Such are the wonders of subjectivity: Cynic and Vampires.

I've just read this interview with Paul from Cynic and watched the videos contained therein and thought..."Hmmm. Cynic has never overtly dealt with Christianity so far as I know."

And so when I watched the anime piece at the end of this blogpost, I am struck by the way that the piece interacts with the song "Evolutionary Sleeper" (first video below) from the new album Traced In Air.



One of the brilliant aspects of art resides within its ability to provoke and evoke the incredibly subjective. The whole reason I went to music school and got a tattoo of Gustav Mahler was because I had such a visceral reaction to the opening movement of the finale from Mahler's First Symphony, the 'Titan.' From that point on, I was hooked. And surely "Evolutionary Sleeper" has within it a great deal of conflict between the known and the unknown - between the question of whether "Were you expected here?" and the answer, "I whispered in your ear." But none of it, at least from the song's point of view and the album's point of view, has to do with vampires, crosses, or the like.

In point of fact, I'd suspect that there is a tacit understanding of the untouchable in the song. That there is an "unknown guest" to name another song from the album who is most assuredly not an undead minion. I don't write this to mock the video makers but to say that I think that what this song hopes to convey is something that really kind of eschews the normal metal diatribes that might come from war, disease, or external tribulation. Like many a Cynic song, I think it likely that what we are being asked to do is to consider ourselves in our places at our times in relation to one another as simple. breathing, human biological organisms filled with our vast but limited consciousnesses that give way to vast but limited sleeping unconscsiousness.

All that said, the responsiveness to musical dynamics and textures in the following video is pretty interesting even if it has nothing to do with the song whatsoever.