This is something of a horror story. This isn’t about a horror you read about, or a movie. It’s about dealing with, well, all this, dealing with things surrounded by horror. For a certain strain of mind, codified in the writings of pessimists like Schopenhauer and E. M. Cioran, that horror is the experience of being alive, of enduring each moment knowing that all those moments will eventually stop. Living to get to the end of living.
If life itself then is, as horror writer Thomas Ligotti has argued with blunt, slicing logic, a Conspiracy Against the Human Race, then how do we counter that conspiracy? What are the tools for fighting it and fighting for the future? What is the fundamental point of not just existing but directing our thoughts and lives toward the next moment, then the next after that, and so on until there are no more moments? The first and last tool is to make something out of nothing and leave something for others, now and in the future, to create.
That is what musician Siavash Amini and philosopher Eugene Thacker have been doing with their Songs for Sad Poets albums; the latest is Volume III and came out in August. Horror and cosmic conspiracy are the context for these albums, not just in the general sense but through specific academic and cultural connections. Thacker, who teaches at Parsons School of Design, has synthesized the media of cosmic horror with pessimist philosophy in his Horror of Philosophy series of books, his darkly lyrical collection of fragments and aphorisms, Infinite Resignation, and the calm yet brooding thinking-through of the experience of facing impending global catastrophes, Sad Planets (with Dominic Pettman). He is the intellectual counterpart of Ligotti and writers like Laird Barron, post-Lovecraft thinkers who have taken the long tail of Schopenhauer and turned it into something almost beautiful and beguiling, even as it horrifies.
Amini’s connection is more basic and organic. Pessimist philosophy isn’t something he found his way to through reading, but as part of his life. Speaking across a video connection from his home in Tehran—which was not under American bombardment during our conversation—he tells me, “There’s a type of pessimism that’s inherent to this land; they teach you in the cradle not to be optimistic.” But he also points out that “even Schopenhauer made music every day, and Eugene is writing books.” In other words, even pessimists can make something out of their existence and the materials of life’s experience, create things that weren’t yet there, and leave ideas and art as a legacy—Ligotti almost convinces himself that the only logical thing to do, when faced with the horror of existence, is to end one’s life. Yet he writes, still. And Thacker writes, and Amini makes music. They fight on.
Together, Amini and Thacker work through the latter’s words. The Songs for Sad Poets project has a quasi-paradoxical mystery at its core, which is that all the sounds one hears (and Amini’s electronic compositional style is structured on tonal principles with a predominant palette of sounds and textures that are more complex than regular pitched instrumental music) come out of Thacker’s poetry. Yet, with perhaps one exception, you never hear the poetry; you never hear words in the music and sounds. The last of the three tracks on Volume III (the first double LP covers two volumes), “Dead Eyes, Dark Stars (for Nikolaus Lenau),” uses synthetic voices to “sing” Thacker’s text, but these are so highly processed that it’s likely no one will discern a single articulated word within the larger textures, and the vocal sounds themselves are so integrated into all the rest of the electronics that they sound like a glint of sunlight at the top edge of a wavelet in a constantly shifting stream. Songs for Sad Poets is a Lieder ohne Worte for the twenty-first century.
This is a deeply embedded collaboration between two men who have never met in person, but understand the other and share purpose and means. “I emailed Siavash years ago,” Thacker wrote in an email exchange, “simply to say how much I admired his work. I had been listening to Subsiding, What Wind Whispered to the Trees, and TAR. By pure coincidence, he had been reading one of my books. Collaborating on a project seemed like a natural next step.”
“I was a big fan [of Thacker’s],” Amini himself says. He works with literature (things like Dostoevsky before Thacker) because it gives him a foundation of structure and form, and he points out that the writer suggested the “Sad Poets” project. The writing may come from Thacker, but he is thinking of the tradition of the “poètes maudits,” the “cursed poets” of nineteenth-century France like Baudelaire, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud, who dug into sensuality, transgression, and derangement. Amini’s sound and Thacker’s writing share a stance of a reserved affect and an assured, implacable purpose: the immediate feeling that something simple is being said followed by an aftereffect that can feel like a kick in the head, or the gut. The way Amini’s music builds and wanes, the steady-state quality it has of something that has always existed, and he’s merely opening a window onto it—the background radiation of cosmic horror?—has him often classified as a drone musician, but the formal construction and harmonic details show clear roots in the Western classical tradition.
Amini notes these for some of his albums, pointing to his admiration for Arvo Pärt and previous generations of composers. He shares a similar concept and aesthetic with Debussy’s imagistic composing, and Amini admits he “even stole some [Debussy] scores” from the music library as a student. The imagism in the music is the first step in Amini’s compositional process. “The brain is a mystery,” he acknowledges, and what comes out of his depends on the mental images that Thacker’s writing produces in his mind. “They’re not pictures,” he specifies, “they’re dynamic, they’re open spaces. You can call it psychoacoustics.” He then designs sounds that fit with those images, using Max software. “I turn up Gesualdo and set fire to the speakers,” is how he describes the colors and textures he searches for, and the constant in his electronic orchestration is a burnt, obsidian, distant quality, with textures ranging from spiky to granitic. He calls it “burnt sound.”
The sympathy between the two shows in their musical references. Asked if he thinks at all in terms of the sound poetry movement, Thacker answers that his “references are actually early music—the almost cosmic austerity of Ockeghem, the clouds of sound in Victoria, the weird tonalities of Gesualdo.” He also hits on another sound-key, “avant-garde pieces such as Ligeti’s Lux aeterna were in my mind too. I’ve always liked the idea of words stretched out so that semantics breaks apart into flecks of sound, resonance, overtones, timbre.” Amini looks at words and looks for images, Thacker listens for sounds, and together they make songs for sad poets.
Another paradox here is that words inevitably at least hint at an idea or a narrative. Thacker denies any specific argument. “These projects aren’t really ‘about’ pessimism or any other philosophical position (tenable or not),” he wrote to me. “For me, any philosophy worthy of the name should ultimately aim to efface itself completely. Sometimes the act of doing that produces a kind of poetry.” The paradox isn’t there, then; it’s not between saying what’s the point and then doing something to make a point. Thacker isn’t arguing with himself. In his pamphlet Cosmic Pessimism, he writes, “. . . pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy . . . Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility . . . Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it.”
This is mood, stance, outlook, the Sad Planets discussion for just how to face the contemporary world. But still, listen to these albums, hear the rise and fall of the music and the constant transformations in the threads of sound Amini weaves together, and there is an organic sense of narrative, or even just drama. Things start at a certain point and change as they reach another point. Even if this were as minor as time changing us each second, there is a before and after and a difference between the two. Talking about this brings out what can be seen as Amini’s throwback roots. Like Thacker, he brings up Ligeti, but also the stupendous Romantic-era Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, who made a story out of almost every bit of music he worked on or played. Amini loves Liszt’s tone poems, their colors and freedom and emotional narratives. And he loves (Hungarian) Ligeti’s sound, the “clocks and clouds” era of ephemeral, haunting clumps of sound floating by on regular pulses, flowing from one configuration to another, packed with tiny, effervescent details. He says his ideal goal is a “collision of Liszt and Ligeti.” Amini “wants to tell you a story” with these songs and their hidden words.
The aesthetic and philosophical stance of the Songs for Sad Poets project is far, far outside mainstream consensus about what to listen to and how to think. On paper, this is closer to metal (Amini plays the music, but as he told 15questions he was kicked out of his band), but not the mainstream kind—this is doom metal in concept and values. But it’s more. Amini, like a lot of drone/ambient musicians, works in a way that feels free from traditions, but what that really means is that traditions are still being formed and still root in a series of identifiable references and antecedents. Talking about Gesualdo and Liszt and Ligeti absolutely establishes traditions, though, of word- and sound-painting, of shaping music with a concrete expressive purpose in mind, even as specific, word-textual meaning is elusive. A Gesualdo responsoria or motet stretches Latin and Italian words, coming out of the mouth, into textures; a Liszt tone poem represents time and place to stimulate mood; a Ligeti choral or orchestral work uses instruments (including voices) to create sounds that are more sensations than pitches. And really, all these come together in the grandness of Debussy’s La mer or Nocturnes, with music that isn’t the sound of sun or night or water or wind, but that triggers our internal memories of the sensations of those. This is a human tradition.
So is Thacker’s hidden poetry. The Beats didn’t pioneer the subjects of drugs, sex, madness, alienation, and the like for poetry; they were reviving a tradition that was seminal in the nineteenth century and even then wasn’t new. Poets have been thinking and writing about these since poetry began. It’s also a human tradition. So the roots here are deep, and that’s where the sympathies between Amini and Thacker also begin. These two men make this work without ever once having met in person, collaborating via correspondence. The means may be digital, but this is something else that is as ancient as communication, getting word across tribal boundaries, even in the middle of conflict between people who share values. It is 2026, and as Amini says, “everyone’s exhausted, they’re going through so much, with your mind.” The new release was finished in 2023 but fits with the contemporary mood because everyone without means is in a fight to preserve something, keep something going, make something for those who follow. The mood may be black, pessimistic; it may feel like they and we can’t go on. But we go on.
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