As was stated in the Noumenon Article, I took a different approach to writing The Darkness than I originally planned to. I was actually inspired by the Silent Ballet interpretation of the album, and specifically the references attributed to Garden:

“Garden” makes a sudden entrance with a dark interplay of clear-sounding piano, electronic ambience, and a heartbeat-like pulse that makes the piece sound slower than it really is; the representation of paradise in the Islamic tradition, this is a garden like no other in reality and where time is entirely malleable, but contrary to our expectations, the only thing we see and hear is ourselves, our own hearts filling up the aural vacuum of afterlife perfection.

While it is rare anyone can get a song meaning spot on, especially an instrumental one - I think David did a good job explaining what the song meant to him as a part of the Album. Truth be told it is somewhat geared in that direction - Paradise and a mystical "Garden of Eden" retreat in my imagination. It should also be known that I too sometimes don't fully understand what the song is speaking of until later reflecting upon it. I write things on impulse, but they do have basis in visions, imagination, dreams and daydreams I have, and Garden, originally "Our Garden", is no exception.

Garden sets the stage for a quiet retreat with a loved one - real and imaginary. I chose to create a echoing Piano lullaby to present the weak and fragile bond holding on with fear in an uncertain and confusing world. Imagine two children together playing in the shadows of an overhanging tree, the scene an almost brush-like stroke of a painter in motion. Innocent and lost inside their own imagination - free from the interplay of a dying paradigm. Then as the song progresses - see the children grow older, holding on to those memories of being together in that innocent state - now slowly feeling the outside world dragging them in and away from each other into separate lives. None of this has sound at first and flies by you as a vision with only sparse elements that present themselves as emotion and idea.

Garden folds up into a reflection near the end, with the drums going, the piano and ethereal synths flowing in a mild dissonance near 3:30. Then a subtle retreat into some unknown state of mind we might all experience after we have been given our time here in this life. The thing that makes these thoughts special to me when I envision them is not only the present, but the potential and possible past and future that reverberates with the drop of disturbance into this world beyond intuition. I almost worship intuition as a spiritual energy, a kind of guide that connects us in a way we don't fully understand yet with the noumenon. I am always amazed that my intuition presents itself in the many ways it does. There can be no greater inspiration than that of an apparition of a thought that just won't stop nagging you to express it.

Pillow was a very popular song when I first wrote it. I received lots of good feedback from forums and places like Soundclick, Soundcloud, and Ourstage. It is a very personal piece I wrote that mixes multiple memories into a sort of collage. The main "motif" of the song was written after reflecting on my childhood years - specifically from 5-7 years old. I blocked out a lot of my childhood years because of certain emotional events. I rarely remember much and only really "see" it when I am reminded by a feeling, smell, sound, or other sensual trigger. It happens very infrequently and usually results in some deep emotional response that I try to make sense of as an adult. Most of the time I just let it float back in and disappear, but sometimes I actually sit down and write it out.

Anyway, the title was chosen from a deep emotional memory of crying into my pillow at night, which seemed to be a regular thing for me. I moved around a lot as a kid, my mother and father were never married and she had me when she was 16, he was only 18. I lived with her during those years and I spent a lot of time alone and unsure of myself. She would send me to live with my grandmother one year and then show up randomly to take me to meet her new boyfriend or husband, only to ship me back to my other grandmother again. I don't blame her - no one ever knows how much a child can change their life, and she was and still is one who lives solely for the night life.

I remember those years as a time when I was struggling to find a "solid" in my ideas of God. I used to pray every night and hope for life to get better. I felt like everything was falling apart around me, and I felt like I was wrong and alone with no one else there to talk to. I never stayed anywhere long enough to make friends, and the ones I had I didn't want (for reasons not mentionable here). I remember many horrible things happening to me in that time, all of which no child should face at that age. I don't regret them because they made me who I am now, but even as a 27 year old man - they still make me shake nervously when I talk about them...even as I type this. God never did "obviously" intercede or show me a way per se. It (God) did give me what has now become Allinnia, and by doing so, gave me something more than money can buy - Wisdom.

I took that feeling of being alone and went with it when I wrote Pillow. The lyrics say it all, albeit a little abstract and awkward they paint a very accurate picture of the pain. I took a ballad like approach to the music, being that I tend to make dark abstractions seem beautiful - for some unknown reason I am still trying to figure out (If the song is beautiful sounding to you then it is probably a very dark and twisted one for me). It's actually quite funny, because most people who sent me an email or IM'd me thought it was a beautiful love/tragedy song about someone who left me and they offered their similar experiences and encouragement. The song was only faintly, and sort of insanely, written with that in mind. Pain and loneliness are the two emphatic factors in the song's meaning.

The rhythm is slow and steady and the piano is a plethora of stacked chords that burst and then fade in intensity, I used a lot of multi-voiced chords and it took a while to finally play them through with the right amount of dynamic. :) I threw in some angelic voices to set the mood and portray the help I always wished I had, as if flying overhead and out the window next to my old bed. I sang about holding onto your pillow and hoping, almost to the point of hearing, for the faint calls and singing of the angels. Then I immediately followed it up with a request for them to both join me here on earth and for those around me to come down with me into this hole I was slipping into. The second half of the song only revises the angelic voices to become more disturbing and half-tone like and elucidates that one should never wait for the angels like I did. The song is finished with a request for someone to walk with me and that someone was a result of bad things happening to a child in life, and that child making an entire imaginary world and life from it. The wound never healed and the scar is still forming.

Abstracia was inspired by an old fairy tale written by the Brother's Grimm called "The Fisherman and His Wife." Abstracia is something I used to symbolize for both the concept of an imaginary land and a mental state, and I couldn't think of anything more suitable. Although the song was inspired by The Fisherman and His Wife, it focuses on the constraints of life and of an implied pressure to do something in that constrained life. I define those who think they know as cynics, and this song was directed at the state of mind I seem to spend the majority of my time in, while they keep on claiming. I think a few quotes sum it up nicely:

We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle "nature". We could never find them in appearances had we not ourselves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there.
-Immanuel Kant

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
-Werner Heisenburg

There are many more quotes just like these that basically state the same noumenal prinicple, but I still am amazed that most choose to ignore it. This song is my tribute to that idea.

What can I say about the two Catch22 songs? They were never originally intended to be a part of The Darkness' line up, but somehow found their way on it. I was working on a project I was calling the Eighth Sphere, inspired by the ancient idea passed down in various philosophical representations as a dark and foreboding concept that never really meant the same thing to anyone who used it in their writings. The number eight has always held a special significance to me - if you asked me why I probably wouldn't give you a straight or concrete answer being that I am still not sure why myself (I am just weird like that). Maybe it's because its glyph is symmetrical, or maybe because turned on its side it stands for infinity? To sum the project up: it was a set of very long and drawn out pieces that painted a very dark and twisted landscape made from the stones of my own dark thoughts.The album never got off the ground and I scrapped a lot of the other tunes on it. I never released any of the songs on the site for the public due to their sometimes questionable nature, but the Catch22 set remained. Waiting, track 15 on The Darkness, was actually the Catch22 - 3rd "movement" so to speak. I later renamed it to Waiting and released it with the other two; The three songs seemed to fit with the overall artistic direction of The Darkness. I might try to re-compile some of the old songs one day, but not anytime soon.

The Catch22 title actually doesn't have very much to do with the meaning of the tracks. I chose it because of the similarity it shares with the term "lose-lose" situation, which was what the Eighth Sphere painted albeit in a mythological and totally ideological scope and further twisted by my own paradigm. Moving Through the Crowd focused on the immense convolutions of the often times preposterous ideas floating throughout The Society. I have major issues with a lot of the invisible motions that emanate from society on a large scale. The many questions we never answer and choose to ignore, the extreme fallacies and arrogance of our vision and everything in between - and there is a lot. However minuscule we might actually be, we never fail to throw our selves into everything we find. This self-realization, if I can even arrogantly say it is, has been a very disgusting experience to bear witness to - so I wrote a song about it.

Regrets of Maturity originally faded from the end of Moving Through the Crowd and intensified this same notion with even more personally perverse ideas. I took old clips from "Legend," a 1985 film directed by Ridley Scott, and molded a dark and demonic request for breaking the innocence of that which holds it. I overloaded the original version with heavy bass and very complex rhythms that made it seem "all over the place," while at the same time riding a very eerie and simple set of progressions that follow a loose tonality. The goal was a sort of very embellished ornament progression with no true tonality and a dynamic transition between ideas, but I strayed a little while writing it and made it much more linear by the work's end.

Overall, both covered a lot of ground and much of it was very personal in nature, but I walked away thinking the Catch22 tunes would be the only ones people might enjoy from the original Eighth Sphere line up. I don't think it is worth writing about all of the many themes that play within the songs, most can be understood by asking why I transitioned a motif a certain way, and how the samples and atmospheres I used supported this new transition(idea). I really wanted to get a feel for how the Eighth Sphere might have fared with listeners, but by choosing these two tracks I don't think it reflected that accurately. I think Waiting deserves its own commentary. It has quite a different and focused closure message to it.

I would love to hear what you thought about the pieces, and what they might have meant to you.