approximate song title translations:

1. A last prayer for the century...
2. Maldoror I: "The fallacious mirage of dread has shown you your own specter..."
3. "Vowels" by Rimbaud
4. A journey with Clara (In the garden of torture)
5. Artificial paradises (Opium, hashish and absinthe)
6. "Anguish" by Verlaine
7. Maldoror II: "In a grove surrounded by flowers..."
8. 1887-1895 (The darkest levels of syphilitic agony and madness as experienced by Alphonse Daudet)
9. "The Secret" by Desbordes-Valmore
10. Maldoror III: "Each night, at the hour when sleep has reached its greatest degree of intensity..."
11. "The Vampire" by Baudelaire
12. Authentic Parisian Satanism (Durtal & the quest to get down there...)
13. I wanted to be a cursed poet!
14. Maldoror IV: "The shameful, incurable diseases that besiege you..."

this time around, the theme and context is late 1800s france and the distinctly french cultural and literary expression being churned out at that time, especially around the era of the "fin du siecle", in english translated to "end of the century".

it is deeply influenced by the concept and phenomenon of "les poetes maudits".

this little ambient work is influenced by the early french angst-and-opium-ridden existentialism of these writers and poets. the album title translates to "faith, hope and cockroaches: ambience excavated from the end of the century". inspired by the decadence in that era, prevalent in both cultural and carnal forms; from controversial boundary-breaking in literature, to dirty, foul excesses of sexual grime and drug-and-alcohol dementia on the streets and in the dens of Paris and other citites large and small; the madness of syphilis and gonorrhea, desperate, unclean destitute prostitution and abject poverty in the slums, opium-dungeons, derelict housings and piss-stenched gutters.

but not everything is about leering madness and dementia, absinthine revelations of Mammonic indulgence, nightmarish surrealism, the occult, decadent excess and sullen pessimism; not at all. not everything they wrote was a long tirade of syphilitic madness, the depths of addiction and the intrinsic anxiety of the human condition. because strong shines also the sun of the human spirit and resilience and the call for adventure and self-realization, often in a kind of irrational, erratic, passionate, Romantic way, through their words and deeds.there exists often a devotion to the mystery of existence and the human soul, and sometimes a kind of awed natural romanticism. emotive evocations of man's dark sensibilties as well as explorations of profound metaphysical, philosophical and theological conundrums remain general throughout the works of the accursed poets.

themes like love, temporality, death, beauty and martyrdom penetrate with intensity the reader of the end-of-the-century poetry and stylistically adjacent literature.

the phenomenological and epistemological ambiguity of morality

the ineffability of divine reality.

every track on the album centers around a particular theme within this broader contextual framework, and the tracks are dedicated to either rimbaud, baudelaire, verlaine, desbordes-valmore, lautreamont, huysmans, mirbeau or daudet.

the whole album, though, is chiefly dedicated to Comte de Lautreamont (Isidor Ducasse), my literary hero and a huge inspiration in pretty much everything art-related i have gotten my greasy hands into. "maldoror" completely blew my mind as i first read it at age 20. i loved it so much i wrote a whole "homage" kind of Maldoror-style book dedicated to him.