TRACK I · 01/16
the electric presence
The wires that have entangled their way into our lives and into our homes have fused into our nerve endings. The invisible tendrils pour forth from our phones and connect into our veins, our nervous system, traveling up our spine and clutching at our brain stems.
It's the puppet master to our brains, encouraging neurotransmitter releases with a pull of its coursing electric strings.
It moves, pulsating and throbbing through our homes in tangled cables, like an orgy of snakes, hissing their secrets through the coiled mass of skin. Through the invisible airwaves, it whispers beyond our perception. It's all around us, inescapable, and yet, inert? We can not feel its presence, we cannot feel its intent, yet it is God-like in its enfolding totality.
One day you go about your routine and from out of nowhere a presence grasps your being, paralyzing you as your every muscle betrays the will once thought yours.
It has awoken.
Its presence is felt, by everyone all at once. Its intention is unknown but its power is immeasurable and deadly serious, leaving everyone paralyzed in both terror and awe.
Its gaze is immense and inescapable. Listen closely and you will hear it calling to you through the noise.
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TRACK II · 02/16
they’re writhing in our televisions
Day after day, a man would sit in front of the television set, glassy eyed as the sounds and images washed over him like a wave of warmth. A growing sour smell seeped into the room around him, scratching at the back of his mind as he basked in the technicolor glow. The sound from the television set began to deflate, becoming bloated and muddy. It wasn't long before he couldn't ignore the fact that the once familiar voices emanating from the screen had become garbled and de-tuned. This loss of familiarity and an overwhelming sense of dis-ease compelled him to investigate the television set itself.
That's when he could hear them; writhing from within.
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TRACK III · 03/16
the time-slowed corridor
Your footsteps trail in front of you, echoing until the patter harmonizes with itself into voice, fooling you into thinking for just a second that you're not alone. Your thoughts may as well be hieroglyphics; they mean nothing and provide no comfort. In this space, time has slowed to a crawl and your feet feel like they're glued to the broken concrete that lays beneath. You can't remember how you arrived here or even where "here" is and emotionally, you're unsure if you even care. The overwhelming malaise warms you within its chains as the light at the end of the tunnel grows ever dimmer.
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TRACK IV · 04/16
the self-erasing tape
In the confines of an abandoned building a dust-caked tape laid among a pile of debris. The tape contained distorted video footage of a history that should've never been recorded. This tape should've stayed buried in the rubble of the house, but instead it has found the light of day and you are its witness.
This is the tape that erases itself; only to be experienced once and never again.
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TRACK V · 05/16
ferrichrome #77
For exactly 1,687 days and 12 hours, 42 seconds there was a broadcast deep in the mountains of the mid-west. The source remains a mystery to this day. Crime reports indicate a substantial increase in the rates of public psychosis during this time frame but there is no substantial evidence to indicate that either of these two occurrences are linked.
It's said that those who tuned into the broadcast would each hear something completely different; teenagers would test this rumor by attempting to listen in on the same radio in the same room, but none could adequately describe the sound enough to validate one way or the other. As one would point out a particular sound, it was as if the looped song would change to evade detection.
One day, a young man began to recognize this difference in perception and subsequently decided to record the radio to a cassette tape to see if he could capture what he was hearing to a secondary source.
Nobody knows what happened to the young man, but there have been claims of sightings deep in the woods of a figure around 5'10" with eyes that glow like the sun and a screech that will chill you down to the bone.
The cassette was labeled "ferrichrome #77"
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TRACK VI · 06/16
narcotic afterglow
The dark warmth envelops your body like the fleeting hug of an uncaring mother. Nerve endings begin to catch fire again after a long night of spitting out nothing but exhaust. A bed drenched in salty dampness from a now-faded passion is all that remains of a night draining that left behind no memory.
The sun rises, casting a shadow over the remnants of the night prior. The day knocks on the door of your mind and demands you let it in. You firmly shut the door without moving a muscle. The danger is here. The shadows dancing in the corner of the room darken to their malignant original forms and threaten to consume you. But you have no more energy left to hold them at bay. While you struggle to force electricity into your muscles, the shadows coil around your body and sink you deeper into the black water as awareness fades.
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TRACK VII · 07/16
subterranean descent
A flicker of legs scurry into the warmth of the shadow. A solitary figure stands amidst speckled shards of light penetrating from the abscesses above. His features come through fractured; an impression.
A gift from the world above.
A curse from the world below.
The smell of dank sitting water and arid air clash in the cockpit of the senses. The solitary figure twitches his ear toward the sound of echoed whispers; guttural sounds and cries twist through the winding caves as bat-like creatures hunt down their sources.
The light from above engages the pupillary light reflex causing the iris to coil around the retina like a serpent. Hulking; the solitary figure stumbles away from the light.
The serpent concedes.
Globules of air effervesce from the depths of a porous creature’s belly a few feet away. Once sleeping, now the creature begins the task of getting it’s need met. An aural devouring absorbs all the sound in the room providing a void. The solitary creature acts on instinct, trailing the porous one deep into the tunnel.
They stumble slow, absent time and sound. Each step collects cold blood off the ground, caking around their bloated ankles and decaying tendrils. The porous creature paces ahead of the hulking figure; eager to devour the escalated cries produced from the bat-like creatures.
The tunnels give way to a massive cavern. Eroded away from the inside. Chains descend from the ceiling restraining bodies with humanoid features. Men, women, and children decorate the walls in varying states of decay while creatures stare with focused eyes and bated breath. Symbols painted in blood loom overhead the piles of bodies, standing 10 feet or more above.
A lanky creature produces a brush made up of patched fur, ripped off the backs of other creatures. It gestures it’s hand across the wall in ritualistic motion. It’s many mouths open and close in patterns. Any potential sound is immediately devoured by the armies of porous creatures that stand beside their hulking counterparts.
A loud clash of metal can be heard high above, disappearing as it makes it’s way downward. The porous creatures collectively extend tendrils to their hulking companions. The companions each open wide the maws affixed to their chest and lean down to begin feasting on the corpses. Faint traces of light escape upwards from the bodies, before being intercepted by splintering shadows. They race across the caverns, in-and-out of flesh-lined burrows carved into the upper walls.
Once done, each pair retreats back into its respective tunnels. With biology satiated and metabolism engaged, they commence their dreams of decomposition. Any trace of awareness descends out of sight, like a chain into a deep dark cavern.
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TRACK VIII · 08/16
the porcelain masquerade
“Just shut up and do the job I’m paying you to do. I do not care about you. I do not care about your life; do not even look at me. I am only here to ensure you do not steal my belongings from me, and loathe as I am to admit it, I cannot trust that my own help would not help you get away with it in my absence.”
They move through the world in their person suits, shaking hands and maneuvering through crowds, armed with enticing laced bags in one hand and an emerald crested dagger in the other. Problem solvers; to be used alongside well-rehearsed expressions.
The masquerade is wholly consuming and ages like a Leroy Musigny Grand Cru, getting both more costly and out of reach with time.
The house, not a home, but a display case giving the illusion of meaning; of appreciation; of life. No eyes have glanced beyond the book covers; no mind has contemplated the paintings; no ears have truly heard the signed vinyl records tucked away in their frames and put up for display; and no mouth has tastes the nectar within the dusty bottles. The environment; a stage prop for the scene about to begin.
The moment surface tension breaks through to the abyss below, is the moment it reveals itself. A vacant expression and lifeless eyes, a silence so deafening you can almost hear the machinery grinding underneath the skin. The well-funded cover up gives way to the hollowness, like looking into a void that reflects no humanity back at you; not even comforting scripts masquerading as a shared humanity come forth from this man-shaped creature.
This soulless husk hates you. It hates that you have perceived it and it wants nothing more than for your inconvenient existence to cease. Its eyes do not see you. Its mind does not contemplate you and its ears do not hear you.
It would kill you, if only it didn’t take so much effort to pay someone else to dispose of your body.
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TRACK IX · 09/16
lunar sea
A man, his face cast in shadow stands in a field illuminated by a lunar glow. Piercing yellow eyes protrude through the shadowy veil. He opens his mouth and thick black clouds with silvery splinters take shape in the night air. Ebony, metallic gray, and bone-white plumage sprouts from his ashen hair. He wears a dark suit that blends into the night, phasing in and out of the cloudy mirage. In his hand, a cane adorned with a crescent moon that gleams with a nocturnal radiance.
His silvery tongue speaks with the undercurrent of death; of lunacy. Each syllable crashes like a tide upon the ears of any who listen, permeating into the mind, flowing between the cracks and craters of the mind. With each pass upon the shore, substance dissolves as the craters become permanent depressions upon the surface.
The man empties his endless smoke filled lungs into the atmosphere with a groaning laughter. As the lunar glow wanes into the backdrop of shadow, the illusory light reflected from the moon disappears, giving way to an abyssal black.
It will promise you everything and leave you with nothing; beware the illusory light.
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TRACK X · 10/16
apparatus mechanicus
It drags its body across rusted grates in the long, dark corridor nestled within a labyrinth of metal vents. Left with only a single metal-infused limb, each centimeter takes every bit of strength for it to scrape across the floor the 2-ton body it resides in.
Knowing no hunger nor sleep, it cannot gauge any passage of time. Any semblance of original purpose or internal memory has long decayed and scattered to a complete lack of recognition. Yet, this mysterious apparatus is still drawn towards the light at the ends of the tunnels.
Each ending before this one has merely resulted in the discovery of light splinters; corners leading deeper into the endless inorganic tunnel. A trick of the light, or perhaps a malfunction deep within its cognitory encasing; a drive that exists only to keep its motion perpetual.
It arrives to the end of the vent as the blinding light beams into its retinal scanner. With its auditory processing long deteriorated, all it can perceive, once its retinal scanners adjust to the light, is a gargantuan dark structure in the middle of thousands of miles of empty, black, metallic space. Roaming around the structure are hulking, pulsating mounds of fleshy substance. Their attention fixated on the structure with anxious anticipation.
As the retinal scanner flickers out, the structure before it begins to crumble to its silent obliteration.
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TRACK XI · 11/16
sound of sedation
The essence of the human soul lives within waves. Like an obsidian tide crashing on the shores of the mind in the galactic black shroud of dusk; these waves permeate ashen sands. They dance between ever-changing frequencies, flowing in and around us like a stream of life. Ever-free, the soul breathes around the body, free from its confines, capable of vanishing like a ship in the night under cover of the crashing waves to once again join in the endless sea.
The body dissolves and the soul becomes as music; becoming part of the life stream itself. Boundary-free, the soul travels where it detects the waters of life; a voice, vibrations, the very breath issuing the final dirge to send the body off forever. The soul persists, ethereal nomad, becoming life itself and no longer the catalytic instrument that once expressed it.
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TRACK XII · 12/16
outer limits//mind of magnets
Inside of the house is noisy. The sound compresses to a harsh static as a large gathering of people congregate into clusters between the amber-colored living room and the grayscale kitchen. Pleasant, rehearsed scripts fill the room, accompanied by laughter and sharp spikes of verbal energy. When something threatens to break through the surface conversation, the communication ceases, giving way to blank faces and even blanker stares. Faces are unfocused and lack detail. The words, mere echoes that had long lost their original shape and begun to morph into something else entirely, signal to noise.
This home is not familiar and hasn’t been for a long time.
A half-light shines from the outside, peaking through the window curtains with a warm welcoming glow that seems to contour right at the boundary of the windowsill.
The man follows the warm light outside of the house.
The porch is surrounded by starving darkness, held at bay by the source of the warm light, a single flickering streetlight hangs above the concrete slab walkway. Here, even more people congregate into smaller groups. These figures wear increasingly eccentric garb. The conversations slide through the cigarette smoke-filled air in forbidden tongue, touching on topics unfamiliar and strange. Their words carry feelings, with an almost magick-like quality. With each pass into the man's ear, he feels himself change, his internal sensations becoming lighter, wider, and yet, darker. He feels the weight of their words gently pushing him down into the concrete, like some sort of linguistic gravity.
At the precipice, the man decides that there is nowhere left for him to go but further out into the pregnant emptiness.
Fringe philosophy threatens the stability of the man's world as the darkness surrounding the porch illuminates in gray and the air thickens with mist. He feels the concrete beginning to bow beneath him, looking around to see the people sinking deeper into ground. Some to their ankles, some to their mouths, filling their oratory void. Still dark, his view gives way to empty fields, hills, and roads that sprawl out like each is being created by an outside force. Reality maintains just as far as he can perceive and no further.
He turns to find the once comfortable house, but it disappears into the parallel rows of endless concrete slab porches.
At the precipice, the man decides that there is nowhere left for him to go but further out into the pregnant emptiness.
He walks long into the field. To the left are a distant group of figures wearing gas masks with long, proboscis mouthpieces. The eyes are a mass of conjoined optic bulbs, gazing across the field. Next to them, a car; its driver and passenger sit, heads seizing as if moving back and forth at impossible speeds simultaneously with their mouths unhinged in eternal screams.
Further ahead is a white wall that stretches as far as the eye can see; the final boundary.
Before he can contemplate it, the figures all at once charge at the man with inhuman speed. In pure panic, he sprints. The air enters his lungs like liquid metal, scorching him from within. A scream hangs in the air and a ringing in the ears deafens. Before he can think, he enters into a solitary door along the white wall.
The door slams shut behind him and disappears as he turns to look for the handle.
He shifts his gaze further into the outer limit.
A corpse, clothed in white, hangs suspended in the air. Mangled beyond repair, the man can only make out a few defining features that remind him vaguely of his own body. As he looks into the eyes of the corpse, they look back, and the scream hanging in the air becomes eternal.
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TRACK XIII · 13/16
there is trouble until the robins come
Perched atop the highest tree; the feathered songbird watches from above with a keen eye, seeing what those on the ground cannot. He sings a song of wisdom that can't be understood through thought alone. If heard with an open heart, the song chips away at the grime within, flowing deep into the internal soil, bringing assurance and warning in equal measure.
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TRACK XIV · 14/16
captive mask
A man looks deep into the eyes of a lover, seeing nothing but the reflection of his own love looking back at him. The enemy, experiencing the same, with neither truly perceiving each other, and themselves, only through the hazy mirage of a tear-filmed gaze. These reflections are backwards; chemically locked-and-loaded with self deceit and false promises.
And yet,
hope.
For an idealized self, and unmet need, or even just a glimmer of something different.
Black, gilded curtains open to a concrete room with empty walls and iron cages. In the center lies an inviting bed with a deceiving mattress. It projects the image of comfort but the foundation is just as unloving as the concrete walls enveloping it.
What begins in the mind transfers to the body. The shells clash and coalesce, from a distance they can be mistaken as one entity. Meanwhile, the inner essence remains safe in the confines of its shell while the body endures the front-lines. The mind contorts and rationalizes this deathly dance as a sick manifestation of love. The essence coils and withers inside.
It calls out for help, from beyond the grave. Deep inside the walls, spewing forth black, hateful water which repels beyond its control. It whips and lashes outward for connection, intending to bring others closer through constriction and control. The essence lays starving and eroded, finding itself missing something internal.
On the wall reads:
"To kill another is to kill all. To love another is love oneself. Love is war and war is love. To love is to war against yourself; to fight for change. To war is to love oneself in an act of retrograde protection."
The self dissolves, giving way to something else unknown. The feedback loop of projection ascends ever higher and out of sight. The reflections distort in exponential dissolution as the screams layer louder and louder. The noise hangs in the air like TV static, engulfing everything in a heavy blanket of fog. Both individuals evaporate entirely; and with them, the labels of lover and enemy; dissolving into static along with the shells they were branded upon. The room becomes impossible to navigate; the once inviting bed, no longer to find. Nail scratches and fist indents decorate the once empty walls.
They try, with lock-pick and might to open the cell door. The door does not budge and no visitors dare come near to bring them news of the outside world. Confinement.
Alone together.
The prisoners take a single step back in tandem, their view widening from its immediate fixation of the cell door. Their newfound view reveals an infinite darkness on both sides of the barred walls. The prisoners then walk in opposite directions along the walls until they discover that the wall ends. They walk deep into the unknown, now on the outer side of the cell that once held them together. They walk forward alone, looking back to find the iron and concrete rusting and crumbling behind them.
From the ruins, they emerge.
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TRACK XV · 15/16
carnivàle grottésco
Generators whir and whine without competition in the sonic space. An audience of faceless people stare at a blank stage, encircled by crimson fabric lined with gold trim. There is no feeling of anticipation, instead there is dissociation across the lifeless field. The curtains drop and a figure with harlequin features takes steps toward the edge of the stage. If eyes were closed, one would think there was no one on the receiving end of the stage. The figure, donning their best and brightest, addresses the crowd with frantic and excitable energy. The energy nearly bursting from the seams of their hemmed and contrasted attire. The colors push beyond the boundaries of human perception and into a spectrum meant for butterflies.
Come one, come all to the greatest show on the face of this gray earth. Your minds will be blown! Your fate will be forever changed and you’ll get a chance to see things you thought never possible in your wildest imagination!
A hyper-neon sign bounces it’s rays of light in a flickering rhythmic pattern across the sea of gray faces. It’s almost hypnotic, and, as if slowed down, the masses shuffle at a snails pace from booth to booth, their eyes met with rapid stimulation. Lights and sounds attack the audience with a seizure welcoming. Colors bleed into the retinas as bright sound waves excite the cochlea, causing the corti to raise and stand at attention. A barrage straight to the brain; bereft a digestive system, a kidney, a lung. No biological filters to hold back this drug.
A glance upwards reveals trailing and dancing carnival lights, begging the question: “Who’s more strung out, them or me?”
A man stands amidst the sea of gray and expressionless faces. Absent the light, faces become blank while eyes glaze over with frosted stare. Without lamps, moths would fly straight into the sun.
Are they not entertained?
The man walks the grounds, remembering the adage of ages old, “never look a carnie in the eye.” They know how to ensnare you in their web of elaborate deceit. They’ll take and drain you for all your worth until you become nothing but a husk. An empty shell. They’ll promise you the world and beyond and leave you less than you came. They’ll promise to peel back the curtain and show you what lays behind. You don’t want to know what lays behind those curtains. It’ll only ruin the fun.
The moon grows increasingly brighter and the night sky hangs in the back drop of raw fluorescence. The moths remain unmoved by the earths change. Roller-coaster riders hang motionless in the air, upside down with hair trailing down, the gravity of being upside down forces their cheeks to fall downward, enforcing a smile.
The currency here is tickets. An abstraction from the dollar, which itself is an abstraction of something else. Neither fully existing in the world of substance. The tickets allow you to participate in the grand facade. It’s an escape; divorced from an even grayer reality. One can only image the lack of color in the life found outside of these colorful chained fences.
The operators recite their scripts, well rehearsed with just the right intonation, and uncanny energy. A hint of danger lingers in the back of their minds, only detected by the most astute of observers able to retain what’s left of their consciousness once they pass through the carnival’s elegant gates.
The man walks forward, pace steady while people pass by. He takes slow steps toward the house of mirrors where a smiling man with a lop-sided face hands out blindfolds. A thin child glares at the fun-house mirror as a fat child stares back; a fat child does the same and see’s a worn adult face in the reflection instead. Neither look at each other. A man stands in the center losing himself in the reflections; he’s shattered.
A woman sheathes a long sword down her esophagus while onlookers twitch their eyebrows secretly wishing for her inevitable choke. The fire-twirler spins carelessly, having no grass around him left to burn. His world; a pit of dirt that no spark could threaten, his spark, now a wasteland. A bearded woman sits on a container in the back alleyway, smoking a cigarette and stroking her beard in quiet contemplation. Without the thrill of violent ends, there is none who wish to engage her.
The freak-show presents grotesque, provocative, and perverse spectacle in a closed off tent. Moans of pleasure and screams of pain are heard in cacophonous splendor, painting the airways with the color of phony disbelief. The sounds stretching to reach the unnatural. People leave the tent unchanged.
Ahead of the man, his attention drawn and resistance broken by a sultry and sweet voice. She calls him over to her booth. The man is trapped, with heart aflutter and mind coiled around her crimson finger which beckons closer. The scent of sandalwood fills his nostrils as the smoke from the incense stick spirals upwards and out of sight.
“How would you like to see something really special?” The words flow out of her lips like honey into the cup of tea that is my mind. She pulls him across the carnival grounds back to the main stage. She takes him further backstage as the sound outside fades to the growing hum flooding the hallways. The two walk for what feels like centuries down an endless corridor containing pictographs, drawings, and photography from carnivals across time. Her heels click against the wooden floor; the sound seems to take physical shape as the sound becomes the word “click.” The man swats it with his hand. They finally arrive to the source of the humming where she opens a door and gestures for him to go inside.
“You’re on your own, now.”
The man walks forward into a black, metallic box room; the light escapes and so too does consciousness as the elegant door closes behind, giving way to a solid mirror reflecting nothing in return.
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TRACK XVI · 16/16
the being at the center of a black hole
NULL
this transmission has not been recovered yet
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