Atrium Carceri
Ptahil

Atrium Carceri, to cool your balls in the tedium of sultry summer evenings, walking on foul, blistering rubber slippers, pouring broth-like discount beer into a plastic cup.

Atrium Carceri, yes, paint my balls black, infest my head with shit noises. Atrium Carceri, a discourse of commas and periods, without words or syntax, just parentheses, fleetingly opened and closed, creaks and chains, drippings and doors that remain closed.

What is dark-ambient? Cold fusion of the balls, Nothing set to music, music that becomes an experience, non-entertainment for masochists in search of love, condemnation for the balls and the ears.

Ok, Raison D'Être is untouchable, Raison D'Être is God, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing else. Sometimes the young bucks hold their own against the fathers, showing you the same thing from different perspectives.

To remain credible within the narrow confines of Nothing, one must know how to play, have the rigor of an inquisitor or the Incredible Hulk, discard everything man has invented from the stone age to today; be sharecroppers and yield crops from a three-square-centimeter plot to raise century-old oaks as high as the sky; and go further, climb like Mickey, Goofy, and Donald on the bark and branches of the magic bean, reach the Impossible, get pummeled by giants, pass colossal doors, climb monstrous steps, with the abyss behind and the giants' blows ahead.

Resignedly walking along the grim corridor of a dilapidated prison: that was "Cellblock". Banging your head against the white walls of a mental hospital: a nice trick called "Seishinbyouin". Atrium Carceri reviews the places of confinement, progressively proceeding from concrete to mind, not raising metaphysical walls around you, but pursuing the reverse path, dumping concrete on your mind.

"Ptahil": Atrium Carceri comes to your home, pours layers of asphalt over your brain, your skin and your balls. Imprisonment of the everyday. The locations change, but the walls remain, solid, insurmountable, erected by that good craftsman Simon Heath, isolated in his New York apartment assembling Nothing, meticulously erecting insurmountable walls that exclude you from the world: lime, cement, a blend of dark noisism that strengthens walls corroded by mold and frost, the sinuous slithering, the stumbling rustle of slimy reptiles on the rough surface.

The formless barrier of synths that come and go, a sludge tide that imperceptibly fills voids and then retreats just as slowly, while the shatterproof glass of the windows trembles and is on the brink of breaking.

The bricks of a minimal electronics that pulses mysteriously, at times rough as the best industrial tradition demands, at times unexpectedly sophisticated, bordering on trip-hop, bordering on a certain auteur electronics. The wearily regular beat of a heart on the verge of collapse, an inexorable clock that ticks away the silence and the cramped, claustrophobic spaces of a dripping yet solid and indestructible place.

Infernal loops that devour you and crush your bones. Then the absences. And some Gothic slips that we forgive nevertheless (after all, we're still talking about dark), but no Gregorian chants, no doomsday orchestrations. The verdict, alas, has already been rendered: punishment, confinement, eternal tedium. Only closed doors, a crawling in the dark, desperately feeling the walls in search of a gap that isn’t there.

Then you resign, lay exhausted on the cold, rugged floor, and then there's nothing left but to think, to escape with imagination, to wander in unknown shores, tasting the flavor of past eras, dead and forgotten civilizations, the hope of reincarnation because in this body one just can’t stay anymore.

And then, even if for an instant, a female voice opens new worlds to you, piano pieces emerge from the cracks of non-music that you wouldn’t even expect, making you think: "But then it's music that I'm enduring!"

Ptahil, Ptahil, my mind is elsewhere, but firmly attached to the objects around me, a shabby little table, a dismantled sofa, the shitty slippers that pitifully host my feet with long, dirty nails. Dirty floor, oil stains on the floor, imprisonment of the everyday, as said, the elephantine step of a hardware electronics, hammer on the balls, bales of screws, nails, and bolts.

Bolt my balls, fix them to the wall, and while I hang upside down, the world remains motionless, the perspective changes but not my life, not my chair, my table, the walls.

Upside-down head full of blood, the pulsing of temples drunk with blood. A daunting descent into the recesses of the unconscious, a desperate escape towards other places, while the drones, poison for the mind, lead to golden citadels, lush vegetation, bridges crossing enchanted rivers, rediscovering previously lived lives, removed and recovered through synths that squeeze cerebral cells to extract what one would never expect: forgotten modes of being, antecedents of life itself, even before traversing the uterus and sticking the head out, in the presence of the Seven, squatting under their gaze, their exchanging of stern glances, a prelude to unappealable decisions.

Is this the alternative, then, the illusion of a mind that spans indefinitely but in the end, unfortunately, remains sordidly anchored to the knobbly surface of my limited perceptions? To my wooden chair? To my table stained with sauce? To my damn discount beer?

Atrium Carceri, to keep going with life. But with style.

DEATH - IS - NOW!