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1. |
Down
02:59
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Down
Do we pull the same rope,
Row the same boat,
March to the same old beat?
Join in communion of blood and tar?
Was it not Pandora’s jar?
Banners high and blazing…
But will all the star-gazing not pull us down?
Into the ground…
Polar ice, fraternal ice,
Both are keen in melting.
What’s with the firm chill,
Why are we not up ablaze?
Would you not rather be in space?
Banners mildly afloat in the vacuum…
But will all the star-grazing not pull us down?
Into the ground…
And all the gravity that once bound myself,
Just a planet afloat, now I’m floating as well
And there’s another dawn dawning, purplish and brown –
Oh can’t you see?
I even blink the other way around!
And every undeterred photon –
And photons abound –
Tells me
We’re going down…
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2. |
Detective Perspective
04:33
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Detective Perspective
A rubber duck family afloat at the sea
In a vast reef of rubble and an insolent plea,
They’re swimming in circles and searching for sense
And wait for another aeon to commence.
A cracked submarine, four warheads amiss,
Deep down you can hear the chanting of fish:
‘Rust and remembrance, interdependence,
Blubber and flubber and amiss...’
Redwood and cedar entwined in a waltz:
Each year a step and every other a halt.
A ballet in amber, just a riddle at dawn,
A million in timber unravelled the saw.
Detective Perspective,
Looks like you’ve got yourself a case.
Detective Perspective,
I don’t think you can turn that one away.
Detective Perspective,
Please would you shed some light:
We talk about ebb, we talk about flow,
Do we talk about the tide?
Colon and liver are playing a game of chess,
And the scrotum’s quite good, but the brain is the best.
But in different matters, alternate affairs,
The head is quite useless, but the heart is right there.
And ‘Yes,’ nods the nodder, ‘I’ll do as I will!’
‘Yes,’ plots the plotter, ‘I’ll do as I feel!’
And plotting his course, clutching the wheel,
He drives to buy shit in two tons of steel.
A buzz in the grass, a humble bee, in the morrow she flies.
A cough, pretty rough, a ladybug lays down to die.
All creatures afloat, all creatures so high in a myriad of fields
All tainted with poison for maximum yields.
Detective Perspective,
Looks like you got yourself a case.
Detective Perspective,
I don’t think you can turn that one away.
Detective Perspective,
Please would you shed some light:
We talk about ebb, we talk about flow,
Do we talk about the tide?
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3. |
Embers
04:20
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Embers
Once upon a time the pearly sun fell on my face
And childhood sounded free with chimes and bells.
Little did I know that I was meant to be a slave
And subjected just like everybody else.
Until that dismal day that dreary stranger came to me
And meant it was required to grow up,
He said ‘Boy, you see, we run this very odd machinery,
In which I need you to become a cog.’
Turning, turning,
Spin the world higher and higher.
Burning, burning,
Burn like embers drawn from the fire.
Hush! And you can hear the woodworks creaking
Under the heavy load of lousy plush decor.
Hush! And you can hear the puppets squeaking
In neon harmonies and songs of evermore.
But work! And you shall hear the coins a-dripping,
A soothing tinkle, sonic balm on your wounds.
Work! And you shall plent’ly be a-sipping
From brimless crystal, flowering with boons.
Turning, turning,
Spin the world higher and higher.
Burning, burning,
Burn like embers drawn from the fire.
Is it not cruel to send the unsuspect adolescent
On a ravaging crusade against himself?
Is it not misery? A constant state of bigotry?
Gradually becoming someone – someone else?
Turning, turning,
Spin the world higher and higher and higher and higher.
Burning, burning,
Burn like embers drawn from the fire.
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4. |
Troll
03:34
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Troll
On a misty mountain morning, mirthlessly and mad,
Don Juan the mountain troll fell right out of bed.
His nose a dripping icicle, his hair a wiry mess,
When with a whump! he waxed the floor with excess body fat.
When with a whump! he waxed the floor with excess body fat.
Confessing:
I love my mountain life, but sometimes I don’t.
Usually I abide my nightmares, but sometimes I just won’t.
Boy, I love my cave a-dwelling, but now I’m not so sure,
What it is I do and what the hell I’m a doing it for.
Don Juan what you’ve been dreaming?
Pick your head up from the floor!
Things are not as they are a-seeming,
What’s behind that cellar door?
All the things you’ve been amassing
Drag you to the mountains core,
All the things you’ve been caressing
Make you so afraid for more.
Esmeralda mountain princess woke to her husband’s spleen
Sounding from beneath the bed, both absurd and serene.
Don Juan, my mountain love, she said, I know your trouble’s deep,
But tell the sprites that haunt your soul at nighttime I must sleep.
Tell the sprites that haunt your soul at nighttime I must sleep.
Confessing:
I love your mountain life, but sometimes I don’t.
Usually I abide your nightmares, but sometimes I just won’t.
Boy, I love your cave a-dwelling, but now I’m not so sure,
What it is I do and what the hell I’m doing it for.
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5. |
Jade?
03:55
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Jade?
Every time a blackbird sings
Crimson tales of fallen kings,
Tempted deeds of amber hue,
I hear midnight hymns of me and you.
Siren’s songs like sonic statuettes,
Years gone wrong, no coming back,
Sulky paths trodden in the air,
Long I saw, how did I not care?
Mystic’s flight or mystic plight?
Come, fathom me my fortune!
When on wings of jade and fire
I burnt myself alive.
I recall running through the fields,
See-saws and back-bends and listening and talking of yields,
Future’s song was calling me to dance,
So distant now, a faint remembrance.
And when I focus I still hear your voice through the door that kept separate our lairs,
And sometimes we’d meet and we’d hear and rejoice and our music would ring through the air.
Then we’d sit on the floor, playing games, smoking weed, then go back try to work through the draught,
And I wonder what we’d have achieved had I not died of thirst and declared it all naught.
Mystic’s flight or mystic plight?
Come, fathom me my fortune!
When on wings of jade and fire
I burnt myself alive.
And I wonder why life goes the way that it goes,
Why one day you have all and the next you’re alone,
No matter how hard that you try and keep afloat,
Your best is sometimes enough,
And sometimes not.
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6. |
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Obsolescence (feat. Aimee Jacob Oliver)
If rational modernity is measurable eternity;
And progression, technology, science, teleology;
If quantity is quality, and quality formality;
And optimum efficiency is digital proficiency;
Could you then, I beg you, please,
Calculate just what it is
Why I feel so ill at ease?
I feel like unplanned obsolescence
In a place that’s turning grey.
When life has taught its lessons,
Was I here? Was I away?
Did I miss out on the quintessence?
Has my way led me astray?
I hear you talking,
But I don’t get what you say...
If civilized modernity is capital in eternity,
And liberal democracy mere corporate plutocracy;
If all is buying, selling, hoarding, masturbating, waterboarding;
And my responsibility stockpiling futility;
Could you then, I beg you please,
Advertise just what it is
That I need to buy to buy me peace?
I feel like unplanned obsolescence
In a place that’s turning grey.
Oh when life has taught its lessons,
Was I here? Was I away?
Did I miss out on the quintessence?
Has my way led me astray?
I hear you talking,
But I don’t get what you say...
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7. |
The Fields of Rye
04:28
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The Fields of Rye
Mountains ‘fore dawn, blackbirds whistling
Shallow creeks streaming to the shore
The fading stars, oh he’d missed ‘em
And missed the silence even more
Octopus minds, itchy trigger fingers
A sylvan canvas all painted black
A king with no land and no wisdom
‘One day’, he promised, ‘I’ll get back’
Going down, down with the river
Down, down the slipstream of time
Down, down with the river
Down in the fields of rye
A bed of thistles, thyme and shrubbery
The weary moonlight sickening with shade
Lotus blossom, dead opossum,
Marble clouds and clay
Red blood dripping from a scarlet blade
Etched in the gold embrace of dawnlight
An earth that gives and takes again
And one is all and all is starlight
All save the barren fields of man
Below vermillion skies eternal
A drowning sibilance in black
Only the wind a vagrant warden
Wafts with a promise long dead
Going down, down with the river
Down, down the slipstream of time
Down, down with the river
Down in the fields of rye
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8. |
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The Rain That Never Falls
Sometimes I feel like the rain that never falls
Marooned in effigies, hidden and appalled
A sullen fog on cloudy carvings in the sand
Before the ocean tide takes me in again
Home, carry me home, you loving grace
Born, I want to be reborn in your embrace
Like lovers meet in tender melodies
And be at one again
I’d walk as far as heaven and farther then
Sometimes I feel like the scarred and tarry moon
Half of me is in darkness and my light is not my own
Obscured by funnely clouds drowned in pastel skies
I stand a puzzled piece and watch my evening draw nigh
Whole, swallow me whole, you loving whale
Born, I want to be reborn in your entrails
Like lovers meet in tender melodies
And be at one again
I’d walk as far as heaven and farther then
Until the dawn reddens my face
Until the sun forgets my name
And until all fades away
All but my love
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9. |
Mason
03:33
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Mason
Steadfast and cold,
As the hammer blows,
Such is fate, a fate in stone,
Carving for night under the sun.
And the star burns,
The clouds they float
And the wind flies.
And the mountain abides it all.
I wish I were the sun.
Dressed in fiery gown
I’d look forever down,
And sometimes you’d hate me,
But just for what I am.
What’s the measure of a mason?
And what’s his aspiration?
Just rudiments that condescend,
Or how he hides the stitches that it took to mend?
Or neither of all the things that I know about,
That I care about, that transcend this simple thought?
But the clouds swarm and cast shade
Oh, I’d rather be a cloud, it’s not too late!
But being a cloud, so shapeless and free -
My wind, where’re you pushing me?
That you roam the skies unbound
And with your slender wings
Carry the flock southwards
In the wintertime?
I wish I were.
Steadfast and cold,
To the mountain blows
The wind, and finds a fate in stone.
Yet mountains tremble at the mason’s approach…
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10. |
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Tales from the Underworld
When the seed of all that you say that I don’t understand
Is plunged deep in the soil of my head
Through procedure, so alienly humane,
And it it’s watered by the brine of my despair, to what other end,
Than for it to root, flower, blossom and shade
The petty remnants of the sun that was my mind?
And it grows like weed in the garden of my soul,
And I don’t know what venomous fruit I have brought,
And it blossoms to filth and ripens to poison
And I’m just amazed at so different a taste
Is this love – or waste?
When the fear of all you could be comes dragging you down
Arresting both your life and mine,
Through conceptions, entirely misaligned;
And you stand firm in chaos and debris, telling me: all is sound,
When all is flight wherever you turn
In the great phantom chase of your madness.
And it grows like weed in the garden of your soul
But still you hold on to the spectre of control,
And it blossoms to filth and ripens to poison
And you’re too exhausted from running away,
Where’s your love gone astray?
Will you ever see the end of the road? I don’t know.
Will I be there waiting for you? I don’t know.
Will our lives ever entwine? Will our love ever shine?
Will my heart mend in time?
I don’t know.
But then I saw it, and saw it again,
Or else I would not have believed.
I still hear you talk of love, dreams and plans,
But then you were free?
I guess I need to see a thousand times
Before I finally know inside.
Guess I need to feel a million times
Before I accept you’d let me die.
And will you ever see the end of the road? I don’t know.
Will I be there waiting for you? Sad but true, I don’t know.
Will our fates ever entwine? Will our love ever shine?
Will my heart mend in time?
I don’t know.
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Alternate Audio Austria
Independent label for quality wayward underground music. Based in Austria.
www.alternateaudio.net
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