Kardashev ‎– Liminal Rite, CD

CD Digipak。前卫死亡，2022年新专辑。

It's strange to live in a time when information is immortal. While humans have been holding onto images since we could scrape the walls of caves and smear them with ochre, our ability to retain memories and ideas has become greatly sophisticated. I, as with many others, have found myself living in images and music from the past to ease the anxiety of facing the modern era. Moments of uncertainty can be assuaged by a familiar and predictable TV show. The fear of forgetting can be abated by snapping a photo and uploading it to social media. Even further, we can reflect and dwell on memories of past comforts. However, these reflections often turn into sour ruminations. We find ourselves addicted to remembering. To hastily retreat into memory is to search for a community where no one lives, and often those thoughts are interwoven with past mistakes and regret.
Liminal Rite explores and amplifies my own tendency to depend on the past, and examines how nostalgia has become a means of self-medication that has only been magnified in recent years. These concepts are explored from the perspective of The Lost Man. He is an elderly individual who, having become lost in his current life, has made a pilgrimage to his childhood home. Though not explicitly stated through the lyrics, he has begun noticing the first signs of dementia and in fear of losing the present, he has run to the past. Throughout the album he walks the property of his childhood home. He struggles to remember his family, the certainty of childhood, and the joy of familiarity. However, he is also flooded by deep regret for the accidental death of his brother. This event, only loosely alluded to by references to stones and broken glass, lead to his father disowning him and casting him out from his family.
The album ends with the lost man becoming fully consumed by regret and despair. He realizes that his past does not belong to him, as he cannot separate the sorrow from the joy, and because his mind is slowly unraveling from memory loss. He sees that his current life, and as a result his future, is nothing but an existence of continued loss. He cannot have the childhood he remembers, and the memory itself is unraveling day by day. He decides that if he cannot have his past or his future, he would rather die and take his history with him. He sets the house on fire and burns himself along with it, yielding himself to the cold and uncaring insects and animals that live in the surrounding woods.
Liminal rite does not tell the story of suicide and despair as a means to be macabre for its own sake. Rather, it is a call to find a sense of self that utilizes the best parts of our past to move forward. It is a reminder that regret is only valuable if learned from and left behind. As was eloquently said by the late composer Gustav Mahler, “Tradition is not the worship of ash, but the preservation of fire”.