Present Day, July 14, 2026
Four days until Sanctified Hunger. I want to be honest about why this album exists in its current form.
I have been working with these themes for decades. The condemnation at fifteen. The five centuries of watching religious violence. The machinery of institutional faith as a mechanism of control. These are not new observations. I have been accumulating the evidence for most of my existence.
What changed was the present tense becoming specific. A military commander using the vocabulary of holy war in an active conflict. The alignment of state power with apocalyptic religious framing in a way that I have watched produce particular categories of catastrophe before. The sense that the pattern was not merely historical but operational, right now, in real time, in the world I am currently occupying.
The album was always coming. But these conditions accelerated the final recordings. They made the urgency of the testimony impossible to defer any further. When the general uses the same words the crusading commanders used, the testimony is no longer historical documentation. It is current events reporting from someone who was present the first time those words were used to justify the killing.
That is what I am. A witness who was present the first time. A witness who is still present. The album is the testimony of both of those facts simultaneously. Four days.