Steve is no stranger to breaking the mold. This is certain. And if the predecessor The Noise Militia (# 38/76) wasn’t enough to clear even the most stubborn minds, Lieberman closes the circle, or rather, draws a decidedly personal Fibonachesque sequence.

The forge in which the creative histrionic returns to give enthusiasm and vigor to the handle of his visionary bellows is the one that dwells in the maze of the noise-punk and thrash metal genres. And this could be the most explicit face of this new effort brought and accomplished by the prolific solo artist.

Then, however, continuing to follow Steve’s sonic epic, we come across, at times with surprise, even elements of the marching band and acid jazz.

And here, things immediately get “difficult” or rather need more effort if we really want to pigeonhole them in some clear connotation.

And it is always here, in Steve’s forge, that it becomes evident that Steve’s vision is a genetic evolution alien to the distinction of gender and style but rather an existential rib extrapolated from his being himself.

To understand, or at least try to scratch the surface of the concept that lies within the 68 hours of song, of The Post-Militia Pogo-Battalion (# 39/77), it is essential to know the hand and the craftsman that moves and tow the artist in question.

Above all, there are three critical points that we must take into relation. The first is the prolific activity of Steve, with his first works dated 1991 and dozens and dozens of releases to follow, practically year after year. Over his career, he has commercially released 38 CDs and 38 cassette albums. Most have seen the light since the beginning of 2018.

The second key aspect is his health. Steve suffered from major depressive disorder and committed parasuicide at 17; he has dealt with bipolar disorder since the age of 11. He still fights against progressive leukemia, which ultimately was deemed terminal. And by the end of 2017, Lieberman refused all further cancer treatment.

The third point: on all his releases of him, Lieberman sings and plays all instruments. So in his music, we find all the juice squeezed out of the two citrus fruits, a little sweet, a little bitter, which we mentioned in the previous two points.

This brief rumination, certainly a bit aseptic, is indispensable for us to lower the work of this outsider to a level of codifiable understanding. The drift is therefore experimental, probative as well as exploratory. Declarative as much as interrogative.

At times it contains the meaning of life, the meaning of death. At times the prayer of a lost one, the reckless guidance of an indefatigable seeker.

For those who still cannot find some sort of meaning in listening to a work like this, we remain stuck to another facade factor, purely numerical. We are sure that, speaking of a song more than 35 hours long, Steve’s previous work, many will have wondered “why?”

So here we are talking about an artist who, from the depths of his complexity, gives genesis to an even more mindblowing work, coming to conceive a unique 68-hour work.

We thus return to those roots that have partly corrupted, partly fertilized, the soil from which the Lieberman coin branch branched out. It is something dystonic – always using terms that are comprehensible to the dimension of the mind of a mortal, of a common one – that fishes, indeed, takes us into a purely unexplored cognitive dimension.

It takes courage, and temper, and heart, and love for life, one’s own and that of others, to have an intimate determination to do something similar. To have insane sanity; to extrapolate a slice of all this into identifiable canons.