Track By Tracks: NIHILO MACHINA - The Black River (2024)

1. The Black River: Part I:

The first part of the two-part title track. This song introduces the “black river” as a metaphor for the near inescapable force and presupposed notions of our consciousness and human experience. We are all born into its waters and are pushed through this experience of ‘being’ without the ability to escape and reach the shores.

2. Aberration:

This song proposes that the very existence of mankind is a cosmic blunder and that the emergence of our consciousness is an accident of the universe that destroyed a perfect stillness. A “catastrophe of chance” that has “shattered tranquility.”

3. Empire of Reverie:

Simply put, this song is a personal anthem of hatred of most religions and its effects on mankind. Describing the deceptive and misleading doctrines, the lies, and false hopes.

4. Singularity:

The singularity in the context of this song is the universe in its entirety. In this case it is suggested that the universe is in fact a single continuous entity. That all things are, in fact, merely part of the single extending universal object. All boundaries are imaginary constructs within the “homogeneity ever defined.” Timeless, without beginning or end, the universe is but one.

5. The Black River: Part II:

Part 2, the conclusion to the title track. Here we see the struggle to escape the black river. In this context it is a mental transcendence and a new way of viewing the nature of being. To further the metaphor, it is the ocean that calls. Escaping the black river leads one to the wide-open ocean of the universe, free to see things with a new perspective.

6. Artifice:

Artifice speaks on the construction of one’s own identity. How each of us has built and defined our own idea of the self. In doing so we have also told ourselves a series of lies, as there is no inherent self, only a manufactured abstraction. These lies corrupt from the very core, which when extrapolated outward create an “edifice to your demise.”

7. Entropic Journey:

The entropic journey is that of human language and its inability to be utilized as a proper form of communication. “Deceitful, dishonest, distorted, fictitious.” The innate shortcoming of language creates a frustratingly convoluted and dishonest medium. Words and meaning perpetually branch out into an “unraveled coherence” or “an endless dichotomy.” The ocean metaphor returns in this song, however here it describes an uncrossable distance in which “discourse drowns endlessly.”

8. Sons Noir:

Although this is an instrumental track it still has much to say. The harpsichord intro, piano outro, and primary keyboard melody throughout the song were played by Kevin Connell. Kevin was a close friend and was tragically killed in his early 20s. These tracks of his were recorded before his death as part of a completely different song. The tracks were pulled from that song and “Sons Noir” was written and formed around his melody. The title “Sons Noir” is French for “black sounds” which was the title of one of Kevin’s original songs.