Three ways of saying without a name

I went and read my own tracklist on Spotify the morning the album went out, which is a slightly odd thing to do, and I noticed something I had never planned. Three of the eight titles are the same title in three languages. "Sine Nomine" is Latin for without a name. "Ohne Namen" is German for without names. "Lumière Sans Nom" is French for nameless light.

If you have read any of Perpetūra you will know why that matters. The whole thing is about a feeling nobody in it can name. And there it is, said three times over on a tracklist anybody can read for free without opening the book, and not once in English.

Here is the bit I keep turning over. I cannot say that in the prose very often. Write "she could not name what she felt" more than a couple of times and you stop believing me, and quite right too: you start hearing me explaining the book instead of a woman feeling something. A song title gets away with it. It says the plain thing flatly, in a language you may not even speak, and it arrives as atmosphere rather than as me making a point.

Now the part I am less comfortable with. Until Monday you could not hear any of this without earning it. Every story had its own theme, and finishing one handed you its sung song in the codex: "A Second Passenger" for Hyunjae, "Not For Sale" for Reine, "I Called It Dancing" for Liuyan. I have given that up. The eight songs are a record now, and anyone can put them on in any order having read nothing at all.

I did sit with that for a while. But a song you only hear once you have earned it is only ever heard by someone I have already convinced, and that is not the thing music is good at. A record goes and sits on a stranger's phone, in among bands they already love.

So it is on the Perpetūra page now, and it is out in full as Perpetūra Original Soundtracks. The novel is still free, as it has always been. Thank you for reading, and for listening, if you do.