Category: Music

  • Ritual Machines: Beethoven, Akira, and the Architecture of Awe

    Listening to the opening trumpet fanfare of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is to step across a threshold. Its call is declarative, commanding attention, almost challenging the listener: you are about to witness something immense. Decades and continents away, Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s thunderous opening in the Symphonic Suite Akira evokes a similar sensation—a flash of elemental sound signaling entry into ritual space, a sonic invitation to stand at the edge of human comprehension. Two works from completely different worlds, yet moving through what feels like the same structural and emotional architecture.

    And it is here, at this threshold, that the parallel begins—not in style, genre, or historical influence, but in function. Both works confront the listener with forces that exceed human measure, only to bring us back, briefly, to what we can understand, inhabit, and act within.

    Threshold

    In both the Missa Solemnis and the Symphonic Suite Akira, the opening signal marks the entrance into ritual. Beethoven’s trumpet peal is ceremonial and formal, imbued with grandeur and expectation. In Akira, the peal of thunder does the same: it marks the city, the psychic forces, and the story as beyond ordinary life. These openings function as a gate, suspending the world we know and preparing us for the extraordinary. The listener is dwarfed, aware that what follows will exceed ordinary scale, even before any human action occurs.

    Human Scale

    Almost immediately, both works pull the listener back into human terms. In Beethoven, the Kyrie is intimate: a pleading, measured human voice asking for mercy. The music is deliberate, breathing, almost hesitant. In Akira, Kaneda’s battle against the clowns is kinetic, muscular, fast, and precise. Both passages remind us of human presence. This is not yet the realm of divine or cosmic transformation—it is the realm of bodies, reflexes, and human consciousness.

    The contrast between threshold and human scale is vital. The music shrinks not to de-escalate, but to re-anchor the listener. It allows humans to act, breathe, and respond. Beethoven’s voice and Akira’s percussion give us agency and measure, even as the ritual looms.

    Embodiment

    Both works rely on the body—not just as performer, but as instrument and site of transformation. Beethoven’s choral writing stretches breath, lung capacity, and vocal endurance. Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s techniques—shōmyō, folk polyphony, and kecak-like patterns—require performers’ bodies to act as ritual engines, producing sound through collective breath and synchronized exertion.

    The listener’s body is implicated as well: heart rate, breath, and tension shift in response. These works do not merely depict transformation; they enact it physically, through bodies in motion and bodies in resonance.

    Awe and Terror

    Then comes the rupture. After re-establishing human scale, both works confront forces beyond it. In Akira, the transformation sequence dissolves bodies, identities, and cities into psychic excess. Tetsuo grows beyond containment, tearing at the fabric of his environment. Beethoven, in contrast, presents awe through the presence of the divine: harmonies stretch, counterpoint thickens, and the listener is reminded that humans exist under laws they cannot control.

    In both cases, awe is not consoling. Terror arises from proximity and exposure. The listener is no longer merely observing—they are in the presence of something that cannot be reduced to human scale. Here, both works enact tremendum et fascinans: the simultaneous pull and push of awe, attraction and fear.

    Collective Voice

    A striking parallel is how both works harness the human collective. Beethoven’s choir becomes a single organism, a massed voice transcending individual identity. Geinoh Yamashirogumi is literally a collective—hundreds of performers trained in dozens of vocal traditions, merging into a single ritual body.

    In both, the collective voice summons the overwhelming. The many breathe as one, and the listener perceives humanity acting in unison, reinforcing the ritual’s power.

    Apotheosis

    Awe gives way to apotheosis, an irreversible crossing. In Akira, the transformation is complete: Tetsuo and Akira cease to exist in human terms. The Symphonic Suite renders this through sustained, luminous sonorities and floating choral masses, untethered from human timing. In Beethoven, the Sanctus and Benedictus elevate the divine to full presence. The music no longer addresses humans pleading for mercy—it embodies the divine, saturating the sonic space.

    In both cases, apotheosis is not triumph. It is reclassification: human scale is left behind, time and measure suspended, and the listener must witness without control.

    Aftermath and Cost

    The crossing carries a cost. In Akira, the world is scarred; the boys that were Tetsuo and Akira are gone, and the closing drumbeats mark their removal from human time. It is a benediction to what existed, a farewell to forms no longer contained. In Beethoven, the Dona nobis pacem is undercut by tension: peace is requested, not guaranteed. The human world remains, but the experience of the divine has left its mark.

    The aftermath differentiates spectacle from ritual. Encountering forces beyond comprehension is not free; the listener, the world, and the human subjects themselves are permanently altered.

    The Listener’s Role

    Neither work treats the listener as a mere spectator. The threshold is crossed with them. The awe is experienced through them. The aftermath leaves them holding the weight of what cannot be resolved. These works do not simply present transformation—they initiate the listener into it. The ritual is performed through them.

    Unresolved Ending

    Neither work concludes neatly. Both refuse resolution. Akira leaves the viewer in a quieted, altered world, aware of what has departed but offering no answers. Beethoven refuses closure through harmonic tension and unresolved plea: peace remains uncertain. This refusal is ethical, not careless. To resolve would domesticate the absolute, pretending mastery where there is none.

    Unresolution preserves awe’s integrity, maintaining responsibility and reflection for the listener. The ritual completes not at the end, but as its consequences continue to resonate.

    The Secular Sacred

    What unites these works is not theology, but function. They create spaces of reverence without requiring belief, enact transformation without invoking metaphysics, and summon awe without promising consolation. They belong to a category that has no formal name: the secular sacred—ritual architecture confronting the overwhelming, without appealing to the supernatural.

    Convergence Across Traditions

    There is no influence between Beethoven and Geinoh Yamashirogumi. One emerges from Western sacred music; the other from postwar Japanese ritual applied to cinema. Yet the convergence is striking. Both move through a ritual cycle: threshold, human scale, embodiment, awe and terror, collective voice, apotheosis, aftermath, unresolved ending. The cycle is self-evident, arising from human encounters with forces beyond comprehension.

    The Symphonic Suite is not conventional film music; it is pure ritual, pure intent. Its cinematic application is incidental. That both works map onto the same experiential architecture suggests certain structural patterns recur whenever humans attempt to process, perform, or witness the extraordinary. Medium, culture, and history differ—but the cycle remains.

    Closing Reflection

    The power of this comparison lies not in style or period, but in shared ethical and emotional logic. Both works ask the listener to traverse human scale, confront the overwhelming, witness irreversible transformation, and reckon with cost—while leaving closure deliberately open.

    These works do more than move the listener: they teach us how to inhabit a world in which the absolute has passed through, without claiming mastery, explanation, or reassurance. The ritual is complete not when the music ends, but when its architecture reshapes perception, leaving awe, cost, and responsibility in its wake.

  • The Soul Cages – A Personal Relationship

    There are albums you listen to casually, and then there are albums that arrive when your heart is torn open. The Soul Cages became that for me. I had heard Sting’s work before, but it wasn’t until after my father died that this album felt like it had been quietly waiting for me. Suddenly it wasn’t just art anymore — it was a reflection of everything I was wrestling with: grief, identity, the tension between inherited faith and personal belief, and the complicated weight of a father–son relationship.

    A Quiet Religion, A Quiet Distance

    Religion was never something my father enforced. It wasn’t preached or demanded. It was just there.
    We were Christians. Not spoken aloud, just expected.

    But as I grew older, that inherited faith stopped fitting as neatly. Not in an angry, rebellious way — simply a drifting, a quiet mismatch between what I was told we were and what I actually felt. It created a faint friction — a distance. Conversations we lacked the vocabulary for, left unspoken.

    It never came naturally to me. Eventually I realised it had never come at all — that what I called belief was simply me acting the part.

    My relationship with my father was much the same: loving, present, but with long, unspoken stretches. He was a part of my life in a way that felt foundational but also unreachable — like a landscape I could always see but never fully map.

    My father was a man of severe moral convictions, the kind that didn’t bend with circumstance. But he never imposed that code on anyone else — he held only himself to its full weight.
    He grew up under the Japanese occupation, and while my family’s hometown was too small for the soldiers to bother with, the self‑sufficiency and iron‑will he forged in those lean years stayed with him for life. His honour was everything to him. He loved old westerns and wuxia shows because their worlds made sense to him — right was right, wrong was wrong, and a man stood by his word. He seemed almost mythical, like an archetype from a bygone era. That clarity shaped him, but it also cost him. He had a great career, yet we weren’t left with much in the end, in part because of that same honour and a stubborn pride he wouldn’t — he couldn’t — set down.

    The Myth That Became Personal

    When I returned to The Soul Cages, I was struck by how much Sting’s myth‑making echoed what I couldn’t articulate. The imagery of harbours, deep water, storms, shipyards — a son diving into the dark to wrestle with grief and reclaim something of his father.
    And in listening to it now, I realise I’m doing the same — trying to reclaim something of my father for myself, something more human than the idealised figure I carried for years.

    And for me, one detail hit harder than I expected:

    Billy longed to bury his father at sea.
    I did. We committed my father’s ashes to the waters — as he had asked in his will — near his beloved hometown, far from the home he built for most of his life, and where I still live.

    There is something disorienting about committal to the sea. No niche to visit, no urn. Just the horizon, the water, the currents. Grief becomes unmoored, and so do you.
    That distant shoreline is not a casual return.

    When Sting sang of Billy wishing he could cast his father into the ocean, it wasn’t the image that pierced me — it was the recognition. That strange, weightless moment when you realise you’re releasing the last physical evidence of him into something in constant change.

    Faith, or the Space Where Faith Used To Live

    My struggle wasn’t with imposed doctrine — my father never pushed religious weight onto me. It was more a lingering question: what do you do with a faith that was inherited as identity, not conviction? What happens when it no longer feels like your story, but still feels tied to your father’s?

    The Soul Cages gave shape to that tension. It captured a spiritual exhaustion — not anger, not rejection, just a tired reaching that never resolves.

    In Sting’s narrative, the son is wrestling not just with grief, but with the spiritual structures surrounding his father’s life and death. That resonated deeply with me. I wasn’t fighting religion; I was untangling myself from a framework I didn’t fully inhabit.

    It was comforting, in a quiet way, to hear someone else wrestling with inherited belief, trying to reconcile love, loss, and identity without answers, only the slow work of acceptance.

    A Language for What I Couldn’t Say

    Grief after the funeral — after the sea takes the last physical trace — becomes a very internal thing. There’s no ritual to anchor the days. Just memory and silence. He specifically wanted a sea funeral because he hated any ceremony. With children, and the general chaos of life, I’ve forgotten the yearly Guinness a few times over the years. I think he would have been okay with that.

    The Soul Cages became a map for that silence. I didn’t find closure in it, but I did find a language — a way to hold my father in my thoughts without drowning in the unresolved parts of our relationship.

    The album reminded me that grief isn’t about resolving everything. It’s about learning to coexist with the things you couldn’t say, the questions you never asked, the parts of him that live in you whether you wanted them to or not.

    Still Diving

    Years later, I still return to The Soul Cages. Not out of sadness, but out of recognition. Out of respect for that time in my life when the sea took something from me, and music gave me something back.

    I listen the way you check in on an old scar — no longer painful, almost comforting in its familiarity.
    This album taught me that grief isn’t something you get over, but something you learn to live with.

    I don’t know if I’ve freed anything from its “soul cage.” I just know I’ve learnt how to carry him, like the tides carry him.

  • The Passing of Chris Cornell

    There’s this projection I had with Andy, Kurt, Jeff Buckley and other friends of mine that died of looking into the future at all these amazing things they’re going to do. I’ll never be able to predict what that is.

    Chris Cornell

    When Bowie died last year, I felt an incredible sense of loss. I did not grow up with his music, but his was arguably the most important oeuvre in my young adulthood as I went through the usual search for identity and my place in the world.

    In my formative years though, it was the 90s Seattle bands and their ilk that had my devotion: Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Nirvana, Alice In Chains and, of course, Soundgarden. Many of my heroes from that era have already been taken from us, but none hurt like this one. Kurt Cobain, killed himself so early I could only have processed that through my teenage angst. Layne Staley, tragic and inevitable. Mike Starr, sadly forgotten. Chris Cornell, though, accompanied my long stumble into adulthood (some say I’m still stumbling) and I was looking forward to growing old with his music.

    When news first broke we were all thinking the years of abuse must have taken their toll. Then it turned out it was suicide and we could scarcely believe it. We thought that maybe he was one of the few who made it through to a better place. That perhaps his seeming comfort with being the full-throated, bare-chested metal god just might be able to overcome the darkness he seemed to have shared with his peers. His wife thinks the drug antianxiety drug Ativan caused him to kill himself. Did he have too much of it? Did his dark lyrics that helped me and countless others make it fail to heal his own soul and the drug nudged him over the edge into the abyss? Or maybe it wasn’t even the drug, maybe this was a long time coming.

    And now one of the greatest voices of his generation is gone. I would give a lot to be like a teenager in the 90s again, when every few months it seemed an album would come along and blow my plastic, impressionable mind. Even so, the trio of Superunknown, Badmotorfinger and Louder Than Love were thunderclaps in an overcast sky of amazing music.

    Thank you, Chris Cornell, and goodbye.