Track By Tracks: Ethereal Void - Primordial Dissonance (2026)
1. Incipient Æturnum:
While this track is instrumental, it sets the stage in a couple ways: the instrumentation is primal, sparse, and pounding; a taste of what’s to come. Much more importantly, it’s setting up a test of how many song titles can get away with using the “Æ” before it’s outright comical.
2. Elemental Exile:
As opposed to usual themes of entropy as the ultimate destroyer, this song is about an extra-terrestrial force that obliterates humanity on the atomic level - removing entire elements from existence (implicitly carbon and hydrogen).
3. Moulded by Emptiness:
We are created from nothing, and we return to nothing. Aside from these key points, the implications of this are entirely perception.
4. The Lifeless Black:
This song is simply about creation emerging from nothingness. You may have noticed these songs are slightly out of order. For a while this track was slated to be the album opener, but musically it didn’t turn out quite how I’d hoped.
5. Atavistic Anarchy:
Honestly, this is just word salad about the inherent pointlessness and randomness of existence as a whole. The lyrics were mostly written to match the song’s rhythms; it’s not all poetry.
6. Primitive Voices I: Æphemeron:
This track touches on the Buddhist belief that the only constant in the universe is change, and any attempt to project permanence onto something (a person, an object, etc) will only end in suffering. The fact that humans emerged as sentient beings and see that as an excuse for cosmic (or at least planetary) superiority is misguided and ignorant.
7. Primitive Voices II: Innate Channels:
This track is somewhat a continuation of the previous one lyrically, but also uses terminology shared in The Design Abstract’s Technotheism universe (specifically Transhuman Ascendent), which, in turn, was lifted from the final book in the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. I expect anyone reading this to read all four of those books and listen to the Technotheism trilogy.
8. Primitive Voices III: Entropy:
No Ethereal Void album would be complete without an ode to the concept of entropy. How many times can we rewrite this same concept? Guess we’ll see!
9. Sequential Lifeblood:
Lyrically, this is the most on-the-nose song of the album, and I know you’re not supposed to admit things like this, but it’s my least favourite.
The meaning of this song is essentially that water is just water. At one point it’s blood, at another it’s rain, and another it’s mud, clouds, urine, etc. Mankind contrives hatred and rivalry; we relish the bloodshed, but all that really accomplishes is that the water keeps cycling. Your enemy’s blood and your own blood are the same, and it will continue to exist in other forms long after you’re both dead, and the hatred and the violence are long forgotten.
I like the concept of this song; I just don’t think I nailed the execution. If you like it, thank you.
10. Chaos Transcendent:
This is basically a summary of many themes already covered in this album; the idea that although we as humans prescribe permanence to things, all things are temporary on the timescale of the universe.
11. To Paint Sorrow Upon the Earth:
This phrase is lifted directly from Thich Nhat Hanh, the brilliant Vietnamese Buddhist Monk. While he used this metaphor to describe the idea that when we rush through life and we trudge mindlessly from destination to destination, we pay no mind to the earth we walk on; our steps aren’t mindful, they ignore the earth and represent suffering. I simply took the idea one step further, describing how everything mankind does against nature is a wound on the earth. We use violence to paint sorrow upon the earth, create systems and transformations that only serve to further the destruction of the planet.
12. Writhe:
This is a very weird and visually abstract take on the concept of enlightenment. It’s essentially instilling mental anguish as the realization of nonduality takes hold on a mind.
As an extreme lore drop that few will care about, this album was written in tandem with an album called Matter by Ut Interficias Inanis, which remains unreleased. That album used a bunch of colour and abstraction in the lyrics, and when they were separated out, some of the influences lingered.
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