As the year comes to a close, I feel the need to look back at my music accomplishments, not in a spirit of celebration, but rather with a critical eye that also looks at the future.
Ten releases (from Arrhythmias to Ancient Hills and Enchanted Valleys, but there are also two secret projects), my first tapes from amazing labels (with one more to come in early 2025), two features on Transmissions from the Dark, two almost complete albums for 2025, one of which will probably be my longest release ever (yes, topping even Polyphony's running time), many amazing collaborations done or planned for 2025, 14 journals... 2024 has been a year of excess, and this is one of the motivations for my introspective mood.
Disclaimer: none of the music embedded in this page is mine, it's from artists I love. If you want to get to know my music, here's my Bandcamp page. If you hear something you like and you want to redeem a code, you can look here.
Friends have been very supportive and December was an amazing month for ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ , but I'm more and more afraid that keeping up with more than a release every other month is exhausting even for the most committed of fans. In addition, it might give the occasional listener the impression that projects are not well-crafted and polished, but rather put out only to keep a place in the metaphorical (and, in my opinion, nonexistent) spotlight. (My side of the story is that the amount of music I record and release is a function of my passion and free time, rather than of the desire to always ping people with notifications).
And yet 'I wanted to do more': the title of this page comes from Italian author Italo Calvno, and those words kept me company for more than a decade. They were written on my master's thesis in 2012 and they are still appropriate for describing how I feel about my 2024. Part of the drive to do more is due to my health journey: as soon as I recovered from my heart transplant back in 2001, I felt I needed to do many things that were precluded to me before. And who knows for how long I could have those newfound strengths? Indeed, my health has gone through ups and lows and, even after almost 20 years of mostly ups, I feel I cannot sit still unless someone chains me (how fitting, for this genre).
This is especially true since work and kids started occupying most of my days (and nights). The precious free time I don't share with my wife is almost entirely devoted to music. Erang once said something similar, and I want to share here a quote by Charles Bukowsky that he mentioned in that discussion:
find what you love
and let it kill you.
How do I reconcile the drive to do more without devaluing my music, while staying true to my heart? This question is stinging me for quite some time, and I haven't found an answer yet. There are, however, some new attempts. For instance, at the beginning of the year I wrote extensively on why I only have one music project. As I said earlier in this journal, this is no longer true. The only thing that has changed with respect to that journal is an unease at the rate at which I publish my music. Giving energies to different projects, while respecting ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ' identity, allows me to keep pursuing this hobby at my own pace, and at the same time having a more manageable output on each different project. In addition, I'll be able to explore different soundscapes (ones that I thought I was incapable of creating) and themes not really fitting ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ.
Forgive me for repeating myself, but I want to be very explicit about this: Athshean is most definitely not my music! It's by the amazing Evergreen.
Alas, the need of finding a new balance with this hobby is also related to new health issues I've been experiencing since the end of summer. I'd love to call them 'minor' and to shrug them off, but they are draining me and, on bad days, are making me afraid that something bigger is coming way earlier than I expected. Since September I've lost my momentum and have powered through some projects, including the last two journals on Disquieting and Ithildin, out of sheer hate towards my declining health that is already limiting me to an extent.
Hence, I need to find the path of least resistance (or, rather, a path of minor resistance) with music, and with my journals as well, as I devote to each entry a lot of time and attentions. It was a pleasure to dive deeper into some of the artists I love, a joy to share my thoughts with you all, and a privilege to talk with a few artists I've written about; I am also humbly grateful for the community's positive response to these journals. Nevertheless, I feel that in the next months I need to take it easier also on this front and instead focus on less taxing activities. For those who like to read my journals, don't worry: I won't be stopping them altogether, and I'm figuring out some changes that might help me keeping a decent pace in 2025.
There's more to my strategy for a more sustainable 2025, including trying to funnel part of my energies into new activities still related to my music journey, but for now it's best to leave everything shrouded in mystery.
So goodbye, at least for a while. But the quest never ends, and I'm sure we'll see each other again.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ, November-December 2024
Secrets, you say? You surely are mistaken and won't find anything following this path...