Behind the music: “Scapegoat”
Part of a series exploring each piece on my debut album, Look How Brightly
I discovered the euphoric dancefloor of DTPM, a Sunday evening LGBT+ club night at Fabric in Clerkenwell, soon after I moved to London from rural Wales in 2004. It had a strong sense of community that I hadn’t experienced before, and attending became a weekly ritual set to optimistic funky house music. Scored for string quartet and kick drum, Scapegoat draws its driving loops and momentum directly from the dancefloor of DTPM. While it doesn’t try to replicate the music itself, it channels the same sense of collective ritual, rhythm, and release that I and so many friends experienced there.
An emotional block
This was the last piece I wrote for the album. While the album spans a ten-year period of my work, my instinct was that I needed to write one final piece to cap it all off. The pressure was real, and I delayed the process endlessly, not only from indecision but also from fear. After all, writing this final piece meant completing the album and moving a step closer to releasing the whole body of work.
Eventually, I turned to a close friend who works with intuition and energy healing. After she helped clear some emotional blocks, I sketched out the piece the very next day. The title arrived just as quickly. For some reason, Scapegoat felt right: weighted, layered, and emotionally charged.
Ancient rituals, modern echoes
The biblical scapegoat is a goat burdened with the people’s sins and cast into the wilderness: “The goat will carry all their guilt on itself to a remote, desolate place” (Leviticus 16:22). In Ancient Greece, the pharmakós was a sacrificial figure expelled to cleanse the city. In Japanese folklore, hitogata — small human-shaped dolls — absorbed impurity before being discarded. In my own Welsh heritage, a “sin-eater” consumed bread and beer over a corpse, symbolically taking on its sins. That person was gravely needed by the community but also shunned, a figure of both compassion and cruelty.
That duality and tension live inside Scapegoat. The house music-inspired loops have a pounding physicality, yet moments of fragility appear when the strings fray, hover, and break down.
Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt’s “The Scapegoat”
Scapegoating today
The practice of scapegoating persists. In times of fear or uncertainty, it is often easier to find a target than to face complexity. Too often, that target is whoever can most easily be defined as “other,” frequently the very person or group most in need of protection. Scapegoating is a cruel illusion: it can unite people temporarily, but it never resolves anything.
This pattern appears not only in society but also within families. In systems theory, one member — often a child — may be unconsciously cast as the “identified patient,” absorbing the dysfunction others refuse to acknowledge. Family therapist Virginia Satir saw this as a symptom of hidden “secret agendas.” Psychiatrist R. D. Laing put it more bluntly: “The person who gets diagnosed is part of a wider network of extremely disturbed and disturbing patterns of communication.” In other words, the scapegoat is chosen to carry the group’s pain, not because they are its cause.
Whether in religion, society, the workplace, or the family, scapegoats are selected to hold what others cannot bear to face.
The musical scapegoat
The music mirrors these tensions. The kick drum hammers a grounding pulse while the strings surge, twist, and circle — sometimes aligned, sometimes breaking apart. Loops escalate like accusations.
The rhythm of blame tightens, drives forward, and fractures. There are hopeful glimmers as the frenzy builds. If catharsis comes, it is ambiguous. Has something been lifted, or merely displaced? Is the ritual cleansing, or does it expose an unease we would rather deny?
A ritual of reckoning
At its core, Scapegoat is about what we carry and what we try to offload, about communal energy and the loneliness of being the vessel. For me, it came at a moment of discomfort and uncertainty — desperately wanting to finish the album but sabotaging it through indecision and procrastination.
Perhaps that is the real subject: the tension between holding back and letting go. No wonder my mind returned to the sense of freedom I experienced on the dancefloor more than twenty years ago, and to the music that invited so many to go on a weekly transformation.
As the final piece I wrote for this album in spring 2025, it feels like both an ending and a reckoning, where the personal, social, and sonic intertwine. If there is a ritual here, it is not one of clarity or absolution. It is a ritual of circling, feeling, and confronting complexity.