Open, the opening track of Wish (1992), marks one of The Cure’s most paradoxical phases. After the sombre majesty of Disintegration, the band returned to a hedonistic melancholy, filtered through the exhaustion and self-awareness of those who have already wandered through the labyrinth of desire. Open stands as a drunken prologue, a profane liturgy on…
It is interesting to observe the layout of Berghain’s Funktion-One sound system. The stacks are profiled exactly like the columns of Carcer. Geomantically, Carcer is the figure of Saturn in Capricorn, domiciled, cold and dry, where matter closes upon itself. The stacks stand aligned like votive stones of an underground temple, projecting waves that shape…
“Candy” by Chromatics is a liturgy in disguise, a whisper from the Spirit to the soul, calling the listener to vigilance, against that grey weight that wishes to extinguish the ember within. The sparse and elliptical lyric opens like a warning from an unseen guardian: please don’t let them in your heart. It is a…
The track Dangerous Drug, released in June 2024 on the homonymous EP, is sung by Megan Louise with the intensity of a bacchante who invokes ecstasy and wound. The song unfolds as a chant, a litany where the voice repeats its hunger and accusation: “Why do I crave it? Why do you break it?”. In…
Leonard Cohen once wrote the unforgettable line: “There is a crack in everything, that is how the light gets in.” Altought often quoted in sentimental tones, it carries a gravity that touches the core of mystical traditions. Cohen, who stood in the lineage of Jewish visionaries, was drawing from an intuition that reaches far beyond…
The opening riff of “Thunderstruck” is a flash in the dark, the violent descent of a force that splits the heavens apart. This bolt is the arrow of a higher order, the discharge of a current that belongs to realms above the seven planetary spheres. This is the domain of the Ogdoad, the Eighth Heaven,…
Strangelove moves in the hidden room where pleasure and pain become one breath. It is a song clothed in the lexicon of human desire, but beneath it runs the profound current of the soul’s encounter with the Divine. The repeated invocation “Strangelove, strange highs and strange lows” speaks of a love that wounds and heals…
There are those who play music and there are those who serve it. And, among the latter, there are a few who serve in silence, with no cry for witness. In the long corridors of sound that stretch from underground bunkers to ruins of churches unseen, some hands work the turntable like an altar, not…
Few bands encapsulate the threshold between public revelation and private longing as elegantly as Tears for Fears. Emerging from the landscape of early 1980s Britain, a nation shifting under the weight of social, political, and technological upheaval, the duo built a sound both lush and intricate, guided by the spectral hand of introspection. The band’s…
In a culture paralysed by its own irony, where the sacred is either aestheticised or annihilated, the mere suggestion that a nightclub could function as a church is met with a sneer. Cultural critics and self-declared rationalists mock the notion as delusion, as metaphor stretched beyond its capacity. But what is being ridiculed is not…
