mailer_daemon: Millennium Rift
I. Doldrums
(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
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?)
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]
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
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"
VI. My Grimoire
(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"
VII. Cave of Brahma
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"
VIII. Millennium Rift
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"
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[1]
- ↑ In numerous writings m_d espouses a belief that the world will end at 12:00am, January 1st, in the year 2000 - a belief that, it appears, set him free from any expectations of performance or exaltation related to Millennium Rift.