This is the second entry in the series that I started a few days ago.
Music is one of my favourite pleasures in life, together with or because of my pleasure of travelling into foreign worlds. I usually write down my dreams, I write down stories (which is my blog's main theme) and I am blissful when I'm in unknown lands, exploring the unfamiliar.
I can fortunately travel in my mind, so I don't actually need to leave my house much to enjoy my greatest pleasure, and the easiest and liveliest stimulant for this activity is listening to music.
Summoning
In the sense of mind-world exploration, one of the best music creators that I have ever listened to is Summoning. Their songs serve as incubators for fantasy, having been born out of the talented creative minds of two fans of Lord of the Rings, the artists and band members Protector and Silenius.
No matter the mood in which I find myself, I always enjoy listening to their music, closing my eyes, lying back on my chair and just imagining that the sounds are the world.
The song
Now, here, I will introduce the track called Tar-Calion that is played by Summoning. Listening to it might be a bit of an issue, since it was released on January 5, 2018 and it is not yet on Youtube. I listened to it on Spotify, but it's also on Deezer and you can get the track for $1.29 (USD) on their Bandcamp.
| Links to the song |
|---|
| Spotify (free) |
| Deezer (free) |
| Bandcamp ($1.29 for the song, $9.99 for the album) |
This is my journey into the song without reading the lyrics or actually caring what it's really about. It's an exploration of the world that I see when I close my eyes and listen to it for the first time.
The journey
Mystery awaits, waiting for a cue to start creating. The guitar is strange. I wonder, imagine, Romans, Colosseum, I realize the guitar's assonance. Then the percussion comes and reminds me of an army of Roman warriors moving forward.
The little flute contrasts with everything, too delicate, flowery, then Arabic (harmonic scale), joined by a trumpet that makes the song pursue an epic scale little by little. The sudden realization of the epicness that is growing. I wonder if I will imagine a story in the economic golden age of ancient Arabia.
Then starts the story of a victory in battle, steps of someone carrying chains. I sense dogs or horses, or someone walking. With hammering on a drum, the story turns dark, into the cavernous depths under Arabia. In the underground mines, a red skyless expanse filled with stalactites, red light swims around creatures of unknown descent. The ocean lies on one side, ready to break the walls, lava lies on the other, heating and lighting everything in red.
And in the middle, the tragedy of an unsafe world is being played, a world where there is no hope. The mountainous cavern accompanies the eternal tale of a group of people who sit and drink something, finding comfort in this little moment, knowing that the dystopy will take, as it always does, the form of pain. Someday something will break and, boop, into the pits of despair.
But for now, they can sit at the edge of the mountain and watch the giant gliding birds, carrying armed riders, going and coming. Perhaps it's the calm and soft instrumentation that makes me imagine this sense of floating, of gliding, of a calm pause, an escape that shares the moment with the dissonance of the aggressive guitar, playing the terrible surroundings.
Even if this sense of gliding entrances me, I know that the surroundings are still active. Carts flow from the mines, labourers pass by with low heads, pick a big rock off the ground and carry it, sweating and tired with unceasing strain, to the cart that will take it to their owner. These are their days. No time, even, to look at the ground and enjoy its red colour, to feel the soft sand as they sit to rest. No. No time to rest. They walk and please.
Bows with arrows of fire are fired into the pit in the center, or across it. What are they hunting? I look down and see a dragon perishing, crying out for mercy. It hasn't surrendered, but it's not angry, it just didn't know that it was going to die like this, that the world would strike him and stick arrows all over its body.
The drums stop, the world decreases in size as I fly up, but I see it overall, an underground capsule of an eternal tragedy being played out, of monotonous activity repeating itself for eternity.