Behind The Tracks: Aeons - Blight (Single) (2021)

“Blight” is actually part one of the story that continues with “Thoughts of a Dying Astronaut” on the Consequences album. It sets the stage for our protagonist on the first stage of his final journey.

The narrator is an astronaut lost in space – alone in his suit by some tragic accident and left drifting in the endless cosmos with only the sound of his own thoughts for company. In “Blight” the initial gravity of his situation begin to resonate; he is not going to escape this – there will be no last minute salvation and no way home. He is lonely and alone, his blood pumping at his temples as panic and fear give way to more retrospective conversations.

He reminisces on what he is leaving behind – and who will mourn him and what the eulogy may dictate. One moment screaming into the silence of the void and another a tearful remembrance of once was. He pleads “Don’t want you to fear anymore” to those he loves in one desperate attempt to assuage their anguish.

But in the second part – “Thoughts of a Dying Astronaut” he begins to go through the other stages of desperation – anger, denial, a plea that he does not deserve his fate and finally a bleak acceptance of the inevitable, just as his oxygen finally runs out… It’s a metaphorical essay on our own fears of death. Did we do enough? For what will be remembered? Will I be scared? Will it hurt? What happens beyond? Rather than frame the discussion in a more familiar setting we wanted to invoke the claustrophobia of a spacesuit when juxtaposed against the endless wastelands of space and time.

The artwork seeks to capture those feelings – alone and unanswered in an unforgiving universe that servers only to remind us at every moment how insignificant – and yet how important we are – to everything around us. One grain of sand in an infinite darkness but also loved by those who surround us.

There are no answers here, only questions we might be well served by seeking to address within ourselves before the consequences of a life poorly lived come to reap what we have sown.