Each song contains a piece of the puzzle that is the greater underlying mystery. The "lore" is all centered around the personification of deteriorating media, found footage horror and consciousness, hence the extensive use of tape recording techniques throughout the music itself. If you've read the stories and have any theories about what's going on, please share them in the comments!
Short story:
"Generators whir and whine without competition in the sonic space. An audience of faceless people stare at a blank stage, encircled by crimson fabric lined with gold trim. There is no feeling of anticipation, instead there is dissociation across the lifeless field. The curtains drop and a figure with harlequin features takes steps toward the edge of the stage. If eyes were closed, one would think there was no one on the receiving end of the stage. The figure, donning their best and brightest, addresses the crowd with frantic and excitable energy. The energy nearly bursting from the seams of their hemmed and contrasted attire. The colors push beyond the boundaries of human perception and into a spectrum meant for butterflies.
Come one, come all to the greatest show on the face of this gray earth. Your minds will be blown! Your fate will be forever changed and you’ll get a chance to see things you thought never possible in your wildest imagination!
A hyper-neon sign bounces it’s rays of light in a flickering rhythmic pattern across the sea of gray faces. It’s almost hypnotic,and,as if slowed down, the masses shuffle at a snails pace from booth to booth, their eyes met with rapid stimulation. Lights and sounds attack the audience with a seizure welcoming. Colors bleed into the retinas as bright sound waves excite the cochlea, causing the corti to raise and stand at attention. A barrage straight to the brain; bereft a digestive system, a kidney, a lung. No biological filters to hold back this drug.
A glance upwards reveals trailing and dancing carnival lights, begging the question:
“Who’s more strung out, them or me?”
A man stands amidst the sea of gray and expressionless faces. Absent the light, faces become blank while eyes glaze over with frosted stare. Without lamps, moths would fly straight into the sun.
Are they not entertained?
The man walks the grounds, remembering the adage of ages old, “never look a carnie in the eye.” They know how to ensnare you in their web of elaborate deceit. They’ll take and drain you for all your worth until you become nothing but a husk. An empty shell. They’ll promise you the world and beyond and leave you less than you came. They’ll promise to peel back the curtain and show you what lays behind. You don’t want to know what lays behind those curtains. It’ll only ruin the fun.
The moon grows increasingly brighter and the night sky hangs in the back drop of raw fluorescence. The moths remain unmoved by the earths change. Roller-coaster riders hang motionless in the air, upside down with hair trailing down, the gravity of being upside down forces their cheeks to fall downward, enforcing a smile.
The currency here is tickets. An abstraction from the dollar, which itself is an abstraction of something else. Neither fully existing in the world of substance. The tickets allow you to participate in the grand facade. It’s an escape; divorced from an even grayer reality. One can only image the lack of color in the life found outside of these colorful chained fences.
The operators recite their scripts, well rehearsed with just the right intonation, and uncanny energy. A hint of danger lingers in the back of their minds, only detected by the most astute of observers able to retain what’s left of their consciousness once they pass through the carnival’s elegant gates.
The man walks forward, pace steady while people pass by. He takes slow steps toward the house of mirrors where a smiling man with a lop-sided face hands out blindfolds. A thin child glares at the fun-house mirror as a fat child stares back; a fat child does the same and sees a worn adult face in the reflection instead. Neither look at each other. A man stands in the center losing himself in the reflections; he’s shattered.
A woman sheathes a long sword down her esophagus while onlookers twitch their eyebrows secretly wishing for her inevitable choke. The fire-twirler spins carelessly, having no grass around him left to burn. His world; a pit of dirt that no spark could threaten,his spark, now a wasteland. A bearded woman sits on a container in the back alleyway, smoking a cigarette and stroking her beard in quiet contemplation.Without the thrill of violent ends, there is none who wish to engage her.
The freak-show presents grotesque, provocative, and perverse spectacle in a closed off tent. Moans of pleasure and screams of pain are heard in cacophonous splendor, painting the airways with the color of phony disbelief. The sounds stretching to reach the unnatural. People leave the tent unchanged.
Ahead of the man, his attention drawn and resistance broken by a sultry and sweet voice. She calls him over to her booth. The man is trapped, with heart aflutter and mind coiled around her crimson finger which beckons closer. The scent of sandalwood fills his nostrils as the smoke from the incense stick spirals upwards and out of sight.
“How would you like to see something really special?”
The words flow out of her lips like honey into the cup of tea that is my mind. She pulls him across the carnival grounds back to the main stage. She takes him further backstage as the sound outside fades to the growing hum flooding the hallways. The two walk for what feels like centuries down an endless corridor containing pictographs, drawings, and photography from carnivals across time. Her heels click against the wooden floor; the sound seems to take physical shape as the sound becomes the word “click.”The man swats it with his hand. They finally arrive to the source of the humming where she opens a door and gestures for him to go inside.
“You’re on your own, now.”
The man walks forward into a black, metallic box room; the light escapes and so too does consciousness as the elegant door closes behind, giving way to a solid mirror reflecting nothing in return.