this post is about No Sentry, track 9
we love timās trombone loop,Ā the jarring note switch and the way a kind of slower melody gets threaded through that, we listened to the variations for hours and hours in a now defunct studio near carisbrooke castle. it always had ballad energy for us, so when @hepostsclouds sent over the glorious strings and it drew out a kind of latent lament quality, we knew it had what it neededĀ
when experimenting with the autotune early on i liked the clunky and slightly dopey sound that the subtle formant shift gave the voiceĀ
i started thinking of kind of lumbering creatures, oafs with arrows in them, sad + slain dumbasses maybeĀ
I made some homemade latex prostheticsĀ to help scope him outĀ
i think the special animal figure was born maybe as a relief from the idea of us as solely pernicious and other leech/parasite/sadist metaphorsĀ
which we understandably resort to when talking about human harm ecosystems
maybe this allowed for more sympathy and absurdity, or pathos and tragedy ?
the idea of a god figure instructing a flower to withhold bloom, or a raincloud not to provide release long into the future, further than us as the fossil record as a kind of mourning
i donāt think the planet is a god or even that god is necessarily a god - but maybe there is a kind of cosmic regret held somewhere about all this
thatās what i suddenly feel without warning at least
MadMax cliche is hard to avoid when talking about an uninhabitable planet. its hard not to imagine extreme dry and extreme cold or hot and wet and the extremes of everything, dead soil. but an uninhabitable world like that is another invitation to dominate, terraform and problem solve. i just know we canāt, wonāt refuse the offer.Ā
i imagine all the technology needed to cling, and i also hope for it, but also hope for a concurrent shift that allows for other ways of being - imagine having to invent stuff forever, better to slip off gracefully no? let the worms have it
with the abrahamic notion of us as stewards/namers/custodians/sentries, it means that, when we are extinct, stuff is reduced to its semantically blank constituent parts
east is north, doesnāt matterĀ
just a slab of stuff, granite, ice, miles of it, no story, stop all geomancing, stop narration, stop narrative, pop words empty
the sound that matched it was like a balloon deflating was the eeeeeeeeeee you hear a couple of times in the recordĀ - felt better than oooh or ahhh, less mannered and sadder i think
anyway i am trying to be hopeful about it - these are thought experiments to reach a more sustainable pattern of living alongside other species and thingsĀ
i always loved nature scientifically and mechanically and aesthetically but had been allergic to fanciful extrapolation about any inner worlds or sentience beyond human meaning- for animals it felt anthropomorphising, and for the planet it felt too mother nature-y - but i also think it was a way of not facing up to harm done
but i canāt really be allergic anymore, acknowledging a deeper life in these systems seems to be the only hopeful avenue and being fanciful is a low price to payĀ
so maybe a story is needed , but maybe we first need to face the blank terror of no story to prompt the better retellingĀ
for our listening party i put the lyrics over a video of a locust i saved from a swimming pool
it preened with its forelegs and looked like it was trying to plead with me to me, maybe for safety maybe for extermination
it died anyway, it was too far gone
