desolation: the shortest song

originally shared elsewhere september 2022. lightly edited for content and context.

click here to watch ambient funeral, a 2023 live performance of desolation, courtesy of youtube shorts.

the dictionary definition of the word desolation is either a state of complete emptiness or destruction; or: anguished misery or loneliness. after a couple of entries that amount to throat-clearing overtures, leading to the decision to re-launch infinite singularity, i was trying to come up with a starting point for this blog series, someplace back in time that would help to make sense of it all, especially what it is that still attracts me to music after everything. i wavered back and forth when it came to connecting infinite singularity to my other career and creative pursuits but have, for mostly practical reasons, decided that this should be something separate.

partly this may be about an endpoint of a journey as well, a destination. the first infinite singularity album, ruins, was released in february of 2002, rather quietly, in fort worth, texas, at a time when do-it-yourself digital recording was still young. it’s hard to think about that now—the fact that it was more than two decades ago, that i have been playing music for over a quarter of a century in total (albeit mostly as a hobby or passion rather than a career). those first two blog entries amounted to reflecting on the decidedly mixed feelings I have about the past 20 years in this regard.

i had a complete third album called monsters that i recorded back in 2018 and 2019 when i still lived in kansas, that i finally got professionally engineered and mastered. to date, it has been the most popular work of music i ever released, which leaves me grateful beyond words (though i will likely find the words later). i finally got around to getting back in touch with my performance rights organization, hiring a distributor, and making the return of infinite singularity official. i also re-recorded ruins shortly after monsters came out (and am now selling both versions of ruins as a package deal for the 20-year anniversary). early 2023, i re-released the debut version of ruins, as well as the sophomore effort, silence, on all streaming platforms, followed by the two part lost kansas instrumentals which covered material recorded between 2015 and 2019.

but this is all still revisiting the past, not building a future. i wanted to give those past recordings the chance to be heard (and spent a little money to make sure they sound decent). admittedly i have been writing songs again and took a stab at recording some new songs over the summer of 2022 which resulted in a new album, hemiboreal, to be released summer 2024. this was after nearly a year of self-doubt: i spent time wondering whether i’m just in a different place now in terms of my life, and whether i still want to bother with making music in earnest. i mean, now that I’m all set up to do it, it almost seems a waste not to keep going, but i have a job i love (that’s really demanding) and i like living a quiet life outside a small town in the woods of northern minnesota. geographically isolated and with other commitments, is making music now superfluous?

i did my time on stage and in the scene back in texas and i don’t think i want to go through all that again, maybe not ever but especially not right now. i love writing songs; recording can be tedious and a hassle but i find it extremely satisfying overall. performing is a rush, but all the booking, promoting, and so on can be a real hassle. it’s expensive and difficult and time-consuming to be a musician if you do it right, and i’m not sure i want to bother if i’m not going to try to do it right. i played a bunch of acoustic songs over the years, and i know people have liked my acoustic stuff (it appeals to a broader audience than avant-metal, which is where infinite singularity falls, genre-wise), but i’m frankly bored with acoustic guitar right now. so, when i first wrote this entry, i thought this might be a memorial blog series, and this infinite singularity website would never have existed.

oh yeah…a starting point. so, that starting point would have to be the year 2000, the year everything really began for me in the sense that I understand it now. a story needs a beginning, and a good beginning means some change to the status quo, right? tolkien didn’t write volumes about all the days when his characters brushed their teeth or peed or harvested crops or whatever before that fateful day when adventure came calling. not that my life has been that adventurous. actually, I don’t know. It’s had its moments. did hobbits brush their teeth? I don’t remember. What was i talking about? oh yeah—desolation and sad stuff. all right, so back to that.

my relationship with my high school sweetheart came to a rather sad and protracted end in the spring of 2000. we’d been together a year and a half, but had known each other for over two years, and had plans to marry before it fell apart. i was in a band that i got kicked out of right around that time, too. neither were things i ever had much luck with: bands and romance. i have trouble with social interaction and can be a really inflexible pain in the ass when it comes to music—overbearing and no fun (i am neurodivergent, on the autism spectrum, with just enough attention deficit to make me obsessive). i also later found out that i am on the asexual spectrum, which created numerous difficulties navigating sexual norms and expectations when i was young. if that sounds a bit whiney, buckle up. i co-founded a band called dogma i (which spelled “i am god” backwards and reflects the sophomoric blasphemies of a kid who had very recently bailed on catholic confirmation classes) that fell apart because my intense motivation to play was matched only by the crappiness of my equipment and inability to make my guitar make sounds that fit a culturally competent mold.

first there were the influences: i was really getting into swedish melodeath (melodic death metal, for the uninitiated) like in flames and at the gates at a time when nu metal and southern metal were all the rage. there was also a lot of slayer and fear factory tremolo-picking and thrash metal that i liked doing but that didn’t mesh as well with the melodic leads, so it took me a while to find a sound that could bring together melody and speed without lapsing into the “look how many notes i can play and how fast i can play them” guitar stylings (i am arguably still trying to find said sound).

then, there was the gear: i played a really old mexican fender stratocaster my dad picked up from a pawn shop for my birthday which badly needed new strings and always sounded out of tune even when it wasn’t. my guitar amp was a 10-watt practice amp i bought from some kid around the corner for 17 bucks (i think he sold it for weed). it had a foil gum wrapper where a power switch had long ago fallen off and gotten lost. the resulting sound was sort of mediocre carlos santana-esque leads with some punk-rock and middle-range melodic tremolos (one friend called the result black metal surf rock).

then, the attitude: I was an impatient control freak who wanted to write all the songs (in alternate tunings, no less) and expected everyone to follow my lead. disorganized playing, crappy gear, and a prima donna attitude: classic triple threat.

i was not right for that young woman, nor for that band, so the short-term misery was far eclipsed by the long-term chance for something better. life doesn’t end after high school, friends—for those of us for whom that was the best of times, the peak, the glory days, great, you got to peak. for many the best is yet to come, and that was good news for me because i set the bar really, really low back then. i graduated high school that may in the bottom half of my class with no extracurricular activities or distinctions other than my attire, comprised of nail polish, hair barrettes, black and white makeup, torn jeans, and weird t-shirts I mostly bought at the local thrift store. yeah, really.

i had a reputation as a troublemaker, with a long litany of truancy, suspensions, and saturday school. i drank and i smoked and thought I knew everything. i insulted or alienated most of the teachers, administrators, and traditions of the school by then out of some misguided self-righteous attempt to live in sartrean good faith (yes, I loved philosophy but not enough to do my homework or strive at much of anything), except the head of the math team; i sat in the back of his pre-calculus class completing number puzzles for extra credit (every single one) but didn’t have the guts to actually admit i loved math and genuinely wanted to be on a math team. i was embarrassed of looking nerdy, which is weird because little else embarrassed me, except perhaps being labeled a “conformist.” so, an equation of sorts materializes: melody plus speed-picking plus philosophy-and-social-issues plus math plus dark and weird. yeah, that’s Infinite Singularity for sure. not sure i’ve changed all that much in any fundamental sense; getting older and wiser is just what happens when you’re young and stupid for long enough. 

i took the SAT tired or hungover or both—i can’t remember now—and scored in the top five percent. i had also informed my parents that after high school i planned to be a busker, standing on the side of the road playing my guitar for spare change. these two factors led to my enrollment in college (or else)—in fact, i graduated high school on a Thursday and was in a college classroom for summer courses by tuesday. threatening to leave home and be a traveling musician and actually doing it are two different things: when push came to shove, i figured going to college would at least buy me time because i didn’t want to grow up and had no idea what i was doing if i did (at middle age, i still don’t know what i want to do when i grow up). if i’d followed through with my threats, i probably would have died in a gutter with a needle sticking out of my arm years ago. so, i worked at a café at the mall for money to fuel and insure my car (which was older than i was) and got a small scholarship designed to “fast track” people like me (read: fuckups who showed an iota of promise) into the local university.

that summer my beloved cat died at the age of 20, and i rapidly started losing friends, as i was working four to five days a week and taking four summer courses. life started getting kind of lonely, but i also met the woman i remain happily married to later that summer (i guess the lesson is that you only have to get lucky in love once if you’re looking for “the one”). i started learning to appreciate studious loneliness. wait…this story was supposed to be about music, right? oh yeah…so i also bought a drum set that summer and traded some pantera cds for a crappy keyboard (you can make your own jokes there) and found this old possibly homemade wooden bass guitar (basically a wooden plank with strings attached) which i started learning to play. i already knew the keys a little bit because my grandmother had a piano, and i had this little toy casio keyboard growing up. in fact, my metal-head friends in high school ripped on me because i knew how to play the keyboard (among other things already mentioned—mostly the good-natured mutual ridicule that good friendships are made of).

my parents were very patient people; they let me stay in their house as long as i kept going to college and getting decent grades and was able to work to pay for school. the “very patient” part comes in when I mention that they endured me learning to play drums in the house for the next five years. guitar, bass, keys—those can be practiced quietly, with headphones even. drums…not so much. i didn’t do these things to annoy my parents or alienate my friends or waste my (very limited) income, but because i was stubbornly determined to be a musician, all by myself, to cut a solo album on which i played all the instruments, even while going to college full-time and working full-time to pay for college and music. i was butt-hurt and i was pissed off and i channeled it into sound. i was going to prove everyone wrong.

breakups, losing friends, changing gears in terms of one’s passion, hobby, career—all are part of life. i was a sad, angsty dude (and arguably still am). maybe the sadness was striving for some kind of depth of feeling; maybe just a metaphysical escape from that working-class suburb in arlington, texas. maybe it was a religious hangover because I never got over being not catholic anymore. i started really getting into black metal in 2000, with bands like emperor and cradle of filth that gave dark mysticism a sort of poetic depth and richness (even though to the uninitiated black metal probably sounds like someone torturing a cat in a construction yard—anthems to the welkin at dusk and dusk…and her embrace remain two of my all-time favorite albums). i have long been prone to vivid, graphic, and usually dark dreams and many of my lyrics have been inspired by those dreams. as i worked, went to college, and composed the songs that would comprise ruins and later silence, i began to realize that i like solitude and prefer it most of the time; i feel fortunate to be in a relationship with someone who shares a desire for solitude at least sometimes.

desolation, the song, became the first track on the first album, ruins. the project was called singularity until I found out, naively, that there were several other projects already called singularity (hence the original album cover) and i changed the name after the first album release was already on its way from the duplication house. also, the first album ruins was going to have seven tracks instead of nine—the song desolation was just going to be an intro for the song calling, but I got talked out of that by folks I knew. i remember working at the café with a young woman, an aspiring actress, who suggested that people might feel ripped off if an album only had seven songs and was going for full price (ah, those were simpler times). i hope things turned out well for her, because she was a decent person, but i haven’t seen her since that film premiere (more later). it was easier to make desolation and requiem into overtures to what were already really long songs. recording desolation took a couple of takes, but was over so quickly—just over one minute long and it was done (here is the new version; here is the original).

it took hours a day for over a year to even passably learn to play drums and save up the money to buy a digital workstation (which was a newfangled gadget back then). it took another summer of playing around to get the thing to work even sort of the way I wanted it. i still remember skipping a performance by two of my favorite bands at the time—dimmu borgir and cannibal corpse—at a venue just up the road because i was too busy learning to record my own music. i still regret that sometimes but have seen both bands live since, and still recall leaving the cannibal corpse mosh pit with someone else’s blood on me last time i saw them.

and then it was done. i didn’t plan for touring or even live gigs—i was watching the aftermath of the whole Norwegian black metal scene and wanted to capitalize on the whole reclusive mysterious thing (which was hard being that i knew a lot of people and spent a lot of time hanging out with them up until i got too busy between work, college, and music). so that was probably going to be the last time i played desolation. except it definitely wasn’t.

in 2012, ten years after ruins, i just about lost everything (more on that later too) and it felt right to play desolation again, a piano version instead of the original synth recording (listen here). then in 2015 i picked up the old electric guitar again for the first time in years and recorded a “full” version with electric guitar lead and keyboard backtracks (here). in 2019, almost 20 years since the original, i recorded an instrumental album called postscript, which, based on the title, i considered my last musical effort before i moved out to the woods, hung it up for good, and focused exclusively on writing and scholarly pursuits. I recorded a new version, much longer and more involved than the original, which will be officially released as a single (and available on the cd postscript: a pseudopsynthphony) fall equinox 2023. desolation was my first song; and is the song i may have recorded more times than any other (at least, on recordings that saw the light of day—more later). sometimes i think my personal favorite version is still the original 2002 version with the eerie synth pads, but again, that’s probably just nostalgia.

being a “studio” musician is weird because you build up all that momentum writing and learning a song and then once it’s recorded, it’s possible you’ll never play a note of it again. the best time is the last time. i don’t know when there will be a last time anymore because i recorded yet another version of desolation summer 2022 which turned into a full re-recording of ruins, titled ruins revisited: 20 years later and now available. but there is a last time for everything. that lesson hit hard at the end of 2000, when our beloved family dog died in my arms on christmas day on the kitchen floor. there will be a last time to see a friend or a loved one. there will be a last day that i am alive. there will be a last day that the sun shines and a last day that life thrives on the planet earth. but recognizing that there will be an end, to everything, is the beginning of being truly alive, not the end. that was the message i wanted to convey with the album ruins, and maybe that is why, coming to terms with the very real possibility that i have more days behind me than ahead, i have found my way back to that shortest song and this really long, winding journey it ignited.

the back cover of ruins revisited. the bertrand russell quote is found in the inside jacket of the original version of ruins, and it captures the starting point denoted by ruins. russell, a philosophy, mathematician, logician, and radical social commentator, himself departed far from that starting point during his long and prolific life. i was a philosophy major back then.