Have we all not suffered? Have we all not felt grief’s bony hand gripped around our ribcage, squeezing until we can’t breathe and we’re buckled under the pain? We all feel grief and wade through its quicksand, sinking until we remember to float.
That’s the message behind DAXMA‘s new album, and today we’re honored to share the new single from it entitled “The Clouds Parted.” Their new record Unmarked Boxes comes out November 19th via Blues Funeral Recordings and Majestic Mountain Records, with preorders starting on October 8th.
The album is inspired by Rumi’s poem Unmarked Boxes, and just as his opening line says, “Anything you lose comes round in another form,” so does his poem come around a millennium later in the form of Daxma’s stunning, rich post-rock epic. Their slow, heavy soundscape paints a bleak picture of some of our most painful emotions. The harmonious vocals floating in the distance are like the hints from our soul that we will survive this, no matter the crushing percussion that threatens to stop our hearts. If you’ve felt this way, or are feeling this way, hit play on our stream of “The Clouds Parted” below and remind yourself that grief is woven into the fabric of human existence.
As the first track of an album whose story arc is essentially about the journey from grief and hopelessness to finding resilience and hope, the song “The Clouds Parted” really begins right in that dark place I had been experiencing myself. I actually wrote the lyrics for the song after witnessing and narrowly missing a suicide bombing that occurred right outside the Blue Mosque during my trip in Istanbul in 2016. This is a pretty personal and emotionally cathartic song to me on an already very personal and emotional album.
Unmarked Boxes
Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flower bed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open
Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep
and changes shape. You might say, “Last night
I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,
a field of grapevines.” Then the phantasm goes away.
You’re back in the room.
I don’t want to make any one fearful.
Hear what’s behind what I say.
Tatatumtum tatum tatadum.
There’s the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I’m only talking about them,
as a town in the desert looks upat stars on a clear night.
— Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273)
