Synthesizing the art of the struggle

“The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, in the production of which every man is a perfect artist, is the presupposition of all plastic art, and in fact, as we shall see, of an important half of poetry also.” – Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, Part 1. 

What does it look like when the perennially warring forces of power, beauty, and transcendence forge a basis of aesthetic expression? Can such a transformation truly occur, and what might it reveal—what does it even mean? It is perhaps a truism to suggest that art, in its higher forms, functions as an exegetical apparatus for the clutter and discordance of everyday life. The latest offering from Greek sound sculptor Kostas (nom de guerre: Aetherfall) does precisely this, and through a principally icy-industrial-synth canvas. Aetherfall’s creative vision summons an Olympian and Pelasgian mythos combined—not merely aesthetical but perennial—a fractal embodiment of Nietzsche’s eternal dyad of Hyperborean majesty and tragedian melancholia: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. 

Composer of the two dreamlike isolationist pieces in the forms of “Astralis” and “Weightless”, the Thessaloniki native speaks to me thus regarding the latter: “It explores contrasts in the human experience, like love and hate, order and chaos, creation and destruction.” These words inspire some rather heavy lifting, but in the context of this work, such dichotomous thinking is highly apt. Our highlighted track “Weightless” unveils the manifold tensions that constitute life’s eternally conflicting and slippery essence, conveying it less in the form of a six-minute composition and more as a philosophic gesamtkunstwerk—each wave inspired by a shard of some greater metaphysical mosaic displaying an ancient and primordial virility.

The track’s title itself carries a sort of Heraclitean glimmer; it’s no indulgence in airy escapism but a full-throated plunge into the dialectics of heaviness and lightness, depth and ephemerality. He tells me: “The intent was to create a floating sensation in a cold and dramatic way, using an equilibrium of aggressive and atmospheric sound,” before elaborating that “these dualities are not merely oppositional forces but interconnected aspects of existence.” Such words—suitably abstract, almost aloof—belie the raw, affective surge of the composition. Your author might be expected to suggest that, upon listening to the piece, he was suspended in a sonic gyre, simultaneously adrift and tethered, with each pulse of the synthesizer acting as both a lifeline of vitalistic salvation and a leaden anchor ensconced in the abyssal sea of discontent, and so on and so forth. But such ambiguous and frankly needless linguistic platitudes would result in forgoing the intention behind the creation. Instead, a more fitting description would be that of a decisive anti-resolution, for here is a piece of stone-cold drone-scaping not so much recreating but asserting sound as Apollonian torque—a kind of vertiginous oscillation between the foundational Graeco-Roman bi-pillars of strength and beauty and altogether insistent in its denial of the postmodern listener the catharsis of repose for good measure.

Essentially, and as is pleasingly the case with a growing number of DIY sound grafters, Aetherfall’s music does not invite glib critique—it demands comprehension. But perhaps most relevant to this journalistic scribe is Kostas’ suggestion that “by experiencing and navigating these contrasts, we find meaning, create balance, and evolve both naturally and collectively.” Aye, there is an almost canny optimism embedded in this, yet one tempered by the stoical severity of the artist’s sonic architecture. As Jungian psychologist Anthony Storr had penned in the highly accessible “Music and the Mind”, “Music structures time by imposing order, [ensuring] that the emotions aroused by a particular event peak at the same moment” (1992). In this sense, “Weightless” consolidates music's ability to transform contrasts into deliberate, time-capsule forms, thus cementing its gravitas of a type of beyond-meaning via distinctly neo-Platonic applications. But it’s not so much a matter of balance as equipoise but balance as violent synthesis—a brutal confrontation of opposites that yields, not serenity, but something closer to a transcendental vitalism, if you can forgive the self-referential inclusion of one’s own system of metaphysics.

In “The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music” (1872), Nietzsche states that “the man of philosophic turn has a foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed.” True words indeed. And if Aetherfall continues to create cerebral impressions that offers freedom in the gauge of transcendence, one might suggest that it is the freedom of the Zarathustrian tightrope walker—a precarious liberation that requires, at every moment, the simultaneous seizing of lightness and the absolute certainty of gravity’s unyielding pull.

The Apollonian represents this very exaltation of transcendence: of reason, structure, beauty and harmony—the divinely guided sense of order we crave whereupon bouts of frenzy and intoxication overtake the pulse. The Dionysian, on the other hand, is the unbridled force of instinct, chaos, ecstasy and the will – the caged eagle seeking emancipation from its restraint. This polarity resonated with ease upon listening to Kostas' more explicitly philosophical vision of sound dynamics: “This required me to explore new approaches to sound and composition, avoiding conventional forms of music production while striving to maintain directness and clarity.” The artist further explains that “[Aetherfall is a form of] sound sculpting instead of sound design,” adding that it employs “unconventional melodic structures that align with the concept of every compositional form.” This, then, is Kostas’ gift to the sonic-philosophical vanguard: a sonorous, low-key electro-Wagnerian hymn to the ceaseless and tendentiously life-affirming metaphysics of struggle, to the ineluctable antagonism at the heart of being. Or, as Nietzsche would have it, a self-actualisation of the dynamic dimensions of one’s Being via the eternal recurrence of the same, as what doesn't kill us may indeed make for stronger creation.

It could be said that warfare runs through the substratum of the purest and most primal art forms, just as believed the symbolic tension between these honourable Greek deities could create a more profound synthesis of eternal meaning—a path to freedom born from life’s inherent conflicts, suspended between the forces that should, theoretically, tear us apart, but provide us with the totality of vision, direction, and self-affirmation for which we strive to attain. And long may this loving-quarrelling marriage remain. 

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References

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872).
Translated by Ian Johnston. Storr, Anthony. Music and the Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Classics, 1969.
Hollingdale, R. J. Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, 1999.