Sorrow

Vaporous mists rise and sink. They shift into phantasmagoric figures before fading again into the nebulous and silent maelstrom. Faint and pale light casts soft shadows in the veils of fog, and vague silhouettes loom in the distance, only to be shrouded by the drifting cloaks of mist. Then, as a portal opens in the fog, piercing sun rays penetrate this shapeless world. Vapours are burnt and evaporated, and order is revealed above and below the chaos. Stark cliffs and peaks seem to ascend above the sea of fog and thrust their barren heads into the gray dawn light. Stately firs stand like monoliths in the solitude of this subalpine dreamscape. Now scattered, tendrils of curling mist float amongst the vertical tree line. Trickling channels of glacial melt stream down cliffsides in thin streaks of gently falling white water. The delicate and soft voice of a stream is heard close by, fed from a purest mountain spring.

So begins Sorrow by the gathering that was known as The 3rd and the Mortal. The entirety of this work explores this strange and wonderful landscape. It is a beautiful juxtaposition of the ethereal and delicate with the rooted and physical. Though this central direction of the opus is maintained throughout, the individual songs themselves visit different aspects of this location, and each has its unique place in the greater whole.

It is not without purpose that I describe this relic of melancholy as having location, but this region is only in part corporeal. 'Ring of Fire' opens with a tangible, yet uncanny sense of geography. The riff descends, down the sharp slopes of those cliffsides, but betrays a pervasive sense of abstractness. It begins to dawn on those who descend those wind carved steps that there is an impossibility about this once familiar path. Like a location from waking life visited in a dream, what appears at first to be ordinary space takes on fantastic proportions. Illogical patterns, warped verticalities, impossible geometries, and landscapes that feel at once both fractal and fluid. Topography of dreams. Terrain of the inner world.

And though these dreams were named together under the title Sorrow, it does not adequately describe the emotions evoked by these inner journeys. It is instead an air of delicate melancholy that floats over this immaterial land. It hangs around austere peaks, drifts over scarce mountain grass, settles into cold hollows, sinks into forgotten and wind worn bones. Even as sun rays penetrate rare windows in the everpresent clouds, their presence is too ephemeral to bring warmth to these cold stones, somber altars that we lay our tired bodies upon to recess into sleep, and dream of roots deep within the marrow of these mountains.