get liminal

we've put so much stuff into 'liminal space' that we kind of felt the need to explain some of it. so here's a track-by-track for those of you who want to better understand what we tried to do.

also, know that you can find all of the lyrics in the digital booklet if you buy the album from bandcamp.

liminal space

the album is inspired by a 1967 essay by victor turner called ‘betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites of passage’, in which the author elaborates on the theory of liminality, expressed in 1909 by arthur van gennep in his ‘les rites de passage’.

van gennep called invented the term ‘liminality’ to indicate the middle stage in a rite of passage, the moment in which the initiated is no more his old self but is not yet his new self, and yet he is both. turner took this concept further into society, after observing and studying the ndembu tribe in zambia, meanwhile jungian psychology brought the idea of liminality into the study of the human mind by reckoning the vital importance of a liminal space in which to operate, called temenos.

through the years the concept has been applied in other fields too, defining liminal spaces such as thresholds, corridors or volcano craters, liminal beings in legends and mythology (any hybrid being is liminal) as well as in the real world (any person who feels an existential displacement is a liminal being, most of the lgbt+ community is liminal beings).

we tried to interpret this concepts musically by walking the edge between different genres, trying ever not to fall on this or that side. songs were born from the most diverse fragments and ideas, lyrics, rhythms, synth lines, weird effects, vocal melodies, all was done to keep this instability and sense of many souls living in one single body.

taupō

taupō is the name of a volcano in new zealand which was responsible of some of the most violent volcanic explosions ever. volcanic craters are liminal places, in that they are both inside and outside, they are the threshold to the insides of the earth. we thought this would be a good scenery to open the album with, also the song sounded like an opener from the very beginning of the project.

it’s a simple song compared to others on the album and it bears a tribute to ‘crow’ and ‘stain’, two songs from the previous ‘pfnz’ chapter; we worked hard on production for this one to make it sound really good and not too weird, just to invite the listener in.

tiresias

tiresias is the definition of liminal being, both man and woman, blind and seer, he is the incarnation of liminality itself.

we started from a 9/8 rhythmic pattern we stole from a greek dance and then worked from there, it’s one of those songs that came out exactly how we wanted. it’s got this odd but danceable rhythm that is thrown into a glitch meatgrinder, it’s got death metal vocals and shoegaze guitars with luminous harmonies and a structure that’s weird but not too much.

kitsune

this comes from japan, kitsune is a shapeshifting fox with supernatural powers who can possess people and make them do whatever it wants. an interesting thing about this is that by dong so it makes the possessed person a liminal being too.

you’d think we’d want some influence from japan in the music too but that would be too easy. instead we got this 13/8 rhythm from a bulgarian dance and started building stuff on it, then we took everything apart and sequenced it into a structure.

da’at

in the kabbalah, da’at is a slot where all ten sefirot can coexist at the same time. this is the simple part to explain, then it gets really convoluted and fucked up so let’s just leave it at that, it’s sort of an imaginary (but very real) liminal space.

what we liked about this is the duality, its being simple and overtly complicated, its being one and many, the ambiguity of the space in itself, we tried to give it a klezmer flavour by building a soundscape on heavily effected melodies in that style, then created this monster rhythmic pattern (35/8) that runs through the whole song and built melodies and sounds on that. this is another one we’re really proud of.

hiranyakashipu

this comes from a hindu demon who sought immortality after his brother was killed. he made a deal with brahma who rendered him immortal… kind of. he is eventually killed by vishnu in a boombastic liminal showoff of smartassedness too complex to be told here but it’s freaking awesome.

some ideas for this song have been lying around for a while but this final form came about only for this album. it’s not a dance track but it’s driven by a four-on-the-floor, it’s got some nasty synth sounds and a cool throat-singing special, it’s a sort of dark-ethno-electro trip.

niizh manidoowag

native american tribes have their own rites of passage. for many of them, this consists in going out into the desert to find your guide spirit and let it tell you wht you should be in your life. if you are a young man and you find your guide spirit is a female (or viceversa), then you are a two-spirit, a man with a female spirit or a woman with a male spirit. these people are very important to their tribes for they are, among other things, the keepers of songs.

the term niizh manidoowag was first used in 1990 in the native american lgbt community to identify each individual who felt this displacement inside themselves.

this was born out of jamming on the 11/8 rhythm we took again from greece, which spawned the main guitar parts. it’s kind of a simple song but still pretty weird to listen to.

temenos

in jungian psychology, temenos is the liminal space in which therapy operates, a space where all judgements are suspended, in which time doesn’t necessarily flow onwards and in which we let go of who we are for a moment to try and look at ourselves from an outside point of view.

being a key concept about liminality, we tried to make it really weird. the main idea was to have this wicked synth bass sound that grounded you to its two notes, then have a melody enter and reveal the actual harmony of the song somewhere else. a 7/8 rhythmic structure was added to make it sound complete but unresolving, then we fucked the guitars up really bad up to the final moments of the song. oh yeah, those sounds at the end of the song are made with a guitar.

also, the guitar line is taken from the verse in ‘taupō’, to kind of wrap up everything before the grand finale.

kunkunka

coshi wa ng’oma

incaba kancofula

these three songs were born together and they are the first material we wrote for this project. they are directly inspired by the writings of turner about his studies in africa (or those of others, van gennep, audrey richards, hilda kuper and more anthropologists).

the ndembu tribe calls ‘kunkunka’ (seclusion site) the liminal period in which the neophytes must be hidden from society for they are not yet part of it.

‘coshi wa ng’oma’ comes from the bemba people of zambia and is a four-verse song in which creation and destruction are made to coexist in the form of a young woman who’s expecting her second child while her first is still too young to be left alone.

‘incaba kancofula’ is the swazi national anthem, sung at the end of the incwala ritual, during which the king is left naked sitting on a lion skin in a tent the dark. during that period all social functions are suspended and no one can put anything into or pull anything out of the ground, for in that moment the king and the earth are one.

musically, it’s all pretty weird. there a lot of sample manipulation going on, some death metal guitars, some screaming and a lot of soundscaping, besides an all-out hysteric breakdown in ‘coshi’. one of the ideas we started with was to try and replicate those ginormous african rhythmic cycles with electronics and programming instead of percussion. we might have gone too far with electronics and a bit of that cycling gets lost. oh well.

yay.