About:
Synthesizing currents of black metal, dark ambient, experimental theater, and butoh dance, Returning is a nexus of extreme art in reverence of the living Earth and its cycles.
Our spirits cry out for all that has been lost in the machine-induced amnesia of our times, and for the viscerally wounded landscapes of our home. We feel an irrepressible desire to re-member, to speak truth, to light a guiding flame for all who seek connection to primal forms of wisdom and knowing. The isolated and technologically mediated reality of the plague-times sickens and confuses us. We are compelled to choose a new path for our art, and choose a new story to tell. Or perhaps it is the same well-tread path, and a story as old as time: we grow in strength and knowledge, only to be dissolved by the force of entropy. We are led away from the interconnectivity of life, and all falls apart. We forget, then remember, then forget again.
In this time, we turn towards a true source; one that lies buried in a cloud of forgetting. The wisdom that we seek is almost completely obfuscated. Our connection to the realm of Spirit is an atrophied muscle, left unused by our ancestors in their migrations across the Earth, as both colonized and colonizers. In our grasping forays into ritual song and performance, we gain strength once again. We are re-membering parts of the soul that have long laid dormant, that have no use in the world of the rational and mechanized. We do not espouse a specific path towards right relation with the Sacred; in our seeking we hope to inspire a vibrant multitude of paths that all lead back to this Source.
Our animal souls thrive with direct experience and connection, unmediated by the depthless mirrors of modern digital media. We open ourselves to the inhuman and ancient entities that surround us: Salish Sea, Olympic Mountains, the Skokomish, Steh-Chass, Quilcene rivers. Towering cedars shedding their needles at summer’s end. Sun setting over salt water. The rain in endless fall. Each performance is informed by the landscape, whether forest grove or industrial decay, as we call on our surroundings to participate in our story. We seek to harness the primal power of black metal music; bodies contorting in emotive gestalt. Movement becomes the heart of our meditation, the medium from which our visions spring forth. Our terrestrial reciprocities lead our hearts to seek hope, and it is towards hope that our songs and ritual gravitate, always.
We do not seek to recreate a bygone golden age, nor do we revel in dystopian visions of what is to come. Our work is the work of the seasons changing, the planets wandering across the sky, the bodies decomposing in the Earth. Above all, our work is to re-member. It is the shadows of forgetting that shroud our futures in darkness. Through upheaval, unraveling, regression, we lift up this offering for the sake of all Life.
