The Curious Proceedings of "Sentient Vortex"

Most Distance to Jupiter tracks begin in the unconscious. They begin as fragments, splinters, particles, sometimes with words or phrases attached. I've often called them proceedings, for lack of a better term. I find wisps of melodies or chord progressions in my head sometimes when I wake up in the morning. They are stuck, repeating, and they force me to stumble sleepily into the studio where I attempt to rescue them from the inexorable oblivion that consciousness brings. Months can then pass, as these proceedings pile up on the computer. Eventually, there comes a sudden urge to sift through them all, and work begins on a new collection of tracks.

Philip K. Dick was an American science fiction novelist (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982). I'm a huge fan, but that wasn't always the case. In high school, I found his prose to be an impenetrable wall. I didn't possess the elasticity of thought that was required to truly get into his work until much later in life. Today, I'm fascinated by Dick's life, and by what he put himself through to produce his work. Dick once wrote and published seven novels in a single year. He'd often produce work that required little to no revision. Finished prose simply flowed from his mind, through his hands, into his typewriter. His biographers have suggested he suffered from the best form of hypergraphia, a so-called uncontrollable "desire to write" brought on by issues with the temporal lobe of the brain, perhaps due to amphetamine abuse, or a bit of schizophrenia (if such a measurement applies). No matter the cause, the reality is this: he was a beast of a writer. He could finish an entire novel in a month, and these hallucinatory texts still reverberate today. Based on his visions, Dick once postulated that the universe was made from information, decades before this notion became a core tenet of the Holographic Principle (itself a property of cutting-edge string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity theory). I'm still amazed by the volume of Philip K. Dick's output. After reading various Dick biographies, I realized my workflow for creating music wasn't dissimilar to his for writing novels, especially during the period 1999-2005 when I released eleven albums, five in the year 2000 alone. I don't know if there's even a term for an uncontrollable desire to make music. That said, some very curious things occurred in 2015 while working on Sentient Vortex, the latest Distance to Jupiter album. I spent the early parts of the year skimming or rereading some of Dick's novels, mostly in preparation for Amazon Prime's adaptation of Dick's Hugo award-winning novel The Man in the High Castle. At the same time, I started rummaging through the dream fragments of music I'd been collecting.

I worked on Sentient Vortex for seven months, from early May to mid-December, 2015. Ultimately, eleven tracks emerged. In the end, two never made it (they had "health problems"). A third was jettisoned quite late in the process, in mid-November. The eight tracks that remained all had strange words associated with them. These were part of the original dream fragments. I'd use the words to name the blocks of MIDI data in Logic Pro X (music production software). This allowed me to preserve these dream words along with the melodies, and ultimately, they became working titles for each track.

In mid-November, after binge-watching The Man in the High Castle series (fantastic!), I found myself digging through the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick looking for clues. I am unsure what I was looking for, but as I flipped around, opening the heavy tome at random day after day, I'd find sentences that contained the words I used in the temporary track titles. Statistically-speaking, this isn't exactly unexpected; these are all fairly common words. But the sentence fragments in the Exegesis made much better track titles and truly fit the moods of the music. My one regret is that I didn't make a note of the pages I found the sentences on (it didn't cross my mind; the published Exegesis is a gargantuan work, a mere chunk of the thousands of handwritten pages that constitute the original, and which even now hasn't been fully transcribed or published in any form). I found a searchable version of the Exegesis online and input the final track titles, but they can't be located. I can find the words, but they appear in different orders. This delighted me. It's the kind of thing PKD's otherworldly sources of enlightenment might have subjected him to as he struggled to come to grips with the life-altering events he experienced in March, 1974. In the case of these track titles, the fact that I now couldn't find the exact phrases within a searchable form of the Exegesis amused me greatly. It's as if the words I'd found had rearranged themselves, or been rearranged by one of PKD's otherworldly intelligences (or PKD himself?). Sentient Vortex was inspired in no small part by Dick's body of work. The mental imagery he conjures, especially in works like VALIS, Ubik, and A Scanner Darkly, is often difficult to shake off. Sentient Vortex is about disparate fragments of "dream melody" finding a form in reality. It's about barriers breaking down between worlds, mysterious places and things, and celebratory rhythms that evoke distant times, either in the past or the future. Here, then, is Sentient Vortex (note, if you're reading this before 12/21/2015, not all tracks will be available for streaming):

The next Sentient Vortex curiosity occurred during the creation of the album's cover art. The piece developed over a matter of a few hours. It consists of four layers: a symmetrical star field (background), a blue layer, a red layer, and the text/logo layer (foreground). No real revision was required except for some positioning of the text elements. The whole thing just sort of happened. And the eeriest element is the "sentient vortex" itself. The blue layer. The face.

Curiously, if you look closely at the center, a five-pointed star emerges (slightly blur your eyes, you'll see it). What's odd here is that my original idea for the cover was that it would be based on simple linear forms. The plan was to place a large, hollow circle on a black background, and within it, a smaller off-center hollow circle. I was going to map the position of the smaller circle to the exact position of the planet Jupiter's great red spot. The outer circle would represent Jupiter's atmospheric perimeter. I had an urge to drop a five-pointed star within the smaller circle, to form a pentagram (potentially inverted) or pentacle. I had collected a series of pentagram images for reference, as well as some high resolution images of Jupiter from JPL to use as a positional guide. The initial version of the cover amounted to nothing more than an uninteresting framework, so experimentation with fractally-generated vortexes ensued. I found a lovely construct almost immediately, and started playing around with it. I duplicated the layer and flipped the copy along the horizontal axis. Suddenly staring back at me was the "face in blue":

Not only did this eerie thing instantly satisfy the "sentient vortex" theme, it also met my desire to place a five-pointed star somewhere within the design (though not inverted, unfortunately). After a few color enhancement passes, the organic five-pointed ideogram became more apparent. The red layer was another simple randomized fractal rendering, horizontally duplicated to frame the blue face. The fact that the face emerged instantly, from the very first random mathematical seed I generated, is very "phildickian," and a testament, perhaps, to the power of the sentient vortex we all wander through as we sleep.

Sentient Vortex comes out on December 21st, 2015. Pre-orders are available now. The full 24bit/96kHz album comes with a thematic digital booklet and copies of the album's cover art - perfect for whichever era the listener/time traveler is computing in (aspect ratios include 4:3, 16:9, and 16:10, featuring resolutions as high as 5120x2880; yes, I'm looking out for you iMac 5K owners)! Note: more tracks will be revealed over the coming weeks as the release date gets closer.

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A Skeleton Key to Distance to Jupiter's "Long Shadows"

On July 31st, 2012, I walked from the backyard of my parent's house into their carport. I'd been in the small guest house outside for many hours, and the passage from this outer building to the carport is mostly covered, so I could not see the sky. As I walked to my car, which was parked next to my dad's SUV, something seemed very strange. It was a typical blazing hot Arizona day, and yet, all around, the landscape was in shadow. However, beyond that shadow, all was bright. Confused by what I saw, I walked into the light and looked up. In the sky, directly between the blazing star at the heart of our solar system and the house I grew up in, was a lone, ominously black cloud. It cast a column of shadow directly onto the property. The sky was a brilliant blue in every direction. There was not a single cloud in the sky - except for this one.

This photo has haunted me since the moment I took it. This was a mere three months before my father died of complications (read: gram-negative bacterial infection) from liver cancer. Throughout the year prior, I was at my parent's house daily, operating a business from the converted guest house out back. I'd been watching my dad purging his belongings for weeks. Each day, as I'd arrive, I'd see him in the carport, filling the back of his SUV with an endless stream of things from his life, which he'd then drop off at the local Good Will. I never let it get to me, because we all knew he was quite sick, but those moments were far more haunting than I realized, for they colored everything, coating each day with a form of dread I'd never experienced before. So when I saw the long shadow in the sky that day, I knew something was coming. My dad's "purging of his possessions" phase was over; it had ended that week, in fact, and he hadn't been as active around the property. This acre lot had been his long form project since the family moved in, back in July of 1977. Being a civil engineer, his will to shape the landscape ruled his existence. He'd always been outside, working, digging, crafting, shaping, and engineering. He'd entered a new phase, however, where his energy was low and he often remained couch-bound, trapped between his failing liver and the curse of my mother's addiction to the relentless mediocrity of daytime television - a blessed noise to her which seemed to act like a protective barrier between herself and reality. An infection seemed to take hold of my dad on October 26th, 2012. I was almost home (25 miles away) when I got the call from my mother that something was profoundly wrong, and I quickly turned around in rush hour traffic. Two days later, shortly after midnight on the 28th, he died.

In January of 2013, I began work on the sixteenth Distance to Jupiter album, code-named "October Mind." This title, I suspect, was a nod to my dad's death, since the words had manifested during one of my silent commutes after he died, and then bounced around in my head for months. The music that was emerging, however, was incredibly difficult to dissect or understand, and it wasn't until the first anniversary of my dad's passing that the tracks began to evolve at a panic-inducing pace. From October of 2013 to the last day of the year, these seven tracks took their final form (they are unrecognizable when compared to their earliest incarnations). Track names and order had been set, so the next step was to find the album title. "October Mind" now felt worn out to me, but as I listened to the final mix of track #6 ("Long Shadows"), an array of visuals filled my mind's eye. Columns of shadow bled from a darkening, innermost sky. It all became understandable:

I then turned my thoughts to the cover design. I had been experimenting with older artworks (based on custom filters using integer maths) from the late 1990s and early 2000s, trying to repurpose them into something that captured the moods of the music, but as I rummaged through my digital archives, I strayed upon that series of photos I had taken of the long shadow darkly cast upon my childhood home. I had never explored these images. I had taken them, and simply forgotten they existed, subtly frightened to look too closely. Would there be an obvious pattern? A leering gaze from a reaper in the sky? As I explored each photo, I couldn't help marveling at the occurrence itself. This bizarre, singular black cloud that had been so ominous and direct in appearance and meaning was truly stunning to behold. On that day, the temperature had eclipsed 100 degrees, and though the historical record shows scattered clouds in the region, at this moment, there was just the one.

The final image has been heavily processed. The orbs of light and the lens-like structure that surrounds the cloud is a nod to the camera itself (an iPhone 4S), which preserved this event. It also recalls the eye, perhaps both of the viewer and of this unknowable "thing" in the sky. The design is bisected on the horizontal by the logo and title. The DTJ logo has always been rendered in Arial Black Regular (a seemingly irrevocable design decision steeped in the long ago, circa 1996); the title was rendered using the font Eurostile. The image ultimately denotes light (top; above the cloud) and dark (bottom; below the cloud), and perfectly captures the mood of the seven tracks that make up the album. I still don't know if this finished piece honors the situation I found myself in at my dad's side in the hospital, just a few short months after the original photo was taken.

As I raised my camera towards the sky on that hot summer day, the cloud felt like a gentle but ominous warning, on a scale that dominated the firmament. The final image, I hope, captures some sense of that, but there is an echo of something else. Though my dad suffered from liver cancer and its complications, his official cause of death was listed as respiratory failure. The truth behind that failure, however, was the gram-negative bacteria that resisted everything the doctors threw at it, even experimental antibiotics. So the circular form you see in the image is also a bacterial cell, the perimeter a plasma membrane, the interior a frightening cytoplasmic mix. Making music is a form of escape, and while none of the tracks on the album are specifically keyed to this interpretation, the presence of gram-negative bacteria in our world is an idea I've been running away from since the day my father died.

The majority of Distance to Jupiter albums all represent a form of personal escape for me: not only of past events and present struggles, but of future potentialities. My father's end was something I knew was coming, and it had been inducing existential panic since 1999. Now that this overarching event has come to pass, it isn't clear where the Distance to Jupiter project will go next. New aural impulses are emerging, but everything feels different.

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Internet-based Therapy for Math Haters

Never did well in math? Did the word problems generate feelings of anxiety? Here's a new way to look at these humorless little conundrums from your past. I recommend you don't immediately read the answers. Instead, let yourself wallow in that old familiar feeling of "word problem dread" and then read on, and enjoy the catharsis.

Now, picture your 10-year-old self at a school desk, #2 pencil in hand, staring at the clock. And remember, this is for your final grade. Begin.

1) Donald has a synthetic rope 26.3 meters in length. He wishes to cut the synthetic rope into 3 pieces of equal length. What will be the length of each piece?

Answer: Donald hangs himself.

Nancy plans a two-day hike from Blood Gulch to Donald's Demise by way of the Northern Trail. It is 7.9 miles from Blood Gulch to the Northern Trail and 9.8 miles from there to Donald's Demise. If she plans to travel half the total distance on each day, how far will she hike the first day?

Answer: Nancy dies of exposure.

Pencils down, everyone!

Who are Donald and Nancy? What is the nature of their relationship? I have no idea. These were written on June 18th, 1994, and let's be honest: who remembers anything from that long ago? If you're mathematically gifted and compelled to provide the real answers to these word problems, you may post them in comments, but no one's going to laugh.

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The Origin of "Hemegohm’s Tendril"

This article is part of an on-going series intended to clarify and expand upon elements of the dystopian novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism and its sequel Hemegohm’s Tendril.

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The title Hemegohm’s Tendril is an anagram. I’ve debated for years whether or not to tell anyone this—but there it is. From the expression’s first appearance in chapter 67 of the novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism, to Horim Fildsbel’s final vision in the sky above Emcast in the story "The Gulf of the Architect," little is truly established about what it is, what it wants, or why it may—or may not—exist. That is the point, however. By design, there must be something very large and mysterious hanging above the heads of every character—in both the novel and the short fiction cycle.

The Shimmerism novel and short stories have all emerged from bouts of automatic writing, usually after story elements manifested in a state of half-sleep or within a dream. Though the term "automatic writing" itself seems a bit cringe-worthy, I can’t negate the fact that a lot of what has emerged has come from a wholly subconscious source.

Simon Shadow employs the use of an artificial intelligence program during the creation of his “sacred book” (as part of the process of creating and registering his new religion; see chapter 16 of the novel). He later employs an algorithm to extract the two most frequently used words within the body of every single religious work throughout the colonized worlds: golden and shimmering, and thus generates the title of his work: “The Golden Shimmer.” The title itself is a nod to the golden mean in philosophy (Simon exists in a dystopian realm, and his writings are aimed squarely at the World Order’s excesses), as well as the golden ratio in mathematics and even the concept of the golden age—or in this case, the lack thereof.

As previously noted, the novel was published in March, 2001, and the expression “Hemegohms Tendril” (lacking the apostrophe) manifested in October of 2004. I woke up with it stuck in my head, and I immediately knew it described the Tigris spider problem in the novel. When I had the chance to update the novel in November of 2004, I decided to add the expression to Ren Pello’s dialogue in chapter 67, primarily because the idea of the Hemegohm as a hyper-dimensional species parasitic to humans was already in play, though unnamed. The expression had also begun to influence the novel’s sequel, which I subsequently abandoned (for the better) after a strange event linked to a set of Scrabble tiles, wholly inspired by Rosemary's Baby.

I had collected the expression’s tiles from the bag—hemegohmstendtril—and then I stirred the tiles around on my desk. Almost immediately, I formed the word THE. The G tile was close by, and just adjacent was the O tile. It took only a matter of seconds for me to pull together GOLDEN. The other letters were in disarray, but the two M tiles stood out. I placed them together, and all that remained were the S, H, I, E, and R tiles. You can probably do the rest. Just as I did.

I now understood this would be the title of whatever followed The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism (it turned out to be an eBook). Admittedly, there are other anagrams within the novel, all meticulously and quite consciously crafted. Yet this anagram—Hemegohm’s Tendril—came from a very mysterious place—a realm which over the subsequent eight years bestowed a fully-formed trio of stories in much the same way.

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In the UK or Australia? Just click!

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Steve Jobs and the Restoration of Sanity

In the first half of 2002, I bought a Macintosh computer. A titanium PowerBook G4, to be specific. This is the story of how Steve Jobs and Apple restored my sanity.

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For years I hated Macintosh computers.

I grew up on Atari hardware. I started with an Atari 800 (with a cassette drive), moved to the Atari 1200XL and then to the Atari 130XE; next came the Atari 520ST, a Mega ST4, and ultimately the Atari Falcon030.

I hated Macintosh computers because they were too expensive.

I could not afford a Macintosh.

I grew up hating anything I could not afford or which I could not coerce my parents into giving me for my birthday. Sad, but true, and probably prototypical of the middle class in the middle Eighties.

But it wasn't really hate.

Macintosh computers actually scared me. Everything I dreamed of doing with computers was sitting right there on screen. I was scared of where such a machine might take me, in much the same way as receiving a driver's license was scary. It bestowed the power to explore. It bestowed freedom. As Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman once sang: "Liberty in new dimensions, ruthless and spectacular."

After my Atari Days came to a close, I spent quite a few years in the PC wilderness. I had to let go of my Falcon 030 and buy a Pentium-based Dell PC. I loved that beige machine. I really did. But really, no, I hated it. I loathed Windows 3.1. That's when this hideous dance of self-deception truly began.

I spent years claiming PCs could do anything a Mac could do, whilst constantly trying to keep Apple's growing influence on society out of my conscious mind.

I was so happy when it looked like the Macintosh line would wither and vanish when Steve Jobs left Apple. It meant I could stop worrying about Macintosh computers.

So we all moved forward, didn't we? The Apple fanatics kept loving their machines, whilst the PC folks appeared to do the same, moving further ahead. But was it really moving ahead? A new version of Windows. Terrible and buggy, slow. Drivers missing. IRQs? Why is there no sound? How do I uninstall something? Registry? You want me to edit my registry? Books. Countless volumes of Windows Bibles. $69 because it has a CD-ROM with it? Wait, what? Each year? Updated! In step with each new version of Windows. Terrible and buggy, slow. Drivers missing. IRQs? Why is there no sound? How do I uninstall something? Registry? You want me to...

What a nightmare!

Which isn't to say I wasn't achieving things on my PC. I was. I created lots of great things, but it was a struggle, and I was doing it out of spite. I was fighting against the profoundly shitty experience of owning a Windows PC by dishonoring the creative urge. Rolling that boulder up, as far as it would go (Windows 3.1). Letting it roll back down (Windows for Workgroups). Pushing it up the other side (Windows ME). Yes, it sucked that the boulder kept rolling back, but at least I had control of it, right? Right?

Flash forward. College graduate. Couple of shitty jobs under my belt, a decent design portfolio the only thing to show for it, but it was enough to score the ubiquitous (and hideous) corporate job with a real salary. Thus, I settled in with my work PC (boulder == Windows NT).

Then the new boulder arrived on the horizon. It was a big one. They called it Windows XP. I purchased it on launch day, and my entire hard drive became corrupted when the install disc failed half-way through the installation. The distribution media itself was defective, or at least that's what the poorly worded Microsoft error message suggested. A damaged CD-ROM had scrambled my system, rendering it unbootable.

Still, I was hopeful. All that boulder rolling had to be good for something, right? Perhaps one of the new Windows XP Bibles could help? I rushed to the store (the internet was worthless at this point, at least as far as information from Microsoft was concerned). On the way there, however, my mind was coming to terms with everything that I had lost. Most of my work was backed up to ZIP discs (adored those; still do), but I had gone through so many careful pre-install checks. I had made sure my hardware could run Windows XP. I had read article after article about performing this upgrade. I was armed. With knowledge. All of it worthless in the face of a defective Windows XP CD-ROM.

Haunted by Sisyphean imagery, I realized I was basically suffering from a form of insanity, rolling a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down, and then doing it again. And again. These were the actions of a crazy person. So I went home. I ignored my dead computer. The next day at work, I found myself on Apple's web site. Something called OSX was in beta. It looked interesting. As I read about its Unix core, I finally realized the truth. It took a few months, but I decided to jettison my fear once and for all.

Eventually, bored at work, I configured a loaded titanium PowerBook G4 and placed the order.

I used the months of down time at home without a computer to purge my experiences with my PC and Windows. I boxed up Windows books. I piled all the PC games I thought were so great (they weren't) into the closet. And I waited, secretly wondering what I had gotten myself into (though I did play a lot of console games). I then received an email, which indicated that my recent order was being cancelled, because Apple had just upgraded the entire Powerbook line. Cancelled, of course, was the wrong word. It was actually a surprise upgrade. I was being given the same price on my computer, but it had a faster CPU (667 MHz G4 replaced with an 800 MHz G4), more RAM, a larger hard drive, and a better video chip. This was my first encounter (as a consumer) with Apple as a corporation. Shortly after I received this amazing new computer, I was invited to participate in a "switcher" survey that Apple had sent me. They wanted to know my story. They wanted to know why I left the PC world and chose a Macintosh computer. And I basically told them everything you just read. In some weird way, when I completed that survey, I felt like I was communicating directly with Steve Jobs. The bottom line was that it was incredibly cathartic to abandon the PC and Microsoft's poorly designed horror-spawn-of-an-OS.

My co-workers were shocked when I explained I'd just spent $2800 on a laptop. During a time when high-end PCs could be cobbled together at Fry's Electronics for $900. But here's the thing: I could afford it. I wasn't afraid any more. And fuck it if Raimi and his people didn't pre-steal the line that I can't avoid using here: "...with great power comes great responsibility." I was finally ready to accept that responsibility, since that's what a hideous corporate job enables: it allows you to buy stuff which other people are convinced you don't need.

Except in my case, I needed this thing more than food, water or even sex. I needed a computer in my life, one that wasn't going to require an endless education on how to get it to work right. I would waste no more money on tech bibles. I would no longer study for a certifications. I would no longer avoid my responsibility to the creative urge. I would equip myself with the best tools. From then on, I would only create.

This was a path I was placed on in 1983 when my dad bought me that Atari 800. I knew back then that a computer would always be sewn into the fabric of my life. The tyranny of the Windows PC was akin to an alien abduction, and that's the best I can say about it. The Windows PC represents missing time, lost years, and nothing more.

Though I can only claim the years 2002 to present as my Apple Years, I have never had one regret. The titanium PowerBook G4 I purchased in 2002 is still going strong. True, it's trapped in OSX Tiger (10.4), but it's the primary general purpose computer in my home. It holds a permanent spot on the kitchen counter. Email, web browsing, word processing, iTunes, and more. It's still doing it all. I know this fact would make Steve Jobs proud.

I just wish he was still around. We need people like him to protect our sanity, especially when technology is often at odds with the people who use it. Steve Jobs humanized computers, and in the process he kept a lot of creative people from losing their minds.

Rest in peace, Mr. Jobs. I will be forever grateful to you.

Literary Vacuum: 9/11 and Art

This article is part of an on-going series intended to clarify and expand upon elements of the dystopian novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism and its sequel Hemegohm’s Tendril.

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The novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism was published on March 24th, 2001. Here's a small excerpt (from page 370):

Another cloud of fire erupted and seconds later the explosive sound reached them, thundering past. The ground trembled slightly and a secondary blast shook the city. Jakren’s mouth was hanging wide and Horim, crossing his arms, smiled thinly. Lorick became frantic, urging the Children to pray—to kneel and pray, kneel and pray.

The tallest spire, at the center of the City, collapsed spectacularly.

Wern, wiping his face, had moved next to Horim.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Fucking great,” said Horim, disgusted, his head shaking. “Just fucking great.”

Jakren heard Horim’s words but he couldn’t react. His eyes were drawn to another fiery blast. The City’s center was in flames and smaller explosions were erupting outwards. He tried to rationalize why his faith would be tested in such a way; why the City of a Thousand Faiths—his goal, his mission, his object of faith—would be taken away the moment it was won. His thoughts brought him little and he recalled his vision—an angry Didrio, a disgusted Chearkin. He thought of consulting the Analecta, to dig his failure out of it, but his eyes now watched the destruction with a morbid fascination; he found he could not move.

The City was splintered by another blast, rife with finality; Jakren’s hopes—the few that remained—dissipated in unison with its cloud of fire.

I remember thinking that the Too Soon rule would apply to 9/11 for a long time. We wouldn't be able to crack jokes about it for years, if not decades. Not that anyone would want to. But jokes are inherently creative, aren't they? They're filters. Jokes generate new perspectives on ideas or events that otherwise wouldn't naturally arise in the populace, so they do have value.

Speaking of jokes, on 9/11/01, I was out of work. In April of that year, I'd been laid off during the dot.com crash, which had hit Austin, TX pretty hard. I had only just arrived there when less than a year later I was heading back to Phoenix. That was fine, however. A stroke of luck, in a way. Before my unceremonious removal, I had discovered that the CEO of the company I worked for was a truly delusional religious fanatic, who often diverted company funds to smuggle Bibles into China. He was very concerned when news of my novel's publication came to his attention. I was brought to his office for a one-on-one, which was odd to say the least, considering I was just the graphics/Web design guy. It became pretty obvious to me that he was nuts, so I let him have it (and by that I mean I was honest and pulled no punches when it came to my views on religion). The dot.com crash was likely the perfect cover for him to press the eject button on my cube (disclosure: no 9/11 post would be complete without a conspiracy theory).

So I parachuted back to Phoenix. I found a decent apartment and got on with my life. Each morning, throughout the summer, I'd wake up, listen to some NPR, and then scour the internet for a job. On 9/11, however, NPR had changed. The tone was new, chilling—quite unlike anything I'd ever heard on the radio in my lifetime.

I couldn't afford television. Not even basic cable. So all I had was the radio. I sat in my dim apartment and listened. And I noticed something strange going on in the corner, by the door. My novel had been published in March, 2001. The initial batch was over there, stacked against the wall, but in two piles of equal height. Two small towers of books, focused on religious fanaticism in the year 2167.

The passage at the top of this post—and so many others throughout the novel—haunted me. They made it difficult to market the work, since at its heart, the novel was a satire. It was just one big long joke. A monumental reductio ad absurdum. I had broken the Too Soon rule by way of a literary causality violation.

I've always been personally opposed to religion in all its forms, but I wondered where the idea of attacking the financial center of a city had come from in my novel. Had it been the WTC bombing in 1993 that had planted the seed? That was my first interpretation. Had an unconscious thought process deconstructed that event? Secretly wondered why it had failed, thus generating the aerial attack scenario? Or was such a scenario simply a natural outgrowth of an imagined future where military hardware was freely available to protagonists and antagonists alike?

The narrative in the novel had been impacted by real-world events before. In 1993, ironically, the original ending of the novel had to be thrown out—not because of the WTC attack—but because of what happened in Waco, TX with David Koresh and his followers. Reality had run away with that ending, more or less, and I had to jettison the last third of the book (Simon Shadow and his few remaining followers had barricaded themselves within the Shimmerite Temple, surrounded by UGMC forces; a sudden attack by the Unholy Mass complicated and confused the situation, resulting in a massive firestorm). So perhaps it was fitting that I beat 9/11's religious fanatics to the punch. More or less, again. And though it may seem like less, the build-up to that moment on page 370 had been in play since the first page of the novel.

The end result, however, was that the book just wasn't good enough to find its way in a post-9/11 world. It generated no new insights. Or if it did, they remained mostly invisible. The satire was diluted and destroyed by the true reality of our world, yet I'm not sure this kind of victimization has any right to be displayed. It's Too Soon, after all. But 9/11 affected Art, and I'm not sure we even know how deeply. Regardless, the only way to truly process 9/11 is through art, and it is happening all around us. The 9/11 Memorial is such an expression. But the processing has been happening all along, since the morning of 9/12/01, in fact.

Religious fanatics attacked the twin towers of the World Trade Center, but they hit us in so many other smaller ways, too. Those two stacks of books against my wall, for instance. That evening I slowly dismantled that scene and created a small wide square of books in the corner. My little cat Inchworm jumped within the space immediately, and she played in and around the structure for months to come, chasing toy mice, as I slowly gave away copies of the work; it had become an impossible sell: "A novel about religious fanatics? Already? As if I'm in the mood for that!"

Is there a point to all of this? Probably not. The trials and tribulations of a novel lost in a literary vacuum aren't very interesting. But 9/11 was an attack on human expression on multiple levels, so rather than let these memories fade and die, I figured I'd leave them here, probably Too Soon.

One decade down.

Many more to go.

The Centers of Old Empires

"The Centers of Old Empires" is story #2 in a short fiction series called Hemegohm's Tendril which expands the narrative begun in the science fiction novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism (story #1 located here). A fractured tale of the multiverse, the story begins in the year 2167. Simon Shadow has been abandoned in an escape pod, cruelly dumped in a distant, unknown solar system by the United Galactic Marine Corps. As the hours pass, Simon slowly realizes his survival is tied to an ominous set of choices...

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This story has been illustrated and expanded, and is now included with the final story in the Hemegohm’s Tendril triptych "The Gulf of the Architect."



In the UK or Australia? Just click!

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The origin of "Distance to Jupiter"

On October 23rd, 1999, the planet Jupiter was very close to Earth. Jupiter was at opposition (opposite the sun as seen from Earth). This opposition occurs every 12 years or so—it's happening again this October—but the distance to Jupiter from Earth varies. On this particular day, the distance was about 3.96AU (592,407,567.93 kilometers, or 368,104,996.78 miles). I was at my parent's home, in their backyard, with a telescope (a 9" reflector), gazing up at Jupiter and its sparkling moons. I'm not sure exactly when, but at some point during this simple run of observations, I had come to the decision to start releasing experimental electronic music. I know that makes little causal sense, but I had always been drawn to music which tied itself thematically to the wonders of the Solar System, perhaps the result of growing up to the tune of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I owned the soundtrack to that series and I'd usually fall asleep each night listening to Vangelis' "Alpha" and "Heaven and Hell, Part 1" on perpetual loop, my mind voyaging out there, watching safely from my spaceship of the imagination as inscrutable space empires waged war on the other side of the Milky Way.

So on this cool, October night in 1999, I found the phrase "distance to Jupiter" stuck in my head. The media had hyped this moment (Jupiter's proximity to Earth), and perhaps that's why these words were lodged there. But my mind was oscillating between two powerful forms of awe: 368 million miles was an immense distance, but it was also minuscule, especially when compared to more distant planets, objects, or other stars. I remember thinking that someday, a journey of 368 million miles would seem trivial to the human species; that at some moment in the future, a sight-seeing day-trip to Europa would be common for the citizens of Earth.

The distance to Jupiter is important in other, less-fanciful ways, too. The planet is close to the inner Solar System, and it possesses a vast gravity well. Many astronomers believe this casts Jupiter in the role of protector, partially shielding the planets closer to the Sun from comets and asteroids; some astronomers believe that Jupiter has the opposite effect—drawing comets from the Kuiper belt dangerously toward Earth. Either way, the distance to Jupiter from Earth might affect our survival or destruction. Beyond Mars, Jupiter and its moons could harbor extraterrestrial life. There is evidence that the moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto possess underground oceans of liquid water, capable of possibly supporting simple plants or micro-organisms. All these ideas are tied, in some way, to distance.

Yet after returning home that evening, those three words—"distance to Jupiter"—did not immediately coalesce into a designation for my music project. Even though I'd been recording tracks since 1996, it had simply never occurred to me to "name" the project, since my rig was so crude and simple. It consisted of a solitary Roland MC-303 Groovebox (music sequencer/synthesizer) and a consumer-grade Sony Minidisc deck. I had tied these two devices together to record live performances. As awful as that might seem, the performances themselves were constructed with loops—sequences of notes and rhythms—not just single tones or random keyboard wanderings. The loop-based approach led to surprising complexity, and the maximum approach to minimalism on the hardware side led to focused creativity. Thus, inspired by visions of Jupiter, I cracked open a fresh MiniDisc and inserted it into my deck to try to capture some of what I had been feeling a few hours before. The unit asked me to name the disc, and I pulled my keyboard close. Those three words emerged—perhaps solely as an honorific—and I've never once reconsidered the project's name.

Later, I extracted the music from the MiniDisc and brought it to my friend Chris Bailey, who put a final mix together. I called the album "To Sleep To Music" (a nod, perhaps, to that habit of childhood) but the title's palindromic quality then caught my eye, and "Music To Sleep To" was released via MP3.com on October 31st, 1999.

"Monstrous Fire" Now Available; "Lines in the Sky" remastered!

The 14th Distance to Jupiter album Monstrous Fire is now on sale for $5USD! Available for immediate download in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC, or just about any other downloadable format you could possibly desire (seriously). Find it here!



Also available: remastered and updated edition of Distance to Jupiter's 13th album Lines in the Sky (2009). Contains two previously unreleased bonus tracks ("Destiny" and "Distant") from the original recording session. $5USD. Find it here!

A Description of "Monstrous Fire" by Distance to Jupiter

This is the 14th Distance to Jupiter album. Put on your headphones, turn down the lights, and close your eyes for 44 minutes. Listen to the whole thing using the widget above, with accompanying notes below.

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Track Notes

Track 1: Sleep. The origin of "Sleep" (known as "Hypnos" during prototyping, but originally titled "What The Fuck Is This?") can be traced back as far as January 8th, 2009, though work was not resumed on this track until almost a year later (December 31st, 2009). This track was the first track recorded for the prior album Lines in the Sky (2009), but it was quickly abandoned, despite its imagery and potential (it did not seem to fit that album's "electro-medieval" undercurrent); thus, it became the perfect starting point for Monstrous Fire, and there was never any doubt that it would be the first track on the new album. It offers a solid departure point for a distinct new direction.

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Track 2: Hidden Reality. This was the sixth track recorded. It emerged swiftly, almost fully-formed, during a rainy, windswept winter day in Phoenix, Arizona (2/20/2011). The track's title relates to its inspiration: the book "The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene, which I had just finished reading; and that, coupled with attendance at the most recent Origins debate, had really pushed my mind into the deep end of the cosmos. When I awoke the next day, I really had no idea that by dusk this track would exist. Though it experienced some subtle iterations in the weeks that followed, these were primarily related to the final mix. The initial sequence of notes—sadness—manifested at random, as my hands fell on the keyboard. I'd been thinking about Hugh Everett and the effect his "Theory of the Universal Wavefunction" (later called "many-worlds") had had on his life and career. I find it fascinating that Everett stopped his research in theoretical physics after obtaining his Ph.D.

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Track 3: Quantum Man. Work on this track commenced the day after finishing Lawrence Krauss's new book on Richard Feynman called "Quantum Man". The track, the 5th recorded, has a distinct structure, with a sort of analytical tone slowly being overtaken by a far more alive sound—that of a buzz-laden guitar. It mirrors a pattern that Krauss points out in the book about the way Feynman lived his life. He was a man who embraced simultaneous life paths (like particles in quantum physics itself). The imagery in this track attempts to embody that simultaneity. A Nobel laureate's life and the life of a rock star inextricably commingled—bound by the distant echo of applause from a Nobel Prize ceremony now lost in time.

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Track 4: Forgotten. This track (the 10th recorded) emerged from the up-tempo wreckage of the second track recorded in the Monstrous Fire project (a track which never made it beyond prototyping). Dropping the tempo considerably and jettisoning most of the performance, I discovered there were some truly mind-expanding note progressions hidden in the murk. The vibrating bass drone was of particular interest, and it seems to hit all the right regions of the brain in just the right ways. The place this track describes is a forgotten one. It speaks of the ruins of a vanished civilization, carved into the black stone of a frozen continent.

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Track 5: Monstrous Fire. The title track, recorded late in the project (12th). The imagery here is subtle, backed by a driving electronic tempo, evoking trance-like feelings; this is a meditation session aboard a faster-than-light star ship. This is a journey into a distant planet's unexplored countryside beneath a darkening sky. The title emerged from a curious bit of synchronicity. Back in 2008, the bookseller Barnes & Noble released a gigantic tome of H. P. Lovecraft's work, called "H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction." It's a feast for any Lovecraft fan (1,100+ pages). Despite already owning a set of the definitive Arkham House editions of Lovecraft's work, I grabbed a copy without hesitation and promptly forgot about it once I lugged it home. So years later, as I listened to what would become track 5 ("Monstrous Fire") through headphones, I stood before my bookcases. I had the track on repeat, listening to the final mix, and I randomly took down the Lovecraft tome. However, I had just glanced at my computer screen, noting the track was 6:14 in length. I am not sure why, but I turned to page 614 in the book, and the first two words on the page were "monstrous fire" - but more than this, as it turns out, this passage is from my favorite H. P. L. story of all time: "The Colour Out of Space" - and in fact, it's from the very paragraph I often cite as to why. Here's a clip: "...the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well—seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism." Monstrous fire, indeed.

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Track 6: We Have Always Been At War. Another dark scene, documented, presented, and processed: war. The last track recorded, the initial three notes were found in an abandoned project file from some earlier point, akin to some blasted out warehouse in the middle of a battlefield. When transformed from guitar into a brooding synth, the track took off. The images presented are of war approaching, at first on a horizon, but coming ever closer, until finally it's right outside your door: machine gun fire, explosions, roaring jet fighters, and the shouted orders of soldiers on the run. The title did not occur to me until I was listening to the final mix. Those who've read George Orwell will understand the reference. In keeping with the theme of synchronicity at work in the Monstrous Fire project, I had started to feel vaguely creeped-out by this track, having listened to it so many times. I'd been upstairs for four hours and decided to head back down into a darkened house. The room below was bathed in a subtle gray-blue tone by the television. When I realized what was on screen, all I could do was smile: Michael Radford's amazing 1984 version of Orwell's "Ninteen Eighty-Four." We have always been at war.

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Track 7: Silver Key. The 9th track recorded. A sequence of agonized, searching notes, growing, repeating, augmented by a blooming, infectious beat; winds of swirling synths, and the guitars which attend to them; distant bells like a beacon, conquering the buzzing digital swarm, before giving way to a seething bank of corrupted violins. A track not so much about imagery as raw feeling. It's about a revisited dream place, overflowing with mysteries locked within the unconscious. The album almost took its title from this track, but something kept that from happening. Something... monstrous.

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Track 8: Unexplored World. Recorded 11th, this track is all about exploration. It is a theme I couldn't escape during 2010 and into 2011, attending several Origins events at Arizona State University. At the kickoff seminar for the 2011 event, Werner Herzog was speaking about his new film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and as I listened to him speak, I realized there were likely more places on our planet still waiting to be discovered. For as much as humanity has spread bacteria-like across the planet's surface, places of mystery remain, and this is culturally very important. This track is an ode to the unknown people of the Cave of Forgotten Dreams. This track is my internal theme to the Origins initiative. There is a rhythm here, and a depth. This is mystery and discovery. The bass notes seem to dive, to burrow, to uncover new things, like sonar pulses in the ocean of Mind. A fitting end to Monstrous Fire.

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Miscellaneous

The album has had two working titles. Throughout 2010, the project was known simply as "Ready" (which was a nod to the text prompt you see on the bright blue screen of an Atari 800 computer). In early February, 2011, thematic elements related to the unconscious started to manifest and it was dubbed "The Gods of Sleep." In late April, 2011, the album's final title was determined (see above).

Inspiration for the Monstrous Fire album flowed from several Origins events at Arizona State University in 2010 and 2011, as well as from the pages of "The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene, and "Quantum Man" by Lawrence Krauss. It was a fascinating project to bring to completion. So many strange little details fell into place during composition and recording.

The Monstrous Fire project originally contained 12 tracks. 4 were cut. The following list contains the sequence of track creation along with the number of prototyping iterations each track experienced:

#1 ["Sleep"] - 21 iterations.

#5 ["Quantum Man"] - 19 iterations.

#6 ["Hidden Reality"] - 14 iterations.

#9 ["Silver Key"] - 17 iterations.

#10 ["Forgotten"] - 6 iterations.

#11 ["Unexplored World"] - 5 iterations.

#12 ["Monstrous Fire"] - 13 iterations.

#13 ["We Have Always Been At War"] - 8 iterations.

Tracks #2, #3, #4 and #7 remained unnamed, and never really emerged from the prototyping phase. Weirdly, an empty project file exists for track #8 though nothing was ever recorded.

MP3s, planet-killing asteroids, and the RIAA...

Initiated in 1999, Distance to Jupiter is an experimental music project.

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The following article was taken from the Distance to Jupiter information page at shimmerism.org, and it focuses on MP3.com and how it was ultimately destroyed by the RIAA (an "industry group" that clearly views the digital distribution of music as an Earth-bound planet-killing asteroid). It was last updated in 2009, but the kernel was written long before, in a time when the iTunes Music Store was still a fantasy. I am posting this here because rumors continue to circulate that Apple will soon unveil a cloud-based music "locker" and it sounds a lot like MP3.com's disastrous "Jukebox" initiative that ultimately destroyed them. I make this point not as a warning, but as a simple observation of irony. Clearly the situation has changed. Clearly, the RIAA has figured out how to survive in the 21st Century—they must become the asteroid.

It's 2009, and the RIAA continues its struggle to adapt to the digital music distribution model. This is telling. In case it isn't already obvious, the RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America, a group which supposedly represents the recording industry in the United States. I think it is important to take a look back at one of the true casualties of the RIAA's greed: MP3.com. No matter what you may think (or rather, thought) of MP3.com, it is undeniable that they unleashed—and gave power to—a legion of creative individuals. By removing the need for the RIAA entirely (the recording industry itself was bypassed), and giving musicians a means of production, artists were allowed to produce what they wanted to hear, regardless of "market need" or genre concerns. A small percentage of MP3.com users were already well-established in the music business, but they participated because they recognized the power of the paradigm. Scorn's Mick Harris comes to mind (he's been creating rhythmic, hypnotic drum and bass since '91 or so). Harris offered rare tracks and new productions on MP3.com, giving him direct access to his fans. But the true foundation of MP3.com was the world of the "unknown" artist; the bedroom-based knob-twiddlers reigned supreme. Every genre of music found its way onto MP3.com's servers. This was technology that offered us an outlet for a creative impetus we didn't understand, nor cared to analyze; all we knew was that we loved making music, and the ability to get it heard—for free—was intoxicating. Those of us who really embraced MP3.com did so because we had no choice. We were tired of consuming the mediocrity that littered record store shelves. But we all had our inspirations—we all had artists to emulate—and we all began to grow in creative ways. MP3.com became a thriving boutique of music never heard, in styles beyond comprehension. MP3.com was a cheap, efficient means of production for people who would otherwise toil in obscurity for the rest of their lives because the RIAA—and especially the record labels—had no interest in pushing envelopes or cultivating innovation.

MP3.com's mistake, however, was their "Jukebox" idea (later branded as "My.MP3.com"). It made sense: If you owned a CD, you inserted it into your CD-ROM drive, MP3.com's software identified the disc via its serial number, and magically, a copy of that CD (from MP3.com's server) was placed in your online "library"—a digital warehouse of music that you could access from anywhere, using your Web browser. The music never left MP3.com's servers. But to the collective hive-mind of a greedy industry, the potential for abuse was monumental.

The RIAA balked, to say the least. The RIAA showed—in the legal crush that followed—what they truly thought of their consumers. We were all assumed to be criminals. No critical thought was ever applied to that assumption. What followed can only be interpreted as panic. The irrational scenarios that must have played themselves out in the vapid minds of those in power at the RIAA will never truly be known. We can guess, of course, about the supposed wrongfulness of people borrowing CDs from their friends, or the looming threat of someone nefariously using MP3.com's Jukebox functionality to amass a collection of music they didn't actually "own"—but the reality was simple: the RIAA and its legal juggernaut became a modern re-enactment of a species trying to avoid extinction. MP3.com was an asteroid—and it was heading straight for the RIAA.

The end result was that MP3.com was forced to change. Their legal costs grew. And that growth was passed on to us - the artists who had sought only to be heard. We were told "If you're serious about your music, you'll upgrade to our Premium Artist service for $19.95 per month." Like the RIAA, MP3.com had sunk into irrationality and greed instead of just being honest about the battle they were losing. At what point had I—as an artist—become less serious about my music? How did MP3.com's legal woes change my attitude towards my music? How would paying MP3.com a monthly fee make me any more serious? The assumption made by MP3.com in the guise of a marketing slant to cover their legal costs was nothing short of a slap in the face. MP3.com rapidly declined. There were still plenty of users—addicted to the crumbling paradigm—who paid the fee. But these so-called artists were also aggressive marketers, obsessed with being famous. For most of us, artfulness was the key. We weren't making the music to make money. We were making the music because we had no choice, and because we wanted it to be heard.

MP3.com is now gone. It vanished, and in my case, it vanished silently, and without a word. I was surprised to learn—upon attempting to order a batch of Distance to Jupiter CDs—that MP3.com had disappeared. What was left of it—and all the music of all the artists who ever used the service—was sold to CNET. What they do with our music remains to be seen (or heard, as the case may be).

UPDATE (3/30/2011): Amazon decides to place itself in the path of the RIAA asteroid...

Distance to Jupiter on Soundcloud

Initiated in 1999, Distance to Jupiter is an experimental music project.

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I've been using Soundcloud for about a month or so now, primarily as a way of prototyping new tracks. What does it mean to prototype a track? It's about perspective shifting, and Soundcloud bestows a form of objectivity when you're immersed in a project. Working on music can become a perplexing endeavor; it's similar to that effect which occurs when you stare at a single word (on a page, on a screen) for too long - it ceases to be that word, and starts to lose context and meaning and just becomes, well, weird. The same thing can happen to a track if you listen to it repeatedly. You lose critical perspective. Knowing that the work is "out there," however, almost instantly forces you to listen with different ears - the ears of an anonymous audience, either real or imagined. It resets the context. It restores meaning. Though my music doesn't get a lot of listens on Soundcloud, knowing that someone might be listening forces me into a more objective place and lets the music breathe again in my mind. Real imperfections are more readily perceived. Imagined imperfections dissipate. Though seemingly intangible, this is one of Soundcloud's great benefits, especially since my workflow is about immediacy and capturing instinctual, improvised "moments" (getting caught up in post-processing can ultimately become damaging to the music).

Update (April 17th, 2011): The album "Monstrous Fire" is complete:



A note about track 2's evolution: it emerged swiftly, almost fully-formed, during a rainy, windswept winter day in Phoenix, Arizona (2/20/2011). The track's title relates to its inspiration - namely, The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene; I had just finished reading this book the night before, and that, coupled with attendance at the most recent Origins debate, had really pushed my mind into the deep end of the cosmos.

Update (December 3rd, 2015): Shortly after I wrote this entry, I discovered Bandcamp.com. I no longer leverage Soundcloud in my process.

Synesthetic Response 5

This is not review. This is response. 2010 is coming to an end, so here's three that have bent my time, altered my path, and changed my approach.

Agalloch :: Marrow of the Spirit
(2010, Profound Lore) [Genre: Metal]
Score: 11

I am almost speechless. After eleven long months, I have found my Album of the Year for 2010. Sometimes, a record comes along that makes you realize how lucky you are to still have your hearing. For me, Agalloch's Marrow of the Spirit is just such a record. It has, quite literally, blown my mind. I have been trapped in Agalloch's world of winter for a full week, six tracks on endless repeat; they are bleak, haunting and incredibly epic. And while many will comment at length about this bleakness, it is the performances here that are the key for me; they wrap you in a sustaining, protective warmth, generating a transcendental sphere which keeps you hovering in awed safety above the landscape. Hallucinatory guitar layers and mind-expanding structural flourishes dot this snow-covered expanse like meteorite fragments: cold, magnetic, blackened remnants from when the solar system was young. But then there are moments, like at 14:35 of track 4 ("Black Lake Nidstang") when that iceberg you were staring at suddenly explodes and Agalloch transports your mind to a place you never thought it could go. That track, "Black Lake Nidstang," is the most hypnotic piece of aural art I've heard in a long time. 17:34 blows by in an instant. It is filled with moments which seamlessly transition. It's the kind of song that widens your eyes as you listen to it; people might think you've lost your mind, sitting there on the train or bus, earbuds pulsing, your unblinking eyes lamely attempting to process the visual overflow of your mind. The whole album, however, is like that. Analog synths circulate in the foundation of these tracks; cellos haunt, Nature whispers, and the solar winds press further into space.

Wire :: Red Barked Tree
(2010, pinkflag) [Genre: Alt/Punk]
Score: 9

Wire are so clearly... Wire. I don't know how they keep doing this. And though I freely admit to being a hopeless Wire fanatic, that won't stop me from recommending this album to everyone. It is difficult to comment on Wire's new album without feeling a need to compare it to their prior work, but I don't think that's a particularly meaningful approach, since they have so many albums. I believe, however, that each subsequent Wire album amounts to a further distillation of what it is that makes Wire the band they are. There are familiar things here - shapes, sounds, textures, structures. Track to track, Colin Newman and Graham Lewis trade lead vocal duty, just like they always have. Newman's twisted style of "language delivery" is in full force, as is Lewis's knack for smoothly eviscerating whatever it is he's targeting (the first track "Please Take" is a wonderful example of this). Red Barked Tree contains DNA fragments from every Wire album. Because of this, the physical CD itself takes on the semblance of a tool for time travel; a shiny artifact from the future. I found myself reliving random moments from my Wire-infused past as I listened; but as these images coalesced in my mind, they were instantly intermingled with new possibilities, different outcomes. The last track "Red Barked Trees" left me reeling. I once had a dream of red trees, long ago (an aerial view of a forest; and near the center, a patch of red trees, inaccessible). There was something important about these trees, but it wasn't until I heard this track that I remembered the dream with further clarity. I don't know what the dream meant, and I am not sure it really matters. I have always suspected there is something more than just music going on with Wire (tapping into a collective unconscious?) and Red Barked Tree is extraordinary proof of that.

Rosetta :: A Determinism of Morality
(2010, Translation Loss) [Genre: Metal]
Score: 9

Something about Rosetta makes me think of deep space; of future points of demarcation from known societal constructs as the human species evolves and seeps outward to colonize distant planets. These 7 new tracks are monumental slabs, floating in an infinite, echoing cosmos; they grab you by the throat, shaking you into awareness with every searching bass note, every cascade of kick and snare and cymbal. The vocals are immersed in Rosetta's trademark hazy grandeur. And the guitars... things of aching beauty, haunting, piercing. These tracks lumber. These tracks gallop. And through it all, there is a seething intensity that I find irresistible. Unlike the tracks on Rosetta's Wake/Lift (2007) album, the tracks on A Determinism of Morality rarely feature cliff dive-like plunges into a crunching abyss. But the free-falling weight of these tracks, taking on much different structures than those on Wake/Lift, are more immediate. You can see their shapes a bit more clearly. But the title track - the album's closer - is 10:51 of abject power, beauty and unrelenting weight. It's like a spoonful of matter from a neutron star. And that's likely an understatement.

Additional recommendations for 2010...

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross :: The Social Network
[Genre: Soundtrack]
Score: 10

Brian Eno :: Small Craft on a Milk Sea
[Genre: Electronic]
Score: 10

Daft Punk :: TRON: Legacy
[Genre: Soundtrack]
Score: 10

Zoroaster :: Matador
[Genre: Metal]
Score: 9

Hans Zimmer :: Inception
[Genre: Soundtrack]
Score: 9

Enslaved :: Axioma Ethica Odini
[Genre: Metal]
Score: 10

Just remember when you were small...

re: John Lennon...

I was in front of the television. My dad and I were watching a Monday Night Football game. History indicates it was between the Miami Dolphins and the New England Patriots, but such details are not part of my memory. I remember only a game, bisected not by a normal half-time show, but by an ABC News bulletin: John Lennon had been shot and killed. I was only 13. I spent the later part of that evening listening to a few Beatles albums in my darkened room, with headphones, trying to imagine things would be the same.

Quitting the World of Warcraft

Since November of 2006 I was a World of Warcraft player. Shortly after being admitted to the Beta for the Cataclysm expansion I simply quit playing.

I've had a lot of time to think about the reason(s) why, if any. It wasn't conscious. It was not something I had planned to do. I recall logging out one night. Then I never logged back in. A few weeks later, I removed my credit card information from my account.

World of Warcraft is an extraordinary experience, in general. Specifically, over time, it became a Groundhog Day-like nightmare. So in that spirit (e.g., the specific), here are some of the things I've discovered about why I quit playing World of Warcraft:

1. I was tired of feeling obligated. More so than in real life, WOW had ultimately become a series of endless obligations. For the uninitiated, that could include leveling up your character. Bound within that task are the quests. The professions. The battlegrounds. The auction house. The holiday events. Once you reach level cap (85), you'll be doing daily quests for gold or honor. You'll be raiding on a regular schedule. You'll be doing daily dungeon runs. If you don't do one or more of these things on any given day, its akin to traditional video gaming's "losing a life" event. You have a feeling of falling behind everyone else in the game world.

2. I was tired of feeling overwhelmed by needing to be somewhere that wasn't real, while in my home.

3. I was tired of the People (note the case). It wasn't a person or group that was the problem; I really did like all the people in my guild. I found myself internally grumbling about the fact that this video game required legions of other People to function properly. I've been playing video games since the Atari 2600 days. In fact, I'm old enough to recall when there were no video games. I'm part of the First Generation of Video Gamers - the ones who can recall going into some local pizza shop or convenience store and seeing a monolith-like black object called Pong had replaced an aging pinball machine. I guess what I'm saying is that I grew up with AI-based friends and enemies, and they are far more interesting to me than... People.

4. I was tired of raiding, and specifically, the absolute insanity that Blizzard decided constituted "fun" in this regard. It seems so insidious, on the surface, that to be the best you can be in WOW requires such insane levels of hand-eye coordination, coupled with the idea that to succeed, the 10 individuals in the raid had to become a single organism. One mistake by any one of the individuals usually resulted in disaster against a raid boss. The learning grind and chaos of reaching the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel was not rewarded, in the end. I was part of my guild's first 10-man group kill of the Lich King, and it was a profound anti-climax. The loot that Arthas dropped was instantly disenchanted. It was unusable. All we gained was the "Kingslayer" title to parade around with, yet the three months of work it took to complete the task was monumental in comparison. This left a very sour taste in my mouth. It was the single greatest disappointment I'd experienced in WOW.

Some part of me misses the daily fix of it all. But that's the craving one feels when one plays a decidedly good game. Forgive me the use of terms usually dropped in relation to addiction. I do not believe video games are addictive. Good games are replayable. Great games are compelling. World of Warcraft is a great game. For a while, anyway.

In the end, I have only a generalization to throw out there (one which no currently-immersed WOW player will agree with): happy people don't play WOW every day. I say that primarily because I discovered, a few weeks after quitting, that I was happier not playing WOW than when I was. In other words, I was unhappy while playing WOW, so I quit. Why did it take me so long to realize I was a gamer who was not enjoying the game?

So today is the day. The Cataclysm expansion for World of Warcraft is released. Is anyone really happy about that? That's a pretty big question, when you think about it. But unlike most World of Warcraft players, I know what I'll be missing by not playing: four more years of the same old crap.

The Profits of Apocalypse

"The Profits of Apocalypse" is story #1 in a short fiction series called Hemegohm's Tendril which expands the narrative begun in the science fiction novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism (story #2 located here). It takes place approximately 33 years after the events of the novel. The tale unfolds during a lecture given at the League of Faiths Pavilion, where one of the novel's pervasively-present-yet-never-before-encountered characters, Pad Q. Glibbert, is addressing his constituents: the chief executive officers of all the galaxy's fractious, bizarre religious sects, shrewdly united under his leadership. In the crowd sits an aging Meinolf Gloomdred, prurient as always, and still quite enraged about Simon Shadow having slipped from his grasp so many years prior...

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This story has been illustrated and expanded, and is now included with the final story in the Hemegohm’s Tendril triptych "The Gulf of the Architect."



In the UK or Australia? Just click!

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Literary Vacuum: A Tremulous Light

This article is part of an on-going series intended to clarify and expand upon elements of the dystopian novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism and its sequel Hemegohm’s Tendril.

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The history of our species is littered with instances of colonialism. One of the earliest inspirations for The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism was the computer game M.U.L.E. by Ozark Softscape, published in 1983 for the Atari 800 personal computer. While nearly perfect in execution and tone, it was M.U.L.E.'s archetypal background theme that bestowed the game's true power. Primarily an echo of "colonization sci-fi" such as Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, and Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, the game casts you in the role of a lone colonist trying to survive the economic uncertainties of colonial existence. In a typical game of M.U.L.E., bad things happened to good colonists; good things happened to those who didn't deserve it; you might go hungry in the wake of a pest attack on your food supply, while rival colonists hoarded food and let it rot, rather than sell it to you, lest you get ahead. By the end of the game, however, players often pulled themselves together for the greater good of the colony. A strong colony became a destination for traders, where all the colonists did well (a victory); a failed colony became a lonely place, on few, if any, trade routes (a loss).

Having played M.U.L.E. countless times, colonialism often resonated in my thoughts as I grew older; it created a lens through which I looked at the world. It became a catalyst for thought and a microcosmic mirror.

On our planet, the dominant form of life is microscopic. Bacteria and viruses may not truly be aware of our civilization, but they do shape it. They have colonized our species like we might colonize a planet. They dominate our bodies. They intervene in our behaviors, just as dominant human cultures exert political, economic, and cultural control over weaker human cultures. Unlike viruses or bacteria, however, our species has mastered the art of influence, both in terms of military power and economics. Where those two forces meet, you find the choking bacteria-like bloom of religion, thriving, spreading.

In The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism, the world's most powerful governmental systems have aligned themselves into a single entity, known as the World Order. The narrative's speculative premise is that our planet will be faced with an overpopulation crisis, made worse by runaway environmental degradation. In the face of this global crisis, a new ideology emerges that legitimizes an overt form of population control; the promise is societal cohesion and protection, but the World Order is steeped in religiosity. It is essentially a values-based system, and while scientific discoveries ultimately allow humanity to colonize distant planets, the World Order's will to control remains ascendant. Humanity submits to it through a form of natural selection (i.e., dissent equals death); though the World Order's corporate spirituality is riddled with incorrect causal associations and invasive dehumanizing practices, submission becomes essential for humanity's continued existence. To do otherwise risks our end.

Shimmerism, the fictional religion, is born on the fringe of the World Order, where its ability to control begins to fray. Shimmerism renounces the patternicity of bureaucracy in favor of the noise and chaos of free thought. Shimmerism sits in diametric opposition to the World Order and its tenets, and so it isn't really a religion at all. It is only cast in such a light because of the World Order's dominance. Survival of the fittest comes to the forefront; The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism is about what happens when harboring irrational beliefs becomes a survival strategy. It paints a picture of what the world would be like if modern religions actually got what they wanted: a timid, quivering civilization steeped in weird beliefs; a societal dead-end, where cause and effect are merely opinions; essentially, a world where humanity's evolved necessity to believe nonweird things is viewed more as a religion than not.

Literary Vacuum: Jettison the Onion

This article is part of an on-going series intended to clarify and expand upon elements of the dystopian novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism and its sequel Hemegohm’s Tendril.

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Problem: When attempting to think one's way out of the wet paper bag of religion, unless you're hopelessly devout (in which case you'll stay in the bag), any given exit will be seen as an attack on the bag itself, and thus, against anyone who is religious.

Thus, we glimpse the terrible beauty of religion. Unbelievers, surrounded by the thoughtless undead (the intellectually complacent, e.g., believers), come to realize that the very act of thinking critically about a particular religion is interpreted as a form of discrimination. Of course, this has everything to do with the weakness of religious thought, which appears to be devoid of logic and reason; its rhetorical power, however, lies in its delivery of a comforting disconnection from the true mystery of the universe. Believers subscribe to a convenient origin story that absolves them from learning; it shields them from the fear associated with an uncaring, disinterested universe. Religion nullifies the sublime fact that no one currently alive will ever have all the answers, and it tells them "You know enough. There is no need to learn anything more." And that is all religious folk really want: an answer to everything, gift-wrapped, with ribbons held aloft by soothing cherubim. And so the believer is caught in an unwavering dance, maintaining a position of diametric opposition from the unbeliever. It's an easy maneuver. Where religion is moral, critical thought is not. Where religion is divine, and thus, infallible, reason and logic are unimportant and ignored (in that order). No debate. No discussion. Religion simply doesn't handle criticism very well. It's a black and white system, with no tolerance for shades of gray.

So given this abrasive societal fabric (and minus the problematic debate on how to tell if someone can actually think critically or not, wherein unbelievers leverage something called evidence to make a point, and believers reject evidence altogether), how could anyone hope to write a science fiction novel that views religion with an adverse eye? At least not without instantly being dismissed as either pointless by those gifted with an ability to think critically (unbelievers), or condemned by those who lack such an ability (believers)?

That was the question that drove the construction of The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism. There are so many layers:

Onion Peelings

The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General at the Expense of the Particular, quoth FRATER PERDURABO, and laughed.
But those disciples nearest to him wept, seeing the Universal Sorrow.
Those next to them laughed, seeing the Universal Joke.
Below these certain disciples wept.
Then certain laughed.
Others next wept.
Others next laughed.
Next others wept.
Next others laughed.
Last came those that wept because they could not see the Joke, and those that laughed lest they should be thought not to see the Joke, and thought it safe to act like FRATER PERDURABO.
But though FRATER PERDURABO laughed openly, He also at the same time wept secretly; and in Himself He neither laughed nor wept. Nor did He mean what He said.


- The Book of Lies, Aleister Crowley

On, off. One, zero. Odd, even. Binary. And in the end, the idea that mystery trumps any expression of itself. Words are inadequate. So the problem of writing a science fiction novel that deals with the evolution of religion became even greater. Ultimately, the safety net of structure became my refuge; structure is one of the great conceits of religious thought: that all of this has happened before, and will happen again, like a vast machine, chained to repetition. We are born in one state of spiritual alignment, and must spend our lives attempting to alter it, to save or better ourselves in the hereafter.

On the largest scale, The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism has many machines - cranes, if you will - and on those cranes are hung gods, like lights in a tree. Modern readers, or perhaps literary critics who can't get enough Aristotle, view the use of a deus ex machina ("god from a machine") with suspicion, even derision. I can see why. Such a device - the sudden appearance of an unlikely character or event that resolves a bad situation - can instantly dissipate the nebulous contract between reader and author, rendering the author as unreliable or untrustworthy. I have to admit, however, that a deus ex machina is great fun. And at least when writing about the foibles of religious thought, perfectly necessary and indispensable. The most important aspect of it all, however, is the machine itself. The crane. Simon Shadow, the main protagonist, moves through his tale as if fated to do so, despite his freedom. The United Galactic Marines Corps, orbiting the planet Reetar, exerts power over those below it, including Simon, literally and indirectly, accidentally and with hidden purpose. On the far side of the planet, the Children of Chearkin (a group of pious refugees suffering from an anachronistic hangover caused by their long transit to Reetar in hibernation), wander the desert, desperately seeking a fabled city of scripture. That they triumphantly reach the colony the moment it's destroyed has everything to do with the tension between fate (theological determinism) and free will.

Ultimately, The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism is about three distinct story threads unknowingly colliding; miraculous resolutions come to pass, but even greater problems manifest with gods and machines. In the end, nothing changes; lives are nothing more than programmed outcomes, and that's just how a majority of religions want it to be. Believers know what's to come; disbelievers do not. Why can't the former accept the latter? That's the question at the very heart of The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism. As far as I can tell, there's no answer, at least as long as religion plays such a monumental role in the lives of organisms on this planet. There was hope that people could laugh openly at these characters and situations, but at the same time perceive the innate sadness of it all. But like Crowley's onion, each successive layer (e.g., viewpoint) counteracts the next. Belief. Disbelief. Belief. So what do we find when we reach the core? I'm still not sure there is one. In fact, finding the center isn't important at all. The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism suggests our best option is to simply jettison the onion. Dump it in the airlock and move on as a species. As George Carlin would say: "I can dream, can't I?" And if I have to use a couple dozen deus ex machina moments to do so, that's no more (and a lot less) than religion has done for the past two thousand years.