Gregory Ritchey kept his old poems in a binder, some written more than 25 years ago, long before he considered turning them into songs. He records as Silent Deep Ocean, a funeral doom project based in Venus, Texas. In an email interview with Doomnation Radio, he describes returning to those pages to decide which could become music. Some poems remained attached to a particular moment in his life; others contained questions he could reconsider with the experience of the intervening years. The words had survived long enough for their author to become a different reader.
Much of Essence of Existence II: The Blood of Ghosts began in that binder. The album appeared digitally on October 1, 2026, with a CD edition on GS Productions. Ritchey performed all its vocals and instruments himself. The “II” connects it to Essence of Existence, released in February 2026, on which he worked with soprano vocalist and guitarist Tehina Spasova, who also conceived its title. The two records grew from the same period of writing: some compositions intended for the earlier album ended up on the later one, which gave Ritchey room to arrange them into a separate sequence.
Preservation can make an old poem seem entitled to a place on a record simply because it has survived. Ritchey’s willingness to alter these texts puts that entitlement into question. The younger writer left him material; the musician returning to it still has to decide what belongs in a song. The distance between the two becomes productive when an earlier choice is open to disagreement. A poem written 25 years ago can still need another draft.
On The Blood of Ghosts, orchestral keyboards carry melodies across a foundation of slow guitar riffs, with extended synthesizer passages opening out around the heavier sections. The voice moves between low growls and spoken delivery. These long instrumental spaces give the poems room to develop beyond the words themselves, turning an image into a setting that can occupy several minutes of a song.
Finding the opposite word
The most literal form of that disagreement is “Primordial Doctrines of Creation,” the second track on The Blood of Ghosts, which Ritchey developed by replacing words from an older poem with their opposites. The immediate problem was practical: “I was undergoing a terrible case of writer’s block so I wanted a different approach to unlock my creativity.”
An antonym can only be found once the original word has been pinned down. “Working with antonyms makes me examine the exact meaning of a word before finding its opposite,” Ritchey writes. “It requires me to draw more deliberately on my linguistic repository.” The new version began with a closer reading of the old one.
An opposite still depends on the word it rejects. In Ritchey’s method, the earlier poem continues to determine the new one’s choices even as its vocabulary is overturned, and revision becomes an argument conducted within language he already knows. The method also reduces writer’s block to a manageable scale: the next word offers somewhere to begin when the demand for an entirely new poem has stopped yielding results.
Asked for a passage showing the original beside the revision, Ritchey wrote back: “Unfortunately, I have lost the original poetry book, so I cannot provide a reliable before-and-after passage from ‘Primordial Doctrines of Creation.'”
Another song began with someone else’s writing. The album’s opening track, “The Blood of Ghosts I-The Stars Have Devoured Me,” draws on Ritchey’s memory of “Born of Stars,” a poem by Midnight Blade. Ritchey identifies Midnight Blade as a poet and photographer who had designed artwork for his early dark ambient releases. He remembers the poem as a meditation on human smallness beneath the night sky, but he had lost access to its text by the time he wanted to use it in full.
“I do not remember the poem line by line, so I worked from its essence and the impression it left on me rather than reproducing it,” he explains.
The two missing texts leave different kinds of absence behind them. The loss of Ritchey’s own poetry book prevents him from laying out the stages of a revision; the Midnight Blade poem was already out of reach when it shaped the opening song, so what survives is the encounter with another writer’s imagination. The song carries a debt whose exact dimensions Ritchey can no longer reconstruct. Crediting Midnight Blade preserves that relationship without pretending that memory has kept the poem intact.
The bird brought down to earth
Ritchey had worked with another poet’s words before, on Essence of Existence. Its song “Your Last Winter” credits the poet Emily Dickinson and borrows lines from her poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”. Dickinson imagines hope as a small bird perched in the soul. It sings through the gale, in “the chillest land” and on “the strangest Sea,” and never asks for a crumb in return.
The published lyrics assign the opening verse of “Your Last Winter” to Spasova: Dickinson’s first lines lead into Ritchey’s own images of a bird bound to the soil, with a cold body and damaged wings. The change puts Dickinson’s assurance under pressure: the creature that represents hope has acquired a body that can fail.
Dickinson’s bird already inhabits a world of hostile weather; her poem’s confidence comes from imagining the storm and letting the song continue through it. In “Your Last Winter,” bodily injury makes the bird vulnerable to the conditions it once seemed able to withstand. Yet the lyrics keep coming back to its singing, which sustains hope even where its survival seems physically impossible.
On Essence of Existence, “Your Last Winter” is followed immediately by “A Nameless Grave for a Dead Bird,” whose lyrics describe a burial without a name carved to mark it. The bird has already entered the ground before its image returns beside a human grave on the later record.
The bird reappears on The Blood of Ghosts, in the fifth track, “A Quiet Place to Remember Loved Ones”, which places a speaker at a loved one’s grave. Its lyrics invoke Dickinson’s feathered hope with an “if,” then leave it “bereft and bare to the sky.” Read alongside “Your Last Winter,” the image carries the earlier poem’s promise of consolation into a scene where the speaker cannot reach the person he misses.
The grave gives that difficulty a location. A visit brings the living as close as the burial place allows while leaving the separation intact: it gives grief something to do, but no control over what the act can achieve.
Where the loss begins
Turning poems into songs also meant deciding where those songs belonged. Ritchey says the first three tracks on The Blood of Ghosts, from its opening title piece through “Primordial Doctrines of Creation” to “A Breath Taken in Desolation,” had been intended for Essence of Existence, then left out because of running-time constraints. On the later album, they became the opening sequence.
The title piece had initially been intended to close The Blood of Ghosts. Ritchey moved it to the beginning when he chose “Absentia Seraphorum” as the final track, finding that song “more powerful and climactic as a conclusion.” The Latin title can be rendered “Absence of the Seraphim,” referring to angelic beings. Changing the songs’ positions determined where the album’s story of loss would begin and where it would end.
By subject, the opening and closing songs move the album from human smallness beneath the stars to the absence of one particular person. A life can appear negligible against the cosmos and still be irreplaceable to someone else. Placing the cemetery sequence at the end makes that personal consequence the last problem the record presents.
“A Memory of Loss,” the fourth track, raised a different question about placement. At 22 minutes and 10 seconds, it is the album’s longest piece, and Ritchey considered releasing it as a standalone single. It now follows the three songs carried over from the earlier writing period and precedes the two closing songs, a position Ritchey calls a bridge between the record’s two halves.
Out of sight of land
Ritchey first conceived “A Memory of Loss” for the dark ambient music he releases under his own name, alongside his work as Silent Deep Ocean. He recalls starting from sustained tones and gradual changes, then finding that the extended piece needed a heavier resolution as it grew.
While developing “A Memory of Loss,” Ritchey was listening to Ahab, a German funeral doom band, particularly their 2009 album The Divinity of Oceans. He points to their use of clean guitar, played without heavy distortion, as a way of suggesting space and depth that he wanted to explore in his own composition.
In “A Memory of Loss,” the clean guitar has a specific job. “I imagined someone lost upon the ocean, alone in a rowboat with no land in sight,” he writes. “The clean guitar represents the gentle, rolling waves surrounding that person.”
The rowboat comes from an experience aboard a much larger vessel: “I have experienced being out of sight of land aboard a warship, so I drew on that memory while imagining how vulnerable someone in a small boat would feel.”
The waves can stay gentle while the person in the boat remains exposed, because the danger lies in the distance from land and the size of the vessel. Ritchey’s memory supplies the empty horizon; shrinking the warship to a rowboat strips away the protection around the person scanning it. Calm water offers no assurance of rescue. The scene can hold still without becoming safe.
That image gives the clean guitar an environment to establish, with a vulnerable person inside it. The compositional problem follows: how long can that person drift in the same stretch of water before the music has to change?
Ritchey says he generally allows a passage up to about three minutes before asking whether it has become repetitive, a call he makes while composing: “I judge when the opening has established its scene and needs to develop.”
Once the parts were recorded, the mix posed its own problem. Ritchey names contrabasses and cellos alongside timpani, the orchestral drums, among the parts competing for room with guitar and bass. He says he adjusted the tone of the sustained guitar tracks to leave space for strings and ambient layers, aiming to retain the guitar’s force while keeping quieter details audible.
Returning from the cemetery
After “A Memory of Loss,” the album closes with “A Quiet Place to Remember Loved Ones” and “Absentia Seraphorum,” which Ritchey presents as connected scenes from one speaker’s experience: the first at the grave, the second in the sadness and regret that remain after leaving the cemetery.
Asked whether the two songs are also connected musically, Ritchey points to the words instead: “The continuation is lyrical rather than a deliberate musical connection.”
The two songs’ published lyrics make that continuity physical. In “A Quiet Place to Remember Loved Ones,” the speaker kneels and touches the ground, trying to reach someone through the soil. In “Absentia Seraphorum,” the world keeps its outward form after the presence that gave it meaning has gone: “structure without presence.” In sequence, the loss spreads from the grave into the world the speaker must go on inhabiting.
Ritchey’s release notes also describe “Absentia Seraphorum” as a meditation on the absence of the divine. In his interview, he connects its angelic imagery to the voice and presence of the person the speaker has lost. The language allows a human absence to disturb his sense of a larger spiritual order.
The title The Blood of Ghosts names a belief Ritchey set out in the notes to Essence of Existence: people who have died continue through the memories and actions of the living. That idea offers remembrance a sustaining role, while the last song confronts its limits.
Ritchey calls the speaker’s realization anagnorisis, a moment of recognition. Aristotle examines the term in his Poetics, explaining it as a movement from ignorance to knowledge within a dramatic plot. Ritchey uses it for the speaker’s understanding that he has made a terrible mistake whose consequences cannot be undone. In that framing, grief becomes inseparable from responsibility for earlier actions.
The recognition arrives too late to become a conversation. In Ritchey’s scenario, the speaker can answer for his own conduct, but the person he addresses cannot answer him. His sadness establishes how much the loss means to him; it cannot establish whether he would be forgiven. A story of regret can easily begin to treat the mourner’s suffering as payment for whatever came before. Keeping the other person’s response out of reach leaves that uncomfortable question unsettled.
Set against Ritchey’s rewriting, the closing scene exposes the limits of revision. A new word can change what an old poem says; the speaker’s recognition leaves him with a past he understands differently and still has to live with. Ritchey brings that problem down to the size of a chair at sunset:
My thought was: I have returned from the cemetery, but I am still deeply sad. I am sitting in a chair at sunset, thinking that I will never see this person again because of my transgressions.
