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"From out of the dark"

From Out Of The Dark

From out of the dark is a collection of 6 songs finished during the infamous Covid lockdown of 2020, drawing musical influences from many different genres and based on different themes close to my heart.

Some with a narrative, others about how I felt a particular junction in life, playing music, writing and recording songs has been a great outlet for me and helped me deal with and express myself in a productive fashion.

With no single genre over the six songs I decided to put them out as From out of the dark, to show how something good can come from the darkness. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed making them.

I appreciate so much all the friends and family who have helped critique these tracks ready for public consumption. Thanks also to my younger sister, Hannah, for providing her vocal talents and lyric writing on two of the songs.

Please listen below and follow me on all of my social networks using the links above.

Matt x

#TheLastWish (#TheWitcher 0.5) by #AndrzejSapkowski mini spoiler free book review

The Last Wish (The Witcher, #0.5)The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I was never not going to enjoy The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski being a lover of both the Witcher video game and the Netflix original TV series. This prequel book is more similar to the latter, and is episodically written with many of the stories cropping up in the TV show. This suits the nature of the Witcher profession, as they're not typical adventurers seeking the glory and fame of becoming heroes but are skilled swordsmen and magic practitioners with genetic "enhancements" to allow them to be extremely agile and sensitive to their surrounding environments, working based (usually) on purely financial motivations, fighting and ridding the world of monsters based on contracts collected in villages, towns and cities.

I thought I would be getting an origins story, and was a little disappointed that this is not the case with "The Last Wish", however upon realising this was "The Witcher 0.5" I settled in to enjoy the collection of short stories on offer.

From rogue genies to magical curses; strange devilish creatures and mutants, there's a fair amount of meat here, and we meet Yennifer for the first time and discover her and Geralt's "origin" story. All the creatures and battle scenes are described really fully and in vivid detail, and the book can be quite gory in places, but I also enjoyed how not all stories automatically end in mindless, brutal combat. There's a lot of it, for sure, but it's all considered and Geralt isn't one to fight needlessly.

My personal highlights were The Last Wish, the tale of an escaped genie that removes bard Dandelion of his voice, and A Grain Of Truth, the tale of a cursed man living in a forest, who has taken on the form of a great beast and is very surprised when Geralt doesn't automatically attack and vanquish him. Queue an interesting conversation between Witcher and beast that reaches an unexpected conclusion.

Well written, paced and never dull, The Last Wish serves as a good introduction to Witcher literature, though I imagine it may be more challenging for readers unfamiliar with the TV show or video game. As a fan of both though, I really enjoyed it.



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