Featured Single: Silent Planet’s “:Signal:” – In Time We Are Mortal

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:Signal:, Review

Silent Planet released a new song1 this past Friday (July 22, 2022) by somewhat of a surprise.

The opening ambiance invites one back into a unique world. A world initially suggested in the group’s earlier releases like From Tides2; continued on records like Understanding Love As Loss3, and Look Outside: Dream4; coming into maturation on the band’s latest outing on the second part of the aptly named song pair Terminal / (liminal);5.

Silent Planet has cultivated these ambient interludes within their music in such a way that they now indeed carry with them the theme of liminality – more than suggestive that there is a transition, awaiting all of us (at the end of these lives).

The mirror unwinds: Twin archetypes collide.

I am reborn, proliferated by a self-replicating passenger: Ghost.

The ambiance shifts into a thrash of sound seemingly withholding a key piece of information. Information that can save. Singer/Narrator Garrett Russell introduces himself abruptly and focuses the wandering attention to the main theme of the song: Duality, and how it is implied in everything, especially existence itself. There is an inherent duality in existence. That which Is implies that which Isn’t. Garrett additionally implies that he is derived from a prototype that he can’t know.

Dormant dimensions grafted to my senses. Infected with fractals, a spore in my skin;

A sequence of consciousness begging to begin again.

Singer/Lyricist Garrett Russell often engages with themes of existentialism and reconciling personal experience with reasons for existence. This record seats the themes of recreation and reincarnation cycles in a frenetic sequence evocative of losing control, before offering the song’s core thesis:

I can finally see the duality of everything: A silent abyss implicit in reality.

To put plainly: We will ourselves to live again as relief from the alternative – the cost of living: Silence. Russell is drawing on ancient themes like those represented in Taoism (and symbolized in the Taijitu, pictured above): As Above, So Below. Physics even has an analog found within Newton’s Third Law: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

These concepts have profound implications for thought and reasoning. For example, as Alan Watts once offered6:

“There is no such manifestation as ‘half a wave.’ We do not find in nature crests without troths, or troths without crests. No sound is produced unless there is both: The beat and The Interval (between).”

In this line of thought, many thinking and esoteric faith traditions conclude that: as there is Life, so there exists Death. Or more meaningfully:

Life is felt as an individuated experience because of Death.

From this modality comes the conclusion to the song, as Russell rediscovers a solution offered by The Ancient Sages of East India7:

The World is Maya8.

I’ll survive one death at a time… there is nowhere left to fall.

Broken visions of a future where we tear the curtain down.

The song is aggressive in delivery, appealing to Mathcore sensibilities while offering a brief moment of introspection before the climax and end. An end which (spoiler alert) is belabored in silence and then punctuated by a flurry of sound. All-in-all suggestive of death, transition, and rebirth. Appropriate considering the content of the song.

In Time all things are known.

Within Time all things are known.

It is one of the reasons and effects of not knowing everything.

If one cannot know everything, then one (a person) is bound to experience just a piece of everything – a finite life (death as a limit to knowledge). Given that one has a finite life, then time is experienced as an essential component in perception.

The one I’m referring to is the one that inhabits self. It is the seer of experience. It is your passenger – Your Intuition.

There is the eternal-self by which all strands of individuation pull away from as it works to maintain stability against The Darkness.

We exist as an ocean below the surface of the great source. Always tidally pulling closer in almost infinite cycles.

  1. Silent Planet’s :Signal: on YouTube ↩
  2. Lastsleep (1944-1946), 2014 ↩
  3. Everything Was Sound, 2016 ↩
  4. When The End Began, 2018 ↩
  5. Iridescent, 2020 ↩
  6. SMU 1965 Seminar: Man & Nature, 1965 ↩
  7. Hinduism ↩
  8. All of The World/The Self is a stage on which Brahman plays. ↩

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