On the cliffs of Uluwatu, when the ocean devours the sun, the seven masks awaken.
Eyes swell red, jaws stretch wide, and teeth gleam like knives.
The stone trembles under their laughter,
and the night opens with a mouth full of drums.

Before gods, before men,
storms carved the first dance:
thunder cracking skulls of clouds,
waves tearing cliffs like flesh from bone,
winds shrieking as if torn from hollow throats.
The masks are fragments of this first hunger,
faces of a rhythm that devours silence.

When dancers put them on, the masks feed.
Flesh becomes rhythm,
breath becomes fire,
and the world shakes with a frenzy of jaws.

The Ritual of Polyrhythm is not a song — it is a feast.
Teeth bite into stone, flames lick the wind,
and every step drives deeper into the marrow of the night.
The cliffs themselves bleed sound until the horizon splits open.


The Seven Masks and Their Dances

1. Mask of Stone Breath

The earth exhales through basalt teeth.
Its rhythm grinds slow and merciless, a jaw of rock crushing time.

2. Mask of Ember Laughter

Flames split into a grin of sparks.
Its rhythm leaps jagged and sharp, fire biting the night in radiant joy.

3. Mask of Ocean Eyes

The tide opens as a mouth that swallows endlessly.
Its rhythm drags all steps into the black water, drowning them in memory.

4. Mask of Hollow Flame

Ash swirls in its throat, a furnace without warmth.
Its rhythm is a hollow blaze, breath echoing in chambers of fire
where sound stretches like teeth across the void.

5. Mask of Thunder Echo

The skull of the sky splits wide.
Its rhythm is a roar of jaws above the earth,
a storm chewing silence into splinters.

6. Mask of Shifting Steps

The ground cracks beneath its feet.
Its rhythm twists and breaks, pulling dancers into chasms that never end.

7. Mask of Air and Dream

The final mouth opens into dawn.
Its rhythm devours form into shadow, shadow into smoke,
until only breath drifts across the horizon, carrying the hunger of night into day.


Closing

At sunrise the masks return to stone,
but their teeth remain restless.
They gnash in thunder, grind in the tide,
and bite within the dreams of all who have seen them.

Mask of Hollow Flame

I am Artur Tokhtash, a composer and sound artist.
My music unfolds at the intersection of classical tradition and sonic art: preludes, improvisations, and electroacoustic structures are not genres, but forms of memory and breath.

For me, sound is ritual. Each piece is not merely a composition but a trace of presence, an echo of vanished spaces, a light from places that may no longer exist.
The piano, in my preludes, becomes a vessel — an instrument that carries not only melody but also the silence between notes.

My works do not function as background. They are spaces for listening, inviting the listener into a state where music becomes both signal and transformation.