Death Rays by Alec Empire

I watched as the wave broke, white foam forming on the water before disappearing again.

At night, the sea looked like black blood, and the moonlight cast a shimmer across it.

"When will the sun rise?" I thought. “Will it ever rise again?”
How deep did it go beneath us…
To dive in now, hold my breath, I swim deeper and deeper and descend into that suffocating darkness …
into death.

I felt the cold wind on my skin and kept my balance despite the wet wooden floor beneath me. Could one ever grow indifferent to evil and just stand by and watch?

People had trapped themselves in a web of lies, and the harder they fled from the shadows, the faster they summoned the storm. And the storm came, rising like a monstrous wave. Some were so consumed by panic that they sought to destroy themselves.

Others had already given up and did nothing.And we watched from a distance.They had made their choice, sealing their fate.
I turned away and resolved to release the music that reflected what was inside me.

Death Rays had been with me for a long time. Loud. Like a wolf circling unseen in the shadows.
And then there was the recording, tentatively titled Crystal Rush on the CD-ROM. Built from outtakes by Nic Endo and Alec Empire during the Shivers sessions.

Nic Endo and I improvised; some of it ended up in the short film Golden Foretaste of Heaven, where Berlin is depicted as an empty desert where survivors stab each other to death.

Your life is the fear of dying. They crush the skulls of babies. Just a little more. On one side, they demand you die for your country. On the other, they do everything they can to drag it further down.
Always just a little more.

"Choose your heroes by losing yourself," Nic Endo says calmly, as the old world burns in flames.

We avoid the sun because it stands for the god of those we reject. Instead, we fed on red meat under the unflinching glare of artificial light.

I can still taste the air of those times, heavy with war, despair, and the scent of inevitable decay.

Alec Empire
Berlin, November 26th 2024

Tracklist

1.	Death Rays	32:42

2.	Crystal Rush (feat. Nic Endo)	9:57

Credits

released November 26, 2024

License