Every transformation begins with a quiet undoing.

Long before the world paused, something within me had already begun to loosen. Around 2018, a subtle restlessness surfaced — not dramatic enough to force change, but persistent enough to whisper: this chapter is ending.

I had built my identity around being a makeup artist. It was what I did. It was who I was. And yet, beneath the surface, a question was forming.

Then the world fell silent.

When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived and lockdowns made it impossible to continue my work, the structure I had relied on dissolved overnight. What once felt stable suddenly had no ground. And in that stillness, a deeper question rose:

If this role disappears… who remains?
If the title falls away… what is left?

Ashes of Earth holds that moment of suspension — the space between who I had been and who I had not yet remembered myself to be. The breath of the duduk carries a sense of mourning, like wind moving through ruins. The harp’s gentle arpeggios flicker like distant light. Beneath it all, the cello pulses forward — quiet, steady — as if something unseen is already in motion.

The EP’s visual language was shaped by a dream: I was inside a spacecraft, leaving Earth. As I looked through the window, I saw a figure reaching outward, their body dissolving into dust, slowly disintegrating into the air.

It did not feel violent.
It felt inevitable.

A form returning to particles.
An identity shedding its shell.

That image became the seed of EP 222.

Ashes of Earth is the first chapter in that arc — the dissolution before the signal is sent, the collapse before the search begins. What follows in the next tracks is not destruction, but transmission… remembrance… and emergence.

Before there is a new dawn, there must be ashes.