The System
Three series. Ten albums. One hundred tracks.
The work is planned as ten albums in three series, a hundred tracks altogether. ELEMENTA follows the first Greek philosophers, who asked what the world is made of. ANIMA turns to the Stoics and to how a person should live — through reason, feeling and character. COSMOS ends with the largest questions: the world as a whole, time, and silence. INTROITUS, the first album, stands in front of them as the entrance.
An old voice in a new form.
Every AIAX track is built from the same few decisions. It starts with one idea from an ancient thinker. The idea belongs to a province — a place and a tradition — and the province decides the instruments. The mood of the idea decides the mode. The ancient world often thought in such correspondences between sound, place and character, and the music borrows that habit.
Modal Identities
AUREA (Lydian)
The brightest of the three. Its raised fourth gives the melody a lift that never quite settles, which suits ideas about light, clarity and beginnings.
VIBRATIO (Dorian)
A minor mode with a raised sixth that keeps it from sinking. It carries the tracks about movement, effort and change.
NOX (Phrygian)
The darkest. Its lowered second pulls the melody downward from the first note. It belongs to the tracks about descent, solitude and being alone with oneself.
Provinces
Roma
Stoicism, civic virtue, practical philosophy
Roman Stoicism — virtue, duty, and the disciplined will.
Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Cicero, Boethius, Horace, Catullus, Augustine of Hippo
Graecia
Metaphysics, logic, epistemology, the examined life
Hellenic philosophy — reason, dialectic, and the examined life.
Anaximenes of Miletus, Heraclitus of Ephesus, Plato, Thales of Miletus, Epictetus, Pythagoras, Simonides of Ceos, Hesiod
Aegyptus
Mysticism, hermetic wisdom, the afterlife as mirror of life
Hermetic mystery tradition — knowledge of the hidden order.
Persia
Sufi poetry, divine love as philosophical method
Sufi mystical tradition — divine love as the path to truth.
Celtae
Nature philosophy, oral tradition, cyclical time
Druidic nature philosophy — wisdom of cycles and the living land.
Druidic tradition