Q: The idea for the excellent cover of your album is yours and it gives a background for lots of interpretations and meditation. Would you reveal your point of view?

I could try, but I really don’t know where to start, as there’s a lot to unpack. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say. I think what it effectively communicates, is loneliness and how everyone is living on their own distant desert planets, the desire by reference to the fruit from the tree amidst the garden, emotional fall, causality, Karma, or cosmic reciprocity – which outside the birth lottery, aren’t other than our own character and what we reflect and attract, as referenced by the title and the cogwheels attached to the floating island and more. The whole album, which was written during some dark, difficult times – ergo focus was on what is not working well, is like a verismo to our social reality, firstly to demonstrate those awful traits of ourselves and others with the view to have those defined and subsequently exorcised.

Lack of communication and empathy, emotional intelligence,  relationships, neurodiversity, spectrum disorders, narcissism, and the human condition, in general, are matters my lyrics often deal with, and those concepts had to somehow be visually represented. To go back to the cover’s features, whenever I am attempting to make a reading for people they explain that they are receiving the feeling the cover was intended to invoke, without necessarily being able to read into the separate notions I described earlier. It is like there are symbols we subconsciously universally understand, on what Carl Jung would call the collective subconscious. Exactly like the animal traits in Aesop’s fables which are also the same in the Persian version of those, if we were to discount the idea being communicated through contact.

We could agree under specific contexts that peacocks are symbols for loud, showoffs foxes are smart or sly; serpents symbolize impulses and instincts and we can’t quite emotionally identify with them as we would be able to do with say a mammal. Human beings are so sensitive to visual stimuli and are hardwired to identify patterns, likely because of hunting and mating. That’s why marketers are selling us ice creams using women who appear, due to their poses and the magic of post-production, to be in prime time during their cycle. The more uneducated we are, the more arrogant we tend to be and therefore easier manipulated. Yet visuals are a powerful tool for when you have something beautiful to propose, with no ulterior motives.

Interviewer: Nedko Ignatov
Publication: Metal Hangar 18
Period: January 2013