(Un)spoken words
Style: post-punk, alternative rock
Color: violet, mint
Theme: quality and quantity of words
Foreword
The faculty of speech: a gift or a curse of homo sapiens? The word can kill, or it can just go unnoticed. Chatter is coughing up from an insatiable mouth and clings to the irritated ear of the listener like mucus. On the other hand lucid speech is pleasing to the ear and it allows you to make articulate sounds. The loudness of the spoken words is often inversely proportional to the amount of meaning in them.
The ability to ignore helps, but not for long, because a social beeing is obliged to follow the rules of a noisy society in order to feel the pulse of the modern world. But you can try to calibrate the distance between you and different people. People who speak.
Lyrics
No courage to say
The right words
To the right person
Dumbness affected
Muscles of face
Buried under palaver
Over and over
People belch out
Empty words
Sentient creatures use speech
That stick like a vile leech
Dumb animals seem wiser
Degrade. More words of low grade
With pleasure I fade
There is no reason to stay
Better to do
Than to say
Time to get
Under way
Silence is waiting for me
Mentally quiet and free
Forced to dwell
In the town
In droning crowd
I drown
Incredibly hard to be
Mentally quiet and free
Mixtories
Bulging eyes, gills spread to the sides… Such is the final image of a face frozen in a grimace of fear. Throughout its life this creature never uttered a single word, yet this in no way diminishes either its dignity or the importance of its role in the earthly world. Moreover, in a world where too many people chatter endlessly, the animal’s silence acquires an even deeper meaning, granting restless bipeds the chance to feel themselves a part of nature. Thank you, animal.
In a cold corner of an unknown room lie scattered fragments of information. With a very limited shelf life, the scribbles are almost forced to be printed, year after year continuing the unbroken relay of spewing words into the public habitats. The question arises: what is the value of this information? No wonder the smoke of burning letters irritates the sense of smell no less than empty words do the mind…
Credits
Behind the song
The story of (Un)spoken words began in July 2019, when Anton Ra composed the verse arpeggios; just a month later, the music was fully tracked. From the very start, the song’s concept was rooted in genres like New Wave and Post-Punk, making it the first track of this stylistic direction in Mixte’s repertoire. A bit later, it was fleshed out with gritty riffs straight out of the 1990s alternative scene, further expanding the song’s stylistic boundaries. The music video was filmed between May and August 2021, featuring then-drummer Frank Hanneken. Those were the final months of that particular band lineup, and by the time the video was released in December of that same year, Anton Ra was the only member remaining in the band.
The lyrics delve into the imbalance between the quality and quantity of spoken words and information as a whole, especially in our current era of data pollution. In 2025, a remastered version of the video was released in higher quality. The audio also underwent a few changes: the rhythm guitar parts gave way to synths, beautifully enriching the song’s sonic palette.