In May 2006, i.e. just under 19 years ago, I self-released the second LP with my project Decembered. It was called ‘A Treatise on Eschatology’. I was pretty much into Gnosticism back then, and basically that’s what the album was all about.

Re-listened to it recently. Although those weren’t the brightest days of mine, the first half of the album feels luminous, probably more than anything I’ve composed before and after.

But the most important track is the sixth one – Vocatus, featuring the voice of Sérénité (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marialipatova/). The recording session was tough, took some blasphemous amount of time, but in the end of the day she absolutely nailed it.

Have a listen, and take the read – a friend who opted to stay anonymous wrote a very appropriate poem to accompany the music.

As of the Soviet song in Track 7… Well, as the person who was born in USSR, I’ve been a ‘Pioneer’ for, like, two years, and was exposed to that sort of indoctrination, even if in weakened and pointless form. Still, its primary goal was dissolution of one’s personality in the collective, and the name of the song – ‘The Jolly Squad’ or ‘The Merry Link’ – feels chilling now, as it reassigns something totally individual – happy emotions – to an inanimate concept which a militant-style organized group of people is.

And it gets even more chilling that the song was written in early 1930s and published in 1947, which basically means that it has millions deaths and post-war misery as a backdrop.

So I thought the song sample would be appropriate to showcase a man-made inferno. Which is certain to collapse one day or another.

Back then I still had an illusion that the darkness of those times would never happen again. I was wrong.