Commission - Atayaska (Patreon)

Hello everyone. Today I am happy to share with you a commission requested by the artist Lore. When she approached me with this concept I was very pleased with the potential for a piece of music that would be easy for me to enjoy creating, and for the way that it would integrate into the kind of storytelling that Lore engages in.

Atayaska is a song about Lore's character Sinuk, and specifically about a chapter in her life where she experiences a radical transformation resulting from a traumatic event that she is still attempting to process. Sinuk falls into a black hole and is separated from the woman that she loves (Brun is her name) in such a violent and unusual way that after she escapes from the ordeal (years later, due to time dilation) her identity shifts as a result of the physical and emotional damage, and she transforms herself into an entity known as Atayaska.

Lore was kind enough to share with me as much information as I could reasonably squeeze out of her about this particular section of the story. Of Atayaska, she wrote:

Atayaska… She’s like an alter ego that Sinuk creates, to hide her true identity while she does her grim work. She either takes the name from an eponymous monster of myth, or starts the myth herself.

The rest of the world sees the Atayaska as an enigmatic human entity that harnesses strange magic to slip through space, time, even memory, so that she can obfuscate her crimes. Some people do genuinely believe that she is some kind of wrathful spirit-monster, because she is so hard to “know” directly. There’s a lot of inferring things about her by the absences she leaves behind. She becomes a bit more tangible when Brun noodles out who she is, and Sinuk/the Atayaska starts brooding in her peripheries.

Many things attracted me to this - a mysterious being, memory manipulation, lovers torn apart, uncertainty about motivations or loyalties - and I knew that this was what the song would be about. And so it is!

Lore was also kind enough to give me complete discretion over how the song evolved. I had assumed she wanted lyrics from the start so I built the original music with that in mind, and the lyrics, when I began writing them, flowed very sensibly forth into this configuration:

From far away to back again
A time was lost in feeding a hunger
It's dragging her under

Become a new thing, once again
Atayaska, hiding in slumber
It's only a wonder...

She watches under a dead moon
Behind a curtain of sleeping stone
Her only goal is to find you
And in her heart, there's a secret - oh!
She's come home!
But no one can know
It's only a ghost!

She traveled up into starlight
To fall beneath an entropic wave
Her only wish was to know you
But time cannot allow her escape
She's gone away!
Who's calling her name?
No one can remember!

I am especially pleased with this track and all of its qualities. Thank you so much Lore for giving me the opportunity to create and share this, and I hope that everyone will enjoy it with us.