Primal Wound — Manifesto

This is made for those who, like me, feel too much in a world that rewards feeling nothing, while all around us the living world is laid waste.

For five years now I have carried an eco-depression; it surfaced, then hardened in me, year on year. I walked the road many will know: clarity first, then anger, then hope and all its striving, then despair, and the bottomless fall of watching the primal beauty of our world undone by greed and the disconnection of humankind. Nothing is mended. I am still porous to all of it. But in time I found something that lets me stand.

For a long while I tried to cure the sorrow, to ‘get better’, as though it were a problem to be corrected. I am now certain of the opposite. This sorrow is not an illness. It is the just and natural response, the sane reply of a living creature still on its feet, watching its world consumed. The day I stopped trying to rid myself of it and simply let it be, without letting it pull me under, something in me finally came to rest.

My answer took this creative form that is Primal Wound. Each piece begins in an emotion, a tension, a moment caught from the living world. Into the very heart of the music I weave the recordings of that world: rain, wind, birdsong, the noise of our own Anthropocene, the cry of the wild that endures in spite of everything, in spite of us. I am not making relaxing music, nor nature sounds to fall asleep to. This music channels my grief at loving a fragile world whose beauty keeps breaking through it all.

I give you Primal Wound and its music: for me, for you, for us, for all that we feel, for the animal in us. I do not pretend it is a solution. But it may be a sign of hope: that we can stay standing without armouring ourselves against what we feel; that we can go on feeling, quiet, alive, keenly attuned, and full of love. Let us stay permeable. Let us be true to our mammal feelings. Let us live this primal wound of the modern age…

The music is here, for the moments you need it: listen to Primal Wound.