This album is billed as "Theatrical Commemorative II, Ikuhara Selection 2" in the COMPLETE CD-BOX. It was released in conjunction with the previous album, OST 6, Advent of Nirvanic Beauty ~Androgynous Me~, as hype for the upcoming movie, Adolescence Apocalypse.

It is entirely new content by J.A. Seazer, with the original iteration of the two duel songs used in the film here: Revive! Infinite History of the [Middle Ages] is the first published version of Saionji's duel, and Shura -Flesh Constellation in the αψζ Nebula- is Juri's. (They take place in this order, though the tracklist here places the latter first.) The first track, Revival Record of the Rose Egg, is an instrumental piece that is used during the opening credits of the film.

How much one likes this album depends entirely on how much they like J.A. Seazer's work. Aside from the above mentioned songs, none of these are used in any of the Utena content that exists right now, they are only here. This being fine by me, I love this album and it's often one of my go-tos. Some of these songs certainly feel like duels, but most are not franetic enough, though they are dramatic and bizarre in the best possible way. Astragalus Earth Backgammon and The Oceanic Moon Dies in Indigo are a couple of the stand-outs, and the ridiculously long, slow, eerie, We Who Have Cast Ourselves Aside Become Fallen Angels strikes me as something that could have replaced Missing Link if the lyrics had suited the events more. This version of Juri's duel is the better one. It just is.

Am I really an adult....?

Though I asked myself that a lot as a teenager, I never came to an answer. I couldn't come up with a definition for the word 'adult'. For myself, I tried to define it through age, sense of responsibility, the issues of marriage and sex — all the obvious criteria came up, but it was still as murky as the bottom of a lake. Regardless, everyone else just went and drew the line one way or another. Parents, teachers, they're clearly just people pretending they're adults....

Actually, am I really an 'adult' now....?

Maybe an 'adult' is someone who tries to be mature....

[Thank you so much to Gallia Valentine for this translation!]

I've been a J.A. Seazer freak for more than 20 years.

In my opinion, J.A. Seazer has been the most important artist of the Japanese underground music scene since the 70s.

However, his real merit has (conversely) been continuously ignored by mass media. Since the 80s, the music business has been focused on growing sales, and on the musical production of an imagined reality to gratify the desires of listeners. J.A. Seazer's music is on an opposing vector to that kind of quantitative information-capitalist expansion.

Seazer's music feels like a multi-genre synthesis, a rich remixture of enka, Japanese and world ethnic music, art rock from the 60s on, and modern music. However, he has his own unique style. Sometimes it invokes nostalgia; sometimes it pushes the listener to anxiety. In other words, Seazer's music always poses a riddle to its listener by building a kind of tension between the artist and the audience.

Since the 80s, he has — rather naturally — maintained a certain distance from commercialism, so encountering his music placed me among a very select number of people who had experienced that pleasure. Thanks to Director Ikuhara's keen eye 'discovering' Seazer's music, and his use of theater music for the soundtrack of Revolutionary Girl Utena, many more people are now aware of Seazer's work. It's wonderful. (Though I do feel a little sad that it's no longer my own personal secret.)

Now I will turn to the riddle J.A. Seazer has posed me with this album.

The music of Revival Record of the Rose Egg Sofia seems to be composed on the concept of 'resurrection of the Middle Ages'. Though it goes against the usual practice of music commentary, I want to imagine a new aspect to Utena's musical world, from just the image those words conjure.

To answer to the riddle that the magician Seazer, in the guise of the sphinx, has posed, I will here point to the title Revival Record of the Rose Egg Sofia as the basis for this new musical sphere.

First, "rose" as the rose bride, Anthy. In the medieval French work The Tale of the Rose¹, roses represent chastity and pure love while also standing for carnal lust. Initially, Utena was created as a character holding two opposing aspects — Anthy acts as Utena's externalized dark side, so to speak.

Surrounded by brutally obscene phantasms, unfettered by existing morals or Reason, while unmoved by immoral actions — the gradually-constructed figure of Anthy as the witch resembles the heroine of Marquis de Sade's novel Juliette. In her numbness, her whole self has been disappeared, and she is made into the repulsive and completely Othered witch, who is responsible for all immoral actions. However, this is simply the bared underside of Utena's personality as 'the girl'. Utena tries to become a prince, she tries to be noble, while suppressing her own dark side. She keeps fighting to bury it. (To me, that's what makes Utena so fantastic.)

Now, the "egg". "If the egg's shell is not broken, the chick will die … for the revolution of the world" is repeated many times, symbolizing the continuing transformation of the 'world'. We see the duels recurring again and again, moving endlessly towards 'eternity'. However, the duels are staged by a malicious god, Ohtori Akio, so they can never break the eggshell of Ohtori Academy. The 'egg' is controlled by the whims of that malicious god, who seems to concentrate all his considerable power on that place. There, light and darkness can exist at once, both holding the same energy.

Finally, "revival". The rose, filled with contradicting, ambiguous doubled meanings, represents the self — that is, the entire human body, which is born from the egg. When the egg is restored, a new age — far different from the 'modern' age ruled by Reason — will begin. This may be what J.A. Seazer means by the revival of the "middle ages".

As Revival Record of the Rose Egg Sofia adds to the musical world of Revolutionary Girl Utena, and to the world of the movie Revolutionary Girl Utena, we — you and I — are added to by the unfulfilled unification of our minds and bodies. Just as those works do not end before they are complete, I hope the limitless, endless unknowns and differences between us call us to continue connecting.

1. Translator note: Le Roman de la Rose; usually titled in English The Romance of the Rose. The Japanese title gives a slightly different impression, so I retain it here. Incidentally, the Dream of Scipio — another book about a dream-vision, and named in Seazer's song "Spira Mirabilis Theatre" — is mentioned in the book's opening lines.

[Thank you so much to Gallia Valentine for this translation!]

     The Medieval Tale of the Rose and Musical Alchemistic Thought

By now, at the composition of Revolutionary Girl Utena / Revival Record of the Rose Egg Sofia, some of the empty spaces in the soul of Revolutionary Girl Utena have filled in. That shape quietly showed itself in early 1990, in Umberto Eco's mystery novel The Name of the Rose. As it happens, Director Ikuhara decided to use "Absolute Destiny Apocalypse" in Revolutionary Girl Utena from the first episode on, for the scene of ascending to the duelling arena; he might have taken hints from the movie of The Name of the Rose starring Sean Connery and the chorus in the opening scene of Banyuu Inryoku's production of Kaspar Hauser.

I again mirrored The Name of the Rose — for example, just as in the scene in [Jean] Cocteau's movie Orphée where the eponymous Orpheus visits his dead wife Eurydice, and she is taken into the mirror, I decided to take myself to that age — yes, the medieval period. Then I wandered, and am still wandering, through "the ape mimicking God," "the intricate device tempting with its mysterious and deceptive pleasures," "the infinitely repeating cycle of the principle of decadence," "the loneliness of the medieval alchemist peering into the bottom of the retort," "the discovery of the principle behind the steam engine, compression pump, and siphon, and that principle's application by Ctesibius' disciple to the design of game machines," "organ, abacus, and globe," "sundial, human form, and water organ," " 'What use is it?' 'In discovering the hidden secret,' " "mysteries of Bishop Magdeburg's hall," "natural magic and the androgynous," "cave, labyrinth, and statue," "Mannerist artists love a capricious angel: wisdom from the Grand Encyclopedia," "hermaphroditic thought," and others.¹

Not living
But moving in the image of life;
They circle about your heads.
Once briefly alive and bright,
These things bring themselves to move
Still, for they await Eternity.
    —Faust²

Eating bread and drinking wine, I started to sketch out some words on manuscript paper (a composition Zeichnung³) in silence. A wave rose in the sea of words, and crashed forward.

     1. The Rose, The Name of the Rose, And the Medieval Tale of the Rose

"The rose is the martyr, or the virgin." (Petrus of Mora, Bishop of Capua.)⁴ The June miracle of the roses.⁵ The first part of the medieval Tale of the Rose, which is titled A Tale of Chivalric Love, is based on the literary traditions of: "battling for love in sleep," "using a story to teach the secrets of love," "the lovers' erotic trial" — " 'The Name of the Rose' is used again and again in the medieval period to signify the infinite power of words. For example, there is the quotation from [Peter] Abelard, "the power of language is such that it is as if the rose lives on in the word";⁶ there is Dante's mystic rose; and there is also Yeats' evocation of the rose.⁷ In other words, the name of the rose is a "term with the power to evoke existence; namely, language." ([Umberto] Eco.)" In addition, the 'egg', in alchemical theory, represents the crucible in which experiments are performed to transform base metal into noble metal, and signifies the miracle of boundless creative chaos contained within a single ordered form.⁸ The philosophical egg. The Cosmic Egg. [Michael] Maier's Atalanta Fugiens⁹ reveals how a mystical force draws the Occult, music, and illustration together into one whole.

It was here that the term 'rose egg' was born.

     2. Revive! O Immortal History, the Middle Ages!

Bearded and long-haired, looking like primitive barbarians from a forgotten era, the alchemists thought "If the imagined spirit (archaeus) dwells within the womb, then with a made space like the womb, it is possible to sow semen therewithin by scientific method and create artificial life," and peered at the black figure within the retort. The cursed science. The dim laboratory. The small, solitary life. The theme of endless temptation — that splendor — and the medieval wizards dreaming their transparent fantasies. The Book of Nature, The Book of Monsters, The Book of All Creation, The Book of Discovery and Invention, The Book of Angels, The Book of Hermaphroditism, The Book of Magic, The Book of the End of the World, The Book of Eroticism, The Book of Paganism, and The Book of Secrets.¹⁰

I composed by the light of a burning candle for four days and three nights. When I threw open the window and looked towards the burning red of the evening sun, I saw a million medieval alchemists wearing armor, straddling white horses. I called out to them! "Utinam reviviscat Medium Aevum! Let the medieval age return to life! In our souls! Our spirits! Our flesh! Our eyes! Our hands! Our blood and breath! Come to life! Medieval age! The whole of that time! In our rooms! Our clothes!"


Translator notes:

1. These are references to ancient, medieval, and early modern Western alchemy and magic. The union of male and female in a single space or body, the human ape patterning itself after god, and of course some of the the various technological instruments are all general alchemical references. Ctesibius, or Ktesibios (285-222 BCE) was a Greek inventor, author of a treatise on pneumatics, and inventor of both the hydraulic clock and a kind of water organ, predecessor to the modern church organ — note Seazer's above references to clocks and organs.

2. My translation of Seazer's Japanese. Stuart Atkins' translation of the original German:
About your heads there hover,
moving but lifeless, images of living things.
Resplendent glories, now no more,
are stirring still, for they would be eternal.
Faust II, Act 1.
Some lines in the Seazer song "Angelic Creation, Namely Light" seem related to those from Faust given here.)

3. Zeichnung: a drawing (German).

4. Usually referred to as Peter of Capua (d. 1219). (Seazer's text actually has it as ペストル (Pesutoru), like "pestle.")

5. I believe the exact quote is "The rose is the choir of martyrs, or yet again the Virgin of virgins." Though the miracle of the roses is associated with several different saints and martyrs, the Virgin Mary and Jesus are particularly closely associated with the flower. Mary is sometimes called 'the rose without thorns', since she is free of original sin.

6. A paraphrase of Abelard's example on the phrase "nulla rosa est" — that is, the phrase is still meaningful even without any actual roses.

7. Yeats, while certainly not medieval, was himself an occultist interested in alchemy. Dante's mystic rose, like "nulla rosa est," is mentioned in Eco's postscript to The Name of the Rose.

8. I have here provided a distillation of Shibusawa Tatsuhiko's explanation of the phrase in question rather than a straight translation of the phrase itself; I suspect that is where Seazer came across it in the first place, anyway.

9. A 1617 book where each section is composed of verse, illustration, prose, and music, all put together. The subject is the myth of Atalanta, but it is an alchemical text.

10. The "book of nature" is the medieval idea that nature is an open book, written by God, to be read and understood. The other 'titles' are presumably an elaboration of this concept.

[Thank you so much to Gallia Valentine for this translation and the DELICIOUS notes!]