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.