Justin Taylor Phillips

The fourth and final episode of the INTO OBLIVIØN documentary. This one was especially emotional for me, because I open up about a lot of things I’ve never talked about publicly before. It was very worth it.

This isn’t a happy story. This is a story of grief, of loss, of fire and fury. It’s the story of a boy who knew nothing, and something outside of him that pulled him into a shadowy place beyond good and evil to show him his darkness, his malice, his vastness, and ultimately, his real self. This is the story of OBLIVIØN.

At the beginning of this year I started feeling an intense dissatisfaction with where I was creatively. I felt stifled from being so deep in the music industry - felt so much pressure to be so many things I wasn't. I decided to get away for a month and a half to a cabin in the remote Icelandic village of Bildudalur, population 65, to intensively write and record the skeleton for my debut album. What I returned with was more than I could have dreamed of, and is by far the greatest creative accomplishment of my life so far.

The most important part of any creative endeavor is, in my opinion, the inspiration. The landscape and world of Iceland blew my creativity out of the water and propelled it into outer space. The place is like another planet - beaches of black sand, huge fields of volcanic rock sprawling as far as the eye can see, geysers and volcanos - it really heavily affected me, and brought out some interesting stuff. In this second episode, “Draumstafir” (Dream Characters), I talk about the environment there and how it inspired me.

This new documentary, surrounding the creation of the OBLIVIØN double album, chronicles my decent into depths I was previously unaware of. It’s my guidebook to the underworld. My love letter to the vast galaxies that exist beneath the iceberg surface of our conscious minds. A dive into parts of the ocean so deep that light never penetrates them. A world inhabited by the beasts we thought we banished from our minds.

Solitude does pretty crazy things to the human mind. It can bring out immense creativity and inspiration, but it can also erode at one's psyche, and cause you to sort of come apart. In this fourth episode, I talk about the isolation I experienced in the north of Iceland, and how it affected and shaped this album.

Of all the difficulties facing artists, sustaining creativity seems to be the hardest. Inspiration comes and goes with the wind, seemingly out of nowhere. One of the hardest parts about creating a concept album in a short amount of time was making sure that I stayed inspired and kept creating.

This isn’t a happy story. This is a story of grief, of loss, of fire and fury. It’s the story of a boy who knew nothing, and something outside of him that pulled him into a shadowy place beyond good and evil to show him his darkness, his malice, his vastness, and ultimately, his real self. This is the story of OBLIVIØN.