2026-01-01
Those who set flame to books / To stamp out ideas / Will soon burn their source //
And I ask you now to tell / What deity finds the scent / Of burning flesh / Pleasing to His nostrils? //
So they birth a fourth Beast / Not of sea or earth / But of themselves / To grant absolution / Through absolute authority / By themselves / For themselves //
Crawling mass / Hemorrhaging bile / Ouroboros lamb / Cut off your face to spite another's
2026-01-10
Alhymor is born on Sunday. On a whim, we placed headphones on the overhead drum mic boom, plugged them into a preamp, and hit record. While the first drum take was being recorded, we adjusted the preamp level because it was clipping. We found the results astonishing, the recording was arcane and authentic. Inspired, we set the headphones on the console desk and recorded unplugged electric guitar and bass into them. Then, we each did a vocal pass, recording headphones worn front to back, on top of the monitoring headphones worn over ear. No lyrics, just howls and gurgles. That was it, only the most ephemeral and slipshod captures. First takes only, not the slightest premeditation or intent. A furious creativity boiled forth. The name is nonsense. A comment that the music sounded “abysmal” bounced around for a few moments, came back as Abymor, Abhymor, Alhymor. It was chosen. The album art is composited from a few extreme close up photographs of the torn and frayed pad on the recording headphones, and the cracks and creases of the studio leather couch. It was uploaded to Bandcamp within a few hours of the first time we hit record.
Alhymor is a pitch black spark of impotent fury, born only when the last shred of hope is destroyed. She is the egregore of desperation, of impaling the oppressor's stamping boot with shards from your own femur. She is every senseless resistance against insuperable force.
2026-01-18
Recorded The Illusion Falters. The name was taken from Vermis I. The orchestral theme was aleatorically performed on a miserably tiny 32 key midi controller.
2026-02-01
From the mountains I watch / A species disfigure itself /Cutting frantically / With the needle shards / Of the machine mirror //
Reaching desperately for shadows / On the walls of their cages / Which glare more vibrantly / The deeper they impale / Their own eyes //
They cannot hear the laughter / Of their tormentors / As a sound distinct / From their own / Hideous cacophony of shrieking //
All sensory channels saturated / With infinitely multiplexed sensation
2026-02-03
Finished recorded Disfigured Reflection. The intro is all generated from a single failed guitar take. There was some strange feedback creating an annoying and unusual overtone, and before it could be discarded, we tested some processing. Extreme stretching for the ambient pad, then quadrupling and offsetting for the first riff. An extra thunderous boost was needed for accents on the drums, so we tapped on a painting taken from the house and used those samples to create a war drum. We are overwhelmed by the outro, it is so much more than we intended.
Before I’m accused of being sanctimonious, I address this to myself first and foremost: put down your infinitely generating bespoke propaganda device and go build community before the Christofascist hegemony fucks us all back to the Bronze Age. On the topic of indecipherable lyrics, I mockingly participate in the venerated tradition of ritual in sacred language and speaking in tongues. If acceptance of absurdity and atrocity can be made more palatable in that way, then perhaps my denunciations will be similarly honeyed and some good may come of it.
2026-03-07
I have searched lifelong / Through endless waves of gibbering nonsense / Worn my fingertips to dust / To find that book which is a staircase / To climb out of this hell //
It's as if I seek a single grain of sand / In desert barren of truth and hope / Spreading forever in every direction / No footsteps remain in the shifting dunes //
As aeons turn, my sanity frays / O Time Thy Pyramids / Grow vaster the deeper I delve / One Thousand One Hundred and Five / Cycles hideously across the pages / Repetitions falsely indicate meaning //
I hear the Combed Thunder / Claustrophobic as The Plaster Cramp / I have stared long into the void / And it whispers to me / "Axaxaxas mlö" //
Heart in my throat, I plunge over the railing / Abandon all hope of finding vindication / The greatest cage is one / With walls that can't be found / The greatest cage is one / With walls that can't be found //
Dizzying acceleration / As the shelves become a blur / Disassociate from myself / I fall for days and years and centuries //
I fall for one thousand years / I fall for one thousand more / And still have not yet truly started my descent //
Heart in my throat, I plunge over the railing / Abandon all hope of finding vindication / The greatest cage is one / With walls that can't be found / The greatest cage is one / With walls that can't be found
2026-05-13
In a dream that was not a dream, I saw angels without mercy, having no pity, whose countenance was full of madness, and their teeth sticking out beyond the mouth; their eyes shone like the morning star of the east, and from the hairs of their head or from their mouth sparks of fire went out. And the greatest of these, Tartaruchus, who is set over the punishments, seized me by my hair and raised me into the heavens. And I saw the four rivers whose names are these: the river of honey is called Pison, the river of milk Euphrates, the river of oil Gion, and the river of wine Tigris. And again I looked, and I saw that the four rivers did not flow abundantly, but were starved and weak. And a third time I looked, and beheld that all the rivers were dry, save the river Gion, which swelled and bloated past its banks. So I drew nigh, and saw that a great deal of blood was mixed with the oil, which formed a foul thick ichor, and I turned my face and wept.
So Tartaruchus smiled, and so great was his joy that his teeth ringed around his head, and from his mouth a great peal burst forth, and sparks of fire drifted down to Gion. And turning around, I saw that a great wall of flame was behind me, and the wall said to me, ‘Why do you weep, for this has not yet come to pass.’ And I said, ‘Gion runs with so much blood, and the flames have consumed the oil so nothing remains but blood, and the other three rivers have already run dry.’
2026-05-24
We finished composing Falling For One Thousand Years. It inhabits The Library of Babel and A Short Stay in Hell. A Shepard tone descends throughout the entire song, which is over seven minutes long. The Shepard tone was built entirely from a single recording with a Sustainiac pickup. The DI was pitch shifted with automation and carefully faded out and layered, and each layer amped separately. The descending tone is thematically relevant, and many of the riffs intentionally try to accentuate this descent. The compositional techniques here are interesting, we frequently passed riffs back and forth to write counterpoint. Opposing motion is common, and many riffs take completely different characteristics depending on which part you listen to.
The lyrics reflect a burgeoning understanding of what large numbers are like, and how unimaginable a finite punishment can be, much less an infinite one. Only the most hateful and cruel sadist could entertain infinite punishment, and imposition of such torment for finite crimes would be the greatest evil and injustice imaginable. In fact, it would be infinitely greater than all finite sins summed.
It would be pointless to observe that the finest volume of all the many hexagons that I myself administer is titled Combed Thunder, while another is titled The Plaster Cramp, and another, Axaxaxas mlö. Those phrases, at first apparently incoherent, are undoubtedly susceptible to cryptographic or allegorical "reading"; that reading, that justification of the words' order and existence, is itself verbal and, ex hypothesi, already contained somewhere in the Library.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
One book, which my father once saw in a hexagon in circuit 15-94, consisted of the letters M C V perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (much consulted in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters whose penultimate page contains the phrase 0 Time thy pyramids.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
"The moon rose above the river" is hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or literally: "upward behind the on streaming it mooned."
— Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Perhaps the most important lyrics occur right at the end of the song, during the strangely shifting guitar outro. The guitars there were both recorded at the same time in an unrehearsed first take that we discussed beforehand, then improvised. One plays a six note repeating pattern, and the other plays the same pattern but with the last note played twice. So, they desync by one note per repetition, and only line back up after seven repetitions. Then, the six note guitar moves to a different position, and the process repeats for some time. Eventually, the seven note guitar switches to play the same six note pattern length, and moves to find the same position, and they play perfect unions for exactly thirteen notes, then stop. During this entire process, a cacophony of whispers develops. The whispers were also recorded in a single simultaneous take, then reversed and layered in offsets with volume automation. A particularly astute and meticulous listener could perhaps make out the recondite language from which esoteric tome we read. In point of fact, we read passages from the exquisite appendix of a Line 6 Pod manual.
Hopefully, the listener will find their experience of seeking meaning in the twisting counterpoint, indecipherable whispers, and descending Shepard tone of this song to be as hopeless as they would searching the Library of Babel.