Light Remembering Its Darkness: The Dual Essence of Mara and Samatha ‣ CVLTARTES

There’s something deeply unsettling in the way duality breathes through Mara and Samatha, two faces of the same cosmic being, the same trembling soul of Belgian composer Gert Stockmans. On November 21st, the artist unveils a two-track offering that feels less like a release and more like a ritual incision, ‘Wanderer of Light’ and ‘Seeker of Shadows,’ each a pulse from opposing poles of consciousness. Together, they do not merely coexist; they orbit each other like celestial bodies locked in gravitational confession, one illuminating the other through contrast, through necessary opposition.

Under the Samatha moniker, ‘Wanderer of Light’ moves like breath in slow motion. It is the sound of dawn before it realizes itself, the slow unfurling of warmth through an atmosphere still heavy with night. Drone layers swell like tectonic sighs beneath delicate piano motifs that drip with the clarity of a newborn star. There is no rush, no climax, only expansion. The listener becomes both participant and witness in this metamorphosis, watching the light learn how to exist, how to grow limbs in the vacuum of silence. It’s an odyssey of becoming, a piece that translates longing into luminescence, where anxiety and serenity waltz together until they dissolve into pure presence.

Then comes Mara, the dark reflection, the inward scream behind the stillness. ‘Seeker of Shadows’ feels carved out of heavier matter, dense and pulsating like the echo of something ancient stirring beneath the skin. Here, guitars replace air with gravity, dragging the ambience into something almost corporeal, post-rock whispers bent under post-metal weight. The march is slow, ceremonial, imperial, yet intimate, as if the shadows themselves were breathing against your spine. In Buddhist myth, Mara tempts with illusion; here, he strips illusion away, revealing the raw, breathing anatomy of despair and beauty intertwined.

If ‘Wanderer of Light’ is the act of inhalation, ‘Seeker of Shadows’ is the exhale that burns on its way out. Together, they frame the cyclical essence of existence, the comfort and the confrontation, the silence and the scream, the birth and the collapse. Gert Stockmans doesn’t compose music so much as he builds emotional architecture: sound as a mirror, harmony as dissection. What he offers through this dual release is a descent and ascension all at once, a requiem and a rebirth, balanced on the fragile edge where light remembers it was once darkness.