Chapter 6.3: The Eighth Life.

The Score of Survival.     

It was late evening when the clang of the iron door broke the quiet of my workshop. I was sitting there, savoring the silence after a long day at Stahlcraft, mechanically sketching with a pencil on the thick paper of my notebook.

The door swung open, and Jürgen tumbled in. He had driven straight to me from his latest altitude — he silently threw a heavy jacket onto a chair, which reeked of ozone, cold stone dust, and fresh adrenaline. Raw knuckles, a scrape on his cheekbone, and that habitual crooked smirk of his. Sometimes it seems to me that my older brother truly tests gravity’s resolve — and each time, he expects it to blink first.

— “Where did you stop?” I asked without looking up.

Jürgen shrugged, pulling off his gloves.

— “A bit earlier than I would have liked, ” he smirked, adding, “didn’t let myself get bored.”

Warning my brother was useless, so I simply asked:

— “Any left in reserve?”

— “Enough for the eighth, ” he said it so calmly, as if he were talking about a missed step on a staircase.

— “One day you’ll miss, ” I said.

— “Then you’ll have a good reason to write a ballad, ” he grinned.

I mechanically sketched his portrait on the thick, textured paper. The hard graphite bit into the texture with a quiet rustle, leaving rough, dark strokes. Looking at that smirk frozen in the pencil sketch, I thought about how Jürgen had managed to burn through at least seven of the lives allotted to a man. He spent them with the carelessness of an absolute fatalist.

And at that moment, I literally “heard” a sound that didn’t exist yet.

A riff. Heavy, like a step on an empty metal staircase. It wasn’t the piercing scream of my Demon guitar. It was the sound of altitude. The music of people who walk the edge for too long. It was a pure, overdriven bass — hollow, viscous, pulsating, heavy as a heartbeat at the limit of its pulse. A perfect part for Jürgen, in which the weight of every one of his steps over the abyss could be felt.

And upon this rhythm, suddenly, like steel parts of a striking mechanism clicking into place, fell the poems of Lena Leary. I had known them by heart for a long time, but right now, looking at my brother, the German translation shot through my head on its own — ruthless, rhythmic, without a single hitch.

I looked at the drawing and suddenly realized that this portrait was no longer about a face. It was about a fall that hadn’t happened yet.

I cast aside the charcoal lead, staining the paper with graphite dust from my fingers, and reached for the colored ballpoint pens scattered across the workbench. Red, blue, green. The line from the text about needing to “sharpen your colored pencils again” took on a literal meaning. I began to hammer those words directly onto the page of the notebook.

The multicolored lines didn’t cross out the graphite portrait. They lay around it, contouring the hard strokes of Jürgen’s cheekbones, encircling him as if building a protective barrier around my brother. The drawing ceased to be a portrait before my eyes. The lines began to resemble an uneven musical score. It was transforming into a score of survival.

“Achte Leben” — the eighth life — our new track.

Beside the text, I quickly, in a few strokes, sketched the neck of his five-string bass, which was already in the design phase.

And perhaps the only way to make Jürgen survive is to turn his recklessness into music. To forge from his adrenaline a dense sound — a bass that will hold him at the edge better than any safety line.

The idea first appeared as a metaphor. Almost like a joke told to oneself. But some thoughts in our lives have a strange quality—they don’t disappear. They wait until a space appears around them where they can be heard literally. Very little time passed, and the idea stopped being an image. It turned into a task. 

And one morning we found ourselves again in the place where any abstraction inevitably takes shape—in the studio.

(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)