It's been days of floating down the treacherous, unmapped river woods when finally, you hit a break in the trees. A massive expanse of lake lies in wait. In the distance, along the waterfront to the west, manufactured structures pierce the cloudy skyline. Smoke stacks and boxy buildings, shackled in rusty iron tubes and staircases, not at all far removed from your expectations of human made factories, create a strange backdrop around a township that otherwise resides within trees. As your boat approaches the harbor, the water gradates to murky brown and green and quickly becomes viscous. The low thud and the scraping sounds of the hull bumping into floating junk and the bodies of dead fish becomes a static din louder than the sound of waves and water. The air smells putrid.

You take notes and some photographs as you approach the shore. Your boat is equipped with a powerful 360º camera that captures just about everything, but if you were out there to make maps that were baseline perfunctory, they would have just sent a robot. Map making is so often a process done from the air, but the trees are too dense to see the rivers, and the sky is the home of many more predators than water. And besides, everyone back east wants to know what and who are actually out there. They want stories.

As you dock your boat, it becomes apparent that this place lives in its own shadow. What was clearly once a verdant and bustling downtown is empty except for trash and specters. The plant beds and gardens are full of dried out vines and mismatched grasses, and seemingly every storefront has broken glass and overturned and misplaced items. It doesn't appear that this situation is the product of any targeted violence. It seems much more likely that this was a slow and consuming illness.

In spite of all of this destitution however, you notice the smokestacks, from which a plume of dark smoke still slowly rises, as if something is still living and working here.

After a few moments of silence, the deafening bellow of a horn blows, and then again, both from the direction of the factory. Your heart races and you instinctively dash for your boat. This may not be a good place to spend the night.


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Dunno how I ended up making this one so long! I was about to do a quick modular thing since I'm trying to finish an album before tour, but as I searched for screws to secure a new module I started singing a song about the process that became the opening bass/drum thing. Now it's another concept piece instead!
All software again. Most interesting sample is the weird choir which is some stretched, tuned, and looped piece of audio of a friend speaking in a recording on FB messenger.

If it weren't apparent, this world I'm building here is kinda trapped at an unlikely intersection of having developed a lot of specific kinds of technology without having even explored their entire planet. I was thinking a lot about how flat earth people thing it's possible that no one has seen all of the planet in such a profound way and definitely got stuck thinking about Lewis and Clark moving west. This is definitely a fantasy world though, because humans in this universe have no interest in conquering anyone or claiming land.
There are also more dominant/intelligent type species, as well as creatures much higher on the food chain, which creates a dynamic we don't really experience on earth too much. Not sure if I'll keep going with this world or not! I have two weeks to finish stuff and then I'll be on the road for 65 days and I usually like to make the songs with longer narratives be things I can invest time into but we'll see (^^;;