cultural studies, music, performance

Rituals of Yearning: Sleep Token and the Performance of Sacred Longing [Part 2/4]

— Part II: The Disappearance of Ritual, the Vocabulary of Hurt, and Sincerity in Simulation

III. The Sacred in Collapse

What Part I introduced as myth and performance deserves a closer look: the interplay of ritual, simulation, and the Real.
Sleep Token’s “rituals” are successful not so much because they are visually compelling, but rather because they dramatize the impossibility of belief. Their concerts feel charged with sacred intensity, but what they actually stage is the absence of transcendence. To make sense of it, we need to consider how ritual itself has collapsed in late modernity, and what remains in its wake.

There is much to be said about the underlying crisis, the disappearance of ritual itself in modern society. One theorist in particular has made this phenomenon his core interest. Byung-Chul Han introduces his work The Disappearance of Rituals (2020) with the claim:

“[Rituals] are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.”[1]

Ritual, for Han, is not ornament but architecture, giving duration a habitable structure through repetition. The daily gesture, the seasonal festival, the communal rite: these forms once stabilized identity by grounding people within a shared regularity. Without these forms, time “lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences; it rushes off.”[2] Time becomes a sequence of isolated moments with no symbolic coherence. In such a world, the self drifts, fragmented and uprooted.

Sleep Token step into this absence of ritual structure in a way that feels precisely tailored to the conditions of a younger generation. Millennials, Gen Z, and even Gen Alpha have grown up in a very particular time of cultural digitization, their lives characterized by the fragmented temporality of feeds, notifications, and on-demand culture. The band’s refusal of banal addresses to the audience, their anonymity, their carefully staged setting and robes, function as a counterweight to this stream of perpetual availability. For a few hours, fans inhabit a space where time slows and takes on symbolic shape.
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cultural studies, music, performance

Rituals of Yearning: Sleep Token and the Performance of Sacred Longing [Part 1/4]

— Part I: Invocation, the Architecture of Devotion, and the Lore of Sleep

I. Invocation

Fog coils outward from the stage and creeps into the crowd. Red and blue neon lights cut through the dark like stained glass refracting into shadow. The air moves in time with the sub-bass, a low hum felt more in the chest than in the ears. Masked figures in black ritual attire advance with liturgical precision, as though their steps mark out invisible sacraments. A hush gathers, not as silence but as reverence. Vessel appears, masked and anonymous, more apparition than frontman. He does not speak; he never does. The stillness breaks, not with the squeal of pop hysteria or the roar of a rock crowd, but with something stranger: a collective exhale. People cry. Some sink to their knees.

“Every single person was singing, I cried from the first moment to the last.”
“It’s called Worships for a reason. Think Church but in the best way possible.”
“I grew up religious. I haven’t been religious in years. The Teeth Of God tour was [the first Sleep Token] concert I went to. […] That was as close to a religious experience as I can recall.”

One fan even reports “crying for 45 minutes non-stop when I got home,” unsure whether it was ecstasy or exhaustion. [1] [2] [3]

At first, this might seem like the familiar tears of pop-idol devotion, the kind caught in phone-camera close-ups when a beloved star celebrity enters the stage. But the register is different, less celebrity ecstasy than something closer to sacred encounter. Language shapes the experience surrounding the band even before the start of the actual concert: Sleep Token exclusively refer to their shows as “rituals,” their tickets are stamped “worship event.” Inside the stage area, the concert experience borders on the dramatic, with fan reactions to songs often escalating into a collective outpour of emotion. Worship in this case is not just a metaphor, but becomes a performance of longing, subjection, and sacred ache, both by the band and the audience.

The Architecture of Devotion

The object of that worship is left deliberately ambiguous. No religious icon stands at the centre, only the shape of one. What fills the space is ceremony: sound wrapped in darkness and silence, swelling toward a release some fans go so far to describe as “cathartic.” [4] The form in which fan devotion takes shape is an affective architecture, where intimate private feeling becomes a collective event.

At its centre stands singer Vessel I, nameless, masked, mythologised. During some songs, he is overcome with emotion and his voice breaks, ending in audible sobs. It is a paradox that defines the band: hyper-sincerity through total anonymity. Vessel performs this duality with ease, and it is not difficult to see how this adds to the overall appeal. The mysterious, bare-chested frontman became a site of desire the audience could pour their longing into. His aesthetic does not ask for identification, it demands devotion: the kind once reserved for gods, then for lovers, now for charismatic performers standing in for both. In a culture that has become  allergic to cringe and saturated with ironic detachment, here is a figure singing about loss, yearning, trauma, and touch, with an open-throated ache that reverberates through his audience.
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poetry

Atwood’s “You Begin:” A Reading

Going through Atwood’s poetry again recently, I found myself returning to “You Begin”, a poem I keep coming back to every now and then. Partly, I suppose, because it seems so straightforward, but reveals itself as being more profound the longer you engage with it; its form mirroring its content.

Some interpretations I’ve come across frame it in terms of maternal love, or the complications and insights of teaching. The readings tend to focus on the often challenging task of explaining the world’s complexity to a child who doesn’t yet have the language or experience to grasp it. I’ve always liked the poem for its elegance beneath its simple imagery: How, by formal way of an instructive educational lesson, it illustrates how language often fails to convey immediate, lived experience for which there can’t ever be an adequate linguistic substitute. Language can be surprisingly clumsy when it tries to bridge the gap between the word and the world.

You Begin is about many different things. It is a poem about the weight of language, signification, the limitations of knowledge, embodiment, and the ever-present, quiet proximity of danger. It keeps returning to the body (more specifically:  the hand)  as the final fallback when signification breaks down.

“You begin this way:  /  This is your hand,  /  this is your eye…”

The teaching begins in the body. Before abstraction and metaphor, the child understands the tangible. The body is the site of first knowledge, and the hand becomes the motif of return. Later in the poem (and, by metonymical extension, in life), when language falters and experience exceeds comprehension, it becomes the anchoring concept.
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games, personal

Studies in Silence: Playing Death Stranding in 2025

Yes, the first one. I know, I know… I’m absurdly late to the party.

So why now? I finally bought it because as with most AAA games, which I always get long after they’re released, I felt I had no excuse to postpone this one any further. Mainly because Death Stranding already came out back in 2019, now the second game was just released, and I’m already being hit with spoilers for both games left and right. Thus: It was on sale. I bought it, installed it, and found myself walking across Kojima’s America about one half-hour intro later.

The whole thing is a paradox in pixel form: It’s slow, it’s lonely and it’s tedious more often than not. But it had me the second the fierce, melancholy ache of Low Roar’s Don’t Be So Serious hit me. I didn’t think I could so quickly become attached to a game which accompanies you with music as half solemn funeral march, half whiny indie ballad, combined with a strange kind of silence while you navigate craggy landscapes beneath low skies while trying not to drop your cargo and keeping your flasked Geiger-counter baby alive (yes, really). 

Kojima masterfully constructed landscapes that feel empty, but still feel full of absence’s gravity. Towers of concrete, ghostly specters, roped pathways between isolated enclaves: the architecture of loneliness as natural space. You cross these spaces as a pilgrim, delivering parcels and binding together a fracturing nation, one knot-city at a time. It’s a myth of connection through absence. The dead bleed into the living.
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personal, poetry

untitled poem no.1

it’s mockingly banal
how neatly the bitter past
blends into this year’s april
leaving no traces.

what is left?
what’s to come?
whatever else there could be,
whoever else still has a voice.

one of my very first.  originally it was written as an aside, a sort of lyrical diary entry. it’s been exactly 9 years since I wrote this one – April 9th, 2016 – and it struck me as relevant again in the light of current events (numerous global crises, political, economic etc). so I saw it fitting that it should also become the first post here. why not?

Writings from the Void