Eclipse - Album

I made Eclipse based around the idea of darkness, specifically growing darkness. There were three main ideas which came from this theme, so the album triples as a musical expression of these ideas. The primary idea was the image of Eschaton, a telling of Armageddon found in ancient literature. Basically the world descends into darkness, with great wars and famine and a great increase in human evil.

One piece of literature says that ‘the love of many will grow cold’ and ‘there will be greater anguish than at any time since the world began’. The imagery for me culminated in a passage which says, ‘the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.’ That was an inspiration for the first track I wrote, Black Moon.

But we see in another passage that at the end of all this darkness there is deliverance, it says, ‘Then I saw heaven opened, and a white horse was standing there. Its rider was named Faithful and True, for he judges fairly and wages a righteous war. His eyes were like flames of fire, and on his head were many crowns (…) He wore a robe dipped in blood, and his title was the Word of God. The armies of heaven, dressed in the finest of pure white linen, followed him on white horses.’

We then see this lead to deliverance for the people, as it says, ‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’

The second idea was the increasing awareness of evil in the world. As you grow older you leave behind the innocence and ignorance of childhood and are exposed more and more to the realities of the world. So the album acted as the expression of a feeling that the world was becoming seemingly more evil with each day. That’s why as the album descends further and further into darkness each track represents a human evil. The first is Whale Hunting which represents man’s evil against nature, the next is The Fallen which represents war and man’s evil against each other, and then 00-00 represents man’s evil as it extends into society, how we hate our neighbours and fight against those near us. And so Deliverance represents the hope that one day we’ll surpass a lot of our evil, that we won’t hurt nature or each other as much, but we’ll learn to co-exist with one another.

The last idea is the darkness inside each one of us. How it can sometimes feel that despair,  hopelessness and dark thoughts can overrun us. The album descends into darkness as a parallel with the increasing overwhelmingness of dark emotions and thoughts. So Deliverance acts as the overcoming of those things. Not the irradiation of inner darkness but the peace found in the knowledge that day by day we can start to overcome them, we don’t have to be overcome by these emotions or hate ourselves for having them, but we can slowly, with each day, change and grow past them.

Originally the album was going to descend into darkness, culminating at 00:00, and be left there. But I realised that that wasn’t the ending I wanted or the ending I needed. Eschaton doesn’t end with anguish, but with rebirth, a new beginning filled with peace. And I wanted to acknowledge the hope established in 4:35. At the start of the album the piano melody of 4:35 acts as the last sibilance of humanity which, with each track, is drowned out by the growing storm. But I couldn’t let that hope be lost, it had to return, because if it didn’t then there would be no hope left in life. If we couldn’t hope for a better future or a better version of ourselves than what is left for us? So Deliverance acts as the triumphant return of peace to a world and a people consumed by their own darkness. It’s the light that we all need.