The band is proud to announce the release of their third studio album entitled “Crimson Wreath“. Recorded at the iCave & Matrix Studios and produced, mixed & mastered at the Matrix Studios.
This album is a natural evolution and a straight forward statement by ILLUSORY, concerning their sound, song structure and general music appearance, following the steps of its predecessors, “The Ivory Tower” & “Polysyllabic” and featuring a brand new deal with one of the most up and coming as well as promising labels, Rockshots Records.
With a total of fourteen tracks and overall running time seventy six minutes, “Crimson Wreath” is an album of strong thematics and the songs that every fan of Heavy Metal music would love to listen to and spread the word about.
One could easily state that a band is fulfilling their dream when they are ready to release their next album. ILLUSORY has worked hard, putting all the pieces together, preparing their third studio album. And they did that whilst facing reality. The ups and downs, the rough spots and the fast lanes, the pandemic itself. It was them… the Ivories and their inner circle.
The time has come and the group of six is about to hand down the successor of “Polysyllabic“, their third step following “The Ivory Tower“. With a tracklist of strong versatile thematics, with a considerable amount of accumulated experience and their own aesthetic in composing and performing, the boys have arrived once again. The new album is wrapped up; the new album will hit the Heavy Metal world with quite a few musical stories.
The art-cover is a bit blur now, but it will be cleared out soon. All will be revealed… and Shine On eventually!
John Cassian, a monk and theologian wrote in the early 5th century about an ancient Greek emotion called “Acedia”. A mind “Seized” by this emotion is “horrified at where he is, disgusted with his room … It does not allow him to stay still in his cell or to devote any effort to reading”. He feels: such bodily listlessness and yawning hunger as though he were worn by a long journey or a prolonged fast … Next he glances about and sighs that no one is coming to see him. Constantly in and out of his cell, he looks at the sun as if it were too slow in setting.
This sounds eerily familiar. Yet, the name that so aptly describes our current state was lost to time and translation.
Etymologically, “Acedia” joins the negative prefix a- to the Greek noun “Kēdos”, which means “Care, Concern, or Grief”. It sounds like apathy, but Cassian’s description shows that “Acedia” is much more daunting and complex than that.
Cassian and other early Christians called “Acedia” “The Noonday Demon”, and sometimes described it as a “Train Of Thought”. But they did not think it affected city-dwellers or even monks in communities.
Rather, “Acedia” arose directly out the spatial and social constrictions that a solitary monastic life necessitates. These conditions generate a strange combination of listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate. Together these make up the paradoxical emotion of “Acedia”.
Evagrius of Pontus included “Acedia” among “The Eight Trains Of Thought” that needed to be overcome by devout Christians. Among these, “Acedia” was considered the most insidious. It attacked only after monks had conquered the sins of gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, vainglory, and pride.
Cassian, a student of Evagrius, translated the list of sins into Latin. A later 6th century Latin edit gave us the “Seven Deadly Sins”. In this list, “Acedia” was subsumed into “Sloth”, a word we now associate with laziness…
… “Acedia” appears throughout monastic and other literature of the Middle Ages. It was a key part of the emotional vocabulary of the Byzantine Empire, and can be found in all sorts of lists of passions or emotions in medical literature and lexicons, as well as theological treatises and sermons.
It first appeared in English in print in 1607 to describe a state of spiritual listlessness. But it’s barely used today.
As clinical psychology has reclassified emotions and mental states, terms like “Melancholy” can sound archaic and moralizing.
Emotional expressions, norms, and scripts change over time and vary between cultures. They mark out constellations of bodily sensations, patterns of thought and perceived social causes or effects.
Since these constellations are culturally or socially specific, as societies change, so do the emotions in their repertoire. With the decline of theological moralizing, not to mention monastic influence, “Acedia” has largely disappeared from secular vocabularies.
Now, the pandemic and governmental responses to it create social conditions that approximate those of desert monks. No demons, perhaps, but social media offers a barrage of bad (or misleading) news.
Social distancing limits physical contact. Lockdown constricts physical space and movement. Working from home or having lost work entirely both upend routines and habits. In these conditions, perhaps it’s time to bring back the term. Reviving the language of “Acedia” is important to our experience in two ways.
First, it distinguishes the complex of emotions brought on by enforced isolation, constant uncertainty and the barrage of bad news from clinical terms like “Depression” or “Anxiety”.
Saying, “I’m feeling Acedia” could legitimize feelings of listlessness and anxiety as valid emotions in our current context without inducing guilt that others have things worse.
Second, and more importantly, the feelings associated with physical isolation are exacerbated by emotional isolation – that terrible sense that this thing I feel is mine alone. When an experience can be named, it can be communicated and even shared.
Learning to express new or previously unrecognized constellations of feelings, sensations, and thoughts, builds an emotional repertoire, which assists in emotional regulation. Naming and expressing experiences allows us to claim some agency in dealing with them.
As we, like Cassian’s desert monks, struggle through our own “long, dark teatime of the soul”, we can name this experience, which is now part of our emotional repertoire.
