wintertide yearning, and other thoughts

on the summer melodrama, an unsightly beast, and viscera

Dear reader,
Today I present to you something more akin to my The Gentle Wonderment of Watership Down; a rather arbitrary expression of my current thoughts and obsessions! I want to share with you:

a British inferno; my melodrama regarding the recent heatwaves and yearning for wintertide
an unsightly beast; exploring the most iconic soundtrack from Bloodborne
and finally, a short piece, the viscera of Pylons by Eaves

I enjoy these pieces a lot and hope to do more in the future so let me know what you think!

With love, your writer.

cover image: Mikhail Guzhavin (1888 — 1931) Winter Night. 1917

a British inferno; my melodrama regarding the recent heatwaves and yearning for wintertide

It is while my weather app says 30c and I feel myself suffocate in humidity that I truly understand the vehemence of my love of winter. Morozko, or Father Frost, breathing verglas over water and a chill that seeps into your very bones. The dark that becomes oppressive, but at the equinox is a heavy blanket that embraces us in a lethargic reverie. I get tired of it too, but no more than of the glaring sun and the constant dimness to the sky, even at midnight, in the summer.

Don’t get me wrong, dear reader, for summer is not wholly unpleasant in my eyes. I look now at the burning eventide that glows aureate on the fields without and wonder at the beauty of lush verdure. But still, I look at the temperature for Friday and yearn for falling leaves.

I want sweet autumn rain.
The type that leaves the heavy scent of petrichor that I wish to bottle up and keep forever; but nature is not so stagnant, and the seasons remind us of necessary change. Snow melts, rain ceases, flowers wilt. We must endure unwanted seasons to reach temporary paradise but there is something comforting about this. We wave farewell to winter, but we will always greet it with wide arms once again.

As the heatwave approaches again, I can only hope I do not take for granted the bitter cold of January.
Good luck, fellow sufferers.

Frenchman’s Creek, Daphne Du Maurier

an unsightly beast; exploring the most iconic soundtrack from Bloodborne

Dear reader…allow me to nerd out on you a little. I like video games (I know, shocker!) and most prominently, souls games. Now while the inspiration has me, I MUST share with you this masterpiece in composition and musical storytelling. Not familiar with Bloodborne? Don’t worry, dear reader, for you must allow me to guide you through a world of beasts and terror, of gore and tragedy; for that is what this piece encompasses.
The very peak of tragedy.

I cannot explain to my dear reader the power that this particular piece has over me. It fills me with pride that a human being was able to create such a sickeningly moving sound.

May chaos take the world, while Ludwig The Holy Blade regains his humanity.

It tells a tale without words.
A cacophony leaden in storied horror,
of a man turned beast; vacuity.
It is a piece in three parts; beast, reminisce, warrior. Violent strings accompany a timbre of quaking voices beneath; like screams, organised terror.
An unsightly beast… great terror looms…! Ludwig, The Accursed is coming…!

Without wit, he was once a proud hunter of The Healing Church tasked with ridding the city’s ever growing threat of beasts turned by the Church’s Healing Blood; the very ichor of the gods. Now, punished by a Neptunian Great One to ever suffer in a nightmare, Ludwig no longer bears the title of The Holy Blade, but of The Accursed.

Vacuity ignites his every attack. He fights like a creature desperate to escape a wanton cage; the corpsepile he resides, or his own flesh?

Eventually, he falls. The music swells quietly with shrill, agonising vocals. The blade, attached to his back this whole time, falls within view and embers within him something churning and dangerous: humanity.

The glowing blade of Moonlight that enshrouded his focus before beasthood took hold.
Ah, you were at my side all along… my true mentor… my guiding moonlight!

The music crescendoes, and in the place of chaotic strings and piercing screams we have the tenacity and valour of a warrior returned. He stands tall despite his beastly form, a sword wielded with pride and honour as each swing cuts the air we once stood.

It is with his humanity returned that we listen to the chants of a grand waltz; a far cry from the dissonant, atonal, chromatic scales of the first phase. We are fighting a warrior of old, once a mentor of our very forefathers and nothing shows this more than the music and the music alone. How timbre and tempo can translate horror and stories!

Ludwig, The Accursed; Ludwig, The Holy Blade in-game models

the viscera of Pylons by Eaves

Furthermore, allow me to share with you something else that has been on my mind recently in the realm of music:

This particular music video is one I return to often. It is a song I enjoy to its fullest while watching the wild movements of a sprite as she.

There is a viscera, a sylvan violence, to her movements; untethered, unchained. A puppet dragged this way and that, thrown like a toy unwanted. Abused, torn, as if she is tearing herself from her flesh; her body a prison, her soul entrapped within. A being of the sea carried ashore, wrapped in a body unfit for such incomprehensibility. She writhes in the mud and I adore the way her body contorts and bends — it is both unnerving and utterly freeing to witness.

The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey

From, your writer.

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