Despite appearances, there's a lot of thought going on over here: about several bands, about certain labels, about the state of play in metal. There's some thought going on about 19th-century piano music, too, and about cults of personality, and about what cults of personality look like once the actual details of the personality in question have been irretrievably lost to history. There's a big argument to be had about what "lost to history" means, and about whether something's always gained when another something gets lost, and about whether the things you eventually win back from history can be traded for an upgraded elven staff. There's a question about whatever's behind weapons-upgrade metaphors generally speaking: aren't most modifications really stopgaps, or functional side-quests, rather than actual improvements? (Heavy modders will answer "no" to this last question, but are biased by their essential nature.)

I guess the question to which Last Plane to Jakarta has been arriving is this: what is an artifact? The question sort of preemptively assumes that we want artifacts. To be clear: we do. We think artifacts aren't necessarily physical-world things, but that physical-world things are still the most convenient way of asserting that there's an artifact somewhere. Above all, we're more convinced than ever that good music is the substance of: its content, its image (I'd prefer "spectre," but sometimes you just have to give yourself a break), and the things people remember collectively about these two: and importantly, the struggle that takes place -- that always takes place -- in reconciling these. The movements of various principals for control. Nowhere clearer, at present, than in this remarkable document, the revealing of which won't make these two opaque & unhelpful paragraphs any clearer to hardly anybody. Still, though. Poetry is what you find when you arrive at the end of prose*, and this double-CD, whose 2nd half I haven't even gotten to yet, is poetry plain & simple, which is to say, neither plain, nor simple. The chances that you'll like it are extremely slight, but there's going to be somebody out there who hears, in the songs on Silent Knight's first disc when considered with its liner notes and accompanying photographs, the sound of wind rushing madly through a vortex. That vortex is history, and the sound made by the wind is the stuff of dreams.

*nb: at either end