The Petrified Divine
I Got Jealous of My Own Playlist: Launching a dark cinematic side project, and the power of making what you actually want to hear.
It starts the same way most nights. The sun sets, the noise goes away, and I go to YouTube on my television in a candle lit living room to pull up something long and dark and cinematic—one of those hour-long ambient playlists that asks nothing of you except to melt into it. It's easy. I'm tired.
I've done this for a couple years now. It's how I decompress. It's hard to find records made like this; the hypnotic, psychedelic ones from the 70s are just too much. I want something warm. Something a little mysterious and exotic.. and seriously downtempo. I search like a lot of people do now, using moods instead of names. And then one night, somewhere between the drone and the dark, I got jealous.
Not of the artists. Not exactly. It was more specific than that - I got jealous of the music itself. Of what it was doing inside my head. Because there's something that happens when you surrender to a particular kind of sound. Your conscious mind loosens its grip and your soul starts building. Images, moods, whole interior landscapes assemble themselves without your permission. I've believed for a long time and talked about extensively on my YouTube channel that sound is not just aesthetic. It is functional. It moves through you at a physiological level. It shapes thought. It can restructure the emotional architecture of a room, or a mind, or a day.
So I'm lying there in the dark, watching my own imagination do something genuinely beautiful in response to someone else's music, and I think: why am I being lazy about this? Why am I handing this over? I could do this.. couldn't I? And how much more power would I be feeding my subconscious that way?
I've been making music under my own name for a while. Not really doing much with it; just a way to keep my mind sharp, really. Dream pop, experimental, things that lean toward the atmospheric and sometimes toward the heavy. I am, as I've always described myself, a multidimensional artist - painter, woodworker, writer, musician and for most of my life that multiplicity felt more like a problem to solve than an identity to inhabit. How do you package someone who doesn't fit in one box? How do you present work that spans genres, moods, and mediums without confusing everyone, including yourself? Nothing I do stands out as one. Everything works together.
I'm 54 now. I'm just learning the answer: you don't force it into a box, no matter what they say. You build separate rooms. Viper's Grey Eye is one of those rooms. It's the room I go to at night.
I didn't set out to make dark music. I meant to make something meditative - mysterious, yes, but soft. Healing, even. I had this image in my mind of something that would feel like open water, like the space between thoughts. My soul had other plans. Everything I make ends up with a particular darkness to it, even since childhood. I was drawing life sized demons on my walls, and my mother went to a psychiatrist about it out of worry. My paintings, my sketches, even my sculptures. The things I write about when I'm not writing reviews. It's just the frequency I operate at. And once I stopped feeling guilty about that, Viper's grey Eye Music became a thing. Low, textural, uneasy in the most beautiful sense of that word. Everything started locking into place. I could even hear the ancient iron doors take hold.
The album's working title is The Petrified Divine. The story behind the sonic experience revolves around the idea of an ancient and feminine serpent deity in the days before monotheism. She represents the chaotic, dark underworld where all the primordial seeds of creation exist. Eventually the main patriarchal religions come in with their battle horses and war horns to suppress this, and the serpent becomes demonized. In the end, she's forgotten. Not entirely erased, but petrified into myth as the world moves on.
What does a petrified myth sound like? It sounds subtle and low-key. It creeps up on you slowly. The sound weighs down on your psyche, putting you in an oppressive place before you even realize you are a prisoner. It surrounds you with an energy that feels slightly wrong, and by the time you finally notice, you are already fighting, unable to remember how long the battle has been raging. It's a melancholy, gothic fantasy. You can hear it in the first fragments of the project: one track captures the last peaceful moments in the temple before the battle horses arrive, its peacefulness warping at the very end. Another finds a female warrior resting in the rain, steeped in deep melancholy. The mood never erupts into the extreme, chaotic noise of cinematic movie battles. It remains soft, dark, and deeply hypnotic, with ethereal vocals preparing to weave through the ruins.
There's something I've observed covering artists for Elevar since 2022: the most compelling side projects are never the ones that were carefully planned. They're the ones that happen when an artist gives themselves permission to stop performing their main identity for a moment. I've watched musicians I've reviewed do exactly this spin off into a separate project, a separate name, a separate sonic space - and I studied how they did it. How they packaged it. How they let it be genuinely other without disowning it. That's something I love about this magazine. I have grown so much simply by opening my mind to other people's work.
This project exists because one night I was tired of being a passive listener to my own inner world. If you make music or write, or paint, or build things - you already know that what comes from you lands differently inside you than what comes from anywhere else. Your brain knows the source. It trusts it differently. It goes further with it.
It is mysticism. It is neuroscience. The ancients never needed two words for it.
Viper's Grey Eye now has two releases from the upcoming album through a Bandcamp, YouTube and a home at vipersgreyeyemedia.com. I'm leaving a loose schedule on its release, because this is an experience for me, too. I have it set for the autumn of this year.
