This is a journal I wanted to write right from the start of the "artists I love" series, maybe as early as February 2024. However, for the longest time I felt lost in how to approach it. This is because The Eternal Returns is an artist for whom my inner music categories (shaped by metal and other forms of non-electronic music) are utterly inadequate, and the only words I have to talk about his music are: eclectic, visionaire, genre-defying... And yet, since I first engaged with his music, I had the clear feeling that, behind everything I couldn't fathom (or maybe exactly because there's so much that eludes me), there lies a treasure of great worth.
As usual, let me start from the album that put The Eternal Returns on my inner music map.
When Shining, Fading, Burning, Flickering was published, I was already aware of The Eternal Returns as a very helpful member of an online DS community, with an immense music knowledge and a love for oddballs and obscure acts. I still remember the first time I listened to the album: I was travelling for work, and the trip made it even harder to connect with this kind of music that was nothing like what I usually engage with. And I assure you that my music diet is not just melodic metal on the rocks.
This just seems like an awfully unnecessary way to notate "leave a guitar in a chimpanzee's zoo enclosure. - S.B.
Lorewise, Shining, Fading, Burning, Flickering is a four-part prequel-sequel to a narrative that began one year earlier with Century of False Dawn.
Indeed, there are many references between Century of False Dawn and Shining, Fading, Burning, Flickering, including motifs and pieces of audio that get transfigured in the passage from one album to the other. The track titles are also intertwined, but the story they hint at is deliberately incomplete, and the albums seem to ask to the listeners to actively engage in recreating a narrative that makes sense at an individual level. While I can't claim to have co-created a clear picture of what's going on in these two releases, I feel drawn to them for the exact same reason why I enjoyed so much reading and rereading one of my favourite books ever.
The sense of challenge and of being transported into something so big, complex, and probably also alien to a degree, was for a long time the main appeal I saw in The Eternal Returns. And, of course, besides the intellectual pleasure there's also the nuanced songs that range across genres and feature contaminations, deconstructions and skillful use of tropes both in composition and production. The overall package makes it for a music challenge that might not be appropriate for all occasions, but it's surely one I am very happy to engage with every once in a while. But this is far from being the end of the story.
As I was writing the first drafts of this journal, a new chapter in the Century of False Dawn storyline has been revealed.
Presented as "a distant prequel to Century of False Dawn", this two-track EP oozes music goodness in many forms: clever noise improvisations on top of emerging orchestral compositions that get gradually revealed as the music proceeds, and a terrific sense of structure from chaos. A cosmogony shaping formless matter into something recognisable and yet with a touch of weirdness about it. I also hear the echoes of experimental musicians of the 1970s, and indeed The Eternal Returns confirmed influences from electroacustic music, musique concrète and dungeon drone.
Handpicked by The Eternal Returns himself!
The Century of False Dawn releases are not the only offering of The Eternal Returns. The year 2023 gave us this amusing gift of a Friday the 13th in October. It was the perfect date for dropping so many silly and spooky releases, and indeed many artists rose to the call. Among such Friday 13th releases, the one that resonated the most with me was definitely this fun-sized horror divertissment.
The Nightmare series, as I like to think about this release and its sequels, takes everything that's great about The Eternal Returns' music, strips away the layers of obfuscation and complexity, especially on the story level, and offers accessible vignettes inspired by horror tropes that shouldn't be taken too seriously. From music-making monsters to shady characters with questionable hobbies, without forgetting dark visions of the future and more, the Nightmare series has something for every light-hearted horror geek.
Another great feature of the Nightmare series is the collaborations. Nightmare Archetypes and Nightmare Academy both include a feature by cellist Arianna Mahsayeh, Nightmare Archetypes closes with a (very fitting) techno remix of Persistent Presence by Kuschranztek, and I have the honour of being a guest musician for Distortion Elemental, the last track of Nightmare Architecture.
Speaking of my personal experience with Distortion Elemental and knowing also the process behind Malicious Melancholy (notice the awesome liner note: everything in the first track is a cello), I absolutely love how The Eternal Returns took the original material and made it his own in such a natural and seamless way. It's almost as if the Nightmares are so good at taking over the world, if only they set their mind to it... And in a sense I experienced something similar when I covered Persistent Presence for Polyphony.
Knowing The Eternal Returns, it was a given that my cover would need to revisit the original song in a more radical way than what I did with other covers. Taking a nightmare and bringing it to dreamland (the setting of Oneiric Quest, Oneiric Divination and Oneiric Punks) was an obvious and yet fun idea. I'm so happy of the results of this mutual contamination that I can't help but wonder what could happen in a more radical Nightmare takeover of the Oneiric realm...
Back to reality, in this exciting time when many DS acts are moving out of bedrooms and into live venues, The Eternal Returns not only performed his music live, but also recorded the performance. You can hear it on Bandcamp, and also see it on YouTube.
It's great that the songs are recognisable but at the same time reinterpreted for a live setting. In my opinion, this approach is very enjoyable for both fans and artists, and the end result is a remarkably good performance. As a fellow artist, I'm sure I can take a few pointers from how well-organised and smooth was the live performance!
I've had the privilege of taking a glimpse into the future of The Eternal Returns, and I can assure you that there are some very exciting releases down the road. Before closing off, I'm very happy to share with you an interview/chat with The Eternal Returns themselves, where we dig a bit deeper into the music and the lore of the project.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ: at the beginning of the journal, I said that my music knowledge isn't sufficient to give justice to what you do. Do you want to share a few words yourself on your music?
The Eternal Returns: all the weird complexities of my music are really a result of me wanting to do many things but not really knowing how. I listen to a lot of different music and I want to incorporate whatever I find interesting about it into my own work. I don't have traditional music education so I learn by picking up and researching different concepts from music theory, and when I get interested in them I also want to apply them to whatever I'm making. Because I'm not good at playing instruments and usually compose with a computer, I'm also neither influenced nor constrained by how the instruments would be played in real life. All of this leads to an eclectic but sometimes chaotic and unnatural mix of genres and techniques. So don't worry about not knowing how to describe it in terms of music theory - it would be a bit like trying to apply literary analysis techniques to make sense of why a child playing with Legos decided to use medieval knights, modern construction workers and Star Wars characters at the same time.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ: with a few exceptions, I think most hobbyist musicians are like that. I do something similar myself, and I believe it shows through my releases (for instance, it's definitely possible to feel when I've picked up key changes from my informal "studies" of Berlin School). However, it'd take a very dedicated fan... But I still think it's great that we allow what we pick up to influence so much our music journey - it's part of the beauty of it. Also, learning new tricks is always enriching.
The Eternal Returns: despite the chaotic nature of my creative process, there is a lot of thought put into my music. Usually, it starts with some simple story idea or inspiration that grows into a concept for an album or an EP. The idea keeps growing and evolving (usually ending up as something barely recognizable) until I have a detailed concept of both a story told by the songs, and of an album as a listening experience. This determines roughly how many songs there will be, how the mood changes throughout an album, what kind of sounds and genres I'd like to incorporate. Of course, things change when I start working on the actual songs and sometimes things end up in a very different place than what I originally intended. Each song begins with its own basic idea - a chord progression, a riff, a rhythm. That's when I start chaotically applying all the different things I've learned to turn this idea into an actual track, more often than not thinking of the mood or narrative behind the song or its place within a larger album to intuitively decide what works and what doesn't. It's really just a lot of trial and error.
When the songs are done, I start putting a release together - rearranging things, sometimes leaving songs aside for a future or bringing in the ones I made earlier, making everything flow together, doing all the little time-consuming tweaks with mixing and mastering to make sure it sounds just right. Surprisingly, despite the narrative aspect of the album being so important to me, I spend far too much time thinking about the titles. It's not easy to come up with a good title - especially when I want the story of my albums to remain somewhat vague and mysterious. That's another weird idea I have for my music: I don't want people listening to my albums to replicate the exact story I thought about while making them, I want them to listen to the music, read the titles and make their own stories. A great thing about music as an art form is that it can have an emotional impact of narrative art forms while staying abstract and open to interpretation.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ: it really shows that there's an amazingly deep lore behind your release, especially the Century Of False Dawn -- Shining, Fading, Burning, Flickering series and the Nightmare series. There are so many evocative images and ideas throughout... I know the obscurity is a deliberate choice but, if you want to share some fragments of information, the floor is yours.
The Eternal Returns: Century of False Dawn is essentialy a hero's journey. The protagonist starts in a place of No Light, goes through an adventure that is also an extended identity crisis, recognizes that the Light he was looking for was a False Dawn and finally manages to find the Light within himself.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ: This is very different from what I've imagined for the release! It's part of the allure of how you present your music: an open invitation of figuring out what's going on with each release.
The Eternal Returns: Shining, Fading, Burning, Flickering takes the story of Century of False Dawn and puts it in a wider historical context. It's not as much of a single story as it is a history book. There is a collective protagonist - Line of Light - and we see it go through different eras: Shining Light, Fading Light, Burning Light, Flickering Light. It lasts centuries, maybe millennia, and there's no ending - just uncertain future ahead. The protagonist of Century of False Dawn shows up, of course - you can hear variations of his leitmotif in Prelude to Flickering Light and in False Rebirth III - but this time the story isn't just about him.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ: I think I picked up on the protagonist being a collective, but I have to admit I have not settled yet on what happens to it throughout my version of the story. And I'm fine with this, it allows me to be playful every time I want to engage with the story of the release. By the way, it gives me vibes of an alternative Victorian era mingled with either spacetime travel or eldritch horror elements (or maybe both). And I keep making a connection with Kamelot's Sacrimony, probably because of both the setting and the unusual title that hints at a bigger story.
As for the Nightmare series, there isn't an actual story in those EPs and that's also a deliberate choice. They share a world (which is very much not the same world as the one of CoFD/SFBF), but I don't think of any of the EPs (or the series as a whole) as a larger narrative where 'events' of one song lead to another. Instead, I see the songs as a series of independent vignettes - each one is a short story and also a character portrait (sometimes of multiple characters) set in this exaggerated, slightly humorous world of horror cliches (occasionally juxtaposed with things that don't exactly fit in) and gothic aesthetics. It's musically simpler so there's no need to weave a complex narrative - the imagery is the point.
Of course, I then decided to contradict myself by making Within the House of Darkness which is set in the world of Nightmare series but tells a larger story through the medium of an album. I just can't stop myself.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ: another feature we have in common (I refuse to call it a flaw): once an idea is set in motion, I can't also help myself and think of how to expand it. And this year it will be even more apparent: all my 2025 releases so far have been sequels (more or less direct), and the next releases I have planned will be sequels as well. Of course, I can't wait to start new storylines as well; however, for the time being, I'm happy to bring to closure some threads that I began weaving in ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ's first year.
Back to your music, I have not forgotten about your early releases, Infinite Loop and Autumn Introspection. Can you tell us a bit more about them, and if (and how) they are connected to the main storilines of your other releases?
The Eternal Returns: those early releases are not directly connected to any of the ongoing series. Infinite Loop in general is very disconnected from later works. It's a fairly short demo I made when getting back into making music after giving up on that for about a decade. There wasn't much of an idea of what The Eternal Returns will sound like back then, or even what it will be (I originally wanted to make a band, and it's still how I think of it - it's just that currently I am its only member). The sound was an attempt to combine some of my musical obsessions at the time - some prog-electronic/Berlin school, a bit of 80s post-industrial, a lot of ambient techno and early IDM (which are things I still listen to, but not as much as I did in 2019-2020). I'm not sure if I succeeded in that, but between those influences and the heavy use of samples I made my most traditionally electronic-sounding release to date. I didn't completely abandon this sound though: some of its ideas will be revisited on Within the House of Darkness, my next full-length album - but this time, combined with the horror aesthetics of Nightmare Archetypes.
Autumn Introspection, on the other hand, is in many ways a prototype for most things I made later, especially for the CoFD/SFBF series. It's the album on which I discovered multisample libraries for realistic acoustic instruments, allowing me to mix electronics with orchestra and guitars. It's also when I discovered the more creative side of mastering, using a tape simulation plugin for a subtle lo-fi flavor. And it's an album that's deliberately structured like a story, with song titles telling a story of a journey to the void and back. It's a flawed album - one of my goals for Century of False Dawn was to make something better paced and more consistent- but it's also probably my most personal release. They're all personal in a way, but this one doesn't hide it behind lore and concepts.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ: all your covers are visually striking, and I'm sure there are a lot of well-thought hidden details about them. The Century of False Dawn series in particular seems to have very meaningful images on them. Do you want to share something about your process and the meaning behind the images?
The Eternal Returns: in the CoFD series, the covers are collages of textile samples from old sample books. I first got interested in those when I discovered a digitized version of Shadows from the Walls of Death, a book created in XIX century as a study of health risks of then-popular arsenic paints. It's a collection of pieces of wallpapers which contained those paints, and its physical copies are poisonous. It's a fascinating story, but it also made me realize how beautiful a collection of pieces of fabric can be, even without an interesting story attached to them. I spent a lot of time looking through other digitized sample books, and I've realized I can turn them into artwork for my music.
The cover of Century of False Dawn is made of Asian textile samples. The central design - a square divided diagonally into two triangles, one darkly colored and one intensely red - is admittedly not my idea, it was already arranged like that in a book. But I loved this image, I thought it could work as an abstract representation of the protagonist going through an identity crisis and having two distinct but not entirely different sides struggle within him. The surrounding samples are also meant to represent events or themes of the story, but not in such a direct way - but maybe when listening to certain songs, they'll just make sense to you.
Shining, Fading, Burning, Flickering also uses Asian textiles. The meaning here is pretty straightforward - four pieces of cloth are aligned visually with four words of the album title, and they correspond with the relevant parts of the album/eras of its world's history. 'Shining' is bright and elegant and expensive looking, 'Fading' is torn and tattered, 'Burning' looks somewhat violent and chaotic and 'Flickering' brings back the central image of CoFD cover, calling back to its theme of duality.
Before the Circle Was Drawn uses French textiles. The fact that they're specifically French isn't significant, but the physical and cultural distance between France and East Asia is. BtCWD is distant from the rest of the series, although it's distant in a different way - it is the world's past, long before any of the events could take place, before any sort of recorded history. Some images have a pointilistic quality to them, some are purely abstract, and there's emphasis on lines and borders - it's the world taking its shape, things becoming distinct from each other, it's something understandable emerging from chaos.
Now, I am not always this pretentious. Album covers for the Nightmare series can serve as an evidence for that because, just like with the music, it really isn't that deep. They are collages of black and white photographs, mostly from XIX and early XX century (some found on the internet, some bought on a flea market). They have mountains, castles, sword fights, ghostly transparent people; they have a blackletter font, a decorative frame, and they're made to look old - simply because such imagery fits the sound and atmosphere of those releases. There is some theming for a specific EP (architectural drawings for Nightmare Architecture, a university building for Nightmare Academy) and some people appear on multiple covers but there isn't really any hidden meaning behind it. It's all about visually representing the mood of the Nightmare series, it's a starting point for what you'll see if you close your eyes while listening to those EPs.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ: your project name and some of your titles (Will to Live first and foremost) are lifted from Nietzsche's philosophy. What's Nietzsche's significance for your music, and for you as an artist?
The Eternal Returns: Nietzsche is an endless source of inspiration. I love how he took influence from the pessimistic worldview of Schopenhauer but turned it around into something more hopeful - he didn't deny that there's no inherent purpose in life and that life is necessarily filled with pain and suffering, but he learned how to create your own purpose and how to both use suffering for self-improvement and find experiences beuatiful enough to make it worthwhile. This is, after all, what his story of the eternal return is all about - turning one lifetime (with all the good and bad that came with it) into infinity, and asking if the way you live would make it a blessing or a curse. His response to the idea that there's no objective morality and it's just a way for society to shape us was to find the morality of your own and reshape society. His response to the world of constant struggle was to keep struggling, never surrender and always fight for your place in it. It is an extremely inspiring way to look at the world, and while I am not deluded enough to think of myself as an Ubermensch, I can at least try not to be the last man.
And of course Nietzsche is inspiring not just for his worldview, but also for the way he wrote about it. He wrote of the world devoid of any real higher powers, but he still filled it with powerful symbolism, myths and religious parables. And he's inspiring for how everything he wrote reflected him as a person - you can clearly see this philosophy as a way of dealing with his own flaws, creating this unattainable ideal and trying to be at least a bit more like it. In a way, I'm doing a similar thing with The Eternal Returns.
As an aside, I'd like to elaborate a bit on the Will to Live title a bit. It is a Schopenhauer reference (and a concept of will to live was an inspiration for Nietzsche's will to power), but it's also a pun. "Live" in the name refers also to the fact that it's a live album. "Will" in Polish is "wola", and Wola is also the district of Warsaw in which the concert took place. This kind of free association and mixing of unrelated concepts is actually how I come up with many of my ideas (and titles), but this is one case of it being relatively simple to explain. My thought process is often wandering in weird directions.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ: bilingual bonuses are always fun! And it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn I included a few of them also in some of my albums.
It was lovely to catch a glimpse of your thought process and to get an inkling of the spiraling complexity you weave into your music. And I bet that if someone wants to learn more, there are some hidden corners of this website that can help getting even deeper into the Century of False Dawn -- Shining, Fading, Burning, Flickering saga...
Until next time, may you always find meaning in chaos and beauty in complexity.
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ, June 2025