Nurse With Wound
Soliloquy for Lilith

Think of the most imposing statue in the world, millions of billions of kilometers tall and equally wide: impossible for those standing at its feet to appreciate its proportions, its grace, its curves.

Think of a painting with an infinite surface, billions of billions of square kilometers: for someone sitting on a pigment, how to appreciate its grandeur, its shapes, its nuances?

Think of the infinite universe, or an atom observed through the most powerful microscope: impossible to grasp its contours, impossible to decipher its secrets.

"Soliloquy for Lilith" is inscrutable, indeed, it is inscrutability made into "music".

Released in 1988, it is a titanic and at the same time Lilliputian work: 3 albums, 8 tracks, 146 minutes and 38 seconds of nothing or slightly more. Or much more.

It is not ambient, it is not industrial, it is not kosmische, it is not esoteric music, it is not avant-garde, it is not meditation music, it is not drones: it is all this, and much more.

A single source of sound: a set of sounds fused and repeated in loops, concentric circles drawn with strange hand gestures performed in the air, as if chewed up and spat out by the formidable jaws of a theremin, the oldest known electronic instrument. Guitar effects modulated by stomping on pedals in a hair-raising seesaw, an exhausting undulation that leads to infinity, colored with infinite nuances that grow as they sink into metallic black, emerging into semi-electric black, and finally returning to rusted black.

Electricity is thanked in the internal notes of the booklet, and here I quote Wikipedia under the entry Theremin, which helps us comprehend the incomprehensible:

"This instrument is fundamentally composed of two antennas placed above and to the side of a container housing all the electronics. Control is achieved by moving one's hands closer or farther from the antennas: the upper one (placed vertically) controls the pitch, the lateral one (placed horizontally) allows for amplitude regulation. The sound can vary between that of a violin and a vocal tone. The instrument is considered very difficult to play precisely because it is played without touching it."

This is why electricity is thanked. Stapleton, a sound physicist, invents the greatest microscope of the world (himself) and digs inside the sound, beyond music, beyond art, beyond the divine, reaching territories unexplorable by the naked eye, beyond every scientific conception, beyond every human and supernatural conception.

"Soliloquy for Lilith" is an empty Pandora's box, a crypt without the dead, the Sistine Chapel painted with oil, it is the Mariana Trench of music: an inexorable and inexplicable plunge into the ocean of sound, an infinite and enigmatic abyss surfacing with the contours of a putrid drop of water.

It remains to be understood when and how (in what psycho-physical state, I mean) to listen to such a thing. When lucid? In the twilight zone? Doing yoga? Praying to God? Celebrating the Devil? In a state of intoxication? In overdose? At the brink of death?

Dead? Probably...