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
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
(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?)
(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
(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
(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
(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
VII. Cave of Brahma
(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)
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[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.