Over the melancholic yet dramatic drill style instrumental of Many Lives (Bury My Dead), Apocraphe produces a lyrical meditation on the multitudinous lives that we each live, and the plethora of people we become inside each of them. The hungry ghosts of our past stand outside the door, howling, waiting for us to take the role of our own personal psychopomp, ushering them out into the ether.
Visual artist Enix Inri takes this theme and produces his own interpretation, a triptych of different styles that melds to produce the perfect accompaniment for the lyrical and sonic journey.
Having passed over half a million streams and views across all platforms, Apocraphe’s album ‘The Escapist Handbook‘ is a certified underground hit, and has been a tour de force for this UK rapper based in France.
The lead track from the 2021 album ‘The Escapist Handbook’ on Main Rock Records.
Produced by: I.N.C.H Beats
Visual art video created by: Enix Inri, with character models in first part created by Karli Bresler
Recorded and mixed by: Sebastien Haby at Studio Cerisier, Toulouse, France
Mastered by: Tyrone Harris at Super Sonics HQ, UK
Lyrics:
Roll the breaks taste the rising dread
Soldier face on heavy my head
Told you day one many lives led
All replaced, fallen shades – bury my dead
Fractal patterns captured like crude graph
Back from the future to view the entombed past
Characters surpassed exhumed and a boon asked
From phantoms ambered in tangents
Divides of the man child’s climb to the new path
Feed of the fruit of the labours
Raised shades who move in packs
Through the gates of Hades
Their place in the brain razed to consumed ash
No name, no taste, no faith, No Face’s smooth mask
Rueful gasps
Their bays of betrayal at the shape the future’s cast
You used to be me now not what I would have been,
Could have been but a dream now
Slumber deep
Til muttered pleas run a beat underneath reaching out
What the one has become is a sum,
A chimera of pieces eaten out
From hungry demons left feeding
On crumbs from it’s beastial mouth
Like tears in the rain they fade
But lay the course like the fall of the yarrow
Caught in the absorbing embrace
Sparrowhawk forced into naming his shadow
And every mistake every made is relayed
In the fate of the forms that are carried
The fallen carrion of those slayed
And replaced before laid in the barrow
Chorus
40 days misplaced in a place that’s barren
Pain we gained is the payment of Charon
Straining of language – passing from Babel to babble
Craving adulation from cradle to gravel
Straight into battle
Cattle in armour cast as a valiant charger
Valedictory markers – scars as dark tattoos
Carved in the manner of Karma
Passed from the father – the sins we inherit
Are debited after – derelict pastures
Where we graze on the mistakes we made
Then straight replayed by our replacements after
Taking our cards that are marked
Then punched when drunk on love and lust
Shudder at another lover’s touch
Deflated estimations from punctured trust
Morpheus forming our causes in pouring
Of Slumber’s dust
What are dreams but our ego’s
Secret need to be understood?
Stood under the leaves of Yggdrassil
While the due rolls down
Genius or imbecile – the two hold court
From one swollen mouth
Provoking doubt
Fisher King who caught hold of a golden crown
Mighty oaks can grow from those seeds
Sown in once broken ground
Chorus