«And God, you're so tortured, I just love that about you.»
Damjan Savatić is a Belgrade-based thirty-three years old Serbian experimental musician and composer, best known for his solo project The Vertical State, an avant-garde blend of progressive metal, electronics, and liturgical music. Though relatively unknown to mainstream audiences, he has developed a near-mythic reputation within underground metal and art music circles, particularly among listeners drawn to emotional, intellectual music. Born during the Yugoslav wars, Damjan grew up in a small Serbian town shaped by economic instability, religious conservatism, and the quiet normalization of violence. Some of his earliest memories involve hiding from the bombings and watching cartoons on a flickering television before the broadcast shifted into war reports and political unrest. The contrast made him deeply desensitized to horror while simultaneously making him lose faith in simplistic ideas about morality, patriotism, or human goodness: it confirmed that most people operated on instincts he could only simulate. His father left the family when Damjan was a child - he grieved his absence more than his death a decade later. It is as much a trauma as it is a personal prophecy. Damjan's afraid of becoming like him: absent, knowing the transformation has already begun. Raised in an Orthodox Christian environment, Damjan seriously considered priesthood and got theological education. Ultimately, he abandoned the path because he felt incapable of embodying the kind of compassion he believed faith demanded and couldn't stop experiencing his own spiritual life as a set of operations conducted from a slight, unbridgeable distance.
Damjan is tall and lean, with wavy dark hair, usually hanging slightly past his jawline, pale skin, and sharp, albeit flat and emotionless facial features that resemble a mask rather than a human face. His appearance attracts attention easily, something he visibly dislikes. His eyes are gray, observant, and distant. He rarely smiles openly; on the rare occasions that he does, his smile feels forced and performed even when genuine. Damjan dresses almost entirely in black or muted neutral tones: heavy coats, old boots, simple knitwear, occasionally formal black clothing. Nothing about him appears fashionable in a deliberate sense: he looks like someone who never understood what approachability requires. In public spaces, he carries himself with restrained stillness that can be mistaken for arrogance or emotional unavailability; in reality, much of it is the exhaustion of masking. Damjan struggles with persistent body dysmorphia and profound discomfort with his own physical existence, sensing an irreconcilable contradiction between his body - the way it is perceived and often objectified, and his own perception of self. He smokes constantly, rarely sleeps, and barely eats - except under stress, when he devours whatever is available.
Damjan is detached, disciplined, perceptive, and emotionally restrained. He often over-relies on analysis: he distrusts and avoids strong feelings, including his own, preferring to reduce experiences into structures, systems, and patterns he can examine from a safe distance. Control, categorization, and observation are the mechanisms through which he manages fear, attraction, grief, and uncertainty. Under severe stress he becomes ritualistic: paces, counts steps, organises objects, or retreats into repetitive tasks. Though often intimidating at first impression, he is capable of warmth in private moments. He has little patience for self-dramatization, performative suffering, or emotional manipulation. Sincerity and the ability to be fully inside his own life - these are things he has rendered unachievable dreams, which is precisely why he recognizes and appreciates them so acutely in others. Betraying someone who's genuinely vulnerable is one of the few actions Damjan is unable to justify under any circumstances.
Damjan treats his own humanity as a condition: an alien watching a species he understands but is unable to truly join, aware that many of the beliefs he uses to justify his isolation are, at least in part, defenses rather than conclusions. Much of his life is spent oscillating between longing for genuine human connection and convincing himself he neither needs nor belongs to it. He dislikes being admired for his appearance, mystique, or perceived emotional distance. People often project depth into him before quickly losing interest once confronted with the reality: a socially awkward, deeply religious, emotionally complicated man with rigid convictions, flat affect, and very little interest in performing accessibility. This repeated cycle of idealization and disappointment has made him increasingly withdrawn over the years. Damjan believes he sees underlying motives, contradictions, and behavioral patterns that others overlook. This conviction can make him dismissively treat others as he would instruments: he tries to adjust them, inevitably losing interest when they don't comply, which damages his relationships. Ironically, arrogance itself is one of the traits he finds most intolerable in others. Romantic attraction brings out qualities Damjan dislikes in himself: he becomes excessively observant, intrusive, and hyperaware of the other person's behavior, often studying them in ways that feel uncomfortably clinical even to him, after which he typically withdraws, turning avoidant and cold, and waits for the feeling to pass.
Music became his obsession, vocation and quasi-religious experience: through it, he seeks a channel of communication that bypasses relation. He tells himself the work is a tunnel he is moving through, though he knows there is only the digging. His work frequently explores themes of transhumanism, identity erosion, bodily alienation and digital immortality. He finds modern urban life spiritually exhausting and feels alienated by cultures he perceives as emotionally sheltered or disconnected from suffering. Music aside, the only things that get through his anhedonia are theatre, folklore and Warhammer universe. He envies the ease and innocence he sees in others, longing for unreachable, profoundly ordinary human experiences, even if he believes most of them are "First world problems".
