Omega Massif
Geisterstadt

At first glance, everything can be deceiving. These days, listening to the first 10 seconds of a band with strange names is the trend of the moment. But then you get bored, bow your head, and laugh to yourself at the idea of having done it again: conforming to the collective will of "if everyone says this thing is cool, it's cool for me too..." And then you lose hope, convinced that there is no possibility for a creative situation on its last legs, like the current one. Personally, I believe that although there is a minimal and pulsating awakening, it is all happening in the most total (de-facto) ignorance of minds that tend to be "conform" (to what, I can no longer explain).

Ok.

Wandering the internet, something I often do alone, even on the street, I notice a handful of precious and lifeless seconds lying there on the ground, pleading for mercy from their dying position. I lean over to feel their pulse, and believe me, not without skepticism, and what I feel shocks me. Almost disturbs me.

I read Omega Massif, and see an eerily haunting cover: a semi-derelict house, a desolate landscape behind it.. Something tells me I have to enter that cover, and as I always do, without even accounting to myself, I enter it. I’d like to say two things right away. First, fuck it. Second, even my hypothalamus is vibrating. So, I look at the sky, and thank that endlessly cursed bastard of a fate that governs us and I tell myself without hesitation that this is how it works: every hundred thousand units, a foreign one appears, with inconceivable features.

If someone told me I was right, I’d stop them immediately because before talking about things one doesn’t comprehend, one must experience it firsthand, and I say this with humility because I’m an idiot, but it’s been a while since I’ve met someone who gets animated about this idea: often, when this seems to happen, masks, expanded, collapse, and I see the (un)real faces of the generation to which I belong, doing everything but understanding what they daily chew that is cancerous and pestilent. But something rises from my esophagus, like an acid reflux, a memory. And it makes me immediately understand that I was like that too, briefly, but I was. And so, what to say to myself and to you? Nothing.

However: there’s a damned fucking little house, a mountain, and nothing else. I don’t even see the faces of these four Germans produced by Denovali Records, but I feel the granite of their guitars going in and out of my eardrums like it’s air. Very low tones. At the limit of detuning, compact, ethereal, heavenly and demonic melodic lines: pagan. Actually, no. Arcane. Something doesn’t work.. I like it a lot, but I don’t understand.

Everything is noise, mountain, basalt, orite, and inner landslide. Sure, now it’s clear: there is nothing but sound, suitably interwoven, with great care in equalization, volume leveling, compression. But especially, there’s not a fucking word. No. Nothing but sounds. And they say much more than they should because they are outside any convention, any hypocrisy, any presumptuous evaluation-free observation, and any territorial anxiety ever meant. 

Waves tens of meters high, violence, nature.

I open my eyes, I am back to myself. And I think about what the hell it was, and almost certainly, if I could sell tickets for the journey I took, everyone would refuse. Blame that damned cover devoid of glitter, which is much liked, and often deceives. But I swear, I have seen. I have lost the use of words, I no longer want to know anything. My hands contract in spasms, I just want to listen, in fact, I close my eyes, I no longer need them. Unlike many, I am no longer afraid to be surprised.

I look at the lifeless body of that image, now it’s dead, a corpse. I smell it, try to revive it, nothing. 

People pass around it as if nothing has happened, in total indifference, all intent on worshiping nothingness.

I get up, decide to leave. No words, except one, that hammers my head and burns like an equatorial sun.

GEISTERSTADT.

And then I go home, go to the basement, and turn everything off: electricity and gas.

Nothing to do.

From the next wall, the muffled chatter of a TV annihilates me.

And then I remember an ancient proverb never so true, as well as suitable for the occasion.

SILENTIUM EST AUREUM.

Silence is golden.

But the roaring distortions, the violently echoing drums, and the dreamlike arpeggios belonging to desolate lands vanished from the face of the earth are worth much more.

More than a damn photocopy newscast, for sure.