
The News The letter was old when it reached him — carried by cart, then boat, then cart again through the spring mud, and delivered by a merchant’s boy who did not know what he carried. Poliphilos unrolled it by candlelight in the guest-room of the monastery where he was staying. It was not addressed…

The story A peasant boy is trafficked to Renaissance Venice, where he gains extraordinary abilities through an encounter with a real mentor who initates him to the world. The philosophy The mentor figure represents one of mythology’s oldest archetypes: the older guide who transforms the young traveler through intimate transmission rather than instruction. Athena mentoring…

I. The Invitation Venice in the aftermath of the Biennale behaved like a city with a headache: the party was over, but nobody had cleared the glasses. Gallerists who had spent June saying darling to each other now crossed the campo in opposite directions, and the ones who didn’t cross fast enough had learned to…

The story Four men from a perpetually dark land steal the moon from a neighboring kingdom. Over time, as each man dies and takes a portion of the moon with him, its light disrupts the peace, unsettling the natural order of the dead. The philosophy The Moon fairy tale resembles the greek Prometheus myth. He…

Every album needs a beginning, and “Eternal Echoes”, structured, quietly, as a Hero’s Journey across its ten songs has “Underwurlde” where that journey starts. Let’s start with the music. Underneath the modern production is an old Finnish folk song from Karelia, Finland so the bones of the melody are older than anything else on “Eternal…

That Italian journal The rain over Berlin had the patience of something that intended to stay for weeks. Poliphilos had taken the corner table in a café off Prenzlauer Allee, the one farthest from the speakers, and worked his way down through a stack of archaeology journals the way other people worked through newspapers: sideways.…

Landside The taxi coupon already paid, forty rupees folded into the driver’s visor anyway because some transactions end with a tip and this one ends with a year, the window down, the driver saying something about the traffic at Andheri that the radio was also saying, while the August heat was pressing against the car,…

Every Song Had to Belong From the moment I began composing “Eternal Echoes,” I knew the album needed variety. Every song had to stand on its own — complete, distinctive, with a strong identity of its own. At the same time, they all needed to belong to the same larger picture. The songs are individual…

The Origin: A Farmhouse and a Feeling of Floating I originally wrote “Free to Fly” in the summer of 1994 or 1995 — the exact year has dissolved, which tells you something about how old this song is. The inspiration came from something else entirely: a three-month summer course I took in 1993. We stayed…

The last rays of warmth embrace meAnd in that moment, from this soilShe has risenNow to that soil she’s going back againThe bloom of the autumn, my returning friendIt’s not the end, the time we spent togetherWith my Last Rose of SummerThe honey bee is singing goodbyeIn the last ray of autumn lightThe last Summer…