Get all 6 ianto mabon releases available on Bandcamp and save 30%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Demos of Empty Hedonia (EP), Days of Empty Hedonia, Atoms Dream of Atoms (EP), Disconnected, Eudaimonia, and so long, so lonely.
1. |
Cosmic Chain
03:51
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A shower of stardust once pulled a part
In a distant dark, in a flash of light
And that dust is my body
It’s a wonder that there’s anything at all
I am no more than that single cell
In a foamy wave on an empty shore
That came from nothing
Like an infancy I cannot recall
A woman alone on a dusty plain
With a swollen womb, that’s what I became
Oh, I love, I love
All those mothers that still live in my blood
I am just one link in the cosmic chain
It’s only a day, I shouldn’t be afraid
But I am, I am
All I’ve ever known impossibly lost
That I can sit here and think at all
Under Cardiff’s sky in the late spring light
It’s a strange, sad dream
Oh, the horror and the beauty, that’s life
It’s not just death death, but saying goodbye
To everything I’ve known, everyone I’ve loved
Like those blue Bergen mornings, the eyes of my first love
And all of those songs my mother played when I was young
I’ve been trying to write one ever since then
Of upstate New York, an island off Stockholm
Barcelona, black country night
Dame Street in Dublin and the hills of west Oslo
And all of those towns on the American coasts
Such human longing I’ll ever fulfil
But I’ve got coffee and smoke, Lazzaro’s eyes
The feeling of motion, Some Rain Must Fall
The sunset from South Beach, Black & White TV
And just making love to a woman I loved
All bodily pleasure numbed to nothing by death
All thought and all feeling gone with my last breath
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2. |
Dormant in Me
02:46
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Autumn fell and I just fell in your eyes
As we went walking through
The empty city by the salt of the sea
Under ochre leaves
And I discovered what lay dormant in me
In your hidden depths
Like all my life was only half of a life
Till I walked with you
But we, we cannot be
Cos that kind of love is just in me
Do you love me, would your dad understand
Or is it all my dream?
A fantasy that you could never fulfil
In my fearful mind
It’s like I’ve never quite accepted myself
Maybe I never will
But I’ll always remember when we sat on the hill
I wanted to hold your hand
But that cannot be true
Cos that kind of love is not in you
But we, we cannot be
Cos that kind of love is just in me
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3. |
Empty Hedonia
03:41
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My mother birthed an abeyance when she birthed my body
Empty space fills empty space forever
Born without something, I just can’t explain
Silent, motionless staring into middle distance
As though consciousness never really entered
There’s no ghost in the machine of my dying body
Maybe it’s not just how I feel
But all of the world has been set up to make me feel
Low
Made to believe in a world that can’t be
Affordable joy, but it’s all an illusion
I know
I feel like furniture in every room I enter
I was a wall in a field on that final summer
The absence at the centre of all my memories
I’m the dust you love, I’m so sorry, love
I’m tired of living through days of empty Hedonia
Where all I do is seek pleasure that I cannot feel
Maybe it’s not just how I feel
But all of the world has been set up to make me feel
Low
Made to believe in a world that can’t be
Affordable joy, but it’s all an illusion
I know
It’s all an illusion
I know
It’s all an illusion
I know
It’s all an illusion
I know
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4. |
The Boredom of it All
04:06
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I want to sell everything I own
Have no possessions in this world anymore
To burn all that I have made
Every song, every word, every page
And walk in winter’s silver light
Be soul-naked, cleansed and free
Cos I know I’ve been so lost, my love
In self-obsession, soft depression
I want to feel okay
And to leave all the waste of my days in the past let them pass away
Let it go to dust, I am who I am
I want to live for now
Free myself from all these screens
Live a real life in the air
Embrace the boredom of it all
To just sit alone in myself
And want nothing more than this
To just breath and love and sing
Cos I know I’ve been so lost, my love
In self-obsession, soft depression
I want to feel okay
And to leave all the waste of my days in the past let them pass away
Let it go to dust, I am who I am
I want to live for now
I want to live for now
I want to live for now
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5. |
Essential Self
04:19
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I don’t think we really change
As much as we say
Beyond the little sum of everything we were
There’s a true and still essential self
Who we are alone
Naked in the dark and face-to-face with death
Like I am still that child inside
Who sang to no-one
My father’s still the man who drank into oblivion
There’s nothing we can say or do
To undo all we’ve done
All that we can do is forgive and be forgiven
And live like it’s our only life
Under this white sky
In a body made of stars with an absence at its heart
It’s a heavy weight
To be anything
To hold so much life inside you
And it contradicts
This consciousness
What’s malleable, what’s constant
What I write and sing
How I interact
And all the things I’ve done in my life
Oh, it’s hard to bridge
This internal distance
And the gulf between every person
We all hurt sometimes
Somewhere down the long aisle of our lives
Sorry for the pain
Any former form of me caused you
If you hurt me too
It’s all a distant part of my heart now
Don’t feel bad
Just remember that you’re good and I love you
Don’t feel sad
Just remember that you’re good and I love you
It’s all a stream, all an addition to nothing
Who I am, who I was don’t feel different
It’s all a dream, all a death that I’m dying
Why do I write, do I sing, do I do anything?
Every moment’s worth more than gold
Every moment’s worth more than gold
Every moment’s worth more than gold
Every moment’s worth more than gold
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6. |
Possession is a Pain
03:24
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In the sun outside today
On your birthday, happy birthday
And the gift is all the love we shared
Cos it altered who we are
Yeah, I’ll always have you in my bones
And that’s far beyond what I could own
Possession is a pain
Only your body’s yours and your mind is yours
But I barely even own myself
This world seems to want me to want all the time
But I don’t want anything but beauty and love
It makes me believe that I’m driven by greed
That I only give if I get something back
That there is no worth beyond the money we earn
And that every life isn’t sacred at birth
I thought I needed to know
Where you’d go
After our end, but I didn’t
Cos it’s your life to live, I’m sorry I’m weak
I know I should have let go
The jealousy makes me sick
When I think of it
That I could hold that in my heart
Now I want to be free of all that’s in me
And let it float away
To love beyond myself
Beyond everything
This dying body that divides us
To dissolve into some great divine
And to disappear
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7. |
In Moonlight
04:16
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In moonlight on the beach
Just you and me
And gentle waves
We were high, I felt so open
Told you that I cry so much
That I could
Turn to drops
And dissolve into the ocean
My head on your shoulder
And your soft hand
In my lap
I hope you still remember
Maybe I could love someone
Who looks more like me and I could touch him
Sleep beside him, kiss his eyelids
What’s the difference, it’s all love
And I think everyone deserves it
To feel safe in someone’s arms
Now we’re ten years older
And I don’t know you
Anymore
And I don’t know who I am
I haven’t been touched since we were young
In Florida
I know, it’s so pathetic
Hold me for a moment till it’s over
Then I’ll go
But I will take you with me
I think I really love someone
Who looks more like me I want to touch him
Sleep beside him, kiss his eyelids
What’s the difference, it’s all love
And I think everyone deserves it
To feel safe in someone’s arms
It’s all a wall I’ve built
Around myself so no one knows
Who I am, what I am
I’m so lost, I need you
Cos you’re the only one
Who can see beyond the falsity
Into my essential self
Just tell me it’s all right
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8. |
The Cell of Our Selves
03:25
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Inside me there’s a world you’ll never know
I know you contain one too
And when we die those worlds go dark
I take it with me everywhere I go
It’s all that I’ll ever know
I’m tired of my fucking self
So when I saw you there in winter light
I wanted to coalesce
To feel something outside of me
What makes you ache inside your secret heart?
What light, what sight, what sound?
What beauty flows through all your dreams?
We lead different lives inside
My grandfather was a woman to herself
She never got to live
Like she wanted to in the open air
There’s so much we’ll never share
Like the suicide in your lover’s eyes
Stuck in the cell of our selves
There’s no escape till death
All our longing is beyond language
And our thoughts are just air in the dark
I almost get out with art
I almost distil something
That I was alive, how I felt sometimes
What I saw with these dull blue-green eyes
All of the love that’s inside
That will die with me
All our dreams in a thousand dusks
They mean nothing to anyone but us
I am just one in the night
And I’ll be gone some day
It’s a fleeting dream, all illusory
And I’m scared just to know that it ends
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9. |
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Alice in the morning your kisses deep and warm
When you came into the spare bed I was sleeping in
Autumn in Guildford, a middle-class existence
Oh, we were so different, but I loved your gentleness
You were my first time and now it’s a lifetime
Since we touched as kids in a field in the summer dusk
Seminal sexual experience ruined by internet pornography
Oh, I was so numbed by that
So, I had to learn how to be with a woman
And I had to learn how to feel my own body
Six months of night trains of closeness and distance
Till I fell in love with a girl who still haunts me
I’ve always been a coward, I’ve always been selfish
I’m sorry I never said goodbye like I ought to
But I hope you’ve found someone; I hope you’ve found something
That you can live for somewhere in England now
We are changed by the ones who we love
Till we’re not the same
I wouldn’t be who I am without you
I am so grateful
You have a piece of my broken heart
And you always will
To love and be loved is to be open to pain
And I haven’t hurt in a long time
I haven’t hurt in a long time
I haven’t hurt in a long time
So, I don’t even know who I am
A lonely man who’s too lost to be found
Depressive Hedonia, please let me be free
An endless search for pleasure is not pleasure to me
Love is what gives our lives meaning and worth
So, what’s there to live for when love’s not returned?
In a city of strangers divorced from yourself
Longing for someone who longs this way as well
Someone to remind you that you’re not alone
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10. |
Edinburgh
03:35
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Edinburgh, you’ve got a beautiful sky
But I really want to go home
Cos days of empty Hedonia
Go wherever I go
I’m already one of the beauty-numbed masses
I have a tired routine
So Arthur’s Seat in early evening
Is just another background
It’s not a home, it’s just a city I pass through
And some moments I move through
As I look for my life
My life is passing me by
In ten years I’ll take a train and come back here
Looking for all that I lost
Nostalgia’s life without the pain
And you can’t go back to what is gone
Like Cardiff at night, you & I and all that
Time in our lives when we were drunk and young
And we shed, we shed tears that nobody else will ever know that we shed
Only the six of us know what it meant
House by the beach, Irish Sea
I left my innocence there in valley and field and salt-wind
My heart, my hearts lives there and in the hearts of everyone I loved there
I waste so much of my life in memory
I waste so much of my life in memory
Now I just want to move, I really want to move
But I can barely take a step
My mind is like a circle, days are cyclical
And I keep going round and round
Every new beginning ends in disappointment
Worn out before I even start
I wish that I could talk more, open up my heart
This shyness is a fucking curse
I guess there are some things that I’ll just have to live with
Things that I will never change
Like I will always love you, I will always miss you
Nothing I can do about that
And that there is a sadness running through my body
That will never go away
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11. |
Lost in the Infinite
03:42
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At 4am I open my eyes for the first time
Half-awake I am wasting my life
I know
I know that
But tomorrow I know I’ll live in the moment
Lost in the infinite all day by the window
My indecision decides what I do
I do nothing
Nothing
But one day I’ll do what I really want to
I take my opiate by eye through the screen light
Until I’m numb enough not to feel any pain
In time
Passing
And all those lives I could live are just someone else’s
I feel the negative ecstasy in my bed at night
But I’ll still live my life in bad faith forever
Drowning in numbness to kill my nausea
It’s so much easier to disappear
I feel my existential freedom in the morning light
But I get dizzy looking down when I have to decide
There’s just so many ways of being lost
Oh, it’s a long hard road to becoming a self
And I’ve spent most of my life like I was someone else
Too scared of being who I am
I guess I’ve lived in despair, I guess my spirit’s sick
But there’s just so many lives that I would like to live
That now I’ve barely lived at all
So I will look for a truth that is true to me
And stand all alone above the black abyss
And be honest with my emptiness
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12. |
Probably Impossible
04:10
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I want to swap this broken screen
For a pane of glass
Or the open air
Outside
All my life I have been dulled
By this false blue light
Where all I see is myself
Reflected back
You and I, we took a walk
In a strange new world
Above the city
I looked in your eyes
I’ve never felt this way before
But I don’t know, maybe you’re just a friend
Oh, anyway, I like your soul & who you are
It flickers inside you like fire
So bright
Impossible to know
We’re all alone, we’re alone, we’re alone
And we, we don’t want to be
Now it feels like autumn, heavy grey sky and light rain
Maybe I don’t love you, I’m just lonely for a while
I’m so full of longing I do not know what I want
For Bergen, oh, Bergen, I swear it felt like home
I wish that I could take you there and lay with you somewhere
To show you where I felt at peace, I felt content, at least
It’s probably impossible for me to be happy x 4
It’s probably impossible to ever be happy
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13. |
The Last Song
03:44
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(I'm gonna kill the self, kill the self
I become when I sing)
Now it’s summer and I’m alright
I have a joy for life, joy for life
I have not had for a while
A simple, baseless joy
Beyond Hedonia
So I’ll never write a song again
I’m gonna kill the self, kill the self
I become when I sing
Those cyclical refrains
Of sadness, longing love
That endless and oppressive ‘I’
Who’s never satisfied, satisfied
With the moment it’s in
It always wants something
And I want to want nothing
Farewell nostalgia, farewell endless adolescence
I will always be a child
Farewell to drunken dawns, to alcohol and cigarette
My body bears the scars
Farewell to lost love, farewell dying eyes
All those feelings that I just cannot forget
Farewell to Bergen, farewell Oslo, farewell Dublin
They still haunt me when I dream
Farewell to silence, suicide
I’ll never shake this heavy sadness from my heart
But maybe there’s no endings, no beginnings
It’s just constantly unfolding till death
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