music & lyrics / Hazuki
I will return to zero and be reborn.
The superb view from the thirteenth step, and the encouraging voices of onlookers.
The spirit is destroyed with the flesh, and the ruts simply changed form to the past.
There are only as many of the imagined and the 4D as there are minds,
negating the hackneyed concept of a “answer”.
For example, when you imagine “nothingness”, what do you picture?
An ocean of light, a silent darkness, an infinite weightlessness where not even time exists?
The drug-induced hallucination of an infrequent user, perhaps unable to be captured three-dimensionally even in music.
The cosmos filling the deep psyche, an unimpossible infinite expansion.
And then the future executes me.
Wickedness and wonder, devouring love and sex, black corpses praying with destruction
Kandata1 clutching the spider’s thread, the affection that can bloom from a beheaded head
The soul becomes the ocean, spilling from the moon and falling to the ground.
At last the rain brings blood and bone, guiding the way to new flesh to for me to receive.
The circle of transmigration, the spiral of life and death that simply repeats itself.
Whenever I’m swallowed into that vortex, along with a pleasure close to restless sexual excitement,
I can get closer to the dreams I had in my childhood, and to my ideal self.
And this song thusly created will again encroach on thousands of fates,
calling me to a fanatic world where there is neither good nor evil.
Lastly-
The one who lowered the guillotine’s blade was not I, but was in reality, all of you who pray for eternity.
The highest grade of narcissism, a memento mori2 offered to the weak.
According to Hazuki in UNDERNEATH_FILES VOL. 4, “the music is full of despair, but the lyrics are full of salvation.” He continues, “‘EXECUTION’ refers to resetting the past so I could move forward, temporarily executing my past self. […] The future kills the past.”
Additionally, this song seems to be the first expression of the well-visited theme of execution (see “GALLOWS“, “GUILLOTINE“). The imagery of the 13th step towards the gallows is also incorporated into the 13th anniversary trailer that announced Akinori’s comeback — arguably, his resetting of his past.
This song is unusually literary for Hazuki, so there’s a few things to note:
1: Kandata is the central figure in famous Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story, “The Spider’s Thread”.
To summarize: the Buddha in Paradise peers into a pond, where he can see the depths of Hell. He sees the criminal Kandata, who had done one good deed in life: choosing not to crush a spider underfoot. The Buddha decides to lower a spider’s thread into hell. Kandata begins to climb his way to Paradise. He realizes that the other sinners of Hell have begun to climb behind him. It is as he shouts that the spider’s thread belongs to him that the thread snaps and sends Kandata and the other sinners back to Hell.
2: A memento mori is an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death.