(Our South Africa-born, Vietnam-resident, contributor Vizzah Harri wrote the following fascinating essay. It includes a distinctive review of Bedsore‘s new album, but also uses it as a springboard to other connections and reflections.)
“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” –Ursula K. Le Guin
“This means that every person brings themselves to every piece of art. It means we all experience a different piece of art. Each time we return to a story we are creating a different story. Rereading is good actually.” – saxifraga-x-urbium (from Tumblr)
If you didn’t know anything about this album prior to clicking on this article and did not want to go into it entirely blind, then I can attempt to sum it up for you sonically in 34 words: This band’s waking dream of an album is like Hail Spirit Noir alchemized with giallo; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; the most serene Italian chamber orchestra; and a few doses of the holy trinity of proggy-death in Skeptic, Cynic, and Atheist.
If you’re not one for spoilers or unsolicited and supposed extensive verbosity bordering on the inane, then you can check the dope new album by everyone’s favorite lethargy-induced-necrosis band right here, though it does require patience, attention, and time; and in the same breath it is the type of long-form conceptuality that commands attention in such a way that one pays it effortlessly. 20 Buck Spin released it in full on YouTube on November 26 this year:
Bedsore have done an in-depth explanation of the whole album track-by-track which is available on their Facebook and Instagram together with a booklet exquisitely illustrated by the artist Welt that you can purchase at their shows. It’s quite an interesting read and you’ll get much better first-hand experience from the composers themselves describing what the concept is, how it came to fruition, and what instruments were used.
They also have a great etymology of their name on their Bandcamp and Metallum pages:
“First recorded in 1833, the term ‘bed-sore’ originally described gangrene caused by prolonged pressure, particularly in bedridden patients.
The word ‘bed’ (from Old English bedd) represents not only a place of rest but also one of confinement and vulnerability. ‘sore’ (from Old English sar) conveys both physical pain and mental suffering, a concept echoed across various Germanic languages.
At the same time, the term ‘bed-sore’ carries a deeper, darker meaning. Interpreted as the ‘suffering of the bed,’ it suggests that the crib becomes a gateway into a realm dominated by unconscious fears, dream-like visions, aberrant figures, and grotesque manifestations. These forces have the potential to lead an individual toward total destruction, symbolizing both physical decay
of the flesh and psychological erosion of the mind.
Thus, Bedsore encapsulates not only a medical condition but also a metaphorical descent into the obscure aspects of the human experience. It reminds us that what promises comfort can, paradoxically, become a source of deeper torment.”
Bedsore L-R: Davide Itri, Stefano Allegretti, Giulio Rimoli, Jacopo Gianmaria Pepe
Going by this eloquent examination of the roots of the word they are known by, it then makes so much sense as to where they have gone musically and thematically. Though if you went the reverse cross-referenced route of sourcing the direct translation from Italian, ‘bedsore’ translates as ‘piaga da decubito’ – plague of decubitus. Put that through the what-is-it machine and you get ‘strike’ and ‘reclining’. They’ve always been scheming to create music that will strike down or command the listener to repose. It’s positively an album to enjoy loudly.
Whether the sanguine spells of Absolute Elsewhere enchanted you or if you were privy to the comparisons made between two albums that could not be more different other than the façade of a retrospective ideal in sound, the only resemblance would be of them both being genre mudskippers.
Amphibians to be exact. Scartelaos is a type of mudskipper; the name breaks down to ‘leaping’ and ‘folk’. Amphibians be Scartelaos, enjoying both the terrestrial and pelagial depths that might seem shallow to the hairy giant apes towering over them. With intent, execution, theme, and sound, Bedsore have succeeded in being amphibians, sonically bridging genres, yet one also gets the ecstatic cinematic introvert’s rigor mortis for simultaneously desiring being prone and leaping. Levitating then, virtual levitation hallucinations by way of inducing a waking dream. I had to do it; mudskipper etymologizes to someone having a wet shudder.
I for one am daily dazed and confused with how much music there is to consume and you might also be wondering where the time has gone? So many things have been said and written about this highly anticipated and rated album. The question then was what could be added to the already high praise of such an immense album in order to not misunderstand or -interpret it? There is the academic urban myth of six degrees of separation regarding social connections; the same myth can be applied to art and abstraction.
One can take 5 or 6 seemingly unrelated sources and show how they connect back to this album. This is not what you’ll be bored with, no matter how interconnected everything seemingly can be. I’m not one for pseudo-profundity, though its interplay with insignificance does interest me. Douglas Adams famously postulated that the answer to life, the universe, and everything boils down to the number 42, that life is what we make of it.
This might be a stretch, but Dreaming the Strife for Love is 42 minutes long, plus 235 seconds. Uranium-235 is the only extant nuclear chain reaction sustaining isotope (fissile) that has existed in its current form preceding the formation of planet Earth. U-235 being such a primordial entity capable of both incomprehensible destruction as well as unfathomable progress, it’s a happy accident that the length of the album coincides with a search for meaning as well as alluding to a radioactive element akin to a god-particle.
A bit further down the road scientists found that even the act of observing something can change or influence that which is observed. Bedsore did not just participate in the resurrection of the Hypnerotomachia (The Strife of Love in a Dream), they allowed it to transcend into a cosmic reality. If you were looking for a more direct reference of reinterpretation and continuation of art, then there’s Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield which was interpreted on its 50th anniversary by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 2 years ago: and well worth your time.
In a year where we’ve had new Mozart unearthing and quite a bit of retrospection including old’er’ artists bringing out new stuff, or old dogs teaching young ones new tricks – like Steve Hackett and Judas Priest – still other bands felt the urge to delve into the near past and further into antiquity for inspiration.
Printed for the first time in December of 1499 in Venice, the full title of the book that serves as concept for Bedsore’s album is Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, vbi hvmana omnia non nisi somnivm esse docet, atqve obiter plvrima scitv sane qvam digna commemorat. – And which translates badly to: Polyphilus’s strife for love in a dream, where he teaches that all human things are nothing but dreams, and by way of mentioning this containing all knowledge that is worthy.
Hapless sidestepping of a reading of the music through its source material and also spoiler alert: The book is about the protagonist’s striving for a love in a dream within a dream. Eventually finding his love requited prior to waking up, but when his eyes open again to the world, he realizes that it was not to be. If you’d like a deeper dive, then this great book on the Internet Archive will suffice. Also check it out for the woodblock prints contained in it.
Bedsore mentioned that the sonic themes repeat and that the true meaning of the album is revealed in the final track, “Fountain of Venus”. But perhaps the best description of what the album represents is this from their Facebook:
“Dreaming the Strife for Love is an exploration of both ancient themes and modern extremities. It is a bridge between the mysticism of Renaissance philosophy, the progressive musical ambition of the ‘70s, and the relentless force of extreme metal. This is a voyage into the labyrinth of the heart, where the pursuit of Love demands more than just passion: it calls for transformation, sacrifice, and transcendence. This album is a tribute to the ancient world of symbols and the progressive spirit of music.”
Bedsore referenced ELP (Emerson, Lake and Palmer) so hard and going so far as publicly stating them as an influence that they named one of their tracks in homage to one of the sickest performances of a classic, Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” “Fanfare for a Heartfelt Love” can be interpreted to be that of the common man, or perhaps I shouldn’t delve into things as deeply as my disappointed tutor in my 3rd year of my bachelor’s degree when he expected the only student who already read Blood Meridian to have more insight. I think that essay more than any other piece of writing was the source of my impostor syndrome.
Well, if you’re a common man like me, and have never experienced said band’s live performance of Copland’s fanfare for us laymen…then goddamn, do yourself a favor and watch this.
The only bad thing I can say is that one of the main characters in that composition, the massive bass drum sound, is not visible in the video. Carl Palmer has proved that he is an inveterate and insatiably voracious daemon when it comes to percussion, having gone as far as playing in a band named after the continent where some of his favorite percussion instruments (like the tam-tam) came from. If he can snare people so effortlessly with his warm-up routine, then I’m sure that massive drum sound in the “Fanfare…” video was telekinetically achieved.
YouTube commenters don’t have impostor syndrome, and they are sometimes highly entertaining. I read a lot of them and giallo was mentioned as an influence, Dario Argento especially. His Profondo Rosso is hailed as the pinnacle of the genre. Goblin, a progressive rock group who found a niche for themselves recording soundtracks did the OST for this and, well, some people even felt that Dreams for the Strife of Love is “like a mix of early Cynic and Kansas had a baby.” It’s more like Hail Spirit Noir went fully giallo à la Suspiria with Moog synths sans sideburns.
Here are some of the best comments that served a good helping of hilarity from the initial premiere of the first single on YouTube that I scooped for your pleasure:
“If Emerson, Lake and Palmer had a Black Metal vocalist.”
“Cynic wrote the soundtrack for an Italian cop movie in 1978??”
“Oingo Boingo Black Metal?”
“For those of you who secretly wished Dream Theater would record a metalcore album … very interesting.”
“Did I hear trombone in that?”
“Killer and has some strong Opeth vibes at times, love it.” [BI had wayyyy more Opeth in it, unless you’re talking 70s prog era Opeth, which this…ahem, kinda is, then yes]
“Unholy elegance. Haunting melodies forged for souls craving profound and harrowing introspection.”
“It’s like if Steve Morse decided to make death metal. So weird in such a cool way.”
“Feels like truly evolved metal with a touch of Peter Gabriel and Keith Emerson flair. So cool.”
“I love that “Per Wiberg” style of the keyboards. I buy for THAT reason.”
A note on the gorgeous artwork by Denis Forkas Kostromitin; it references this woodcut: “A ”mighty huge” elephant of black stone, with gold and silver dots. Upon the large back of this prodigious animal is placed an obelisk of verde-antique.” Below is the supposed original as well as a wonderful modern interpretation by Welt and Kostromitin’s art piece above:
The album cover art shows no live elephant, instead, if one strains the eye a bit it seems like a desiccated elephantine figure crushed under the weight of the sky-accusing obelisk. One can ruminate that elephants’ idiomatically storied memory serves as metaphor for all things of old eventually running the course of entropic affinity. Further delving into the art brings us however to the back cover:
Without further ado, a few notes on the music:
“The age of haste, its cinematographic succession of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even an ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence. It consists of temporal sedimentations emitting a phosphorescent glow.”
― Byung-Chul Han
Life hides
in the small moments of quietus,
when an eternal melody greets you
after the fade of panic.
If you’re overeager for death metal, then it does not really start for seven minutes and 31 seconds. Nevertheless, the opening act running into the second track offers a splendid primer. Big ideas and disproportionate toil can hide in short timeframes. Just look at Shingo Tamagawa’s Puparia as an example, and then the wonderful documentary on the making of his visually overwhelming short film.
The overture to “Minerva’s Obelisque” is like a credit roll of characters that we’ll encounter in the coming showcase. And before we even commence, we are reminded to breathe, that here we have a piece of music to savor. Composed by those not unaware of how suspense can summon import and how to construct it. Daemonic in the Sagan-ic sense of adding to the intrigue of having us meditate on meanings of obelisks and Minervan wanderings. Minerva after all comes from the Proto-Indo-European root of ‘menos’ meaning ‘thought’.
“Scars of Light” is the first track that sets off into a more metallic frame of reference, where at the 7-minute mark (of the album proper), we have just a touch or so of ominous flurries. When the riffs finally do pull through to rock away, we are in Cascadian arenas vocally, the organs and keys never truly depart. Esque-wires of blackened Greek avant-garde. The 2:57-3:02 mark that repeats again about half a minute later sounds like it is a direct sonic reference to Hail Spirit Noir. I thought I was going to find the exact tune and chord and went through HSN’s entire discography, but it turned out to be a Mandela effect.
It might sound familiar because of how many times I’ve already heard it, and revisiting every HSN track is never a chore. In sound, aesthetic, and psychedelic leanings there definitely has been more of a crossbreed from these Italians into the modern sound of the avant-garde with the prog stylings of Dreaming…
The second track is never disjointed and not at all predictable. With some impish laughter and harlequin touches, it’s the keyboards that truly move the song forward. With guitars and bass more like the supporting actors and drums accentuating.
Here is the official video sublimely animated by Costin Chioreanu:
The opening of “A Colossus, an Elephant, a Winged Horse; the Dragon Rendezvous” sounds like a generator, a trawler, like Charontas got a motorboat for the Styx, or Dragnipur’s ever-trudging wooden axles. The latter being apt for its superlatively fantastical title.
Raspy atmospheric black metal vocals again regale us while the music still never really pushes the heavy buttons. Making more space for setting tone and atmosphere with a supremely cinematic background. The synth/organ solo is funky and then in elephantine fashion the song morphs into a confluence of a fractured fulcrum of sonic singularity.
A soundtrack for a corpus envisioned and transgressed into the surreal. When the vox take a step back to being drowned out by the atonal-in-concept instrumentals yet not in a sound way, before eventually reminding me of Muse guitar whammy warbling for absolution (round the 6:55-minute mark) and pushing again with percussion positively furious afore the wane.
The harpsichord/harp bridge into the final act is whimsical on the verge of treading into the border territory of what fairytales actually were imagined as by their creator. The heavily augmented vocals sound like some waterlogged be-lunged pneumonic beast squealing for surcease. There have been a few albums of late that fell squarely if not fractally-obliquely into that category of music to trip on without the use of cognition enhancers, this is one of those.
Bedsore remain the best source for words on their own composition, one sentence that hit me as apt was: “This results in an album that, rather than feeling like two separate albums in one, embraces a coherence for both forms, to create a surreal, reality-bending immersion wholly their own.” I first noticed the single recommended on one of the Avant pages with some intriguing ideas in comparison with the folks from Colorado, but I can’t get enough of either of the records.
The tongue-tickling “Realm of Eleuterillide” dropped in my lunch break one Friday afternoon and it was pure sonic bliss. It’s been quite some time that vivid imagery materialized with such ease when listening to a piece of sonic teleportation. I’m not thát sleep-deprived, but I have had some insane insomniac/hypnagogic experiences in the past; and this was just genuinely being able to meditate in full on the music, consciously.
This was before I bought new Sennheisers and it was only on a shitty tone-deaf JBL Charge 5 haha. You’ve read this far on my after-2 post-work hits of a blunt, so I’ll give you an example of the imagery I wrote down on first listen.
When “Realm…” finally transverses into death and the vox kick in it’s like there are 2 different songs or frequencies meeting, that shouldn’t fit but do, the vox and synths on one, the drums and strings on another. And the image was that of a flooding river meeting the ocean on springtide. The kind that, like the Amazon, then creates perfect surfable waves on the incoming tide from two opposing forces of nature. Perhaps it’s been too long since I’ve gone on a dawn patrol, haha.
If you’re going to try only one song off this album, then it should be this one. There’s such a fantastic interplay of holding back the full enormity of what transpires within the dream and it builds so beautifully into photodramatic supremacy together with the portentous swirl of the synths, one can but bask in its grandeur.
“Fanfare for a Heartfelt Love” might be the shortest track on the record but it opens imperiously with an organ piece commissioned by Dante himself. Melodiously driving with more cinematic overtones. We’re treated to one more flourish of what can just be described as one of the coolest and most bombastic endings to a track recorded in recent memory.
The realm of the weird has not so much been transgressed but completely plunged into with “Fountain of Venus.” For an album written on keyboards more than on strings, it’s not that the guitars took a step back, they’re there and they add much emotive allure to the overall product. If the ending of “Fanfare…” had you excited about what sounds could be explored, then “Fountain of Venus” takes it a step further before executing the smoothest transition into extremity and then melding themes both aural and conceptual.
It’s not a kitchen sink approach, more in the vein of a fusion (fission more like) of looking at Italian cuisine as an outsider, where minimalism can outstrip more robust diversity. For there are a lot of ingredients, yet measured meticulously to capture one’s utmost attention and leaving just that much empty space for a hope to be filled that never arises, because the way it starts is the way it ends. An exercise in infinitely dividing by two as a logical anomaly of never arriving at zero. Dreaming the Strife for Love is an album to listen to on headphones, in the dark with your eyes closed and with nothing else going on. Not even putting words to paper.
Some interpretations deem the hero’s real love that of the all-encompassing heretofore, of antiquity. If one deconstructs the names involved. To go one step further: etymology’s etymology is that of etumos. Truth. Hence etymologists being seekers of the roots of truth in words.
Bedsore brought us a truth statement in sonic form. Antiquity that has vanished from our present, other than the records we keep in vellum, tape cassettes, and compact discs, and if you’re extremely old school – on floppy disks (the virtual skeuomorph of the save symbol nigh ubiquitous. Growing up rather innocent it was only in later life that I realized how infantile South African humor can be at times, the floppy was colloquially known as a stiffy… The largest ones contained a whopping 1.44megabytes of storage. To put it in perspective, you’d need a sturdy column of ten floppies to contain those elegant thorny riff whisperers of old –Fluisteraars’ track “De Doornen”.), parchment, or on digitized ineffable clouds that may be as delicate as the faintest of cirrus clouds evaporating in the sun that will eventually swallow our little globe filled with strife and eros.
On my way to Moc Chau in Son La province, Vietnam, ideas were bouncing around in my head as to how I could finish off possibly the last article I’m writing this year. Pulling over at a rest stop for a smoke I at first thought the white cloud I saw peering over a wall was that of trash burning, but the sickly-sweet smell of life-supporting death, that of pesticides, hit my nose. Having worked in the lawn care industry for 3 years, the illusions and delusion of ‘organic’ lawn care, it was unmistakable. It got me thinking about what toll it takes in death to bring forth life. Driving out of Hanoi at first through plains and then mountain passes covered in vegetation, the most striking feature of the landscape is how utterly cloaked in dust it is.
One can almost hear the collective skirl of the dust-draped greenery displaying the fruits of development and progress in the sprawl of prodromal Hanoi. The passes through foothills covered in vines and broad leafy foliage absolutely slathered in powdered clay for a thirst not slaked for months. So dry, not so much a carbon footprint as a dust footprint. It brought on the question of how much has to be transformed and moved, how much disproportionate labor demanded for the advancement of a burgeoning power.
Change has a price, and I thought also of the old and new, of friendships rekindled and others moving on. Of grieving the passing of not just loved ones transfiguring on to the aether, but those that diverged onto other paths. People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lesson, as my aunt Liz loves to say. So too with art.
I mused on the transience of existence, of the finity and the fickleness, and of the brittleness of it. Yet, also the resilience if we choose to see it, grasp it, and hold it dear. And of love. Dreaming for a strife towards that what may have come if we should have chosen it. But also, to reflect on and appreciate what came before, so we can cherish what we have at this moment.
So, to sign off, listen to this album right now already. Now is the only time cos the future is but a dream.
Dreaming the Strife for Love was conceived by Bedsore and Timo Ketola who passed away in 2020 and who was responsible for countless album covers including Bedsore’s Hypnagogic Hallucinations.
All music was conceived and composed by Jacopo Gianmaria Pepe and Stefano Allegretti
Arranged by Bedsore:
Stefano Allegretti – Classical Guitars, Keyboards, Synthesizers, Mellotron, Organ, Lyrics, Songwriting, Recording
Jacopo Gianmaria Pepe – Vocals, Electric Guitars, 12 Strings Guitars, Songwriting, Lyrics, Recording
Giulio Rimoli – Fretless Bass, Bass Pedals
Davide Itri – Drums, Percussion
Guest musicians
Kariti – Vocals (track 1)
Giorgio Trombino – Saxophone, Flute (tracks 1, 2, 3)
Giulio Guidotti – Trumpet, Trombone (tracks 1, 4, 6)
Additional Production staff
Lorenzo Stecconi – Mixing, Recording
Magnus Lindberg – Mastering
Luca Sapio and Alex Di Nunzio – Engineering assistants
Visual artists
Denis Forkas Kostromitin – Cover art
@welt_art_official – Additional art (booklet)
Ebe Paciocco – Layout
Costin Chioreanu – Illustrations (additional)
Francesco Maria Pepe – Photography (band)
Links