Lyrics:

How hard, and for how long, can one scream
Into the silent stillness of a dream?
The heart is strained, 
Losing its voice from infinite exclaim

A soft caress from a consoling breeze
May bring contorted ones down to their knees
The hands are sore,
Lying before some empty frontier door

This wall I've pushed against is solid brick, 
And not knowing how thick still makes me sick
The boulder falls
From my shoulders, exhaustion has me crawl

The infantry retreats to the long journey home, alone
Their emotions burned bright
But now are numbed, muted, and out of sight

Are my wild animals now free, 
Or in their cage, by carousel decree?
If part of them is still awake
Will they know what's at stake?

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Anecdote:

The protagonist has finally reached the breaking point in their own story, but instead of it resulting in an explosive send-off, their exhaustion has plagued them with a resounding emotional numbness. The burning emotions that once fueled their catharsis and motivation are now muted, leaving them in some sort of apathetic, sluggish purgatory. They don't know how to interpret this new state of mind, whether it's a forfeited compliance with the absurdity, or a new, misunderstood beginning that stems from an elevated state of consciousness. All they can perceive is the ambiguous frontier ahead, which gives them no indication of hope. Because this dramatic shift has occurred, the protagonist fears that their deep confusion has placed them in a fragile state of vulnerability once again, but where the knowledge that they've harvested up to this point may be useless against an even greater unknown.

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Scott Mitchell Gorski - Upright Bass, Voice
Lindsey Paige Miller - Cello

Songs, Lyrics, and Concept By Scott Mitchell Gorski
Cello Parts written by Lindsey Paige Miller

Recorded and Mixed by Greg Norman at Electrical Audio in Chicago, IL
Mastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service in Chicago, IL
Produced by Okapi

Carousel (Part II)

Wild Animals

Lyrics:

Are you “The Child”, or just an oaf of this mercy mild?
Set out to sea! Art thou now free? We'll see!

Was there betrayal of a soul once lone and feral?
Will "Nothing" congeal? Is evil real? Feel!

Can you see beyond the trees? 
Did you climb the highest peak?
		
Have you found comfort in the mirror that you chose to hold?
Do you see you, or those who froze? Who knows?

Warming your bones with thoughts of eagerness that once rose
But, now you wait. Where is the bait? Too late?

Shivering in this year's first rain, 
Molting your cares away

Reach for the clouds in desperation – you gave your vows!  
Turn on “delight”! No room for “fright”! Alright!

Harness the laws the child kingdom once had you gnaw on
They once seemed trite, but now are quite finite
	
Eternal youth comes in a mead of blood and honey

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Anecdote:

Having submitted to the current of society, a man has been stripped of any tendency to approach life “as a child”. A higher power intervenes to constantly interrogate him and criticize his path of taking comfort in security and perpetual nostalgia, which minimizes his ability to feel, “The Now”. It explains to him, that by remaining in a safe state of ignorance and unawareness of himself and his surroundings, he is voiding his chances of absorbing the true emotions that make one feel alive – like experiencing beauty, evil, pain, pleasure, and all of the ambiguous grey areas in between. If one is to truly be free, they'll venture out alone on a risky journey to embrace wonder and the unknown. They must continue to live as a child, and they'll soon realize that there's still so much more to gain, and that the pain along the way is well worth the sweetness of authenticity.

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Scott Mitchell Gorski - Upright Bass, Voice
Lindsey Paige Miller - Cello

Songs, Lyrics, and Concept By Scott Mitchell Gorski
Cello Parts written by Lindsey Paige Miller

Recorded and Mixed by Greg Norman at Electrical Audio in Chicago, IL
Mastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service in Chicago, IL
Produced by Okapi

Child Kingdom

Lyrics:

A vast frontier coaxes the will of one
Within the embrace of absurdity
But when purgatory emerges in loops and chains
The victim basks in surreal lamentation

Then from the fog, appears tribes of garnished masks
Breed for their dimness and utility
Armed with their chic clubs, sharing mirrored interplay
Convinced they make inherent idleness graceful

Though weak, their numbers are high
They advance in parallel, hitching to a tailcoat path
Solo in thick company, blocking the deviant

Drifting in tandem, forming whirlpools at random
Speaking for all, they take our name
Aimlessly trapping the ripe in their net of hype
Soiling reputations within their mediocre frame

Ears are boxed if fresh sounds escape
Eyes are blinded and the vision stolen if a new way is seen
Tongues are cut from the mouth holding bad taste
	
If bright minds rise above the cold, dense darkness 
Stories will shed on the present
Abandon course, and there'll be no trace to follow
Placing the reigns of fate in callous, red hands

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Anecdote:

Despite his acceptance of absurdity, a quirky individual still feels as though the world contains infinite possibilities. His perspective changes only when redundancy, predictability, and formulaic processes begin reigning over the community, encapsulating anyone who falls within its societal perimeter. The mass surrounding him is fueled by ever-evolving aesthetics and other superficialities that block him from his intended path. Because he unwillingly lies within their boundaries, they categorize and speak for him, but will never include him, because the individual mentality threatens the credibility of their collective power. When he tries to deviate, the perimeter shifts with him. Anything he creates is filtered, diluted, or stolen by the group, but the ideas are never allowed to transcend their barrier. He realizes that if one has the strength, courage, and wit to rise above this wall, an unfiltered bit of honesty may leak into the public consciousness. But if one does not fight, they'll be lost in the mass, inevitably feeding the monster they once tried to elude.

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Scott Mitchell Gorski - Upright Bass, Voice
Lindsey Paige Miller - Cello

Songs, Lyrics, and Concept By Scott Mitchell Gorski
Cello Parts written by Lindsey Paige Miller

Recorded and Mixed by Greg Norman at Electrical Audio in Chicago, IL
Mastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service in Chicago, IL
Produced by Okapi

Bright Within the Darkness

Lyrics:

He fulfills the beast he was born to be
Under guides who gauge his brawn
And apprehend the weak beneath,
Finding no faith of his own

Though we all pull from the same flame
She carries the torch, as she was taught
Without igniting her own

Amongst ornamentations of our carousel
We all look out to see
Kaleidoscopic views beneath
The blurred but indiscreet
Revealin' a motion suite

Often left unnoticed, we step off its course
Into the stillness of a fugue-state
While stumbling in its tow 

A stupor of clarity disarms 
The warm numbers of marching piles
For no longer do they dilute the stale taste
Held in the open mouth of a stumped face

Your own cement shoes bind you to the love and justice, true
The carousel still turns
But porous minds will be tapped into
Then wrought dry for their aesthetic stew

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Anecdote:

The offspring of tradition are guided and judged within the confines of the elaborately decorated carousel, where heavy amounts of stimuli have distracted them throughout many rotations of lapsing time. The cyclical redundancy and its formulas have stunted the healthy growth of their own identities, and so they become curious about the blurred kaleidoscope outside the carousel's boundaries. Enticed by the blurry, unknown territory, they take a risk by stepping off their familiar path, but immediately find the new world to be intensely disorienting. Without an identity, they are initially confused when confronted with reality's challenges, but as they adapt, they begin to understand the individual power they all possess. They disconnect themselves from the routine of the carousel and its lingering concepts of false romanticism, and begin grounding themselves in this new world of clarity. As they progress, contemplate, and evolve, the masters of the carousel attempt to prey on what's left of their insecurities and naiveties, in order to increase the potency of their formula which prevents others from stepping off the carousel.

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Scott Mitchell Gorski - Upright Bass, Voice
Lindsey Paige Miller - Cello

Songs, Lyrics, and Concept By Scott Mitchell Gorski
Cello Parts written by Lindsey Paige Miller

Recorded and Mixed by Greg Norman at Electrical Audio in Chicago, IL 
Mastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service in Chicago, IL
Produced by Okapi

Carousel

Hooves drummed upon high hills
The sowing and harvests began
Damp doors shoved us out into swill 
While swords slept sound in our hands

The icy rain fell monotone, 
Then hard came down the hail
We never reached the peaceful port
When into ourselves, we sailed

Luminous flowers erupted in bloom        
With the nature of souring wounds
And in the depths of their cold, rose-flesh 
We were destined to be consumed

En masse we moved like mastodons
Slow footprints in fresh, fallen snow
Driving hard into each bleeding dusk
What we sought had already flown

Our failing future was fragrant
Which was why some chose to flee
Had they not joined the trail-blaze
They'd be gravel beneath our feet

The ruling jaws locked tightly on
The most aggressive and resistant,  
While those wandering curiously
Were given potions at a distance

Bargaining for the comatose muse
With their compliant and static souls
A submissiveness fit for breeding use
Gagging hard under idle control

Success only sat down at the foot 
Of the bed of the rich, jeweled dead
While those with the millstone collars
Chewed on their last, remaining dregs

We are what we eat – the new livestock
Enduring our exhausting lives
Cradled by cages, caught in a deadlock
Chaos guiding our severed minds into despair

More crop, more domestication, less symbiosis
More destruction, less space, more anchored, less exploration
Diet less diverse
	
More disease, more death, more births, more work, more resources
More property, more possessions, more greed, more enemies
Less harmony

More concern, more laws, more rulers, more walls
More maintenance, more slaves, more myths, more fear, 
More allegiance // less time, less aware

More dependency, more trapped, more isolated, less free, more pain

Endless Migration

I know that I have long been doomed
To the realm of eternal terror, 
But the ironic laughs resume
When I find I'm already there

Hell, for me, is all that we've built 
With our sick, imaginative quilts
Where escape is our one desire,
Married with excuses to retire

Our decisions help us deteriorate
But with a closer look, our minds dilate
While a solid offering will banish
What long ago should have vanished

We looked out our blurry windows
Where there once were the gaping holes
But now we've drawn heavy curtains
So we can scroll through deep loopholes

I'm strung up through taut steel strings
Of the sharp Hieronymus hell harp,
Ceaselessly, she saws and she sings
To the screams of all my ripping scars
		
The language of prayer I'd refused to speak
For I'd rather hang tight than be
Flushed out the swollen derriere
Of our devil on his night chair

Wisdom ruptures the refuge dome
While my pleas hoist up the mainsail 
To safely return to rooted homes
Before our fragile lifeboat fails

But we'd be not mortified, should we capsize
For they've siphoned our pride 
And replaced merry attitudes
With a myriad of plain platitudes

Is the imminent any more tragic
Than a birth into this world of woes
If we're ruffled by natural magic?
When the new enters, the old goes...

Hieronymus Harp

Birthed wriggling 'round roots
Up from the mossy beneath
Not a fiend, nor friend
Pass their rusting, wild sheaths

We bow before the keepers 
Who hold outstretched hands
Soaring o'er the shrine of spores
“Survival” is our command

Nunquam obliviscar
Ne puero gladium
Homo homini lupus
Non timebo mala

Simple plans are sold
And thus begins her funeral dirge
Upon a stable stance of mold
The new evil's emerged

While distant, echoing mirths
Engrave a fashioned path
The flick'ring torch of Earth
Lifts its weight of thundering wrath 

Nunquam obliviscar
Ne puero gladium
Homo homini lupus
Non timebo mala

What we fetch up from the well
Shows not our reflection
For surrogate dirt licks its kin
Spilling pride infection

To claim thine dusted soil
Is to poison Mother's milk
It's her, we can't outwit
'less we return to moving silt

Nunquam obliviscar
Ne puero gladium
Homo homini lupus
Non timebo mala

Return to Moving Silt

Some fear the nothing, eternal 	
While some find it a sweet relief
Some fear our abundance of freedom
Armed to their cut teeth

Everywhere that I go, 
There is nobody nowhere and though 
Our landscape's a pale unknown
They are incontinent plateaus

Some believe that the unmoved mover
With his horseman of minty green  provide	 
A meaning outside what we may prefer
Pray tell, oh, flawed creator of our lives

Choices may be illusions
But right now, control is what I feel
I don't give a damn if they're predetermined
I won't be forced to kneel

Restrictions will wind us up
Yet we renounce responsibility
Allowing fabled, bad, blind faith
To forge cacophonies

People are more easily fooled than convinced
That they've been fooled, it's been said
Their teeth sink in each time we flinch,
And when we struggle, their grip tightens to further embed

His cart has an axle that creaks
Though it drips with dead human grease
Our sorrow now guzzled with glee
Stabs a soft self-effigy

Emerging from the evil wilderness
Outside Meinong's Jungle gate
I glimpse the idolatress
Who states that we're not safe

Mounted upon seven beastly heads
She raises the chalice of martyr blood
And in her scarlet forehead carved
The harlot mother of earthly abominations

The Unmoved Mover

The line is fine between 
The charlatan and the fool
Our children, they laugh and they sob
When their elders steal or get robbed

Quartered at the crossroads
By interactions which tether
The naive to the depleted
We're cheated 'till we're defeated

The vacant cherubs may 
Put on some pointless play 
From their hive, ready to contrive 
Yet another game

While the all-knowingly insane 
Fall into the high-rising flames
Of all that infiltrates
Their ill and waning brains

To some, they all may appear just the same
Caught coughing in a hall of mirrors
For in this locked furnace, we remain
	
Attempts to not be swallowed
By our ever-changing times
Fight the tides to grasp positions
Which tempt with prideful crime

In the end, will reduction,
In us, be implanted?

Or with our heroes spent, 
Will combustion,
To us all, be granted
As we fall?

Elders

With our scattered rights and freedoms flung
These dependencies had not been wrung
But the twine of myths then held us dear
Wrapped us up, drunk and fraught with fear

We formed cozy covens of the wood
For a lack of evil does not one good
Where the twine of myths kept us all close
Deep in our hovels, where the fires rose

Fictions climb high up angel limbs
While their vines unwind in spiritual hymns
As for those unbound by the tail of tales
The twine finds the throats of the ones who assail

Indelibly woven through sinews and fungi
We're spent 'till we're bent, facing only the sky
With groves set ablaze, dark trumpets moan
Unleashing sweeping floods from our impotent thrones

Some perch on the wall, eating dung, drinking piss
Left with wanton hunger – curiosity, amiss
Our breath fans the flame, to lift and inflate our lore
Scalding fellow men who seem too pure to ignore

All our nations
Will die over generations 
But as they pass
More myths will rise up 
Like dew from the grass

The Twine of Myths

The first dawn had crowed, then sighed
All that was once near, soon became distant
The dank plumage gave loitering eyes
Revealings of strain, set to a resistant refrain 

A horned crown sprouts from thy head
When salvation becomes salivation
Dead and gone means another is fed
To what shall we give our brute dedication?

Time slithers down the closing funnel
And with it waning concentration
Sacrificing the light through some tunnel
For demon sages of anticipation

The skills of which had been ingrained
Shall now, only accumulate pain
Through practice, traction is not gained
For our efforts are punctured and drained

With the boat, one is no longer moved
Though they're tempted by lures and bait
Means of escape are suddenly removed
But to compromise is to castrate

Visions erupt waves of deep concern
Inherent disorder will never perish
Harken back to a calm that can be discerned
And to its moments forever cherish

Thoughts buzz around thy head like pesky flies that will not die
The mind corrodes as they slip through each 'tempt to grasp	
Our mentor becomes the tormenter in every room
From the time we leave our womb 'til we enter our tomb

From Womb-to-Tomb

The kelinky, pot pot chee 
Of the great, old hollow tree
Would enter the shards 
From hellfire swooping down 
To the sides of their fallen brethren
Through conditions, dire

The feathers of fidelity
Will beckon their flaccid flag
For embodiments of virtue
Ignite the threatening, saintly stag

The kelinky, pot pot chee 
Of the great, old hollow tree
Nest there no more
For their wise and noble abodes
Fell by the same malignant roar

With the last ounce of honor ousted
A wholesale slaughter of goods
The righteous never had rights
They were all impaled right where they stood

Chipped and chopped, peeling off their gown
Though high above they never looked down
Those who bear the caring crown
Are those who are hunted down

Not left to rest nor to rot in peace
Not for soil to absorb and eat
They were treated and embalmed
Preserved like a psalm of living dead meat

Their bodies stacked as ramparts
Murdered pillars meant to protect 
The correct living from foreign forgiving
Where honest actions don't seem suspect

Hiding behind carcass barricades
Buried deep within a fortress built 
From the forest which in haste, it did replace
The true source of our enforced guilt

All hell is hailed by fanciful freaks who flail
In fading fads stirred with feathers and fur

Feathers of Fidelity

Lyrics:

Forming prophecies from all the smoke that's been released
Finally finding fortunes in the drunk, sunken tea leaves
Caught between the fields of green and seductive serpentines

A diluted resolution
Flails his arms for that fake farm
Hugging its feet for the blessed retreat

Pounding form into the dirt over rotting finds
Infertile and bitter with no means of taking flight
Soaking into the flytrap that robotic apes contract

Through ebb and flow, with a coarse touch
Remove our inherent crutch
Prod the laughing foe to confront their chateau

Solitary ventures have fallen short in their packs			
Blood of infectious broods leak into the source of facts
Lactations contaminated in the hostess' breasts

Cast them into the coiling flux
Forge your spatial communion
And sit in the garden I've eaten, in peace

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Anecdote:

Subconsciously avoiding a constructive self-evaluation, an aimless wanderer hastily seeks prophetic signs, divine symbolism, and patterns in nature for some personal guidance and reassurance. But when his own ploy is suddenly unveiled, he persuades himself to take a new initiative, only to find other paths that have been heavily trodden upon. Old age has stolen his agility and youthful ambition, leaving him with an inability to begin his own course. He reaches out to successors for consultation and consolation, but is only handed plastic principles and invitations to join their pursuits, so that he can adopt an identity under their wing. He declines out of suspicion and retreats to a natural environment to take pleasure in eating society's forbidden fruit. Though indecisive and against all odds, he acknowledges and embraces his naivety, choosing ambiguity over the security of being a gear in the machine of another.

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Scott Mitchell Gorski - Upright Bass, Voice 
Lindsey Paige Miller - Cello 

Songs, Lyrics, and Concept By Scott Mitchell Gorski 
Cello Parts written by Lindsey Paige Miller 

Recorded and Mixed by Greg Norman at Electrical Audio in Chicago, IL
Mastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service in Chicago, IL
Produced by Okapi

Carousel (Part I)

Bundle's Bolero

OKAPI is a duo which utilizes upright bass, cello, and voice through raw, intimate orchestrations driven by honesty and philosophical content. We advocate the conscious confrontation with reality, rather than the subconscious avoidance or distraction from it, and encourage individual awareness, freedom, and healthy growth. We hope to inspire consciousness in all those who are willing to listen.

Okapi

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