science doesn’t have too many explanations yet for what goes on in the mind, but I’m convinced it’s all a product of my own mind.
In a sense, science put me on the path to doom. It provided me with scepticism at first towards the catholic ideas I was exposed to at school, things like gods, heavens and such. Trying to look at reality in a logical manner, and aided by my understanding of various sciences at the time, mostly astrophysics, I ended up with the conclusion that reality is finite and closed-off. No afterlife, no gods. It’s an assumption, I have to admit, but almost 25 years later I still stick with it – I see a logic in it.
In my view of reality there’s no physical border somewhere in space one might crash in to at one point, but as there’s a limit to the amount of energy within it, so is there a limit to how far explorers would be able to go. Reality is also that which allows us to exist, so while we exist we must be part of it, within it, so leaving it shouldn’t be possible. Reality in my view thus has an end point in time, and is inescapable, so no hint of all that happened within it can exist outside of it, providing no proof of it ever having existed to whatever lies outside. This idea can also be brought back to a much smaller scale, to one lifetime. Given enough time, there comes a point where there’s no proof left of an individual life ever having occurred. Reality at that point would have looked the same with or without that life. Thus, life is pointless. At the time, this realisation made me quite miserable and lethargic. I think that when I discovered doom metal some years later, my state of mind made me feel connected to it more than any other music genre. I was already making music myself around that time, but slow and nasty stuff at times, like how I felt. Trying to clean it up, putting some beauty in it must have been the turning point, at which I realised it could help channel what I felt into something constructive. I listened to a fair bit of black metal, darkwave and ambient, and the mix of those three provided the original components of my music. I expanded upon and experimented with that starting point, and in a sense, I’m still doing that. I definitely didn’t set out to create funeral and drone, as I didn’t even know such genres existed.
I’m still to this day convinced that life, or reality as a whole has no purpose. But instead of remaining fixed on the thought that my life is pointless, and by extension anything I do, I try to return to the original idea of reality as a whole being without a point that I can see. If the nature of reality is nihilistic, and we are a product of that reality, then having a nihilistic mindset is in a sense the same as having a neutral, logical point of view upon reality.
If reality is finite, it’s also of finite complexity, making it theoretically possible for it to be fully understood one day. Full understanding of something allows to predict what happens in the future. It’s as if all of reality can be turned into a single, complex mathematical equation, with time as a variable. That in turn implies that for a given starting situation, all that will happen within that reality is already set in stone the moment it’s created. So no free will and all that. Specific ideas are destined to end up with certain people, or people are destined to have a certain idea. Depending on how one looks at it, ideas have people or people have ideas – it’s the same thing.
I’m well aware that none of this is science, but it remains a fascinating matter to reflect upon. Part of me likes the clean logic of the finite reality assumption, part of me hopes to be proven wrong.
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Question Five: It often perturbs me when I read of artists and musicians who claim that album and song titles are not of that much importance to them. For me names and titles are probably of equal importance to the music; they can draw me in to music that might otherwise be somewhat average, and conversely poor track titles can drive me away from even the most exceptional music. So I'm interested in your thoughts and approaches to track titles and the importance you place upon them.
Your album Voice of the Stars contains 3 tracks with the titles; Arcturus, Betelgeuse and Aldebaran. What can you tell us about your choice of these 3 specific stars and the particular voice they have within the universe you are creating with Arcane Voidsplitter?
The importance of titles varies greatly, and over time their meaning or their link with the music can get lost. Just as I have a list of musical ideas, I have one with bits of texts, and many entries are just single words, things I wrote down because at the time they resonated with me on some level. Every so often I have to go through this list and remove entries because I no longer know or feel why they were there.
It happens I’m working on some music and have no idea what it is or can be about. In such cases I check this list of words and texts while listening to the music and see if something matches. When that happens, the combination of music and concept at times allows the music to grow and fully embrace the concept and expand upon it.
There’s some symmetry in Voice of the Stars in how the music and the songs are laid out in time. Arcturus and Aldebaran are tied together through this symmetry. In reality, both are stars with mass in the same order of magnitude (both a bit more massive than the sun). This is interesting as it allows to imagine a star system similar to ours centred around such stars. But these two have much larger diameters (25 to 45 times that of the sun).
Aldebaran always had something of a dark mysterious nature to me, no doubt thanks to H. P. Lovecraft’s works. If you pronounce it slowly, it even sounds ominous, just like Arcturus. That’s a dimension that’s lost in the music, but often enough I collect words just because of how they sound, what rhythm they have, as there’s always the opportunity to embed that into music.
I knew Aldebaran had to be part of the album early on, but Arcturus was decided later. I looked through a list of stars and paid attention to physical properties and the quality of their names. Due to the symmetry there needed to be some similarities between this star and Aldebaran. Arcturus fit best from those stars I checked. I then decided to make Aldebaran the last song because the name comes from Arabic, which (supposedly) translates into the bright follower, which seemed fitting for a closing song.
Betelgeuse is an enormous star, in the sun’s location it would reach past Jupiter. Imagine living on a planet around a star that’s expanding to the point it touches or even absorbs this planet. One of my (unreleased) short stories features an alien from a planet in orbit around Betelgeuse. The species evolved to be able to survive the expansion of the star.
Finally, there’s a link between the stars and the Voidsplitter ship itself. This is something that will be explored in greater detail far into the future of my story, so I don’t want to spoil too much of it. Within the story, reality is built up entirely out of energy, which occurs in three forms : energy and matter as we know it, and space, which is the matrix on which this energy and matter latch to. Energy and matter can only go where the matrix exists and the matrix is also that which defines the number of spatial dimensions. There exists an alien species, called Rift Spirits, made up out of energy who can influence this matrix, which is a necessity else they’d just evaporate. They basically warp space to contain themselves, but they’re just as content to take up residence in large masses, such as stars and galactic black holes. The people who find the Voidsplitter (and similar, smaller vessels) identify it as a weapon, aimed at the central black hole of a nearby galaxy. They assume some alien society living there must have been at war with the builders of the vessels, and the Voidsplitter was tasked with destabilising the black hole to the point of causing that entire galaxy to be torn apart. Instead, they discover later on, the vessel was aiming at the Rift Spirit living inside the black hole.
I’m well aware that a lot of the background info is not present in the music, but I’ve been putting small hints in album and song titles for as long as I can remember. Sometimes these hints just point to concepts present in my other releases, but most of them point to this central storyline. The hope is that I one day manage to finish this story and that people who have been into my music since the start discovering how it’s all tied together.
I recently picked up the Arcane Voidsplitter album from Aesthetic Death and it was a couple of listens before I managed to make the connection to Until Death Overtakes Me. I seem to remember that you had taken a sabbatical from music a couple of years ago.. so what can you tell me about the decision to step away from music and your return under the new moniker of Arcane Voidsplitter?
At the time the decision was taken in response to online feedback to what I was doing getting out of hand. There was a (in my mind) complete lack of respect towards my work, disguised as ‘criticism’ and there were increasing threats. At one point something related to game programming I was doing online was sabotaged and I connected that act to the same people who were sending all kinds of threats my way. The plan was to lay low for a couple weeks and then start making music again under a different name, but instead I ended up putting all my energy into my programming projects, which saw some success so I stuck with that for a couple years.
I spent a lot of time thinking about my music and realised that which made me take a break was just one small aspect. A lot of things weren’t working out and I was spending too much time and effort on music related matters that really didn’t help my own projects forwards. Looking back, it seems I was perpetually tired and angry back then. During 2015 I gradually began exploring the idea of making Until Death Overtakes Me (UDOM) material again. I had a good look at my old way of work and then spent a fair amount of time trying to come up with a more efficient workflow. It became apparent right away that my new way of working was a vast improvement. I now work in a more relaxed manner, spend less time than before yet am more productive. Best of all, I was enjoying creating music again. That gave me a boost and over a short period of time I went from spending all my time programming computer games back to making music.
Next to UDOM, I had several side-projects with varying degrees of importance. While I knew I’d miss some of them, I didn’t want to try reactivate them so I could focus on UDOM. As it tends to go, I experiment a lot with sounds and this gives rise to new projects. So again, I have a bunch of these. With UDOM I create more introspective material, and the subject matter of songs is to some extend personal. I’ve always had an interest in science-fiction, and during my break I managed to put a lot of that in these small games I built, but I also continued work (again) on a story set in a fictional futuristic universe. I wanted to have such elements my music as well, and the obvious idea at first was to incorporate them into UDOM but it didn’t work out. The next best obvious idea was to start a new project, which would give me the opportunity to also create a new sound from scratch to match the concepts rather than try to make them fit in the existing UDOM sound. While the name Arcane Voidsplitter (ARCV) is taken from a small arc within the story, the project deals with very broad concepts. Instead of for instance exploring a certain period of time or a character from the story, I wondered what the universe or reality as whole might sound like. I could imagine that sound in my mind easily, but it still took a bit to actually create it.
I tend to determine the level of success of a project or a song by how much I enjoy it myself. In the end, I primarily make this music for myself. ARCV is one of my favourite projects – I’ve listened to it a lot and no doubt will continue to do so. UDOM is still my main musical outlet, but ARCV allows expression of things that would never work under UDOM, at the same time it also adds a dimension to the story I’m working on.
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“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.” - George R.R. Martin
I'm intrigued by your suggestion that you can quite easily imagine how Arcane Voidsplitter should sound, but it takes a bit of time to actually create it; so I'm interested in learning a little more about your approach to making music. Many artists and musicians speak of how it can feel as if they are not in full control of their own creative endeavors. To quote David Bowie; “Strangely, some songs you really don't want to write. I didn't like writing 'Heathen'. There was something so ominous and final about it. It was early in the morning, the sun was rising and through the windows I could see two deer grazing down below in the field. In the distance a car was driving slowly past the reservoir and these words were just streaming out and there were tears running down my face. But I couldn't stop, they just flew out. It's an odd feeling, like something else is guiding you, although forcing your hand is more like it.”
Perhaps you could tell us a little more about your creative processes? How do you go about actualizing the sounds you hear in your head? Would you consider yourself an architect or a gardener? Are you doing all the work or do you ever feel as if something is guiding you / forcing your hand?
Over the years I’ve been creating music I’ve tried to better understand creativity. As it is the source of my work, or rather the seed, better understanding and controlling it should result in more output. I’ve only had a tiny bit of success in that, but it does help.
I like to think of creativity as a force similar to evolution. It’s chaotic, purely random. It combines all known elements randomly and the results that are stable persist and might become the building blocks of yet something else in the future. Whereas evolution has no filter since it’s a process without intelligent guiding, the own (subconscious) mind serves as a filter. It looks all the things this force in the back of my head has created and decides what is good and what isn’t. If something is deemed good, it gets pushed to the forefront and that’s when I become aware of it. This is how ideas form.
Before my hiatus, I had the habit on acting on such ideas right away, but I’ve come to develop a kind of sense that predicts whether I can let it simmer a bit longer so to say or not. At one point I might write a couple things down, create a short section of a song, then let it sit for a bit. Going back to it once in a while I find that this process in the back of my head has continued working on it and might have provided me with a few more ideas I could add to what I have so far. Then comes the point where I feel I’ve received everything, and then it’s up to me to put in the work to finish the song. This is usually how more complex songs, mainly for UDOM, come into existence. The length of this process, the number of steps in it, can vary a lot.
I feel that I’ve grown capable of influencing this process a bit – I don’t have to sit around and wait until ideas pop up. I think it has to do with turning creativity into a habit, rather that something that happens by accident. I also work in the same environment all the time, according to schedule of sorts and I believe that subconsciously, a part of me associates how I feel and where I am as a trigger to force the creative process to work harder. The result is that I know I can create music whenever I want. This confidence feels great, but also seems to further enhance the creative process.
This all works fine when creating songs for a project that already has a sound. Creating a new sound is different. I can imagine notes, melodies, texts clearly, but sound is far more difficult to define. Heavy, droning, atmospheric, cosmic, these things will be different for every person. A sound in my mind is a collection of feelings, images, scenes. I can feel the drones, the heaviness is such that I’m carried on its waves through a (mostly purple for some reason) nebula with a pulsing star as a heart at its centre. The star sends shock waves through the dust, creating complex interference patterns, changing the shape of the nebula. I’m witnessing something sacred, majestic (hence the choirs – I hear them, but don’t see them). Perhaps there’s a spaceship there (the Voidsplitter) who had pointed a device at the star causing it to pulse like that – it might go nova. Specific to ARCV, this scenery is influenced by a science-fiction story I’ve been working on, so it’s not something entirely new that suddenly appeared in my mind.
Only a few things in this image hint at sound (drones, heavy, choirs), so I started with that. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve made my workflow more efficient, and this is where it helps me the most. Creating a base with heavy guitars, droning synths and choirs takes almost no time. I can’t do much with it, but the next step in the process will build on this and might need more instruments or other sounds I’ve created before – being able to add these in automatically and almost instantly really helps since now I’ve reached the point where I have to sculpt the sound such that listening to it brings up the images and scenes I had in my mind to begin with. There’s a fair bit of trial and error in this, adding sounds I made before, or just instruments, removing them again, tweaking the balance between all the elements and on and on. Any sound has the power to evoke imagery of itself, perhaps even influence what I first saw. So the sound I’m creating evolves, but so does the original imagery, they grow towards each other until a point is reached where I know I’m as close as I’m going to get.
In this process I always end up creating songs, or sections of them, but sometimes I have no melodies to start with, so I might pick something that already exists (fair bit of a Bach chorale, BWV 1, was used in the creation of the ARCV sound, and some of that persisted in the first album). For the second album, since the sound existed, I could start exploring what was possible with it, what other imagery or ideas could be created with it, and so grew the idea of Voice of the Stars. In creating this album, I did tweak the sound a little – it’s something I do with all my projects, while the sound remains static within the scope of an album, between albums I do change it, even if only in tiny amounts.
So, I’m a gardener for the most part. It’s fun to dive in and see where you might end up. It’s also more relaxing and the process feels more natural and that makes it all the more enjoyable for me. But sometimes I have a clear idea of what I want to create and will not divert from it. If I set out to make an album for UDOM for instance, I know what it will be about and how many songs I’ll need and what each song’s concept will be. The individual songs might still grow in a more natural way, but they must stay within the bounds I’ve set up for the album. UDOM is also much older than ARCV, I know it better, so I might feel more confident knowing that setting up bounds will not hinder the creativity – it’s a different way of creating things, but it’s good to experiment not just with sounds and music, but also with how one creates them.
In a few cases I’ve also experienced what David Bowie describes. It feels as if some things just need to be created and I just happen to be the vessel through which that needs to happen. At that point, there’s not much else I can do than guide the process, let it happen. It can be incredibly productive – the base of the instrumental UDOM album ‘Flow of Infinity’ was created in a manner of days, but it still took more than a year of refining that base to finish it. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a fully external force driving me – I believe it’s the subconscious, and who knows how deep and far it goes, what is in there. Perhaps these were songs that existed in an advanced state and I simply wasn’t aware of them, and one day they where pushed to the forefront. I feel it’s important to keep an open mind for any avenue through which one’s own ideas might come.
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“We learn as much (and sometimes more that's useful) from our fictional role models as we do from the real people who share our lives. If we perpetually reinforce the notion that human beings are somehow unnatural aberrations adrift in the ever-encroaching Void, that story will take root in impressionable minds and inform the art, politics, and general discourse in anti-life, anti-creative, and potentially catastrophic ways. If we spin a tale of guilt and failure with an unhappy ending, we will live that story to its conclusion, and some benighted final generation not far down the line will pay the price.” - Grant Morrison
You've mentioned the science fiction story you have been working on, so I'm interested in learning a little more about your relationship with science fiction. I have been a fan for as long as I can remember; and I tend to find myself drawn more towards the dystopian end of the genre spectrum. I often attribute that with it aligning more with my deep-rooted propensity and proclivity towards a nihilistic disposition. But in recent years I have come to wonder whether that nihilistic disposition was not developed and nurtured by my early exposure to dystopian science fiction?
I'm here reminded of a quote from Tom Cheetham, from his discussion of the work of French philosopher and theologian Henry Corbin; "Your mode of being alters the mode of being of the world around you. Your mode of presence defines what can be present to you." So perhaps I have merely conditioned myself to the pessimism I feel towards the ultimate fate of the human race? Perhaps my consideration of the dystopian trajectory of modern culture is merely an erroneous narrative I have fallen into rather than an objective observation of what the world is really like? Neal Stephenson has spoken of his growing tiredness with the whole dystopian futures element of science fiction; "I don't think it's serving the same kind of the social purpose it might have served at one point - to be depicting dystopias all the time - and I think that it might be more functional and more useful to think about ways that we don't end up with a dystopia."
In a world which sees differing beliefs and ideologies constantly engages in verbal warfare, it has become obvious that we have become enmeshed in a toxic and virulent narrative, and what is needed is for a simple edit or re-write of the story. Jeffrey Kripal believes that our modern world needs better science fiction: "We’re all, kind of, arguing about what the narrative is, and I’m just like saying, “Hey, okay, let’s wake up. Let’s admit we’re arguing about the story and let’s tell a better story.” That’s the source of the quote you put up there earlier. This is the ‘better sci-fi’ line. We need better science fiction, not because one’s true and one’s false, but because we’re living in a set of stories that are pretty nasty."
So what can you tell us about your own preferences within science fiction. And what is it you are attempting to say with your own work? What are your views here of the ideas put forward by Morrison, Corbin, Stephenson and Kripal? Do you think that better stories and better science fiction might lead to better cultures and societies; or do you see anything of that sort of social purpose, function or use for science fiction?
It’s been a good while since I’ve read anything science-fiction. First of all, the time generally isn’t there to read, and secondly I seem to end up reading more fantasy over science-fiction, probably because I haven’t really found much that appeals to me. I’ve been collecting a list of interesting books for a while now, but am yet to get to the point to actually find those books and read them.
Those I’ve read are mostly hard science-fiction, primarily by Larry Niven and Arthur C. Clarke. I think it began with me having an interest in astrophysics while still in school, reading about various exotic theories, then wondering what it might be like to live in a reality where such theories were true and mankind had the capabilities to go out into space and discover even more exotic stuff.
The appeal to me of science-fiction in general over fantasy lies in it being something that’s yet to happen. Fantasy often takes place in times similar to the middle ages (or past times in general). No matter how immersed I become in a fantasy novel, the fact it’s fiction is inescapable. When I finish a science-fiction novel, there’s the idea that what I read might still come to pass (no matter in how small a part). Perhaps because of that I never cared much for dystopian or apocalyptic stories. Reading is still a form of escapism, and I actively avoid works that are too much like present-day society and the way I think society will evolve in the near future. I don’t need to read about it because I’m exposed to it already and I don’t like it very much.
In my own work I don’t set out to dictate some or other moral lesson. At the base it’s quite simple : I just want to create an interesting story. Something one can get immersed in, where one can step away from real life for a bit and take part in an alternative reality that’s not as grim, but also not too overly optimistic. There’s some subtle criticism on current-day society, kept low-key so that it doesn’t distract or become an element that could overshadow the story itself.
Mass media in any form has often been a tool for those that control them to put messages out. If something becomes popular enough, the main reason why it attracts attention often ends up being copied by others in an attempt to catch some of the exposure for themselves. You can sometimes clearly see these trends come and go in more commercial oriented media, like a subgenre of novel suddenly getting popular and various writers putting out stories in that genre. And in that blind pursuit of fame and money, messages get copied along unintentionally and that can really influence the targeted audience on a specific subject. Sometimes I get the feeling people are putting things like this in motion just to see what kind of fallout they can generate. Release a rumour on some social media platform, targeting this or that group, see how people respond.
In sense you could say an artist should pay more attention to the contents of their work, but artists are people too and occupy every shade of the moral spectrum. What one might find morally apprehensive could be considered the norm by another. Art and those that create it don’t stand above non-artists – they’re regular people, too, with the same faults and virtues. To imply that one genre of one type of medium could influence society seems a bit much, and as long as money continues to dominate every aspect of society, I doubt many would risk what they have for career to attempt to change society.
I don’t read enough to have seen a focus on dystopian science-fiction, but if I look at political evolutions I can’t but see a dystopian future lying in wait. A lot of people seem to worry about where we’re headed, but also seem convinced they’re incapable of influencing the near future. An author writing about the matter might show off his worries, subconsciously perhaps, or they might actively be trying to warn people. I find it difficult to believe that science-fiction by itself might be reinforcing some kind of fatalism in people at large, though I can imagine some people being influenced to varying degrees. Perhaps people seek out such stories to validate their own views without anyone challenging them. News media or anything on TV and social media, controlled by political or capitalistic interests are far bigger dangers in my mind than one genre of literature.
That doesn’t meant artists should stop trying to produce works displaying a better future, or creating heroes with positive traits. Art does influence people, perhaps on a larger scale than I’m convinced it does, perhaps enough to make a difference either way. On the other hand, I’m not convinced it’s art’s purpose to do this. It’s a noble idea to stop displaying or glorifying certain things in popular media. As an example, these days protagonists are far less likely to be smokers as some creators worry that they might entice young people to pick up smoking, mimicking their fictional heroes. Such a decision might come subconsciously as well when a creator learns about the dangers of smoking. But it’s a decision each artist should make for themselves. Going as far as saying that an entire medium should no longer talk about this or that subject imposes a potentially significant limitation on the art form itself.
I guess it depends on how an individual artist sees oneself regarding their value within society or humanity. Someone setting out to create a character with the idea that they’ll influence their audience in some or other way feels to me like going past noble and towards arrogance, making it seem as if the author thinks their audience is of low intelligence and malleable. That could have the opposite effect, if the audience catches on to what the creator is trying to do.
We have a lot of scepticism towards the science surrounding climate change these days. What if one medium as a whole was to focus on scientist protagonists working hard to find solutions, glorifying the idea of doing the right things for this specific problem? I think people would grow tired of the preaching soon enough. A more subtle approach might work, letting ideas enter the audience’s subconscious, but that takes time. And since artists are still regular people, you’d have deniers amongst them. On top of that it’s my impression those on the darker end of the moral scale are generally more motivated to attempt to influence others to their line of thinking.
While I’m convinced the entire body of art created over mankind’s history shaped what we are today to an extend, and influenced the point where we’re at now in our mental evolution, I don’t see any subset of contemporary artists strong enough to influence society in a significant way and within a reasonable time frame.
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“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.” - Elizabeth Gilbert
Despite all the differing projects you have put your name to over the years, most of them seem to share a heritage or tradition tied to the funeral doom / drone end of the spectrum. So I'm interested in what it is that attracts you to that particular form of musical expression? I have long been intrigued by the insight of Carl Jung that people don't have ideas, ideas have people. Elizabeth Gilbert takes flight with this concept in her book Big Magic: “I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”
Do you have any insights into why you seem to be particularly drawn to funeral doom / drone, or why funeral doom / drone seems to be attracted to you? What do you think it is about SVC that has the idea of funeral doom /drone attempting to make itself manifest through you?
I’ve never been attracted much to psychology and much less to a spiritual way of looking at matters, which is the impression I get from Elizabeth Gilbert’s quote. Science doesn’t explain everything, though (perhaps one day), but I’ve often found a simple logic in explanations it does provide. When it comes to ideas or creativity, many people seem to be looking for ways to make it work for them. Books like Big Magic, while I haven’t read it, appears to provide the author’s way of dealing with or acting upon ideas. There’s always a challenge in trying to put into words something as abstract as ideas or creativity. I think any creative person has to get to know themselves to better understand where their own ideas come from or how to influence the flow of ideas, recognise them for what they are, and so on. This is a process that takes time. Big Magic could provide someone with a starting point, but they’d have to be open towards its spiritual approach. I’m a sceptic, so the book would never resonate with me.
I like how Stephen King approaches it. He likens stories to artefacts or relics, they exist with a certain substance and aren’t created from scratch by the artist, but it’s then up to the artist to excavate with care to preserve or uncover as much detail as possible. When an idea comes up in my mind, it’s never a single note or word, it already has a certain substance, but to me it’s nothing more than a starting point, and it’s also the only thing I get for free, the rest of the work I have to do myself. This sudden appearance of ideas, especially when they’re great or already full of substance and details, is often a thing of magic almost. Chances are good any song or story created is something entirely new, something that didn’t exist before, and that is an amazing thing to consider. To put that into words however, isn’t easy. You could say it’s magic, or something on another level of being. Science doesn’t have too many explanations yet for what goes on in the mind, but I’m convinced it’s all a product of my own mind.
In a sense, science put me on the path to doom. It provided me with scepticism at first towards the catholic ideas I was exposed to at school, things like gods, heavens and such. Trying to look at reality in a logical manner, and aided by my understanding of various sciences at the time, mostly astrophysics, I ended up with the conclusion that reality is finite and closed-off. No afterlife, no gods. It’s an assumption, I have to admit, but almost 25 years later I still stick with it – I see a logic in it.
In my view of reality there’s no physical border somewhere in space one might crash in to at one point, but as there’s a limit to the amount of energy within it, so is there a limit to how far explorers would be able to go. Reality is also that which allows us to exist, so while we exist we must be part of it, within it, so leaving it shouldn’t be possible. Reality in my view thus has an end point in time, and is inescapable, so no hint of all that happened within it can exist outside of it, providing no proof of it ever having existed to whatever lies outside. This idea can also be brought back to a much smaller scale, to one lifetime. Given enough time, there comes a point where there’s no proof left of an individual life ever having occurred. Reality at that point would have looked the same with or without that life. Thus, life is pointless. At the time, this realisation made me quite miserable and lethargic. I think that when I discovered doom metal some years later, my state of mind made me feel connected to it more than any other music genre. I was already making music myself around that time, but slow and nasty stuff at times, like how I felt. Trying to clean it up, putting some beauty in it must have been the turning point, at which I realised it could help channel what I felt into something constructive. I listened to a fair bit of black metal, darkwave and ambient, and the mix of those three provided the original components of my music. I expanded upon and experimented with that starting point, and in a sense, I’m still doing that. I definitely didn’t set out to create funeral and drone, as I didn’t even know such genres existed.
I’m still to this day convinced that life, or reality as a whole has no purpose. But instead of remaining fixed on the thought that my life is pointless, and by extension anything I do, I try to return to the original idea of reality as a whole being without a point that I can see. If the nature of reality is nihilistic, and we are a product of that reality, then having a nihilistic mindset is in a sense the same as having a neutral, logical point of view upon reality.
If reality is finite, it’s also of finite complexity, making it theoretically possible for it to be fully understood one day. Full understanding of something allows to predict what happens in the future. It’s as if all of reality can be turned into a single, complex mathematical equation, with time as a variable. That in turn implies that for a given starting situation, all that will happen within that reality is already set in stone the moment it’s created. So no free will and all that. Specific ideas are destined to end up with certain people, or people are destined to have a certain idea. Depending on how one looks at it, ideas have people or people have ideas – it’s the same thing.
I’m well aware that none of this is science, but it remains a fascinating matter to reflect upon. Part of me likes the clean logic of the finite reality assumption, part of me hopes to be proven wrong.
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Question Five: It often perturbs me when I read of artists and musicians who claim that album and song titles are not of that much importance to them. For me names and titles are probably of equal importance to the music; they can draw me in to music that might otherwise be somewhat average, and conversely poor track titles can drive me away from even the most exceptional music. So I'm interested in your thoughts and approaches to track titles and the importance you place upon them.
Your album Voice of the Stars contains 3 tracks with the titles; Arcturus, Betelgeuse and Aldebaran. What can you tell us about your choice of these 3 specific stars and the particular voice they have within the universe you are creating with Arcane Voidsplitter?
The importance of titles varies greatly, and over time their meaning or their link with the music can get lost. Just as I have a list of musical ideas, I have one with bits of texts, and many entries are just single words, things I wrote down because at the time they resonated with me on some level. Every so often I have to go through this list and remove entries because I no longer know or feel why they were there.
It happens I’m working on some music and have no idea what it is or can be about. In such cases I check this list of words and texts while listening to the music and see if something matches. When that happens, the combination of music and concept at times allows the music to grow and fully embrace the concept and expand upon it.
There’s some symmetry in Voice of the Stars in how the music and the songs are laid out in time. Arcturus and Aldebaran are tied together through this symmetry. In reality, both are stars with mass in the same order of magnitude (both a bit more massive than the sun). This is interesting as it allows to imagine a star system similar to ours centred around such stars. But these two have much larger diameters (25 to 45 times that of the sun).
Aldebaran always had something of a dark mysterious nature to me, no doubt thanks to H. P. Lovecraft’s works. If you pronounce it slowly, it even sounds ominous, just like Arcturus. That’s a dimension that’s lost in the music, but often enough I collect words just because of how they sound, what rhythm they have, as there’s always the opportunity to embed that into music.
I knew Aldebaran had to be part of the album early on, but Arcturus was decided later. I looked through a list of stars and paid attention to physical properties and the quality of their names. Due to the symmetry there needed to be some similarities between this star and Aldebaran. Arcturus fit best from those stars I checked. I then decided to make Aldebaran the last song because the name comes from Arabic, which (supposedly) translates into the bright follower, which seemed fitting for a closing song.
Betelgeuse is an enormous star, in the sun’s location it would reach past Jupiter. Imagine living on a planet around a star that’s expanding to the point it touches or even absorbs this planet. One of my (unreleased) short stories features an alien from a planet in orbit around Betelgeuse. The species evolved to be able to survive the expansion of the star.
Finally, there’s a link between the stars and the Voidsplitter ship itself. This is something that will be explored in greater detail far into the future of my story, so I don’t want to spoil too much of it. Within the story, reality is built up entirely out of energy, which occurs in three forms : energy and matter as we know it, and space, which is the matrix on which this energy and matter latch to. Energy and matter can only go where the matrix exists and the matrix is also that which defines the number of spatial dimensions. There exists an alien species, called Rift Spirits, made up out of energy who can influence this matrix, which is a necessity else they’d just evaporate. They basically warp space to contain themselves, but they’re just as content to take up residence in large masses, such as stars and galactic black holes. The people who find the Voidsplitter (and similar, smaller vessels) identify it as a weapon, aimed at the central black hole of a nearby galaxy. They assume some alien society living there must have been at war with the builders of the vessels, and the Voidsplitter was tasked with destabilising the black hole to the point of causing that entire galaxy to be torn apart. Instead, they discover later on, the vessel was aiming at the Rift Spirit living inside the black hole.
I’m well aware that a lot of the background info is not present in the music, but I’ve been putting small hints in album and song titles for as long as I can remember. Sometimes these hints just point to concepts present in my other releases, but most of them point to this central storyline. The hope is that I one day manage to finish this story and that people who have been into my music since the start discovering how it’s all tied together.
