Forward by Pat O’Regan: Some stories can only be told twice. The first time, when they happen to you at times of darkness. And then the second, when you tell the memory back to yourself once you’ve learned how to live Read more
Forward by Pat O’Regan:
Some stories can only be told twice.
The first time, when they happen to you at times of darkness. And then the second, when you tell the memory back to yourself once you’ve learned how to live again.
Living With Giants have always operated in that space where language fails but music prevails. An instrumental band whose weight comes not from volume alone, but from both restraint and tension stretched thin with the emotional embrace held just long enough to bruise.
Their original album “The World Is Held By A Taut String” was written from inside the darkness of night. It was a document of depression, solitude, and the quiet claustrophobia of surviving yourself.
Now, Living With Giants release an album that's not a sequel, but in fact a return.
Marking the fifteen-year distance between then and now, “The World is Held…” re-tells the same story with the cruel mercy of perspective. It’s the version spoken by someone who made it out the other side. The events have not changed, but their meaning has. Where the original was bound to the immediacy of pain, this retelling observes it from a place the subject never knew was coming. There is an unspoken dramatic irony at work here in the sense that the listener understands the future even though the music revisits a time where you believed there was none.
The first three Acts remain the nucleus of the album. Raw and unresolved, but in every way essential. Living With Giants preserve the emotional truth without softening it. But the story breathes differently now. What once felt like desperation is reframed as endurance. What once sounded like an ending is exposed as survival in disguise.
The final track “Farewell” seals this shift. No longer a slow fade away into nothingness, it becomes an offering and a message sent back through time, a genuine wish for well-being. A quiet acknowledgment that the person enduring those feelings could not yet imagine the life waiting beyond. It does not overwrite the past, it honours it, while refusing to let it have the last word.
This is a story told after time has long passed. It's not the night as it was lived, but the night as it is remembered by someone who got to see the morning, even if they weren't sure it would ever come.
Artist Forward:
In this new re-telling, we revisit this story not to relive it, but to perform a ritual of severance with it. While the original telling was a first-person immersion, this re-telling uses a matured vantage point of Narrative Autonomy. By panning the camera out, we have moved back from the role of “The Subject” in the story to the role of a witness, providing the safety and space needed to observe this past without being consumed by it.
This shift utilizes cognitive distancing to move us from the "looming" sensation of the original struggle to a new place of understanding of it. We intentionally stripped away the frantic noise and over-explanations of the first telling, replacing them with a high definition spectacle of singular emotional truths with a new found clarity. Through the lens of Temporal Growth, we can explore the reality that healing is not a return to a pre-crisis state, but an ongoing evolution.
This re-telling also conveys a new closure through ritual severance, where the story is fully realized and “The Subject” is finally liberated. After fifteen years with this story, the string that has been tied to the memory now worn from the tension and ready for release, this story has become a place of study and reflection rather than a place of suffering.
We invite the listener to bring their own attributions to these concepts, offering this work as a final, articulate recollection of a memory before the inevitability of the future.
-Living With Giants
Some stories can only be told twice.
The first time, when they happen to you at times of darkness. And then the second, when you tell the memory back to yourself once you’ve learned how to live again.
Living With Giants have always operated in that space where language fails but music prevails. An instrumental band whose weight comes not from volume alone, but from both restraint and tension stretched thin with the emotional embrace held just long enough to bruise.
Their original album “The World Is Held By A Taut String” was written from inside the darkness of night. It was a document of depression, solitude, and the quiet claustrophobia of surviving yourself.
Now, Living With Giants release an album that's not a sequel, but in fact a return.
Marking the fifteen-year distance between then and now, “The World is Held…” re-tells the same story with the cruel mercy of perspective. It’s the version spoken by someone who made it out the other side. The events have not changed, but their meaning has. Where the original was bound to the immediacy of pain, this retelling observes it from a place the subject never knew was coming. There is an unspoken dramatic irony at work here in the sense that the listener understands the future even though the music revisits a time where you believed there was none.
The first three Acts remain the nucleus of the album. Raw and unresolved, but in every way essential. Living With Giants preserve the emotional truth without softening it. But the story breathes differently now. What once felt like desperation is reframed as endurance. What once sounded like an ending is exposed as survival in disguise.
The final track “Farewell” seals this shift. No longer a slow fade away into nothingness, it becomes an offering and a message sent back through time, a genuine wish for well-being. A quiet acknowledgment that the person enduring those feelings could not yet imagine the life waiting beyond. It does not overwrite the past, it honours it, while refusing to let it have the last word.
This is a story told after time has long passed. It's not the night as it was lived, but the night as it is remembered by someone who got to see the morning, even if they weren't sure it would ever come.
Artist Forward:
In this new re-telling, we revisit this story not to relive it, but to perform a ritual of severance with it. While the original telling was a first-person immersion, this re-telling uses a matured vantage point of Narrative Autonomy. By panning the camera out, we have moved back from the role of “The Subject” in the story to the role of a witness, providing the safety and space needed to observe this past without being consumed by it.
This shift utilizes cognitive distancing to move us from the "looming" sensation of the original struggle to a new place of understanding of it. We intentionally stripped away the frantic noise and over-explanations of the first telling, replacing them with a high definition spectacle of singular emotional truths with a new found clarity. Through the lens of Temporal Growth, we can explore the reality that healing is not a return to a pre-crisis state, but an ongoing evolution.
This re-telling also conveys a new closure through ritual severance, where the story is fully realized and “The Subject” is finally liberated. After fifteen years with this story, the string that has been tied to the memory now worn from the tension and ready for release, this story has become a place of study and reflection rather than a place of suffering.
We invite the listener to bring their own attributions to these concepts, offering this work as a final, articulate recollection of a memory before the inevitability of the future.
-Living With Giants