The Broken Candle is an ambient project from musician Eric McLean. Ambient music can be a solipsistic genre in many ways, emphasizing the personal benefits of its tonal schemas in terms of healing and contemplation for the individual- enclosing the listener in a sound vacuum where only they and their mind exist. Eric's Post Mortal is an examination of the world that doesn't fall prey to this selfish game, using a silty combination of tones to indulge the passage of time, embrace one's place in it, and pierce the veil of separation between individuals and their individuated fates. It's a worthwhile endeavor to use environmental music to lay claim to the context of one's personage, as a fact that is not divorceable from the social and physical reality they inhabit. Just as it is impossible for a person to emerge without lineage, it's nearly impossible to envision the world without yourself in it. As inconsequential as your life can appear at times, everything around you is, in fact, shaped by your presence. From your relationship with friends and your dependence on family, to the tasks you set yourself to each day, the way you've made your living space your home, down to the air your body breaths and displaces as you sit reading this- none of it could be the same without you. Still, one day you won't be there. Or at least, your consciousness won't. That world will exist, but it will not exist without you having left your mark on it in some manner. I'm not suggesting that immortality awaits us because of something that we've written, or a piece of art we have labored over, or because somewhere, there is a footprint of ours that will fossilize and become a ponderous artifact for future anthropologists, I am speaking to the realities of this moment and how they carry into the next. How the things you say, the people you meet, the joy you share, reverberate out from you and how they will profoundly impact the world in ways you can't imagine. I don't believe in the butterfly effect, but I do believe that the world is an interconnected place and that no one lives in total seclusion. And further, I believe this is a good thing. It is impossible to completely isolate one's self in the same manner that it is entirely impossible to take oneself out of existence once they have exploded into it. Post Mortal is the integration of one's own mortality, but also the observance of its finitude, and how it was spent gladsomly with and for others.
