5. RAGE!

The Curtain

Welcome back again. This week I’m talking about the fifth track to be released from ‘You Could Be Happy’. It’s called ‘The Curtain’, and below we find out why.

Rage

The first word of Homer’s Iliad is μῆνιν (mēnin), which is the Greek for ‘rage’.

So points out Stephen Fry in Troy, his awesome version of The Iliad. That particular moment describes Achilles’ rage at the loss of Briseis, a slave woman, when she was claimed by the Greek commander Agamemnon. Far better critics than I have unpicked this scene and Achilles’ emotional state, so I’m not even going to try. But my understanding is that it is simple, blind, rage. The completely overwhelming kind, where there is nothing in your world but your anger.

A friend once told me that Shiva is the Hindu god of water. There’s a bit of a ‘citation needed’ on that factoid, as I’m not certain it’s true, but I like the message of this story so we’re going to roll with it anyway. I had always thought of Shiva as being the God of destruction, and asked my friend how that fitted with the water business. ‘With perfect anger comes perfect clarity’ was the answer To me there is something pretty insightful about that, and I suspect this is what Achilles felt. No mediation, no what-ifs, no second guessing, no compromise, no listening to reason; just pure, unadulterated rage.

The Curtain

I imagine there will be a subset of readers and listeners out there for whom the title of the track and the accompanying artwork make immediate and intuitive sense. For everybody else, here’s a bit more of an explainer. The picture on this track is of a place called the black lodge, which features in David Lynch’s amazing creation Twin Peaks, and is characterised by being decorated mostly with long red curtains.

I think I’ve got my head around Twin Peaks mythology a little better than I have around Hinduism or Homer, but even so, it’s pretty dense, so I need to caveat this explainer by saying this is what it means to me (TP experts, please don’t jump down my throat, in other words). The black lodge is a place of terrible, pure, destructive anger, populated mostly by beings only interested in pain and destruction.

The music you hear in this track is a reflection of that place. The bass line is a single, repeated phrase that doesn’t deviate; it just becomes more and more intense as it singlemindedly enhances the chaos that swirls around it (the chaos being all the noisy messy drumming). The gloves are off, the red mist is up; we’re not stopping now.

You could be forgiven for wondering how we got from the self-pity of last week’s track to the impermeable rage of this week’s. All I can really say is, like everything else on this album, that’s how it works for me. I can sit around feeling sorry for myself for quite some time before something snaps and I just lose patience - whether it’s with myself, or the world, or the situation, I’m not certain. But it’s anger that throws me back into the loop, makes me eventually get up again and run back into whatever fray I had been trying to exit.

First Sequence

And finally. I’m not certain how exciting you will find this, but this week’s big reveal is that the first sequence is not so much five tracks as one big track with some different bits, and it all slots together into a fifteen-minute-odd continuous listening experience. The pieces were written deliberately to flow into each other. You can recap the entire first sequence here, or indeed anywhere you like to listen to your music.

And where does this first sequence leave us? We have a protagonist, who is struggling with a cycle of ideas and emotions that will be familiar to many of us. In the immortal words of Master Yoda, stress leads to anxiety, anxiety leads to depression, depression leads to self-pity, self pity leads to anger… I’m not totally certain that’s actually what Master Yoda said to be honest, but it’s close enough. I hope you will have heard all of this in the music. Sometimes the solo instruments show the protagonist to be lonely, isolated, reflective; and sometimes overwhelmed by an emotional state too powerful to counteract.

But sometimes in the music there is something else. Another voice. A transmission. Something trying to break through. You heard it near the start of this sequence, in a rare moment of respite, and at the end, fractured, broken, pleading to be let in, and ultimately unsuccessful. But we have more to hear from this character.

What next?

Glad you asked! Firstly, thanks for reading this far. You’ve already been part of the creative journey of this album, and I very sincerely thank you for paying attention. All I’d really like is for people to listen and be part of what I’ve made. Job done. However, if you have friends or people you think would enjoy this, please encourage them to sign up to these updates via www.thesixteenth.net. It would mean a lot. And maybe actually listen to the songs in whatever way you enjoy!

You can listen to the music here, or through the links below.