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 CoFD and SFBF, 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.
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...
ᚼᛁᛆᚱᛐᛆᚿᛋ, June 2025