Entropy Always Wins

Another soundcloud song I didn't realise wasn't here. This is one of my favourite soundcloud-only songs and something I wish I had the old project files to so I could mix it to 'fit' with a few other songs for an EP.

I thought I'd say a few things about this song from 2015-16.

This song was strongly inspired by Locrian, as when I was younger I had a tendency to try and 'copy' other music projects I really liked in order to reverse engineer them in terms of composition and sound design. I do this less these days, but it taught me a lot. Then I'd later try and add my own spin on them in order to not rip them off.

I still think my song has some things that set it apart. For example I used home-made 'tubular bells' by getting various metal poles and tying them to a mic stand with string and hitting them with drumsticks. I did a lot of other junk percussion here too, using sawblades and other junk from my Dad's forge/workshop. I also used a clarinet (not in key) similar to how Swans use them in The Seer. Finally, the drums are a mix of drum machine with additional layers of real toms, mostly because my neurological weirdness made playing the hi-hat at the same time of the toms/kicks/cymbals difficult. Then there is the acoustic guitar playing alongside a doom metal bass, a small amount of post-rock guitars ...and a melodica. The instrumentation is certainly interesting.

With the vocals, it should be obvious that I have no voice training on them (although I suspect HRT changed my voice a little too...somehow). I was still in the closet at the time, and looking at the lyrics and it's so 'eggy' as it was just before (and as) I was coming out (roughly around the time of Hook Echo). I feel like the various horrible things in the lyrics below describe the closet well, especially if it's a closet you don't yet have the words to make sense of.

It also ties a lot of my lifelong special interests astronomy, cosmology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. I still have been meaning to write more on heat death from a theoretical point of view, specifically inspired by Ray Brassier's 'Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction" which is a book I frequently return to.

I probably will remake this for a future release but with a less post-metal approach to sound design and ideally something that suits the release it will be on. However as it stands now I am quite proud of it, especially as something that is more of a (very) slow, patient burn.

lyrics:

i am not me
but my own shadow
a dirac sea

pallid swarms of
winged lampreys
unmolested by the sun

not a void but a hole
accreting all the dust

i hope fracking pumps
up the bodies
from down below the crust

i fell in love
with the prettiest guard
at my prison camp

she lovingly fed the
incestuous mass
that gives birth to the dead

that tickles the glistening
pink feminine cut
that emits the air we breathe

the arrow of time
points one direction
entropy always wins
__

the arrow of time
points one direction
return to the womb

the arrow of time
points one direction
entropy always wins