The muse was able to speak to me only after I lay dying, only after the gods had taken the flesh off my bones and broken my heart open, only after I was contained in exile in my little shack on the far outskirts of town. For it was only after I’d wept and raged all the battle and curses out of my being, when I’d given up my will to live and welcomed death as a great relief, when I was quiet enough, empty enough . . . it was then that I was able to see the Invisibles that gathered by my side, it was then that I heard the voices, keening and singing and imploring, that had haunted me all along.

Photo: Peter Paradise

From the roots of an inheritance anguished and old, my lungs pushed out a voice and my bony hands played a tune. The music moved through me. In the otherwise merciless silence of that Plutonian winter, my teachers came to me. The bitter wind had taught me to sing. The long dark hours gave me second sight and made me more acute of hearing. The solitude of exile taught me that to be oneself, with only the gods and spirits as witness, requires a large and heavy coin, but it is a price well paid. For after this sacrificial death there was a resurrection; music was the early spring green of the earth upon which I stood and the alchemical gold in my blackened hand . . . such wealth now mine . . .

Still, I will never be the same again. It has been said that one does not look into the abyss without the abyss also looking into you. I am again born yet of the same body, and in this new existence the boundaries I once assumed between the living and the dead have been dissolved; the wall between the worlds is thin indeed.

Dark goddesses, outraged children, cast-out daughters, disinherited scapegoats, murdered ancestors, unrelenting furies demand my acknowledgement and advocacy. Ghosts of the betrayed, the forsaken, and the left for dead reveal themselves to me, gathering around my piano, attracted as they are to the vitality of an embodied voice and to the empathy that could only be shown by one of their own . . . the uneasy ghost of my past my own worst enemy, with a split self born of violence and shadow, my tricky and mad doppelganger walks with me always, and I wrestle with her beside myself, to this soundtrack of my own creation…

You Murder Me.

The Furies' Prayer is currently out of print.

Track 1: You Murder Me (mp3 5.2mb)

By popular demand, we will be printing more of The Furies’ Prayer soon. Stay tuned! If you think you’d like to sponsor the next printing (and therefore expedite the process!), contact us.

More tracks can be heard here.

Aepril Schaile and the Judgement is also featured on the Boston dark music compilation Sky So Grey

Boston Dark Music Compilation: Sky So Grey

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