The Poison Pie Publishing House presents:

February 1, 2025
The fourteen stood in silence around the tiny flicker of the candle. Eventually they broke ranks and began to whisper to each other. None had expected the sacrifice to take this turn. Rather, each had anticipated a public spectacle of violence at the hands of the Minotaur. Only now did they understand why the legend of the Minotaur was inextricably tied to the labyrinth. It was to hunt them in the maze. As this realization dawned, one male voice suggested that they would be easier to track as a group. In a panic the youths scattered.

written while listening to:  Emanuele Maniscalco Meets Sandro Gibellini - untitled (Ritmo & Blu, no catalog #, 2016, Italy, digital files, discogs.com)

February 2, 2025
Before she could register a word of caution, Melite stood alone at the candle. It would burn but a few minutes more. Listening for the others, she heard vague sounds of sandals scratching over earth and rock. Muffled by the sharp corners of the labyrinth, the shuffling grew fainter by the moment. Melite remained still. While she did not want to surrender to a gruesome death, neither did she succumb to a surge of adrenalin that would prompt her to flee for her life. There were no destinations in the labyrinth and no reason to hurry.

written while listening to:  Guillaume Gargaud - Strange Memories (Setola Di Maiale/Chant Records, SM4160/CR2009GU, 2020, Italy/United States, cd, discogs.com)

February 3, 2025
She waited then until the candle sputtered out. The darkness descended about her instantly and completely, with no regard for whether it might find her company to its taste. Melite thought that a strange fancy on her part, to imbue the darkness with its own desires. It was an early symptom of the effect that the labyrinth had on those trapped within it and a premonition of the terrible, inconsolable loneliness to come. Would she reach such despair that she longed even for a visit from the Minotaur?

written while listening to:  Jason Kahn & Magda Mayas - Night (Editions, 018, 2025, Switzerland, cd, discogs.com)

February 4, 2025
With outstretched arms, Melite began a blind sojourn through the subterranean maze. The fingertips of one hand traced the wall beside her while the other paddled forward through the air, preventing an unexpected collision. Her steps were tentative lest she trip over unseen stones. Her progress would have been slow, except to call her movement progress at all required that she knew where she was going. On the contrary, she wandered without gain. She had little hope of lasting long, given her snail's pace, as she made easy prey for the beast.

written while listening to:  Shoji Hano & Derek Bailey - Fish (P.S.F. Records, PSFD-8009, 2001, Japan, cd, discogs.com)

February 5, 2025
The combination of darkness and disorientation brought to mind a game that she'd played as a kid. A group of friends held hands in a circle while one blind-folded child spun about in the middle until she was dizzy. She then had to tag a replacement, guided by their shrieking voices as they did their best to dodge, each constrained by their neighbors' grip. As her fingers closed on empty air, Melite whispered the rhyme that accompanied the game, "Darkness, darkness everywhere, I shall grab you here or there!" Again and again, she found nothing more than scraped knuckles against stone.

written while listening to:  Keiji Haino - Live Ateliers Claus (Les Albums Claus, keiji haino — 03, 2020, Belgium, digital files, discogs.com)

February 6, 2025
As she trod farther into the maze, Melite descended along sloped corridors. Bereft of sight, her other senses described her surroundings—her fingers against the stone and the acrid smell of bull in the damp air. There was a sound too in the underworld, an almost imperceptible hum of the Earth. If she stood in one place too long, the echoes accumulated in her ears until the hum was amplified to a roar and she was compelled to hurriedly move on. No less baleful than the Minotaur, a madness lurked in the labyrinth, stalking her.

written while listening to:  Joëlle Léandre - At the Le Mans Jazz Festival, disc 2 (Leo Records, LR 458/459, 2006, United Kingdom, cdx2, discogs.com)

February 7, 2025
Melite discovered early in her exploration of the maze that the rectangular passageways opened up into a much older mine. Crudely dug tunnels, braced with timber, connected natural caverns, which extended the labyrinth far beyond the city limits of Knossos. Though she did not know it, Melite traveled beneath the surrounding countryside toward the root of Mount Ida, forty miles to the west. Guessing to some extent the scale of the maze, Melite ruefully conceded that she was unlikely to be reunited with any of her fellow travelers.

written while listening to:  Susan Alcorn - Touch This Moment (Uma Sounds, no catalog #, 2010, United States, cd, discogs.com)

February 8, 2025
Melite grew tired for, though her pace was slow, she required constant physical and mental vigilance to navigate without accident through an unseen landscape full of unexpected turns and rubble at every step. Entering a gap between a boulder and a stone wall, she cleared the ground of gravel. As she lay down, Melite regretted that her pristine white gown was dirtied with dust and detritus. She smiled at the ridiculous concern for none would ever see her again save the Minotaur, who, presumably, cared not for the state of her garment.

written while listening to:  Tyshawn Sorey Trio - Continuing, sides C & D (Pi Recordings, PI98, 2023, United States, lpx2, discogs.com)

February 9, 2025
Melite supposed that the pervasive darkness would be conducive to sleep but she found herself unable to escape the waking reality of her predicament. Her thoughts turned to her soft bed at home and from there to her parents. She saw again the last image of her weeping mother, held in the arms of her father. Melite's tears emerged silently and traced clean, wet paths sideways down her dusty face. Was she expected to find relief in the notion that as soon as the Minotaur noticed her this trial would be over?

written while listening to:  Artifacts: Tomeka Reid, Nicole Mitchell, Mike Reed - ...And Then There's This (Astral Spirits, AS139, 2022, United States, lp, discogs.com)

February 10, 2025
Eventually, Melite succumbed to sleep on the hard ground. What dreams visited her were consumed by the surrounding darkness ere they entered her memory. She woke later with no sense of how much time had passed. Her body seemed unable to relay whether it had sufficiently rested. Her mind, however, wanted no more of lying down behind the boulder. She rose to her feet and listened. She heard neither the clatter of bestial hooves against stone nor the voices of her wandering friends. Instead, the persistent hum returned to her ears and drove her forward into darkness.

written while listening to:  Anna Webber's Simple Trio - Binary (Skirl Records, Skirl 033, 2016, United States, cd, discogs.com)

February 11, 2025
No less than sleep did her body require sustenance. The air in the mine, while damp, did not provide adequate moisture to slake her thirst. Her sandaled toes occasionally felt shallow puddles of gathered water, delivered by cracks in the stone above. At first she shunned the idea of drinking from such a source. Although her eyes failed her, she clearly pictured the turbid water. Yet when her ears detected the irregular plink of isolated drops of water falling from the ceiling, she followed the sound until she knelt beside a hole and reluctantly drank.

written while listening to:  Qasim Naqvi, Wadada Leo Smith & Andrew Cyrille - Two Centuries (Red Hook Records, RH1002, 2022, Ireland, lp, discogs.com)

February 12, 2025
Melite wandered through the winding tunnels, excavated in centuries past by miners following the sinuous veins of copper, tin and silver. The logic of their path, that of metal woven through stone, lay beyond her comprehension. For her, the mine proved merely an endless extension of the insidious labyrinth of Daedalus, designed to bewilder hapless travelers. The narrow tunnels induced a claustrophobia in Melite for they had been dug to secure passage with minimal leeway. Nor could even a woman of her diminutive stature stand upright.

written while listening to:  Evan Parker - The Heraclitean Two-Step, etc., disc 1 (False Walls, fw16, 2024, United Kingdom, cdx4, discogs.com)

February 13, 2025
A change in the echo of her footsteps alerted Melite when she entered an expansive cavern. Although its precise dimensions were lost in darkness, the larger space provided relief from the constriction of the tunnels. At the same time, entering the chamber increased her disorientation for she lost touch with the wall. Melite tried casting bits of gravel in every direction, hoping to define her surroundings by the clatter of their impact. All she accomplished in rotating about was losing her sense of the direction from which she had arrived.

written while listening to:  Caktus - Flimrende (Barefoot Records, BFREC076LP, 2023, Denmark, lp, discogs.com)

February 14, 2025
Melite attempted to walk the perimeter of the cavern, a task made difficult by a partial collapse of the ceiling, which had filled half the chamber with scree. She stumbled over loose stone, sliding further down the slope with each step. Eventually, she found an exit, though she was unsure if it was the same tunnel by which she had entered. Her frustration at potentially backtracking gave way to resignation. If she started over, so what? It was not as if she had accomplished some great feat thus far in her wandering, nor was there anything else for her to do.

written while listening to:   Dan Blacksberg - The Psychic/Body Sound System (Relative Pitch Records, RPRSS021, 2024, United States, cd, discogs.com)

February 15, 2025
In the absence of sunrise and sunset, it proved impossible for Melite to keep track of the length of her incarceration within the maze. Time flowed like molasses. We presume something more than a week in the world above passed before she ate her first earthworm, followed by a beetle. In doing so, she obeyed the impulse, written in the fabric of our biology, to survive. Enough time passed that the disgust she initially felt at consuming the subterranean diet gradually dissipated until, running her fingers over such quarry, she gobbled it up without a second thought.

written while listening to:   Jen Shyu & Jade Tongue - Sounds And Cries Of The World (Pi Recordings, PI61, 2015, United States, cd, discogs.com)

February 16, 2025
The mine did not offer up other amenities as readily as it did food and water. Company, in particular, was a luxury in short supply. She spoke often to the darkness for lack of a partner. Several times she heard faint voices speaking in the Attic dialect, but stumbling blindly forward through the tunnels failed to reunite Melite with her friends. She began to suspect that her mind played tricks on her; her friends were all long dead, consumed by the Minotaur. She alone, by chance rather than stratagem, had eluded the beast only to prolong her isolation.

written while listening to:   Christian Vasseur & Charlie Beresford - Les Amoureuses (Ramble Records, RAM-123, 2023, Australia, digital files, discogs.com)

February 17, 2025
Melite began to yearn for an encounter with the Minotaur. She fancied it not as a bloody meeting between predator and prey but as a kind of dalliance in which an awkwardness reigned due to the unfamiliarity that each partner had with the other. In her imagination, she pictured a creature who had been exposed to the influences of the labyrinth as she had, only for a much longer time. The effect of the dark solitude on her was magnified in the bull. Where she had become uncertain and lonely, the bull was deranged by the same forces.

written while listening to:  The Andrew Cyrille Trio - Good To Go, With A Tribute To Bu (Soul Note, 121292-2, 1997, Italy, cd, discogs.com)

February 18, 2025
Her hallucinations of the Minotaur grew into rendezvous, where the pair maintained a reserved distance. She considered the visits a kind of formal courtship, the likes of which she had observed with other girls in Athens. The heavy breathing of the bull, disturbed by the occasional snort, betrayed only an inscrutable ambivalence. As usual, one could never be entirely sure of the intentions of any suitor. The separation between them kept its rank odor from overpowering Melite. Nor, most assuredly, did she run her fingers through the coarse and bristly fur along its flanks.

written while listening to:  Chet Baker - She Was Too Good To Me (CTI Records, CTI 6050 S1, 1974, United States, lp, discogs.com)

February 19, 2025
Melite had all the time in the world for her fantastic and grotesque romance to bloom. Reassured by the certainty that, given her seclusion, no one would ever know of her words and actions, she engaged in coquettish behavior with her imaginary beau. She had no experience in such matters and no matron to caution her. She ignored its aloof silences and brusque departures. She fawned over the curves of the deadly horns adorning its crown and laughed away its lewd gaze. Such was the madness of the maze in which Melite subsisted.

written while listening to:  Hank Mobley - Hank (Blue Note, BLP 1560, 1957, United States, lp, discogs.com)

February 20, 2025
Her movement within the maze never ceased, though it was without origin and destination. The exercise of her legs seemed to keep the penetrating hum of the Earth at bay. Melite had long ago lost any sense of her relation to the entrance to the labyrinth beneath the palace of King Minos. In her wandering, she came upon a flooded section of the mine. She retreated from impassable tunnels. In a cavern of unknown immensity, her feet encountered a subterranean lake. The stone formed a long bank with the cold, black water. Kneeling, she drank of it.

written while listening to:  John Zorn - Filmworks II (Toy's Factory, TFCK-88753, 1995, Japan, cd, discogs.com)

February 21, 2025
A splash emanated from the interior of the lake. Melite immediately suspected that some aquatic, serpentine horror swam within the black depths of the labyrinth. She rose to her feet with every intention of sprinting back to the security of the narrow tunnels. However, her silent beau, hidden in the shadows, had secretly been trailing her. Without revealing himself, he emitted a derisive snort, which prompted Melite to remain standing beside the lake as the creature responsible for disturbing the water drew near.

written while listening to:  Rob Mazurek & Exploding Star Orchestra - Dimensional Stardust (International Anthem Recording Company, IARC0036, 2020, United States, cd, discogs.com)

February 22, 2025
A woman tentatively called out in the tongue of Athens, "Who's there?" Melite recognized the calm voice as that of Eurymedusa, with whom she had entered the labyrinth. The sudden discovery of one who had yet survived the mine filled Melite's heart with a great joy. She waded waist deep into the water, hoping to touch Eurymedusa and dispel the nagging doubts that she succumbed to another hallucination. Eurymedusa halted her approach a dozen feet away, treading water to keep her head above the surface. Melite cried out, "Come closer so that I may hold you!"

written while listening to:  Jim O'Rourke - To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye, disc 2 (Sonoris, sns-16, 2019, France, cdx4, discogs.com)

February 23, 2025
Never had Melite so longed for an embrace as she did to be held in the wet arms of Eurymedusa. Alas, her friend was not immune to the wiles of the labyrinth. Having encountered the lake, Eurymedusa claimed its chill depths as a sanctuary from the beast. She would not leave the water but bade Melite to join her. Melite could not swim. Each pled with the other, one to come ashore, one to brave the lake. Neither yielded and the ensuing conversation transpired with Melite seated unhappily on the stone bank as Eurymedusa bobbed before her.

written while listening to:  Charles Mingus - Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (Impulse!, A-54, 1964, United States, lp, discogs.com)

February 24, 2025
Each lost in their own madness of the maze, the two women offered a few comforting words. When they reached the limit of what solace speech might provide, they parted. "Farewell," Eurymedusa called as Melite retreated. Melite wondered how in the world she could fare well, wandering as she did through the endless darkness of the mine. "You too!" she replied. Not long after, she encountered the odor of the Minotaur in the tunnels. He seemed not at all concerned for Eurymedusa, as if she was but a memory of a woman already drowned.

written while listening to:  The Thelonious Monk Quartet - Monk's Dream (Columbia, CS 8765, 1963, United States, lp, discogs.com)

February 25, 2025
In an admittedly egregious dismissal of the prolonged torment of Melite within the mine, we simply suggest that months passed—months in which her static relationship with the Minotaur persisted in a bizarre, romantic détente. His prowling presence became as ubiquitous as the unforgiving stone or the inky blackness. One day Melite abruptly detected a glimmer of light around a curve in the tunnel. The faint glow was imperceptible to all eyes save those long adjusted to utter darkness. She soon arrived at a natural chamber in which all surfaces were studded with crystal facets, reflecting and amplifying a soft luminescence.

written while listening to:  Cory Smythe - Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (Pyroclastic Records, PR23, 2022, United States, cd, discogs.com)

February 26, 2025
The strict hexagonal geometry of each jutting crystal contrasted with their haphazard placement in the stone. The light gathered at the center of the cavern where the largest crystal presented a smooth, horizontal surface, as if it were an altar in a temple. Before it, rocking on his feet, Porphyrion shifted like a moth entranced by the radiance captured in the altar. He seemed very much at prayer. He turned to greet Melite, as though he had been expecting her, which only heightened her suspicion that his form was an illusion of the light.

written while listening to:  Otomo Yoshihide - Summer Snow (Sound Factory, STK003, 1995, Hong Kong, cd, discogs.com)

February 27, 2025
Like Eurymedusa, Porphyrion could offer little more than a temporary respite from the isolation of the mine. During her brief visit to his temple, Porphyrion's attention seemed to drift from his guest to the unseen mineral god, who dwelt within the chamber. Although he was within arm's reach, Melite dared not touch her friend due to a baseless and absurd fear that by doing so she would extinguish his light. He said good bye as if he were a priest blessing a member of his congregation. She thanked him though she had little faith in his god and he knew it.

written while listening to:  Lukas De Clerck - The Telescopic Aulos Of Atlas (Ideologic Organ, SOMA046, 2024, France, lp, discogs.com)

February 28, 2025
Let us suppose that a year passed in the labyrinth. Like many suitors, the Minotaur tired of waiting for the consummation of their union. He led Melite along ascending tunnels to a secret exit from the mine and there expelled her. Before stepping out, she turned and forgave the Minotaur for his rejection of her. Ask yourself, Gentle Reader, "What grief is greater than suffering at the caprice of an insentient universe?" If you come to a satisfactory answer, you will have moved one step closer to understanding Melite.

written while listening to:  Signe Emmeluth - Emmeluth (Smalltown Supersound, STSAFJ392LP, 2022, Norway, lp, discogs.com)