Various, consolidated
Every century I have moved through has produced its particular version of the same configuration: a system of authority that begins with a claim to legitimacy, accumulates power on the basis of that claim, and eventually uses the accumulated power to enforce the claim against the evidence that the claim has become illegitimate.
I watched it in the Church of my birth, in the specific form that condemned a fifteen year old boy for reading philosophy. I watched it in the Ottoman courts as they reached and then passed their apex. I watched it in Victorian imperialism, which had constructed an elaborate justification for extraction that required increasingly forceful maintenance as the justification became less persuasive. I watched it in the 20th century’s great ideological systems, each of which produced, as it reached the limits of voluntary compliance, the apparatus of involuntary compliance.
The black sun is what authority becomes when it has consumed all available sources of legitimacy and is running on inertia and force alone. It burns but it does not illuminate. It commands but it cannot persuade. It produces compliance through fear and calls the compliance endorsement. I have watched this configuration many times. I recognize it in the present moment. The specific forms it takes now are new. The configuration is not.
Black Sun Rising is the track that maps this configuration in sound. April 24. Before the album. So you know what is coming. May 22.