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Peter Hammill: In Camera

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Charisma Records
Released: 1974.07.01
Time:
 47:34
Category: Progressive Rock
Producer(s): Peter Hammill, Tony Wilson
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.sofasound.com
Appears with: Van der Graaf Generator, David Jackson
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Ferret and Featherbird (P.Hammill) - 3:43
[2] (No More) the Sub-mariner (P.Hammill) - 5:47
[3] Tapeworm (P.Hammill) - 4:20
[4] Again (P.Hammill) - 3:44
[5] Faint-Heart and the Sermon (P.Hammill) - 6:42
[6] The Comet, the Course, the Tail (P.Hammill) - 6:00
[7] Gog * (P.Hammill) - 10:20
[8] Magog * [in Bromine Chambers] (P.Hammill) - 7:01

*) Tracks [7] and [8] are typically combined into one track with a total time of – 17:21.

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Peter Hammill – Guitar, Bass Guitar, Piano, Harmonium, Arp 2600 Synthesizer, Mellotron, Vocals, Producer, Engineer, Cover Design, Arranger, Digital Remastering, Liner Notes, Reissue Producer
Guy Evans – Drums on [3,7]
Chris Judge Smith – Percussion & Backing Vocals on [8]
Paul Whitehead – Cello & Cymbals & Drums & Percussion on [8]

Tony Wilson - Producer
David Hentschel - Overdub/Mix Engineering & ARP Programming
Frank Sansom - Cover Design
Mike van der Vord - Photography (front)
Gordian Troeller - Photography (inner)
Kathy Bryan - Transfers
Phil Smee - Package Design

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded at Sofa Sound, Worth, Sussex, Dec 1973 - April 1974 (4-track analogue). Overdubbed and mixed at Trident Studios, London W1, April 1974.

Comes in a single sleeve with an inner bag with lyrics and credits.

In Camera by Peter Hammill, who wrote, arranged, recorded, performed and produced the music on this album between December 1973 and April 1974 (Track A1 was written in 1969, track A3 in August 1971).
Guitars, bass, piano, harmonium and oddments were recorded at Sofa Sound, Sussex.
Voice, synthesiser, Mellotron + Guy / Reduction: Trident Studios.
Thanks also to:
Hugh for the loans of bass and piano
Mr. Higgs for tuning the latter
David for the loan of his wah-wah pedal
Nick for tape ops.+pan-pots
John for haulage
Alice for coping with the chaos

Gordianisation: Troeller

These recordings are dedicated to my brother Andrew.



1973. A time of flux, as always, as not before. Two post-VdGG Mk I albums had been recorded, "Chameleon" and "The Silent Corner"; both contained elements of band playing and the first truly solo-recording efforts. Tours had been done, both solo and band. Time to mark out another blueprint...time to get serious about solo recording.
By this time Sofa Sound, as a home recording unit, was fully established in a spare room at the cottage in Worth. This was, at least in part, the "Camera" to which the title refers. The recording machine remained 4-track, but I think I might have had something more of a mixing/recording desk by this time, and possibly some better microphones and outboard stuff. It was all still pretty primitive, though.

Anyway, even at the outset it looked as though this was going to have to be a project which I'd get on with by myself...and that this would be a certain blueprint for the future. At this point it seemed inconceivable that there would be any future VdGG activity and so...this was going to be my career. You can tell just how on the case I was about that from the subsequent song notes....

I was accustomed to solo recording by this stage and unabashed by any potential restraints. It seemed to me that the form should and could encompass everything from simple guitar tunes to pure noise. Obviously I still stand by that!

"Home" recording at the time did not allow for the luxury of limitless time or options. No click track, either, so sometimes the bar lengths got pretty abstract. I had already decided that a number of things, including, for the most part, lead vocals, were going to be overdubbed at the Trident stage of proceedings. Very, very open.

Additionally, I went into the sessions with only two songs in a finished state: "Ferret & Featherbrid" (written in 1969) and "Tapeworm" (1971). The rest came to me along with the recording; another blueprint for future methodology.

When I did get to Trident there was a certain amount of incredulity about what I was attempting and a stream of engineers came in to check out the lunatic with a (domestic) 4-track overdubbing onto 24-track using the then state-of the-art ARP synth. At the time synths were monophonic, so every harmony line had to be played in, rather than being a mere shift of patch. The synths and vocals were all done Very Fast...but I suppose I knew what I was doing. I'd have a great deal more trepidation about attempting the same kind of thing today...a certain audacity was involved. And today, of course, everyone brings in work they'ce done "at home" to be buffed and polished ready for release.

There are lots of mistakes, imprecisions, almost-but-not-quites on these recordings. This was, I suppose, always inevitable in view of what I was attempting. I'd put it down as one of those which are learning-curve rather than finished product, at least in a sonic sense. I mean this neither as excuse nor admission. I think I've always been fairly clear about learning in public?Anyway, I've no problem with the brutal bits...just that the beautiful ones could be a bit sweeter. You can't have everything. But check out that COMPRESSION on the guitars and bass! Not very correct but damn good fun....

Guy's drums were overdubbed at Trident, though I can't remember in which room. Possibly not the main studio area, but somewhere mre off-beat. He had a hell of a job, anyway, in view of my somewhat liquid approach to timing...at the time. David Hentschel also did fantastic work programming the ARP. It was always something of an unstable beast; but it fully satisfied my somewhat imprecise aural desires.

Nearly all of the vocals were done in a small overdub room in the Trident mix suite. No time for preciousness there. This was all in the land of slap it down and print it.

The cover? Some thought it was a tad Gary Glitter at the time; certainly it doesn't seem to have much to do with what's inside, apart from actually showing my mug for once in a while. I did wear the cloak, though, usually while scurrying through Gatwick Airport at three in the morning after having been dropped off at Victoria after a Northern show. In any case, I think my feeling of the time was simply "look, here I am, this is this....". The inner shots (not visible in any form on the - ludicrously simplistic Virgin CD release) were taken by Gordian - at the Aerosol Grey Machine sessions!

In any case, all of this is somewhat by the by. The most important thing, personally, about these recordings is that shortly after I'd started the Sofa Sound end of things my brother got knocked off his bicycle in Brighton and was in a coma for the rest of the recording and mixing. Nothing to be done but to get on with what had to be done. To the best of my memory I regarded it as my responsibility - my effort to make him well - to do the best work I could....in the room, in secret, in private. It's for this reason that, alone in all the work, this album came with a dedication, to my brother.

So, the songs:

"Ferret and Featherbird" was, if I recall correctly, something of a late entrant to the lists. I felt that something approaching a "sweet" song was needed to balance the other stuff. It had, of course, originally been recorded for "Aerosol Grey Machine". Wish I knew where my old lap steel disappeared to....

"No More (the sub-Mariner)" and "Faint-Heart" are united both in their subject matter (to a certain extent...reflections on past self/faith/identity &c.) and in their full-on use of synth overdubs. I must have known that something like these versions would emerge from an intensive spate of overdubbing in Trident, but I was definitely pushing the envelope a bit here.

"Tapeworm" is evidently the most conventional song here and wouldn't have seemed out of place being done (in a "Rock & Role" style, perhaps) by one of the groups on the preceding two albums.

"Again" and "The Comet" have been live staples of mine for years since these recordings. I suppose that means they have a self-evident strength as pure songs. Here, both were approached somewhat architecturally. "The Comet", in particular, was conceived as something of a guitar quartet (all self-played of course): bass, acoustic, electric, 12-string.

"Gog" was the high point in the recording of my Harmonium and was one of the tunes with which it graced me. Many of the others appeared, eventually, on "Usher".

It was also, of course, taken into the live VdGG pantheon of toons. Maybe in the course of making this I broke free of whatever chains I still had left about not-really-being-a-musician? This is wild, swirling, edge-of-control stuff. I still love it.

And then "Magog". I stuck Paul and Judge in the bathroom and fed them prepared and not-so-prepared tracks. Two passes of tape, I think...and then a lot of work. It didn't seem that odd to me to stick concrete stuff like this together with, say, "Ferret". The rules are the same: tension and release. Use of accident, captured on tape. The "sproing" (for want of a better term) sound which occurs at the end (and is the release of tension) was, for instance, a once and once only effect of hitting on the button of the bass compressor. As if you needed to know that. Such accidents are strewn all over these recordings and contribute, I think, both to their charm and to their other-worldly menace.

They don't make 'em like this any more. Actually, they didn't at the time. Then, you were a serious concrete artist, or a sensitive singer-songwriter, or an all-out rocker, or a Progmeister, or whatever. Weren't you? As now...aren't you? Get in your cage or box!

I begged, I beg, to differ.

Fair to say that some kind of future for me started here. Future, interrupted.

In the mixing room I got a call offering me a couple of (solo) supporting shows to Genesis in Canada. I'd been well away from all that band, big stage stuff for awhile by now.

You'll know what happened next....

Peter Hammill



With the exception of the final track ("Magog"), this is a very good example of early Hammill solo work, ably assisted by David Jackson's haunting sax. "Tapeworm" is a rocky, powerful number while "Again" is an evocative, sad love song. "Magog" is a succession of bizzare, echoing, dark sounds, totally unrepresentative of Hammill's work, probably recorded with a good sprinkling of humour and tongue pushed firmly into cheek.

Ali Sinclair - All Music Guide




I joke to friends from time to time that Peter Hammill should’ve released a live album titled “Got Goth If You Want It”. Because after I bend their unwilling ears from time to time in order to win them over to the side of either solo Hammill or Van der Graaf Generator, I find I gotta turn the humour waaaay up because except for maybe five people I’ve met in the past 20 years no one really appreciates VdGG’s or Hammill’s dark complexities twisted up with lightened shades of love and its distresses as they find it entirely too much. But despite the darknesses Hammill delves into, at the heart of these penetrations is the omnipresent (albeit never promised) calling of redemption...Or at very least: peace. And although he never exactly takes the QUICKEST route in all of his lyrics’ point A to B’s, he was (and is) an fantastic artist that caters to no one including himself, releasing albums that are at once confounding and personal while heaping umpteen-tiers of lyric upon lyric that fill both sides of 12 inch inner sleeves delivered in one of the strongest yet delicate voices I’ve ever heard in my life.

Hammill’s fourth solo album, “In Camera” was unique for several reasons. Not only was it the first time he recorded an album solo or otherwise without backing from all of Van der Graaf Generator (although drummer Guy Evans is here in attendance on two tracks) but it also signaled the use of far more synthesizers in the form of engineer David Hentschel’s unforgettable ARP programming. According to the now de rigueur copious liner notes rendered in Hammill’s own fluid, spidery script on the inside sleeve -- in blood red, no less -- he first laid down the guitars, bass, piano, harmonium and oddments (!) at his home studio, then took the tapes to London’s Trident Studio where he then added his vocals, synthesizer and mellotron touches into a raging, psychotic panic attack of a record.

‘In Camera’ is a term with three different yet interlaced definitions: 1) “in secret, private, or closed sessions”; 2) “In private, with a judge, rather than an open court; in the chambers of a judge”; and 3) “In the chamber” (its literal Latin meaning.) It is interesting to note that the album “In Camera” reflects this on several levels: the base tracks were recorded at Hammill’s home studio (see 1), then taken to a studio in London where early VdGG cohort Chris Judge Smith (see 2) joined in the recording process, appearing on the track “Magog (In Bromine Chambers)” (see 3). And the title was not chosen lightly. But the clot thickens...

The album begins with a parting into a gentle forest clearing as “Ferret And Featherbird” emerges with phlanged, picked and Hawaiian-slid guitar overdubs as the lyrics return again and again to the lines “time and distance” as he tries to unravel the eternal dance of love and time. But the lightness of the track is abruptly forgotten with the next track, the ARP synthesizer-dominated “(No More) The Sub-Mariner.” The ARP sizzles over Hammill’s recounted memories of childhood’s heroic games -- of planes and Panzers, and a time when his beliefs were unshakable. The additional pitchshifting on the ARP and bass chords drag Hammill nearly down the many mental sinkholes in the song, as he’s about to be utterly blown into self-doubt for all eternity with the reappearing ARP swirls, but when “Tapeworm” follows, it tramples over everything. The introductory, white knuckled piano chords open up for the entry of drums for the first time on the album as Hammill’s double-tracked fuzz-wah guitar clots and bass anchorage rush out in a frenzy. And with Guy Evans’ cymbal crashes bashing away, it propels everything in the manner of the very best Van der Graaf albums. And just as Hammill’s already completely vocally worked up, a sonic curveball in the form of a giddy, lighthearted barbershop quartet interrupts everything. It returns into the near spat-out vocals over the rushing drumming and piano-banged chords, rocking out to the heavens and echoing equally kamikaze lines. Recounting them verbatim without the context of the backing music falls more than a bit short of conveying its desperation, but it’s there in all its adrenaline glory:
“Sprinting down the highway
Running over the edge,
On and on into our doomsday
There is no saving ledge”
Once more, the mood shifts to quieter realms of Hammill’s emotions with the lovelorn lament, “Again.” Acoustic guitar and vocals fill in the traces of a loved one’s shape and perfume within early morning sheets, only to be buzzsawed by a surprise ending of two separate feedback waves that stop the reverie dead in its tracks. Ending the ever-exhausting side one is “Faint Heart And The Sermon,” sweetened by the baroqued-up opening with an undercurrent of low-droned cellos. By the song’s end, the mellotrons open up the gates of Hammill’s pawn heart in a majestic end with string brass as though some sort of conclusion has been reached...But has it?

Side two encompasses two truly dark odysseys. “The Comet, The Course, The Tail” begins with the slashing of an acoustic guitar that echo its lyric of “Channeling aggressive energies/The death wish and the will to survive” as Hammill’s spiritual and philosophical questions shift between balancing and canceling themselves out. Additional echo is applied to his vocals during the chorus, making his words about the comet of human existence spread across the sky in a similar trajectory. It’s an awesomely beautiful track, but nothing can prepare you for the rest of side two where for a little over 17 minutes Hammill physically cuts open the body of his own simmering angst to let pour out all of his hyper-alert and charged psychic darkness into a quietly deranged vacuum and called it “Gog/Magog (In Bromine Chambers).” Aided only by Guy Evans on drums, sleeve designer Paul Whitehead and old friend and early VDGG member Chris Judge Smith on a variety of instruments, it starts off with Hammill going completely POTTY as for better or worse or just to save his soul, invocating himself as all the spiritual gods of dark mystery to “Love me for one more LIFE!!!” over heavy organ storm clouds and wildly recorded tom-tom fills that tear through the careening mass of banked keyboards and all-around general angst-y vibes in the truly singular way only Hammill can conjure. And the images “Magog (In Bromine Chambers)” conjure up are absolutely fucking INSANE. When the body is pierced and beams of light gently emanate from its elongated slit, it is gently lifted by unseen hands above the bromine chambers where salty, yeasty pools of darkened protein and dripping stalactites dip into pools of painted hues of violent red and deep crimson’d purples, all ringed by walls blackened by millennia of charred souls as a chorus of voices begin (It’s none of the members listed on the album, and they must have been well spooked if they recorded this piece in complete studio darkness but for the rows of red power lights decorating the amps and mixing desks.) But the bromine chambers tell no lies and hide no truths -- the pools are already filled with the dreck of humanity’s discontents, fears and guilt like the run-off from the world’s psychic cesspool. All stirrings in the chambers are residual forces of out own self-narrated fears, now fully peeled away to expose the most doubtful and unnamable human emotions to the cleansing properties of the swirling, reddish-brown corrosive liquid bath...

A challenging and visceral confessional, “In Camera” is a highly engaging album of sheer fuck intensity. But it almost sells it short by calling it just an ‘album’ -- it’s more the result of an ever-exploring and keen mind as it makes contact with magnetic tape via studio recorders via amplifiers via instruments, leaving behind only the bared evidence of such an axis. I’m grateful he was able to safely get these demons off his chest. Now I gotta work on mine...

The Seth Man - June 2001
© 2014 HeadHeritage.co.uk



In Camera is the fourth solo album from the English singer-songwriter Peter Hammill. It was released in July 1974. Much of the material was recorded in Hammill's home studio on simple four-track equipment. He then took the tapes to Trident Studios, where additional elements such as drumming from Van der Graaf Generator colleague Guy Evans, and layers of ARP 2600 analogue synthesizer were added. The album has a predominantly dark, gothic, claustrophobic feel, with the lyrics laced with apocalyptic, religious and existential imagery. "Gog" is a particularly intense and demonic song, featuring (even by Hammill's standards) strident and aggressive vocals, grandiose harmonium chords, and powerful drumming. This segués into "Magog", which is virtually a musique concrète piece of sinister drones, percussive noises, and including a ring modulated spoken vocal. Songs such as "Ferret and Featherbird" and "Again" are gentler offerings, and Hammill refers to the first as "something approaching a 'sweet' song".

Wikipedia.org
 

 L y r i c s


FERRET & FEATHERBIRD

Time has come between us:
in the passing months I've felt you slip away
as your words and mine came like nursery rhymes
till there was nothing left to say.
        
Distance came between us long ago,
as our memories faded away...
over the miles I ceased to smile
because nothing felt the same.
        
That's how it seemed a week ago,
far off in time and space.
        
Time and distance are between us now,
they form a bond to make things sure.
Nothing ever shatters,
you know what happens:
time and distance make a love secure.


NO MORE (THE SUB-MARINER)

In my youth, I played at trains: now all steam is gone.
In my dreams, brief shelter from the rain,
I try to catch the fireglow....
With Dinky Toys, I thought that I was Stirling,
with cricket bat, I saw myself as Peter May;
now, with all these images returning,
I wonder who I am today?
        
As a child, I refought the war
with plastic planes and imagination:
I sank Tirpitz, blew up the Mohne dam, all these and more,
I was the saviour of the Nation!
Oh! To be the captain of a ship of war!
The pilot of a Tempest or a York!
To hold my trench against the Panzer Korps
instead of simply being one who talks
and reminisces of his fantasies,
as though life was nothing but to lose...
these only antecede the knowledge that, eventually,
he must choose.
        
It's a hallmark of adulthood
that our options diminish
as our faculties for choice increase,
till we choose everything and nothing,
too late, at the finish.
        
In my youth, I held belief: my faith and thought were strong.
But now I'm stripped of every leaf,
and it robs me of the sight of right and wrong.
Oh! To be the son of Che Guevara!
One unit in the serried ranks of black!
A Papist or an Orangeman, a eunuch...
then doubt would never cast the dagger in my back.
Oh! To be King John or Douglas Bader,
Humphrey Bogart or Victor Mature!
Which one is false and easy,
which one harder?
Of that,
of this,
of me
I'm really not too sure.


TAPEWORM

When I was a child they made me read
word-daggers of quiver and squirm;
now in the stumbling dark I see
I am a worm, silently fruiting your garden,
my sister ,my child .
Night casts ominous meanings on the purity of my soul
I feel devilish leanings I'm beginning to lose control
and the vortex sucks me in.
Steeped in sin I die
but am reborn.
        
I want to see the cosmos slip,
planets and moons collide,
feel gravity lose its grip...
it's all inside
All the dead husks are shattered,
my life-blood, my world ripped apart
in the laughter of space
it's all chaff blown out and lost.
Now I am making the pace
although I don't know what tape I'll cross...
maybe catastrophe.
When I cross the line
I know that I will find myself
or maybe you.
        
I am a man from the country of destruction,
I am a man a woman and a god,
I am my own weapon of kamikaze
and will one day cut through the
hidden knot
        
Feed me honey and watch me rise
to the bait lying on the knife;
if you let me I can hypnotise your life.
It's all really so simple,
my lover, my twin.
Hand in hand, sprinting down the highway,
running over the edge,
on and on into our doomsday;
there is no saving ledge
nor outgrown shrub.
Is this the way?
Out in a blaze of glory?
Some day I'll find the answer
some day I'll
end the story.


AGAIN

I stretch my hands,
clutch vacant laughter
in silence and sweet, sweet pain;
without demand,
but with a longing
for what will never come again.
        
I smell your perfume
on the sheets in the morning:
it lingers like the patterns
on the window after rain,
a past that lives,
if only for the present,
but which is gone and will never come again.
        
To your sad eyes,
turned away, mine say
'Do you? Did you? How?'
As the darkness
slides away the day
shows what was
and makes what is now.
        
I see your picture
as though it were a mirror
but there's no part of you
outside the frame
except the change that you gave to me:
this will never come again.
        
I am me,
I was so before you,
but afterwards I am not the same.
You are gone
and I am with you:
this will never come again.


FAINT-HEART AND THE SERMON

With my face drained of colour
and my brain of blood,
like Billy Budd
I'm lashed to the grating.
With senses growing duller
and with quaking heart
I make a start
at temperature equating
and my lungs suck useless air.
        
Like paraplegic dancers
in formation team
my understanding seems
hidebound in its movements,
contemplating answers
that could break my bonds -
to be half wrong
would be, in me, improvement...
but my comprehensive faculties are impaired.
        
And it seems absurd, but now all I've heard
fades in empty words and is worthless
as the Human Laugh rocks the cenotaph
but the joke is half-true, and mirthless.
        
Trying to trace a reason
from the spinning words
but all I've heard
seem at odds with their meanings,
phonetically pleasing
but delivered in such haste
that in their place
my mind commences screaming.
        
On the verge of belief I crash onto the reef
and a cynical thief steals my senses.
So I cling to the pew with dimensions askew,
and recognition refuses present tenses.
All the lives of the saints demonstrate that my faint
is a minor complaint, but the end is
nowhere in sight.
Why can't I find me a way to go?
        
I don't want to die in the nave,
but I know it may be with me some day
so I've got to find a way I can save up
my energies, and find a cause to pray
to something for something
to which I can give my creed.
        
I'd gladly succumb to the wave,
if I thought the water taught a way to light;
I'd gladly succumb - I'm not brave,
and it's easy to believe what the preacher says
except for the conflict raging between my head
and my brain.
I don't want to die, but just the same,
some day....
        
Waiting for a moment
that I know will come
when I'll have to run
and find another sermon.
Everyman and Norman
and the talking priest--
still, I am at least holding all the doors open.
Inside me all outside is shared.
        
As the cracked bells peal it all seems unreal
but the seventh seal stays unbroken
and the Offertory plate tenders no escape -
still I refuse to scrape up a token
of esteem for these false
alleyways of the course;
I must try to divorce sense from sensing.
Tell me again,
tell me the way to go.
        
So when I talk to myself
although I take good care to listen
my heart grows ever more faint,
there's something missing?


THE COMET, THE COURSE, THE TAIL

They say we are endowed with Free Will -
at least that justifies our need for indecision.
But between our insticts and the lust to kill
we bow our heads in submission.
They say that no man is an island
but then they say our castles are our homes;
it's felt the choice is ours, between peace and violence...
oh, yes, we choose, alone?
        
While the comet spreads its tail across the sky
it nowhere near defines the course it flies,
nor does it find its own direction.
        
Though the path of the comet be sure,
its constitution is not
so its meaning is possibly more
than the tracing of a tail
in one brief shot at glory.
        
Love and peace and individuality,
so order and society are man-made?
War and hate and dark depravity,
or are we slaves?
Channeling aggressive energies,
the Death Wish and the Will to survive,
into finding and preserving enemies,
is that the only way we know that we're alive?
        
In the slaughterhouse all corpses smell the same,
whether queens or pawns or innocents at the game;
in the cemetery a uniform cloaks the graves
except for outward pomp and circumstance.
        
There is a time set in the calendar
when all reason seems barely enough
to sustain all the shooting stars:
times are rough.
I'm waiting for something to happen here,
it feels as though it's long overdue...
maybe a restatement of yesteryear
or something entirely new.
        
And the knowledge that we gain in part
always leads us closer to the very start,
and to the founding questions:
How can I tell that the road signed to hell
doesn't lead up to heaven?
What can I say when, in some obscure way,
I am my own direction?


GOG

Some call me SATAN others have me GOD
some name me NEMO...I am unborn.
Some speak of me in anagrams,
some grieve upon my wrath...
the ones who give me service
I grant my scorn.
My words are
'Too late', 'Never', 'Impossible', and 'Gone';
my home is in the sunset and the dawn.
My Name is locked in silence,
sometimes it's whispered out of spite.
All gates are locked,
all doors are barred and bolted,
there is no place for flight.
Will you not come to me
and love me for one more night?
        
Some see me shining, others have me dull;
gun-metal and cut diamond -I am ALL.
Some swear they see me weeping
in the poppy-fields of France...
in the tumbling of the dice see them fall!
Some laugh and see me laughing
down the corridors of power:
some see my sign on Caesar and his pall.
My face is robed in darkness,
sometimes you glimpse me in the shade,
All friends have gone,
all calls are weak and wasted,
there is no more to say.
Will you not crawl to me
and love me for one more day?
        
Some wish me empty, others will me full,
some crave of me infinity - I am NONE.
Some look for me in symbols,
some trace my line in stars,
some count my ways in numbers:
I am No One.
Some chronicle my movements,
my colours and my clothes,
some trace the work in progress
- it is done.
My soul is cast in crystal
yet unrevealed beneath the knife.
All wells are dry, all bread is masked in fungus
and now disease is rife.
Will you not run from this
and love me for one more life?


MAGOG (IN BROMINE CHAMBERS)

In Bromine Chambers
there can be no mercy,
no bitter flagellation for your sins;
no forgiveness and no sackcloth
can cease the dance
of ashes on the wind.
        
Too late now for a wish
to change all wishing;
too late to change, to breathe, to grow.
Too late to smother out the tell-tale footprints
which mark your passage through the greying snow.

 M P 3   S a m p l e s


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