DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM by RADIO BIRDMAN. Story and video by Troy Walsh.

Wyangala, New Year’s Day, 2021.

Stood at the top of my fifteen-sloping acres of falling-into-failure farm on Wiradjuri Country in Central West NSW. I am high in a short side-valley that leads down towards the path of Kalari and the first blooms of pink, peach light creating the day over Wyangala Dam. It is January 1.

I have just stumbled from inside a pop-top caravan, from dark, brooding thoughts, from Radio Birdman playing, “Alive, alive, alive..” A new year. Swimming out. Waving, not drowning. Not a year swirling around, being dragged, in a vortex, taking me from defiance to near despair. Punk music soundtrack.

Climate catastrophe and covid added to the screaming in my brain. The wailing I couldn’t hold my children when I wanted too anymore. An empty swing set moves in the breeze behind me.

The whirlpool of the events of the last twelve months hasn’t swallowed me up yet but as I stand and watch the sunrise, I feel I will never be the same again, the damage has been done, and from now on life is leaving me.

Descent Into The Maelstrom is the first-ever song I made a YouTube video for; using some wobbly footage from that morning. I wanted my own version to watch again and again, getting blasted by myself, on that lonely hillside.

It was a time of riding on a barrel of a song and being saved by a fisherman called Friedrich Nietzsche and his novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (my YT channel named after the book).

I was inspired to mark my days creating something out of the mess I had become.

I wonder if it was also some sort of metaphorical fall from the cliffs of a monster wave, A Descent Into The Maelström with a tainted catharsis, that the vision, the words, the story by Edgar Allan Poe arose from. Are Denis Tek’s lyrics riding on that same ocean, those same thoughts?

Stereo Story #765