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The Angel of History

by Cryptodira

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Charlie Farnham
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Charlie Farnham The vocals on this! Such a nice blend of styles when it comes to growls and screams... then they throw in those sweet sweet cleans. Definitely my favourite facet (of many). Cryptodira cover a lot of sonic territory on this record and don't shy away from a bit of melody. Do yourself a favour a buy this. There's a lot to love. Favorite track: The Blame for Being Alive.
DemonOvTheFall99
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DemonOvTheFall99 Perfect blend of brutality and catchy melody. Awesome contrast between two different styles of harsh vocals and cleans. There is a lot to absorb here! I'm loving it... buy this record! Favorite track: The Blame for Being Alive.
Kieran McNairn
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Kieran McNairn Cryptodira deserve to wear the crown The Dillinger Escape Plan adorned for so long. This is mature mathcore but also so much more. I can't imagine what it takes to construct something as technical yet listenable as this. The dual vocal attack works because of the very different approaches taken. You have to listen to this at least 6 times to allow you to focus on every members' contribution, then another time on top of that to try take it all in. Favorite track: Dante’s Inspiration.
Dan Curhan
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Dan Curhan This is unique, vaguely core-influenced death metal with lush and creative arrangements, utilizing a variety of styles, tones, and effects. The musicianship isn't super showy, but undaunted by time signature change and rhythmic variety, making this one a sleeper on the technical front. It might take a spin or two to sink in, but make no mistake, this is a feature, not a bug. Once you connect with this rich, dynamic, and multifaceted masterpiece, you will remain forever connected and never bored.
Nikita Khrenov
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Nikita Khrenov Hot damn can these boys shred. Such an interesting amalgamation of prog, hardcore, sludge, post rock, and death metal stirred together to create a stew of mind-blowing proportions. Every listen brought on a new discovery and it could very well take until next December to experience this album fully. Favorite track: The Blame for Being Alive.
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1.
All rise and behold: He who raises and murders ontology. Every morning he is on four legs, and every evening on three. What mediates these ends—when the sun is burning brightest—is lost, as too is all of history. What is lost: the patience, the labor and the suffering of the negative. From his sin proceeds existence. A violence transubstantiated into the social bond, and the beauty of Antigone. In her own right, she becomes a second earth which we imitate to save us from the first. In the place of the primordial earth, she is sacrificed symbolically—thus the symbol can finally make itself arbitrary. She’s sacrificed on the altar of the colony, so her body can be broken up jealously into compartmentalized territory. An energy bounded; both to precociously synthesize it, and to suppress its femininity. The ends of efficiency eclipse the means of happiness and health. Performativity reigns in a manic teleology. The wretched of the earth are de-personified and reduced to nothing but technology. Bellowing out from the chasm of His churning belly is a quiet voice. Calmly, it makes a claim about the truth of his utility; but the Truth can only yet be revealed half honestly: "Blood and misery stick to the triumphs of society, the rest is ideology." -Horkheimer The rest is what is found(ing/-in) me clinging seemingly hopelessly to hope. I am an appearance. I Am splitting everything in two, like egos or the red sea. Find me please, someone. Anyone lack(ing/-in) the Truth I am powerless. I am composing the shadow of the very life I protest. Each breath of this life is spent wasting itself. I live a life which has outlived its own ratio, and all it has left to imitate is the very death which took place in the past. That past—that debt—is my will and inheritance. (It/Will) is what is found(ing/-in) me ecstatically taking pleasure from the pain Like turning water into wine to stimulate its profit rate. Find me calling for the rest: A ‘rest’ which is both margin and repose. Both residuals of suffering and return into nothingness. Traces which are drowned out by floods. The floods which rush in after parting the sea between what-is and what-ought-to-be. The floods which I nonetheless fantasize in the very act of producing a totalizing thought. To arrive at totality: everything must be broken down, recomposed and accounted for. The smallest units for totality which we are given by the sacrificial cult: Break it all down into pennies, infants and letters. These splintered units are the very same with which bodies have been unified. Unified under a name: the name of a Patriarch. The name is Logos, which was projected into the beginning. Logos, whose name is Law. Despite this totalizing impulse, the world will overflow the word. Because the ends are lost, the only vision left to alienated consciousness is the discontinuing of everything. How gentle is the fantasy of beginning again? But tyranny still rests here, in latency, for what is this but an apocalyptic fantasy? So, try this failed intention again. In the meantime, the self-same is reproduced. Multitudes broken down to one docile Soul. As in any system, silence is preferable. Multitudes recomposed to conform to Forms. The eternal Forms of blessed anamnesis. The Forms in which I hide from unforeseen consequence. In those Forms, life is emptied of content. Life becomes hollow, and all becomes vanity. All rise and behold his body which chains us in the horror of our own. We lack the Forms after our half-honest disavowal so now Lack has become a Form. We feel nothing on the skin we sacrificed. We feel nothing, except the passage of time. Found(ing/-in) me, hope and despair unequally I Am splitting everything in two to grasp this wrong reality. Find me, someone, anyone tell me that it is not (y)our fault. I will lend my voice to suffering so that it may speak honestly. All the while fearing my obsession with Justice will destroy my sincerity. Intercourse blindly made history. And history dialecticized itself. It made itself into dialogue. Beautiful Telos folded into brute Causality. From where came this pit? This hollow? This hole? T'was when the Idea encroached on the soul. The idea of peace: all tranquil, all calm, It-Self waging war on all not embalmed. The Idea is whole; seducing us so. The Idea is death, in wait to unfold. From when did we need? From when did demand? Between these two modes, a force reprimands our clay-addled foot. A shade in pursuit of all which gives pause, or lets us take root. Desires its name. It conjures its own. Its seeds shadow all. In each, they are sown.
2.
The aporia of bourgeois ressentiment: Because I am alive in a body that will die Because there is a god that cannot be m(I)ne Because there hides death in punctuation and pause Because this miracle is just oh so much noise Because my shame is that I’m an object in the others gaze: I too long for a paradise which is confirmed by their torment. I too am born of primordial hate. There are so many people, so there’s so much profit to make off of them. There are so many people, but they’re making so much noise. I can’t be happy with God if it means I cannot be one, and I can much less share one with the masses. All God can do is dampen my restless circulations. If I stop moving, I’ll be crowded out. I can’t bear the thought that someone else could save me. I would rather bask in a misery of my own choosing. Amor Fati, I love of my own prison bars, because they’re mine. Freedom and bondage congeal in all I see, as far as I can see. Because my mind has no private life Because I’m conferred by the others eyes Because I need that mirror to feel satiated I too am born of primordial hate. My pleasures undo my invested sense of self as I’m tossed from one identity to the other. Even in my proudest displays of narcissism I take value from the good faith of the other. Even in solitude, I need to be looked at to see myself; I need you to look at me, but cannot stand being seen. The only solution is to sell my image. Even then I am displaced outside the safe sanctions of Self by the very chains of signification which I utilize for the sake of communication, exchanges and warfare. The discontents of the Self institute its structure. As the “I” speaks, as it wants and needs, it demands indivisible and unconditional attention, but on the condition of this divided and dividing demand. Hell is other people. But I am other people. I am all their words. I am all their acts. I synthesize with them, even in my isolation. All of their Being is the blessing of my being. All of their body gives me my language. Hell is me.
3.
It is too much to hold; too loud to ignore. It is too meaningless and yet too heavy in its presence. It is too meaningless, how it makes us fall from everything. The lack of everything traces itself on our emptiness, while the feeling digs and sinks and stabs its way inside. From the outside it burrows under skin, into bone, until it seems to emanate outward from our very form of feeling. It is irreducible within our own consciousness and makes that consciousness feel itself to be a mistake. Consciousness echoes out in a bloodcurdling wail. Between each bout of insincere laughter, it yawns and writhes. Pain exceeds every name, every ruse of language. It exceeds every cunning shackle of domination. Nature is always overwhelming such attempts at mastery. Pain exceeds every name, and all out-thinking. It is altogether overwhelming the instant it hits. The breaching of pain punctuates and institutes the ego. No wonder so much of its energy is poured into eliding and effacing itself in the search of pleasure. All our naming and science can today only be self-justifying, for so long as there is no domination over pain nothing can justify its existence. Even speaking its name, as we’ve been doing, risks identifying with pain. Using the name tritely expedites the inadequation of the concept. With just an instant’s duration, it can feel like an eternal presence Grounding the mind unshakably in what is hostile to it. Pain is a concrete Idea which engages the whole body in anamnesis. Pain binds the body to time, before time can become its essence. Pain exists above all exchanges, profits and dancing. It is the ground below our forms of intuition. It cuts across and sits beside any pleasure; brooding and waiting. It flows in our blood. Always waiting. Always ending. In-difference, we feel what’s missing in-divisible understandings. What’s missing is meaning. But meaning is survival. But survival robs us of forever; it bars off and separates for-ever. As it constitutes the base of our inner sense, Time, we see that pain is our hitherto history. Even when safe from physical harm, we’re tormented by a desire which can never find satisfaction according to the cultural imaginations which have issued from history. But we desire nonetheless, so we continue moving forward. At pains we are repulsed in hopes of finding an end to the pain. But it will never come, so long as the times are off their hinges. Pain is perpetually misplaced and mistimed, not to mention how often it is misrecognized. Ideology has misjudged and mistaken it for a noble divine lie; a theodicy. Pain is the social repercussion of scarcity and sacrifice, Both of which have overstayed their welcome and utility. Pain is our separation from divinity; the spaces between words which render each insufficient; schisms in communal being. It is the syntax of sexed beings; the truth which makes advertising so effective; the seething expression which art appropriates; it is the negative imprint of the Good which we’ve lost. It’s a sun which never sets over an empire of chaos; it is the necessity of speech to be subject to succession; even when we are momentarily blessed with its absence its trace remains, taunting us from between the lines. The wager was not worth the existence of Pain.
4.
“Come closer, sit next to me. But don’t you dare touch me. Your silhouette will light up my eyes. Dance for me; imitate divinity; parody eternity so I can believe that this moment won’t die. “Let me displace my form into the one you will take. Let it be so everything finally makes sense again. …I say “again” but cannot recall when I had harmony last. “Masquerade for me and fill-out what is fake inside of me. I will make you my world, and it will be such a beautiful world. A world where all of creation stops short before my Word. “No more negation or opposition, other than in performance. No true otherness; nothing lost or unknown; no more secrets. Everything illuminated by the all-burning fires of my passion. “It all should burn anyway. Everything’s decomposing bodies. Everything burns; fire is the greatest defense against incontinence.” The blame of the body will fall on the same ones we fetishize, sex and stigmatize in order to enjoy. It will fall on the objects we love (f)or hate. They will be the scapegoat. Bodies without the organ. The one we lose at birth, and forever made into an object. In the shadow of that organ, life is but the trace of loss and lack. “Now that it is gone, and I am abandoned to organic rhythms, everything left to me after the fall is capable of breaking and dying. Everything’s fleeting and partial objects, dishonest repetitions. Everything fakes and only glimpses truth as masquerade.” Held against the Idea of eternity—life that is not immortal— life in the shadow of the phallus is always-already dead. “Sit next to me, faux-divine distraction from mortality. I’ll make you into Truth, but a truth for my own signifying economy. A truth which is blinding, burning white, and yet shrouded from you. A truth which is bitter and painful, to justify my own pain.” The speaking subject is ripped in(-)t(w)o discourse(s). Temporalized and thus given an end. Where there ought to be the necessary punctuation for teleology to blossom, for the patriarch, this is only an obsession with death. The thought of death is repressed, only to return in erotic visions. He exhausts his life in his cursing of life, he curses fate while jealously imitating the one he supposes to cause fate. In the pit of guilt, he returns to subjugated substitutes. “How wonderful that I can displace this guilt outside myself?” He speaks, and seals into femininity the blame for life itself. Even the attempt to glorify femininity for bearing this blame smacks of sophistic prattle and violent perversion. Know-it-all-men obsessed with a primordial and pre-verbal womb; the photo-negative of frustration and pain. They simply put their own unconscious out for rent so they can find it once more, conveniently when evicting others. These know-it-all men speaking of an abstract Mother of all, thus rendering their own particular mother as lazy existenz. What they truly obsess over is the same (differ/defer)ing specter of guilt. The primal father resurfaces as the cause of our fear of mortality. Since we can’t reclaim or re-appropriate the object which we’ve lost, since that object was never there to begin with, let us exceed the narrow vision of these shameful sons who only know how to jealously possess what they want to be. Let us know no metaphysics in the assignment and reassignment of the bodies which only truly know the binary of pain/pleasure. Bless us with the contentment of knowing both being and having. Life, when subject to temporality, self-destructs under the weight of eternal Ideas: the Idea of unchallenged freedom only gives rise to jealous aggression. But speech is not enough; we will continue to hear a death-cry masquerading as a pathological will to life and power. Standing at the burial site of the primal father, the cries of the sons synthesize like the gnashing teeth of the damned: “Everything must be a mirror of our virility. We will suppress even our own enjoyment and fulfillment if it is not a projection of the vulgar image of masculinity. We will take a pact of surveillance so we are each our own tormentors and prison guards, as well as the others. Everything will be burned by the passion of the most powerful. Everything’s fucking the same, but it’s better this way. Everything ought to sit still and obey, like corpse-puppets. (It’s) Everything’s not(-)all that we want.”
5.
Fate is the guilt of the living… of those who survived. And yet this forever fading light of forgiveness falls against and makes the shadow of guilt never fade. Each individual life is an absolute origin unto itself. Each soul is as particular as it is eternal. Each is an overflowing, and a movement forward, but one which stops again, shorted by guilt. Each one decays as it is drawn into debt. The debt of capital starts again from its own ashes; it starts again from the other’s dreams it raises and shatters. It makes a desire-object of their labor and security. History has a motor force; its subject has a drive. The subject longs to disrupt these cycles of pain and loss. History yearns to stop the cycle of irreparable damage. A market finds the restless eye of the rentier. It is an eye which hasn’t blinked in at least a decade. It improvises its supply chains, and miracles a demand. After labor value is lost, price loses itself in inflation. The production of surplus will suffice for blind survival; the consumption of that surplus is what will blindside it. Watching its profit-margins slowly whittle themselves down, the producers are sold down the very river consumers drown in. All it has to do is reinvest after the crisis and sell-off. It is one self-interest which forsakes an entire populace. When reproduction expands deeper with every cycle, the rentier’s attitude towards life can only be irritation. The faster circulation of its life is anxious and agitating. Rest comes for it when rest comes for all: after death. Sleep and happiness can wait until that horizon. The rentier operates with simple maxims: If there’s no demand, cut income and employment. If there’s no supply, let the working class starve. If the people strike, divide them and go to war. The cycle: find it, profit off it, and waste it.
6.
Those who have overseen the writing of history are the same who have forced it to be class warfare. Those who have overseen the writing of history have forced history into dialectics: the gravedigger. Those who have overseen the writing of history take a step back into surveying their horror and scream: “I have never known peace, I was born wrapped in blood, not peace. Hitherto history has been endless warfare. “All my time is spent folding itself in scale and value. All my time feels the anxious pressure of condensation. “It’s the time of my machines, but also the labor time without which there would be no profit. Every cycle, I manipulate the organic composition of capital ever so slightly more for the momentary promise of profit, but in doing so cleave the numerator and denominator further apart from a sustainable exploitation. Every cycle I dig my own grave that much deeper. “My ideology is the product of imitating a second nature yet divining it as the first. Organic cycles of summer and winter maimed and displaced into an apology for booms and busts. It is repetition, the empty time of my fate and mythology. In every trace there is guilt, on and with which I squander labor. The circuit was once as simple as buy—sell—buy more. Now my profit-guarantees are warfare, torture and starvation. “Where warfare was once consequence, now is profit itself. Thus, I have never known peace, and never want to know it. But I can’t escape the consequence; each breath I fire out draws in counter-fire: each breath is a self-quickening death. All I want is perpetual change, but also to sanction that change. I want a change that can never hurt me or take my property. All I want is a history evacuated of the very motor force I constitute. All I want is a history where my deprivation and oppression and exploitation of the overwhelming masses can continue forever, unchecked and unbalanced.” Since time is the essence of consciousness, time which is free seeks the highest expression of consciousness: freedom. The impulse of the ruling class to hyper-accumulate greater surpluses, coupled with irrational allocation, only means greater waste. An expa/ending divide which kills both meaning and time. An expa/ending divide in the demand: “your money or your life.” The question only has its meaning if the worker is bleeding. It only has meaning if there’s trembling singing, and missing hope. When we are made to abandon our most profound sense— Historicity; our feeling of history; how history falls before us at the level of our skin; how we locate ourselves in its epic— all that remains to ground us is a generalized and empty time. When meaning is lost, and so too any value labored for; when there is no proper referential substitute to guide us; In that temporality, we are led in serialized procession by causal chains of history: fetishes at root. They are formed from our practical engagement in society. So, with every moment that passes, the true subject of history— but a subject which knows better than to call itself one of history, since its honest project is to end class-war-history— knows no rest in trying to reclaim our “to be” from the omnipresent ghost of our own labor. History is reclaimed “to be” a stance of hope. History “to be” absolution, stared in its eyes without revulsion. History reclaimed from those who, in search of profit, squander the life and health of the worker. We will know peace. We will know rest. We will know life. We will know love. We will know dignity, and so much more.
7.
“Enlightenment: my child and my doom. It is my project, which knows no bounds. There is nothing which limits or localizes it except for racial distinctions and national borders. My subject is open to everyone and all who embrace my liberal/legal freedom. And that freedom can only know the embrace of those who look just like me.” In return for the affirmation of life, of revolutionary promise, is exchanged a “No” to demos, and a “no” to life. Enlightenment culminates in objective madness and the negated promises of happiness. As its hate outlives classical imperialism and overstays its welcome by globalization it exhausts all objects in reflection. As we excavate the childhood of Europe, we bring to light a bedrock made of myth. Myths like bondage being freedom, and sacrifice the only show of value, and sacrifice our totem, transgression and reason. The white mask speaks into its own vacuous project yet suppresses and silences the call which echoes back. We cannot ignore today what we never knew then: De-centering and displacement are necessary consequences and supplements of truth and freedom. From these contradictions came a truth. A firm affirmation/affirm a-formation. The much-repeated promise, for the New. The promise for liberation and amelioration. The promise to give empty forms new life. The promise of security and meaning for each life. The promise which enlightenment has forgone. The promise which had nearly been forgotten by spectacle-fetish malaise and endless-war economy. But a promise which we recuperate as the empire falters. A promise which we fall back on in the afterlife of culture. Blessed be the absent End of History; for it spares us its cursed presence. History is still ongoing so long as we find sacrifice-ideology underpinning freedom-ideology. There, the ones who go without, the lambs and the meek will be unfree. Where found the unfreedom of any is found the unfreedom of all. So let us never stop repeating the “yes” we are: Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. Yes to a deferred promise, ever restated. The promise for liberation and amelioration. The promise to give empty forms new life. The promise of security and meaning for each life. The promise which enlightenment has forgone.
8.
From the fall, we know it all. Or at least, all which our logos can name. We took refuge in the proper noun until metaphor began to suppress itself, in search of the paradise which instituted it. Like every search for a lost golden age which never existed in the first place, a culture which prides itself in such a search can only bring its subjects into a state of dispossession and meaninglessness. Such is culture which mimics the tragedy of the fall within each and every unfortunate child it raises. What shallowness! What abuse of speech! What pedantry we hear from the demagogue! He makes “again” the end of his project. How can the Good let itself be lost to begin with? What good would it be to let loss come again? If the Good was lost, it was a lie to begin with. Turn to look back, and turn to a pillar of salt. Posit a fall; cover one lie with another. In the wake of a fall; in the shadow of Lack— Fate, Guilt and Past are our unmerciful gods. The Moloch to which our happiness is sacrificed. We replace social bonds with exchange-relations. The logic of quid pro quo renders in advance any utterance effectively useless to say out loud. With that logic, we equate love and aggression. Blood and misery stick to this ideology. From the fall proceeds an eschatology. A history which can only damage and fail itself. A history which repeats and turns to salt. Whether we project the fall onto childhood, lost love or lost golden ages, there is no point in fixating our gaze backwards for too long, in order to long. There is only forgiveness beyond these schemas. A forgiveness which was always-already created. There has to be something other than sacrifice. There has to be something outside of pain. There has to be a value which exceeds price. There has to be more to living than survival. There has to be adventure hiding in comfort. There has to be possibility latent in security. This life we were thrown into could not— it must not—have meant to have been so sad. Life has been poured into our hands, A gift we’re given only to be filled with pain. It couldn’t have meant to be so forever. Life has been placed in our hands, so we have an imperative to drive out any demagogue who treats life lightly. Who exploits the pain of repetition in order to extract a profit from it. There was nothing to make great again. So, let’s never say “again” again. The happiness of the masses can only lay in the future, not the past.

credits

released December 4, 2020

The Angel of History was recorded in January 2020 at The Basement Studios in Winston-Salem, NC
Produced by Jamie King and Cryptodira
Engineered, mixed, and mastered by Jamie King www.jamiekingaudio.com

Guest vocal tracking by Ray Marte at Westfall Recording Co. in Farmingdale, NY
Additional tracking by Glenn Ramsey in Port Jefferson Station, NY
All music written and performed by Cryptodira
All lyrics and concepts by Matthew Taibi
Guest vocals on “The Blame For Being Alive” performed by Sam Raia
Guest vocals on “The White Mask Speaks” performed by John Carbone
John Carbone appears courtesy of Moon Tooth and Pure Noise Records

Album artwork by illustrated by Adam Burke
Album layout by Sean Kelly
Photography by Jeremy Lewis

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