You pick up your last guitar, the only one you haven't been able to sell. You sit cross legged, listless, and pretend to wonder what you'll play this time. A game/lie you play with yourself

Seven riffs savoured, saved from the studio's cutting room floor. Each over-practiced phantasms of a path long since spurned. Their regimented practice life support for them as much as you.

Your plectrum sets the first string vibrating. But this time something differs. Your view shifts, alternates between your knuckles gnarled around the guitar's neck to one distant, sitting opposite someone else, playing that same guitar. Your guitar.

Reality dithers. Someone else's hands are guiding the guitar, your guitar—it seems to glow, the only thing in focus.

This...else, their face, it's wrong somehow. It's there, attached to their body—and above your guitar—but the features behave in no mode you have encountered. This is not the only thing out of place.

They're playing is slow. So impossibly slow. But the interstices are full, too full, pouring forth like burst dams. Your sounds. From your guitar by another's hands. This music is somehow like nothing and everything you've ever heard at once.

Who is this that drinks your life—your seven riffs in seven modes—and gives back something else, something more? A twisted mirror reaps what you could not, stealing dreams from myriad yesterdays, a final lysis of what is you and yours.


~~~


Huge thank you to Dub Cthonic for the original 2nd Jult 2021 release (now sold out) of limited edition cassettes. Check them out here:

dubcthonic.bandcamp.com/album/detacher