writing music: “Icarus Walks” by Epik High

Daedalus made a pair of wax wings for his son, Icarus. After that we remember what happens: Icarus uses his wings to escape captivity and then realizes that he’s curious for the world; over the ocean he flies too close to the sun. When he turns around to see that his wings are melting and realizes what’s happening, he begins to fall; he drowns in the ocean below. 

Pieces, part one is an album that I have really come to love recently. At the end of the school year when I was starting to really wonder about what to do and who I am, I could really only see my love for writing as the thing that grounded me to the world and that would allow me to relate to and interact with others. My world kept getting darker. I feel like I’m still sitting in blackness. Pieces, part one also includes “연필깎이” and “낙화” which are about living through the blindness (연필깎이) and maintaining your dreams despite them being impossible (낙화). The album rewards belief and hard work, but also curiosity and positive attitude. It doesn’t do it in a way I’ve seen before—not a YA anything is possible if you believe kind of message. It’s about being in a time when you feel far away from yourself and imagining what you must look like, wherever you are, and continuing to walk even in the darkness, when there’s no way to tell where your foot will fall.

“Icarus Walks” retells the myth we all know. The greeks were obsessed with hubris, the ways it could kill a person. If you angered the gods you were dead. But Pieces, part one is a different framework. We’re not in ancient Greece anymore; this is a world of cities and shadows and facade and noise that muffles the heart’s own language, where the choice between what mask to wear can consume the face that would support it (re: “nocturne” and many others from Remapping the Human Soul, the last album prior to p.p1). In this kind of landscape, the gods may have forgotten us, or found a better world. It’s now humans with the capacity to inspire and help each other through ugliness and periods of fugue. In Pieces, part one, when Icarus falls to the water, something else happens at the surface, and when we realize it, something else can happen inside us, too.