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So Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind has it’s 13th birthday today, so I thought i’d tell you some stuff about what this movie means to me.

I saw it for the first time when I was 16 with my first girlfriend and it completely blew me away. It quickly became one of my go to movies to watch before bed or when I had nothing else to do (along with V for Vendetta, Fight Club and Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist at the time). For every time I watched it I noticed something new, understood it more, drew more and more parallells between it and real life.

I won’t go so much into depth that I discuss the entire movie, but I will discuss the theme of love. For me, Eternal Sunshine depicts one of the most intense portayals of love, out of any movie i’ve ever seen. How at the end, both Joel and Clementine are willing to go down a road they know will end in pain, because the feeling of what they had (will have) in the beginning is so utterly euphoric. It’s so back to front to what we are taught to believe in or act. We’re taught to work hard and suffer now, so we can be happy later on in life. Would you rather be happy now and miserable later, or miserable now and happy later? Once you’ve gone down that road and been hurt so badly, would you be willing to go through all that again just to taste the bliss for a while longer?

To me, I interpret it as their love is so profound that there is no other choice for them than to be with each other again. A true act of masochism.

To tie this back to Concealed in Clouds, the original 1st track for AAAA was meant to be a song called “Meet Me In Montauk”. Although we scrapped it as the song itself was more on par with our EP, rather than the rest of the songs on the album. The lyrics were a direct tribute to Eternal Sunshine, basically just referencing to the story of the movie. It was a good track, just not good enough.

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It's all about staying healthy friends. Put some work into yourself to keep your mind and body clear; without barriers of fatigue, you may let your soul slip into your art, instead of slipping away.

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No. 6: Elation

A topic I really want to talk about is elating songs. I love music, I really do. I listen to loads of different genres, and I’m inspired by and admire artists of all sounds. But the songs that stand out the most are the ones that elate you; make you feel something, give you butterflies and a sense of euphoria. Songs that are almost frustrating to listen to because you want to just transcend into it, which you can’t. I can only liken the feeling to when I was a kid, watching Dragonball Z, and then standing in my room just flexing my whole body whilst trying to turn into a Super Saiyan (Oh, come on, it can’t just be me!)

Different songs affect you in different, but similar ways. Like when I listen to “Life Itself” by Glass Animals, I get the grooves and I just want to dance. It fills my body with this joy and I can’t help but smile. That feeling is similar to when I listen to Sam Cooke, it just makes me smile and I want to groove – the same but different. Another example is when I listen to “Sleepwalking” by Bring Me The Horizon. It has this ineffable ambience to it that just wrenches your soul; you want to sing, scream, move your whole body, etc. Your body can’t figure out what it wants – it just feels so concerted with your soul that it wants to move in the same way, because music is abstract and so is the soul, but the body isn’t and that barrier causes frustration. Anyway, I get the same feeling when I listen to “Winter Bird” by Aurora, that I do when I listen to “Sleepwalking”. Again, very different genres and very different artists – but both speak to me in the same way.

So I’ve created a playlist of 20 songs that have affected me in one of the thousands of ways that music does.

Check it out, go give the artists some love and tell them we sent you!

#RegardsCiC

https://t.co/YWzPkVCRE2

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No.5. ‘The most of everything.’

I feel so dizzy. I was told yesterday that I have unusually low blood pressure – which is appropriate since I’ve been feeling a bit thin, if that even makes sense. “Like butter spread over too much bread”. You always wonder if there’s an end to all of the adversity, or if that is just what it means to live? And I don’t just mean the band, I expect adversity there, I’m talking about work, relationships, life, economy, friends. I can’t remember ever having everything in place, I can’t ever remember not struggling with the most of everything.

And people can complain about me whining, saying that “that’s how life is” and to “just get on with it”. And yes, that is how life is, there’s nothing special or unique about feeling bad – what is special and unique is how to get by. But learning how to get by without hurting yourself or hurting others, that is the hard part. Being selfish is simultaneously brave and cowardly at the same time. Brave because it can be so utterly difficult to put yourself in front of others sometimes, and cowardly because you don’t dare suffer a bit so that another can feel good. It’s about moderation, just like everything is. That is why I don’t accept everyday life as it is. Suffering in moderation. Regards, CiC

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No. 4. ‘Aspire.’

Yesterday we released the first single off of our debut album “Aspire. Apprise. Assemble. Arise.”. I originally wanted to call the single “Aspire. Apprise. Assemble. Arise.” and have it as the title track, but it was deemed too long for a single, especially a first single. So we compromised on the title “Aspire.” instead of its demo title “En Route”. We still sometimes call it ‘En Route’ between ourselves.

Nico wrote the original first draft of the lyrics, to which I re-wrote some of it and amended others. Not much though, I just gave flesh to an already sturdy skeleton. It felt like something I could have written anyway, so much so that I sometimes forget that I didn’t (entirely) write it.

I remember when Benjamin showed me the first draft of the song. I was walking with him in the park, heading towards town for whatever reason. It was rather late, or at least darkish, early Autumn 2015. He played it to me through his mobile, at this stage it was a very crude little demo that he had been forced to record midi, since he had no soundcard and couldn’t record real guitars. But I loved it, I listened to it so much that the little midi notes came alive - mostly through my imagination. It was so real to me, and it felt so unique and I felt such huge pressure to write lyrics that would live up to it.

Now it’s out and I couldn’t be more proud of it. It came together just as I had imagined - in some ways even better. I just hope everyone else enjoys it as much as I did when I first heard that crude demo. Regards, CiC

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No. 3. ‘What comes is better than what came before.’

Sometimes you stumble upon fragments of your past, and their sentiment just happens to correspond with what’s going on with your life right now. Life goes in circles. I love being alone with my thoughts, just not too long. I enjoy solitude, but I believe, as to quote Christoffer McCandless, happiness is only real when shared. You grow up, things consume your day and you no longer have time to spend with your friends, like you used to do every afternoon. My heart aches for all the friends I never see anymore. Friends I vowed never to lose, friends I cherished, friends who are now but an anecdote of these past years. How I loved them, how I still do. But life is unforgiving, sometimes helping one means hurting another, and bring yourself to hurt someone you love is an almost impossible task (for me). Even though I know that not acting at all also hurts. I never understood the expression “The first day of the rest of my life.” when I was a kid. I do now though, and I truly believe it has begun. Regards, CiC

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No. 2

I’ll be completely honest with you in this regard; music itself is not my main passion. My passion is in the art, in the creation, the chase of a magnum opus. To be honest, the kick I get out of hearing a new (good) demo and/or finishing a text that i’m satisfied with, is greater than that of the adrenaline of a live show. By no means am I implying that playing shows is in any way plebeian, simply that the rush of creating something that you revel in is absolutely momentous.

 And that is the reason I play in this band, to be able to work with the arts. Because music is so ambiguous that it can be symbiotic with anything, meaning that we can, with our music, incorporate and implement it into our music, into our product and into our lives. We’ve already tried to start this in small steps, working with an incredible artist for the cover of ‘Dewdrops’ names Erica Elly Gabrielsson. Our hope and dream is to be able to keep working with more artists in different forms - instead of simply hiring someone to do a job for us.

Music has the power to augment virtually anything. I can’t imagine a life without music in it. I do not, however, deal in absolutes. I firmly disbelieve that a person is placed upon this earth for any singular reason, that there is one true love or that you’re made to achieve a certain goal, I don’t believe in fate and I don’t believe in karma (as I stated in ‘A Home in Flames’). I believe that your life is a product of what you make for yourself and what others make for you - independent of an invisible cosmic force/balance. I believe in actions and reactions, that if you treat others well then they will (in many cases) treat you the same, though this isn’t a given. That if you dedicate your life to others, you will leave no time for yourself, and vice versa.  In my opinion, it all has to do with balance. If you’re unhappy, it’s because something negative is outweighing its opposing positive. To create happiness for yourself you have to work on balancing out the negative - and this also goes for balancing out the positive, because without lows there are no highs, and the higher you go the further you’ll fall. And we all fall.

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No.1

So I can start with some news. 

As some of you know, we’re currently working on our debut album that will go by the name “AAAA”, for now. Don’t worry, when the time comes we’ll let you know what the A’s stand for and what they mean.   However, it obviously takes a lot of time to get things just the way we want them, without half-arsing it. What I can tell you is that we’re still in the demo phase of the album, but, all of the songs are written and composed, all 12-13 (we’re indecisive of which songs make the cut) of them! We’re still working on some of the vocal patterns, but that’s about it.   Although it may seem like this is taking a long time, things are happening all the time. Whether we’re discussing lyrics, vocals, mix, guitars, or even merch, tours, shows, etc. the venture that is Concealed in Clouds, is consistently on our minds.

We’re trying to create something special and uncompromising, and this takes time. So, in an attempt to stay relevant and fill the void, we have decided to start a fortnightly blog and VLOG (i’ll actually try to update the blog weekly, but I ain’t promising out). There isn’t a theme for this, though i’ll regularly update our progress, and it gives me a chance to write. It gives us a chance to discuss various topics, not necessarily regarding music. It’s important to understand that Concealed in Clouds is not exclusively analogous with music, we are pertained to art and all that that signifies.

So, look forward to seeing more of these in the future! Peace! /Joshua

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