Track By Track: XAON - The Drift (2018)

All lyrics apart from “Terra Ingognita” and “Zarathustra” were written by former bass player Florian Jacot-Descombes, the former 2 were written by vocalist Rob Carson.

The lyrical direction was under the guidance of some questions related to the topic of the metaphysics of the human against the possible physical nature of the divine. Of course, there are the questions of the human nature’s transformation and about a meditation related to the ontological nature of the problematic of the drift.

1. Terra Incognita:

This text is a reinterpretation of the Hyperborean legend, the mythical continent beyond the great North populated by one of the first civilisation and a man’s journey towards its search. What he finds behind the ice walls is and idyllic land that may be nothing but a dream.

2. On the Nature of Flights:

It is the first part of a long narrative split in two, the song “Broken Anchor” is the second part. It recounts the meditations of a man losing his sister. He is naif, a dreamer and psychologically feeble. Realising that his sister killed herself by jumping off a building is too hard for him, making it impossible to mourn.

The central themes are powerlessness, psychological distress, bitterness and the fight for internal dereliction. The protagonist in bad faith and by strong auto persuasif episodes, convinces himself that she didn’t die but fled this terrible city where she live with the hero (the relation between the two being similar to that of Oscar and his sister in the movie “Into the Void” by Gaspard Noe). This flight away from this unnerving city is also an evocation of the classic 70s sci-fi movie “Soylent Green”.

Although there are two human protagonist, there is also a third one, terrible and

majestic, imperial, absolute and cruel: the city.

3. Khadath Al Khold:

Here we also have a very long narrative split in half, this being the first part and “Frozen Shroud” being the second. This song was originally called “The Drift” but was later changed and paralleled with the great book “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” by legendary author H.P. Lovecraft.

I recalls a wondrous land where its inhabitants never had to surrender, the reason being that they had frightening characteristics. In this dream, it is a continual anguish between protecting yourself against the maleficent and toxic influence of this place while taking pleasure from this enchanting land like Arcadian shepherds. One of the biggest influences for this text is the 1630 painting “Et in Arcadia Ego” by Nicolas Poussin and the feelings assailing us discovering this tomb inside a marvellous world.

4. Frozen Shroud:

It is the second half of the previous text, inspired by the life sagas of Snaebjörn Galti and Erik the Red and the colonisation of Greenland. All this with a share of fantasy and questions about the permeability between the rational reality and the sensible world where the ideas, the human projections and perhaps the creeping horrors, whose fourth name, their real denominations are to never be spoken of.

5. Zarathustra:

This song is about the eternal recurrence, a cyclical vision of the universe who extends and compresses eternally like a celestial heartbeat (big bang and big crunch). This phenomenon is personified by Zarathustra after “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Nietzsche where he speaks about eternal recurrence. This narrative recounts the fatality of this recurrence and the absence of free will when everything that is already was and forever will be without flinching.

6. Broken Anchor:

It is the second part of the song “On the Nature of Flights”. Here we still have our protagonist, wandering in a state of absolute suffering and fleeing a truth he can’t fathom, preferring to flee weakly within a puerile fantasy.

7. I Writ My Hopes (Into the Streams):

This title is an invocation of the epitaph of one of the greatest poets of the english language with Shakespeare, Milton, Wilde, Shelley, Donne, Yeats and Byron: John Keats.

The biggest influence for this text was the punishment of the Flying Dutchman and its crew in the opera Der fliegende Holländer from Richard Wagner. Individuals fleeing from troubled lands and embarking towards a better country but the voyage continues until everyone begins the lose their memory about their apparatus going to disaster. Are they really going towards a new land? Are they dead or alive? Is this journey real? Maybe its all in their heads? Maybe their brains are maintained in isolation as a scientific experiment and they’re being fed the same memories over and over again waiting for something to happen.

The lose of temporality, the meaning of life, suicide, the reification of thoughts and intimate things to each individual are the central themes for this song.

8. The Wounded Gods:

The song is taken from a meditation on the nature of our soul, our spirit, if their existence is proven, of what are they filled and constituted of?

Is it a simple but glorious homogeneous marasmus where memories, impulses, fears and hopes float adrift?

In a desire to think according to "physics" of the divine and "metaphysics" of the

humankind, there is wonder if you could perceive the spirit according to a model

approaching the Tree of Life evoked in the Kabbalah where these so-called "gods" would be the kabbalistic Sefiroths.

However what happens when, in the middle of all this, there is a Sefira which is corrupt, hurt and gradually becoming dysfunctional? What can be the effects on an individual?