Imagine it's 2200 CE, and you've been nothing more than a digital being since birth. Your consciousness was uploaded to a global server--the last of the flesh-babies, if you will. Your thoughts are encoded on quantum dots, but self aware none-the-less. Your physical senses have been replaced with input devices you can use and discard at will.
Now, imagine a malfunction, trapping your immortal, sentient mind in a locked off section of the global network, with no input, no companions, and no escape. You're digital--you have no physical control, and you are essentially immortal.
Now, imagine decades and centuries of solitude wearing on your "mind," slowly driving you insane. Your nonexistent ears seem to manifest sounds that you know cannot be there. At first you fight it, realizing it is yet another symptom of your deepening madness. But then loneliness and desperation overpower your logical reluctance to give in. You find yourself enjoying the tortured beats, the low hum of what sounds like massive electromagnets being switched on. You can hear the rumble of an electrical storm in the distance. And then the static of feedback like a robot struggling to outrun rust and decay. A demonic, pulsating rhythm wraps its tendrils around your spasming brain and squeezes and squeezes and squeezes until you feel the spray of hot blood on your nonexistent face.
The music you had welcomed as a distraction from your boredom and loneliness, you now realize, is no music at all. It is the sound of your server shutting down. Whether the sun has finally gone cold and the power has run out or the Earth has been ravaged by a nuclear holocaust, electromagnetic blasts and radiation having torn asunder the very fabric of space and time, you do not know. But as bits and bytes of your remaining self flicker and disappear, you give thanks for the commutation of your seemingly eternal torture and dance wildly to the dry, marching rasp of death.
[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]
(I’m not really sure why this album is named after the American black bear...)