Millennium-rift

mailer_daemon: Millennium Rift

(SPECIAL PREVIEW)

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I. Doldrums

Lyrics

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(VOICEOVER)

In the halcyon days of the early internet, electronic bulletin board systems provided a forum for the posting of all manner of digital content. UseNet in particular became a haven for hackers, cyber artists, and tech-literate outcasts to congregate. From this strange social amalgam emerged mailer_daemon, an anonymous digital recluse of the highest order. Based on his Usenet history, mailer_daemon spent the 1980's as an under-recognized composer and poet in New York City. After a series of creative and personal disappointments, mailer_daemon uploaded Spectral Peaks, a dense, cryptic collection of hypertext containing a manic swirl of references including hair metal, Christian apocrypha, Nintendo games and quantum theory - all through a lens of surrealistic boredom.

I need to stop

indulging in the doldrums

every Friday night

I go to town and see Wozzeck

un chien andalusian

I need to stop

looking for something to believe in

And on the zellige boardwalk

you told me we all walk along

ambient rain

"the tiles the tiles the tiles"

II. DMC Oblivion

Lyrics

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(VOICEOVER)

Amongst his shared obsessions was a fascination with the DMC Delorean, a silver car of gargantuan cost and feeble engine. "A car with wings glued to the ground" he called it - a description with which mailer_daemon seemingly identified.

And I am not this man

bathed in Egyptian musk

something is melting

beside the road

III. Pyramids (Do You Believe?)

Lyrics

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(VOICEOVER)

As the early 90's dawned, mailer_daemon lived increasingly online. Although not explicitly stated, he makes increasingly frequent references to cannabis and often readily conflated the world of the living with the endless and timeless violet expanse of cyberspace.

Each and every morning

I douse my inner anima

with fresh eucalyptus

and gently prod my skin

until the skelemetal goes:

BOOP BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP BEEP

Pull up to the terminal

patch on the BlackNodes

A kilabit extravaganza™

like a mind daemon

"the never was a night in the jacuzzi"

in the pleasure dome hang the pervpigs

wet like cenobites with high desire

IV. [Metal Swans in Rain]

Lyrics

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(VOICEOVER)

Around the year 1992, mailer_daemon appears to have met a female companion. This occurrence, so unexpected, served to clear the haze in mailer_daemon's hotboxed mind. The relationship, in his account, displayed intoxicatingly masochistic undertones and a shared sense of antisocialism. After years of almost complete isolation, he found his deepest thoughts reflected back to him - a mirrored face looking back at him, rendering his life, suddenly, beautiful and poignant.

I wish I could take my mind

and penetrate it with your mind

I could crawl in every crevice

and I still wouldn't know

I could cross forbidden borders

a hidden world of strange disorder

where rocks look like flamingos

You told me tales of a synthesizers that sounds of metal swans in rain

You said that your sunglasses were lost deep inside of you

but I still wouldn't know

up on the bridge

where everyone's leaving town

V. Another Day in M'Hatra

Lyrics

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(VOICEOVER)

Around a year after their meeting, mailer_dameon appears to have accompanied his companion to the city of Los Angeles, a locale he found simultaneously fascinating and repulsive. The move appears to have somehow altered their connection - irrevocably. He found himself again isolated and in a foreign world. rather than return to New York City, mailer_daemon sought the stark desolation of the Mojave desert, and area he referred to in his writings as Hatra, after the ancient city in Iraq, mostly famously the home of Pazuzu, the biblical demon antagonist of William Friedkin's film The Exorcist.

Like a warrior at war with war itself

I laugh at the swarm of nanobots

swooping in over barren fields

beyond the glow of distant sci-fi cities

VI. My Grimoire

Lyrics

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(VOICEOVER)

mailer_daemon's final digital codex, an icy, distant series of entries he dubbed the Meta Simulacrum, contains the entry Cave of Brahma - a reference to the Hindu name for the cerebral seat of consciousness. "Fuck everyone who's ever felt anything but sadness" reads a line from the entry. mailer_daemon, circled by coyotes and forsaken by God, reaches his breaker wall.

I could see through it all today

if not for the Asparagaceae

especially the dead one

I imagine and I dream

endless eights

severed dicks

pazuzu

VII. Cave of Brahma

Voiceover

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(VOICEOVER)

mailer_daemon's final digital codex, an icy, distant series of entries he dubbed the Meta Simulacrum, contains the entry Cave of Brahma - a reference to the Hindu name for the cerebral seat of consciousness. "Fuck everyone who's ever felt anything but sadness" reads a line from the entry. mailer_daemon, circled by coyotes and forsaken by God, reaches his breaker wall.

Everything is over now

it's dust and weeds in the Cave of Brahma

wrapped in these memories like salesman's suitcase

I see each face every time I close my eyelids

it's unclear to me the moment when it all went wrong

maybe there was poison gas in the cave of brahma

it's unclear to me what the fuck I should do now

everything has ended and nothing else is beginning

Cave of Brahma

Raped landscape

distant planet

this dead river bed

she's my dominatrix-atrix-atrix

lathered up with dust and bone

cave of brahma

I wander around this wasteland alone

dodging scorpions like I'm in some bullshit western

I hear coyotes howl and moan

they cry like babies when they start attacking

I can't believe I ever even said the name of g_d

fuck everyone that's ever felt anything but sadness

I'll tie myself down on the tracks

am I the only one who's world is ending?

I can't believe I ever even said the name of g_d

he laughs like a villain before he starts attacking

the cave of brahma is a void

VIII. Millennium Rift

Voiceover

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(VOICEOVER)

His final fascination appears to have been with the concept of the Boltzmann brain. An obscure but generally reputable theory that posits the following: it is infinitely more likely that our minds are tangles of spontaneously arisen of atoms floating in space than what we commonly understand ourselves to be: creatures of flesh and blood searching in desperation for someone or something that understands us so we can experience, even for the briefest moment, a respite from the void.

Tarot, taboo

they all seem to agree

what follows from the tea leaves

is nothing short of murder

Only cynics build an ark

the rest hide out in Lesotho

tarot taboo

they all seem to agree

but to a boltzmann brain

nothing really matters

I'm just a brain

Magnum opus of the reclusive composer and hypertext poet mailer_daemon. With ambition on par with Karlheinz Stockhausen's unperformable 7-day epic "Licht", Millennium Rift calls for the construction of ornate masks and laser grids based on principles of sacred geometry. Despite Millennium Rift's relative compositional complexity, its sound is palette heavily influenced by 1980's pop and jazz fusion calling for the Yahama CS-80 (the Blade Runner sound) and KORG M1 synthesizers, heavily gated electronic drums and rototoms a la Phil Collins, and vocals treated by the Eventide H3000 harmonizer. The score also bears a heavy Eastern influence, calling for various Asian percussive instruments and a guzheng (or Chinese plucked zither). Lyrically, m_d appears to have spent years culling lyrics from his various codices of hypertext, circling 'round his obsession with with Y2K