Black Hole Zion: October 2019

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

What Are The Secrets of Time Travel?

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What are the secrets of time travel? This has become a favorite to play. I (Mark) don’t usually like to talk about the lyrics. I usually give a glib answer about Jar Jar Binks or The Golden Girls when someone asks. After a long conversation with my friend, Steve, I decided to open up a tiny bit more. Imagine feeling so desperate to change things in the world and get something you lost back that you contemplate meditation and suicide as means to travel through time. Then, in these moments of despair, an infomercial flashes on your screen with promises by a man that claiming to have figured out the secrets of time travel. He calls himself a doctor, but not because he is a physician. He has legally changed his name so he can advertise himself this way. He’s recruiting participants for his program and the protagonist in the song follows the words on the screen that say “call now!” He ends up being favorited by this fake doctor during the intake process. Instead of being a participant, he becomes an intern and discovers that our television personality isn’t giving people the secrets of time travel. He’s performing lobotomies. Our protagonist knows this is wrong, but continues assisting. He’s so desperate that he hopes for a shred of truth. He’s also started viewing the doctor as a mentor and religious figure because he’s so broken down and in need of something to believe in. When he finally wises up, we hear it from this perspective in the song. He’s jaded even further about the world he lives in and is angry to have fallen for such a scam. However, he hasn’t given up on the ability to travel through time and live forever by metaphysically dying. He’s still seeking. In the album, I used “The Extraction of the Stone of Madness” by Bosch as the basis for the art and lyrics panel. I ran it through a series of processes related to “glitch art”. The stone of madness supposedly caused dementia or other mental illnesses. The “cure” involved drilling the skull open to release pressure or let evil spirits escape. This served as a kind of inverse parallel to what happens in the song. #timetraveltuesday #industrialmetal #glitchart #hieronymusbosch

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