This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about the beauty and power of Old Solar’s version of the Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2022 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.
This is one of two posts in preparation for the 2 days of Post.Festival 2023, the largest post-rock festival in the US and an event I’ve been dying to go to in recent years. I’m going to cover two bands that have been crucial to my love and experience of post-rock as well as difficult touchpoints on my healing journey of the last couple years due to difficult associations.
This is a sweeping album. The concept of it feels like a post-rock version of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, and I think they capture the sentiment of each season well. You’re likely to be moved by one or several of them. Favorite track: Autumn Equinox: A Winnowing Fork in His Hands.
SEE flows through the ebbs and flows of the seasons, the highs and lows of abundance and lack as the course of beautiful, heart-rending change. It is nothing short of a glorious album. Although I suspect the band are deeply Christian, the well-captured experience of the vibrant change of presence and absence remind me of Taoism and my own deep interest in it; this album captures the resonance of something like an I Ching-esque progression of yin and yang through the seasons.
I’ve found the track: “Autumn Equinox: A Winnowing Fork in His Hands” particularly haunting. My first connection with this album was a brief obsession, a spring dalliance of sorts. Months later, I woke from dreams with this song stuck in my mind, hearing it over and over on repeat. I fastidiously dug through my album collection to recall where it came from, niggling in my subconscious until I rediscovered this album. I’ve never had that experience prior or since with any other song.
The song represents my favorite season, fall, and it expresses that shift into a pensive mode of fullness slowing down, being harvested and brought in before the cold. It also feels pensive as though a high feeling is now on the edge of loss – that transition of connection into withdrawal and repose (Hermit – Virgo) and an independent vibrance of compassion, growth, and abundant harvest despite this (Empress – Libra). It also feels like a time of things balancing out, the decisions and efforts of the year being weighed out into their results, karma playing out, and the symbolism of all that balance in the equinox (Justice – also Libra) just before the strong transformation of the reaping and movement into quiet (Death – Scorpio).
As far as I’m concerned, if you can listen to this song and not feel its poignancy, your heart is completely cold. It pulls strongly at a variety of emotional depths like few songs do. Returning to this album has been a slow and difficult process for me, but it’s one I have relished listening to again recently. Old Solar is one of the main bands I’m thrilled to see on this trip to Post.Festival.
NOTE: Use the time stamps in the YouTube description to jump to the song
This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about Nietzsche’s philosophy as an inspiration for an energetic/emotional stance towards life, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2022 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.
I’ve written about Russian Circles a few times on this blog, and in many ways, this won’t differ much, as I find the same refrain of empowerment and an abundant life force that grows above and beyond challenge, oppression, and calamity.
This post won’t differ greatly in that sentiment, but I’ve wanted to express my passion about this song for some time, and the feelings I have around it line up well with another post I just wrote on my other blog – the ending passage of it with an Empress riding her sea turtle Chariot off across the seas of self-doubt in the Moon (yes, all tarot allusions). I’m hoping that this will act as an accompaniment to that other post, offering a different expression and media around it.
If I had to guess, the song I’ve listened to most in the last few years has been “Micah” from Russian Circles’ original album, Enter. There’s something about the progression of this song that haunts me. It’s so simple and complex at the same time, so slowly intentional at first with an uptick in the middle of smooth virtuosity and energy. It feels empowered on every level – a sense that my forward movement is a growing, unstoppable force, but not one of any animosity, rather determination. At the same time, it rests in between movements, taking that considered tone again and regrouping – an open heart that relishes being on this journey without ever giving up, despite the melancholy edges to the tone. The second uptick of the cymbal play with the guitar creates one of the most epically driving and cataclysmic builds I’ve ever heard in a song – to me, it is truly riding that Chariot (the card of agency, crushing obstacles, rushing ahead unimpeded, and reaching one’s goals).
A couple months back, I walked through the dark of my neighborhood – an exercise loop of a weighted vest and climbing hills, while listening to this song on repeat. Somewhere near the end of the walk and the 7th or 8th time of listening to the song, I flashed on those tarot cards and associated meanings as a whole – the Empress (abundant life force) riding the Chariot (the fast, unimpeded forward movement) as a Hermit (finding connection to deeper inner truth – that inner light of compassion revealed, learning on the journey and that learning lighting the way forward).
Truth be told – that combo is currently an inspirational view of myself or who I aspire to grow into/presence as. That’s precisely the feeling of awe and empowerment I take from this song, and I can only hope music like this touches others in a similar fashion.
I started this a while ago, and I left it aside, doubting my creative voice here, and it felt more dramatic than I could write in a way that resonates with me yet still feels like a fitting tale. However, various events of late have brought back past memories and feelings, a sense as a friend has said of the universe throwing events out that echo elements of past occurrences – asking the question of me: “Did you learn the lesson at hand?” As such, I thought it worth finishing this little fairy tale story about resilience in the depths of pain and growing beyond those experiences. It is fiction and yet represents learning and catharsis with an emphasis on the lessons learned, as poor as I might be at expressing them. For me – it was almost like a journaling exercise to strengthen my own understanding. I can only hope it speaks to someone else out there across the ether as well.
What is love?
It’s an easy question. People speak about it confidently, certain they know and can express it simply. She, however, thought that the apparent ease was deceptive, uncertain the answer was simple or readily uplifting. The thoughts congealed into thick globules of disbelief in her mind as the Empress bled out on the floor.
Months prior – he swept her off her feet. She resisted at first, having come to believe that love didn’t matter after many a life adventure. He spoke of connection. He understood her in ways that others didn’t. He valued her for more than just her looks or her charm. He was captivated by her mind and heart, and he eventually captivated her in turn. The King of Fire wooed the Empress with charisma, confidence, charm, and passion.
Then the drama. On. Off. Up. Down. I love you. I love someone else. You’re the one. I prefer someone else. At first she was somewhat at fault too, but as it dragged on, any “both” or equality long went away. She was no longer seen. No longer valued. No longer understood. She was a nuisance most of the time, a shiny bauble to be remembered when wanted, and yet, she did everything she could to calmly and glowingly exude: “I love you,” to let it permeate and radiate out of every pore of her being. In seeing his darkness, she leaned into compassion, care, understanding, acceptance, and patience.
In truth, she was an Empress no more, beholden to desire, a reversal of energy, a misplacement of her way in the world. She had lost her self-worth somewhere along the way, the golden glow of the Empress.
Finally, he made it clear that she was no longer wanted, never again. He made it clear that he felt angered by her lack of respect for his other commitments, even though those activities and behaviors were precisely the last iota of self-respect she had: not willing to say that it was laudable to her that something and someone else would lead to the diminishment of and poor treatment from this former King who was no longer anywhere near such. That was the one self-abasement and self-negation too far – a stamp of approval for treating her like garbage. Something that leads people to be worse versions of themselves is not deserving of respect, especially at one’s own expense.
The last of this was separation followed by brief reconnection and an unwillingness to even take accountability to the extent of accepting that he no longer had or deserved her trust and that he had lashed out at her for her last grasp on self-respect, for her struggling to make sense of his slowly escalating self-righteousness. He twisted events into self-righteous dismissal and told her she was obsessive and lost in her own mind, while also lecturing her on topics she had studied for years and he had not studied at all. Even when the lightest of points were made that she no longer trusted him after such behavior, he puffed up and acted as though the need to rebuild trust was ridiculous and beyond the pale. He cut ties with an act as though their friendship’s ending deserved some sort of joyous funeral pyre and as though such a sentiment of joyous festivity would clearly be shared by her.
All of this left her questioning her feelings, her care, her intuition, the time spent, her openness to compassion and understanding, and most of all her ongoing connection despite being told she was wrong, confused, stupid, and lacking emotional depth. In short, she felt like she was mad – she not only didn’t trust others anymore, she didn’t trust herself – her mind, her read of others, and her own emotions.
The ongoing sharp pangs of this deep existential wound were why she decided to move into this moment of pulling out her sword of truth: cutting out the blackened heart of despair within herself. She screamed as she cut through her breast, bleeding everywhere, but she still reached into her destroyed chest to pull out her heart and passed out on the ground.
The Empress is a great being – one of abundance, of the ultimate power of love, not just romantic love – but the loving energy of life, of maternal nurturing, of the life force that loves to exist, grow, and flourish. As such, even cutting her own heart out may have ended her in a sense, but it didn’t really result in a final ending. Death, from her 3 to the 13, was a moving forward of the wheel of fate into an evolution, a transformation into something new.
She gradually, over the course of extended time, pulled herself off the floor, the hole in her chest fused closed again, and the doubts, creeping thoughts, and self-dismissal slowly faded, as the taint of the rot of a corrupted love, an addiction, passed out of her system. First, she gained her self-worth again fully, recognizing her own excellence and working again on growing it to its fullest. She lost her cares of worrying about outcomes or attaching to any intentions of trying to control. Rather, she began to flow with life again – the power of yin, rather than the selfish and short-sighted application of yang. Her doubts were last to fade, but in her healing growth, she eventually blossomed again, a lotus in the muddy waters – recognizing that she didn’t need to trust other people or seek their love again. No matter what, she was pure abundant joy in and of herself. She could give her compassionate love to others without clinging to them or to any story that dimmed her light or limited her.
Perhaps some day she would find an Emperor, balanced, giving, kind, empowered, and insightful, rather than a self-centered, power-based, controlling, egoistic king, but in truth, she knew the rarity of such a person, and would sweat not a single drop worrying, waiting, or even desiring that outcome. She would give her energy to herself, to the world, and to others – fostering compassion, patience, nurturance, and growth in all that she encountered to the best of her ability, listening and caring while no longer allowing anyone to diminish her.
She no longer sat in meditation, rest, and healing from her wounds. She stood up, walked out of her castle, gracefully strode down to the sea below, and rode off into the moonlit night on a giant turtle that surfaced in front of her as her feet touched the sand, her chariot to traverse the depths on her journey forward.
This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about Nietzsche’s philosophy as an inspiration for an energetic/emotional stance towards life, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2021 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.
The cool air of fall blew off the sea onto my face as I walked through my darkened neighborhood last night with Russian Circles’ live album, Live at Dunk! Fest, driving my steps. I was pondering what exactly to say for this post. Last week offered a great opportunity that I had awaited for years, seeing this power trio live for the first time. They’ve been my most listened to band for the last few years, since I got into them. I have listened to almost only their music since this concert was announced. Even though my expectations were somewhere up in the stratosphere near where the upper atmosphere borders space, these guys didn’t disappoint. It would not be an understatement for me to say that this concert and all the experiences around it made my year.
Between that and the fact that my last post about Russian Circles brought confused feedback from friends, finding it too difficult and dense, I thought it would be good to describe their dynamism again in a different way. If one band warrants that focus, they do.
When I was walking and pondering last night, the songs on the album while looking down on the dark, moonlit water of the sea, moments from the concert arose in my mind. The particular song to pull at me first was Afrika. As I said last time, “Guidance” is the album I find to be the band’s best, but Afrika is the point where the movement of the first 3 songs starts to chill a bit. However, in the concert, the rolling drums of this song grabbed me and made me feel like I was flying in a way that felt like a therapeutic moment for a lot of recent life. I remember thinking that I never realized just how much I needed this song.
How do you express a feeling like this without riffing on big ideas that would probably take too much background reading or explanation? Furthermore, how do you do it with a band that’s as sparse and cryptic, completely left up to interpretation, as Russian Circles? I’m going to do this by trying to delineate the atmosphere that resonates in this band’s songs and then try to analyze that down to it’s movement and energy as two focal points.
The overarching atmosphere that is in Russian Circles’ albums is a feeling of intense, crushing circumstances yet adapting and growing beyond them, shining above them. The already mentioned song, Afrika, is a great example of this. I spoke of this at length in my last post. For me, Russian Circles’ albums feel like a destruction that leads to new flourishing, creation, and hope. If I were to use another anchor point rather than Nietzsche, I would use the associations of the Tower card and the Star card as ideas here – the destruction of an existing order opens the way for the hope of the new, a light in the darkness.
To expand or express this differently, I’d like to re-center on two focal points within that atmosphere. First, the movement of their music is a moving onward. Second, and in resonance with the first, the energy feels to be that of growth. To me, again in relation to ideas from tarot, this feels like the powerful abundant dynamism of “Empress energy”, basically an abundance of life force as flourishing in most every sense. Ironically, when thinking of this further, I realized that the name of one of Russian Circles’ albums is “Empros” which means forward or onward in Greek(and sounds a lot like Empress). So, to reiterate the previous concepts here and in the earlier post: their songs are a moving beyond that which presses down on us with a feeling of growing out of it or above it.
Funnily enough, when I saw them live, I waited for an autograph afterward, and I chatted with others waiting outside. One of the other fans was thrilled that they had played Youngblood from “Station” because the entire album had helped her through a dark chapter of her life. I couldn’t agree more. Songs like Micah, Ethel, Vorel, and others have had the exact same resonance for me precisely because of the dynamics I described above.
In trying to choose a single song to exemplify this, I thought of Mlàdek, especially because it is from that album, “Empros”. Also, it was the final song of their set when I saw them. This song speaks of that forward movement and that growing outward, in spite of the many challenges we face. Beyond that something about this song in particular makes me fully feel the image and quote from The Dhammapada I wanted to use to sum up everything I’ve said here about growing and shining within and beyond adverse circumstances:
As a sweet-smelling lotus Pleasing to the heart May grow in a heap of rubbish Discarded along the highway, So a disciple of the Fully Awakened One Shines with wisdom Amid the rubbish heap Of blind, common people
The Dhammapada, Chapter 4: Flowers, lines 58-59; trans. – Fronsdal.
Studio version of Mlàdek:
Live album of RC at Dunk! Fest 2016. Mlàdek starts at roughly 53:00:
This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I felt it must be shared, as the song I highlight and the experience I had in the described concert really resonate with the last post I just wrote. I recently wrote a post on the best albums of 2021 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.
This last weekend, I had the pleasure of a short road trip to attend the Post-Rock and Friends Fest in Portland, OR. I had a chance to see a few bands live whom I’d been wanting to see for years. I’m going to write two posts about this regarding the two bands that really grabbed my heart.
One of my favorite post-rock albums of 2020 was Death by Coastlands. Here’s what I wrote on my 2020 best albums review:
Prepare to face the destruction of death in this album. Coastlands goes full post-metal and crushes you without falling into the standard doomy dynamics that post-metal can get stuck in. It’s epic, empowered, and gorgeous. This came out near my birthday, and it ended up being a perfect birthday present.
Returning to this album a couple years later for an intensive listen brought so many new layers of interpretation and experience. The last year has been a long slog through a cycle of death for me (in the sense of facing the end of the old). My sense of who I was has died. My sense of purpose has died. My ability to stand up again, walk forward, and move on has been challenged, time and again. In that time, tarot cards have been a meaningful self-care tool for solace, insight, and a sense of meaning when things have felt meaningless.
One of the key cards in the high arcana is the Death card. If you are unfamiliar with the tarot, you’ll possibly pause with some trepidation at that, but Death is more than a card that says someone around you will die. It’s a card about the end of an old cycle and a transition into a new one. Life is a vibrant unfolding of change, and a key component of the new coming forward in change is the old ending and disappearing. That’s what death is. As I put it in one of my favorite poems in the early days of my other blog:
Coastlands’ album overflows with this energy of change, empowerment, flow, and growth through the death of the old. Every song has heavy, crushing power, but there are major key aspects as well where the lotus blossom grows in the detritus at the side of the road (image from the early passages of the Dhammapada – a chapter with overtones of living well in the face of the transitoriness of life, interestingly enough). The dirge has just as much of a joyous affirmation. It’s a recognition that one’s going over is a going under (Nietzschean riff – early Zarathustra).
I know that this post is dropping a lot of references, so let’s return to the band and the album concretely – seeing Coastlands live emphasized all of this I’m saying. I overflowed with energy and intensity, and I was even more impressed after the concert when speaking with the bassist and realizing that the band’s sound has changed and developed in the last couple albums as the lineup has changed, and new experimentation and growth is already shining through in the little that’s been revealed about their upcoming album. They are harnessing the strength of a new cycle – transitioning with change, the blockages that the last couple years have thrown at all of us in so many ways, and other various challenges of individual and group lives. They take these and shine. That’s the opportunity of the Death card.
Two versions of the Death card – Crowley’s from the Thoth Deck, which shows the cutting off of the old, and a more current reimagining of the Thoth deck, the Wayward Dark, by an artist in Portland (hence the choice here)
I want to showcase the final song of Death as a share here. The song “Marrow” starts with a sorrowful chorus of voices and doomy guitar riffs with discordant static from the amps. It grows into a heavy crescendo of guitar and drums. The old has been cut off, and we’re to the marrow deep in the bones of the broken. Then the song shifts to a more pensive, flowing guitar on top of the heaviness it pulls us along beyond that first stage into something more, something that survives. That’s the true power in that marrow*. It’s the potential to stand up again and make something new.
A rough attempt at poetry – initially thought of during a recent run. The beginning is merely a symbolic expression of the pain of loss – not any message of intention at self-harm.
Languid flow oozes – ebbing life and death Crimson crystals coagulate Drops fall to the ground Mixing with the salt of tears
The stain of such a staunched flow Crimson – the deep color of compassion Mahayana monk’s tender tone A reminder: death (XIII) is transition
Romance may have withered and fallen The faded crimson of a dead rose Yet heart’s vulnerability Can hear the cries of the entire world
Twisted knot on my arm Crimson dyes of tattooed ink A lucky symbol and inspiration Wisdom and compassion: entwined as reality
No matter my despair My raw flesh of heart Can pull in all the despair of the world And push out peace to all – tonglen
May this pull in the despair of heartbreak from all those who feel it, take it upon myself, and replace it in everyone out there with warmth, acceptance, and peace.
On the Way 
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