Uboa

Uboa - Pareidolia Shadow (WIP)

Added 2024-01-08 02:01:25 +0000 UTC

Here's a near-finished song from my upcoming split with a certain internationally renowned doom metal band who also hail from Naarm (Melbourne). The instrumentals and mixing are *almost* there and have a strong doom metal influence so it fits with the other band on the split. My side of the split will be 23 minutes long, divided into about 5-6 songs. A much earlier version of the song was put up on soundcloud as 'The Eyes of Yesterday' roughly a year ago.

The instrumentation includes baritone guitar tuned to drop G, synth, field records , vocals, sampling (mostly a choir, found on Splice) sheet metal for the 'cymbals' and 'rides' of the percussion. I extracted it from a broken drying machine before throwing it out to hard rubbish. Ignore the SM7B in the photo, which wasn't a good mic choice due to it's lack of high-end, I instead use stereo cymbal mics. This 'instrument' appears of several songs of the split. Generally I don't usually like 'normal' sounding drums and being a long-time fan of Einstürzende Neubauten, I absolutely adore scrap-metal percussion, whether live or sampled.

(As you may notice on The Origin, I don't use a 'normal' drumkit there, songs like 'An Angel' actually use a mix of kick samples and junk metal instead which I believe gives it more character).

One issue in this specific recording is my standard vocal mic broke (dropped it), and am currently trying to repair it myself (Australia doesn't have many mic-specialising technicians and the mic is produced in Canada). So here is a vocal scratch track with my SM58 clone with a LOT of processing. Since my singing voice is 'airy', I always prefer to record with condenser microphones. Once the mic is fixed, I'll likely re-record the vocals to get a more smoother high-end that isn't entirely drowned out by guitars and doesn't need so much high-end multiband compression to sound good (and thus more 'natural'. I'll probably re-do the screams with my SM7B, as small-diaphragm mics and condensers can mics can make them sound 'tinny' (one of my main criticism of my mixing for The Flesh of The World).

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The topic of the lyrics isn't subtle. Indeed it's based on my own experience with being diagnosed with autism (specifically, the face-emotion test). However it is fiction (my parents are actually really cool, indeed my dad is who got me into industrial in the first place) and is done from the perspective of a character in a fictional dystopian, surrealist sci-fi world. This world - based on dreams/the unconscious/nightmares - but also based on my leftist political beliefs - is a fascistic, hyper-capitalist nightmare world full of all kinds horrors - both 'realistic' and 'fantastic'. It's also inspired by a wide variety of fiction from William Burroughs, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Torrey Peters to the Interface Series and even the SCP foundation. The composition I performed with my recent Australian tour with Liturgy, 'Future Null Infinity', also takes place in this realm.

I am sick of directly discussing things about myself, and the upcoming record (where most of the lyrics were done in 2018) is hopefully the last time I'll 'trauma dump' about myself directly. For obvious reasons, it is too emotionally taxing to discuss all the difficulties of my life for a living. However, I still want the music to have an emotion and I've always wanted to write this dream-world down but find standard fiction difficult (and scary) due a tiny amount of dyslexia. Hence this 'Uboaverse'.

This realm isn't new. The song 'Misspent Youth' off the Origin is actually based on a dream. It is about the regret of not coming out earlier in my life, but also how noting coming out in the 90s/00s in Australia would of been a nightmare that may not be survivable. However this realisation came to be in a series of interrelated dreams in a semi-consistent world with consistent character dating back to my teenage years. Specifically about a girl (who admittedly was a semi-Mary Sue for my closeted self) named Evelyn May. I'll go into more detail with this story later.

This song (and indeed likely my entire side of the split) is about one of the characters of this world called April Adams, a friend who grew up with Evelyn in high school. These are the two characters implied in 'Misspent Youth'. Of course, the lyrics of the song do convey how I actually feel about my transition and some facts about it (I did come out at 26, for example).

Basically, Evelyn and April were eggs together, and figured out they were both trans in that awkward way young people did back before transness was really intelligible. Coming out in their school in the city-state 'burbclave' they live in basically means being 'disappeared' by the christo-fascist state police. Of course, this is sadly happening in the real world too.

This song is specifically about April being diagnosed with autism in childhood, and how her parents physically abused her into being neurotypical and 'normal' (indeed, not dissimilar to 'adversives' in ABA. Tragically, they claim to do this for her own protection. In this neofascist world disabled and ND (not to mention Trans!) people tend to be disappeared and put into death camps in the name of eugenics, so being diagnosed with autism - or rather Aspergers - is a death sentence.

The final line ties into the fact gender dysphoria and transness has a strong correlation with autism. Indeed, I consider my own autism and transness closely interlinked. I suspect part of the reason they are connected is there is the autistic difficulty in not being oneself (i.e. why masking is difficult) as well as the inherent difficulty socialising us into particular social roles, including gender roles. Often this is because we see through bullshit, and gender roles are largely bullshit.

But fiction - even the fiction of dreams - places some distance from reality (especially painful reality) which allows us to discuss reality in a less triggering way. Furthermore, sometimes reality is only intelligible through the lens of fiction. Finally, while we do indeed live in a horrifying boring dystopia where genocide is currently mainstream, I do worry how much worse things can get insofar as capital, the state and reactionary politics get much worse. It won't be a boring dystopia anymore, but 'interesting' in the same way one's own trauma is technically 'interesting'.

Anyway, this is already too long so I'll conclude here. Let me know what you think of the song, especially if you think the vocals even need to re-recorded, as I am happy with my performance (just not the mic). Like most of my prior work, every song in the release is part of a continuous whole, like chapters in a novel, hence the abrupt beginning and end. I'll be working on the prior song next, which acts somewhat of an 'introduction' to Pareidolia Shadow.

the nice lady makes a face

I don’t know what it’s meant to mean

she shows me more faces like hers

and I think they all look the same

she spoke to mother quietly

she said if they knew they’ll kill me

mom said to keep this our secret

forever

“I’ll get someone to make you be

normal”

then dad beat the sperg out of me

to protect me