The Blog Post Occludes The Liner Notes Of "The Map Occludes The Territory" By Nicola Boari
I was on the Internet Archive, looking for the archives of Mother Earth Bulletin by Emma Goldman, an early American anarchist. I found an incomplete archive from 2004, which was a little disappointing, but IA searches will sometimes uncover delightful, obscure curiosities, completely unrelated to your search. Thus, my discovery of this album:
It's called The Map Occludes The Territory (Can't you tell? It's written right on the album cover!), and it's by an Italian producer named Nicola Boari. It's an ambient/drone/noise/sound collage album, consisting of a single fifty-seven-and-a-half-hour-long track. Unfortunately, I am of the philistine majority who does not have enough of a taste for ambient music to write about it in terms more intelligent than, "oh, this part is interesting," or, "ooh, that part sounded like a scary robot," so I'll spare you my review of the music(?) itself.
The liner notes include an essay that I deeply resonated with. You can read the whole thing by clicking on the album art up there. Archive.org seems to be one of the only places the album still exists, along with something called Free Music Archive. Here are a few quotes that stood out, to me:
I’m updating this attempt to an explanation almost six months after its first draft. It already feels foreign to me, the roads I thought I had traveled, the trajectories I had so thoughtfully traced no longer lead to any known destinations. The map and the territory are now illegible, they speak the language of a cancelled childhood. Reading or listening to it doesn’t make me feel anything, if not a bit of pity, gripped as I seem to be in a vice of pathetic biological, social and existential terror, and that usual aura of fake self-pity that is specific to me. I feel a certain vertigo for the almost total lack of correspondence between the me of then, and the me of now. The me of then is verisimilar, and yet other.
Sleepless at night I try to fall asleep watching documentaries on the universe, on the origin of things, the fate of all things, and I grasp none of it. The vastity of what’s both above and inside of us, the unfathomable heat or cold, the still desolation of silence, the depths of eternity, weight and mass, matter, none of this makes any sense to me, it sickens me, and both my ignorance and my incapability of understanding any of this draw me to despair, to fear.
I dread that moment, when I will be taken away from myself. Death is also now more present than we’d like it to be, with the tragic daily bulletin of the people who are no more, the imminent danger of infection, the sheer existence of the multitude is what makes even more dangerous. I fear death with my whole being, I’ve feared it since I’ve been, the thought of a before and after, the absence of an after, creation and destruction, the horror of not being, and most of all of not being enough in this here and now, of not having mattered.