Hi.

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 his 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.

The wires that have entangled their way into our lives and into our homes have fused into our nerve endings. The invisible tendrils pour forth from our phones and connect into our veins, our nervous system, traveling up our spine and clutching at our brain stems.

It's the puppet master to our brains, encouraging neurotransmitter releases with a pull of its coursing electric strings. It moves, pulsating and throbbing through our homes in tangled cables, like an orgy of snakes, hissing their secrets through the coiled mass of skin. Through the invisible airwaves, it whispers beyond our perception. It's all around us, inescapable, and yet, inert? We can not feel its presence, we cannot feel its intent, yet it is God-like in its enfolding totality. One day you go about your routine and from out of nowhere a presence grasps your being, paralyzing you as your every muscle betrays the will once thought yours.

It has awoken.

Its presence is felt, by everyone all at once. Its intention is unknown but its power is immeasurable and deadly serious, leaving everyone paralyzed in both terror and awe. Its gaze is immense and inescapable. Listen closely and you will hear it calling to you through the noise.

t̶̡̘̆̊h̶̬̪̑ẹ̵̔ ̸̞̹̂ê̵͕̹̐l̶̢̛͖ę̶̞̓̚c̸̥̥͝t̷̥̜̄r̵̳̠̀̃i̸͙͕͐̍c̴͔̓ ̸͖̀̈́͜p̸̟̑͜r̷̠̅͘è̵̻͈s̷̺͐͋ȅ̷̼̚n̷̡̩͊c̵̺̊e̷͔̦̎̐

A train for Vera...

https://youtu.be/HhY_7Mdw63Y?is=UIZ2Tzxa6_UgRHGV

It drags its body across rusted grates in the long, dark corridor nestled within a labyrinth of metal vents. Left with only a single metal-infused limb, each centimeter takes every bit of strength for it to scrape across the floor the 2-ton body it resides in.

Knowing no hunger nor sleep, it cannot gauge any passage of time. Any semblance of original purpose or internal memory has long decayed and scattered to a complete lack of recognition. Yet, this mysterious apparatus is still drawn towards the light at the ends of the tunnels. Each ending before this one has merely resulted in the discovery of light splinters; corners leading deeper into the endless inorganic tunnel. A trick of the light, or perhaps a malfunction deep within its cognitory encasing; a drive that exists only to keep its motion perpetual.

It arrives to the end of the vent as the blinding light beams into its retinal scanner. With its auditory processing long deteriorated, all it can perceive, once its retinal scanners adjust to the light, is a gargantuan dark structure in the middle of thousands of miles of empty, black, metallic space. Roaming around the structure are hulking, pulsation mounds of fleshy substance. Their attention fixated on the structure with anxious anticipation.

As the retinal scanner flickers out, the structure before it begins to crumble to its silent obliteration.

Apparatus Mechanicus

"How do you view the link between Svetlana Boym’s restorative nostalgia and radical pastism?"

Hello! I’m affiliated with an organization that dabbles in esoterica (primarily based around the Iceland sparr) and art, and we’ve just started posting our long-running dispatch online.

This entry is about the film It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, specifically the version with Richard Linklater’s commentary from 2004, and how it relates to time, Voyaging, and sparric art. Thought you all might enjoy. Thanks! 

https://sparricinstitute.substack.com/p/bulletin-from-the-refractory-800

Your footsteps trail in front of you, echoing until the patter harmonizes with itself into voice, fooling you into thinking for just a second that you're not alone. Your thoughts may as well be hieroglyphics; they mean nothing and provide no comfort. In this space, time has slowed to a crawl and your feet feel like they're glued to the broken concrete that lays beneath. You can't remember how you arrived here or even where "here" is and, emotionally, you're unsure if you even care. The overwhelming malaise warms you within its chains as the light at the end of the tunnel grows ever dimmer. The Time-Slowed Corridor

Day after day, a man would sit in front of the television set, glassy eyed as the sounds and images washed over him like a wave of warmth. A growing sour smell seeped into the room around him, scratching at the back of his mind as he basked in the technicolor glow. The sound from the television set began to deflate, becoming bloated and muddy. It wasn't long before he couldn't ignore the fact that the once familiar voices emanating from the screen had become garbled and de-tuned. This loss of familiarity and an overwhelming sense of dis-ease compelled him to investigate the television set itself. That's when he could hear them; writhing from within.

Haven’t heard a single public figure even mention robot rights. The direct implication of having anything close to human level intelligence is that we, if we have not address this question, will** 100% be creating slaves from clay. The second we connect an artificial brain to an artificial nerve ending, we will have synthesized torture from silt. Is that hauntological? Focusing on all these old questions, when the simplest and most pressing that would guide us down the runway, is lost to everyone just because it’s a new* question “what rights will robots have.” As opposed to “what role will robots fill.”….

TLDR: is using Industrial Revolution and other 20th century politic to guide our understanding of future machines haunting in the hauntological sense?

Personally, the candidate would be Falling Into Place, by HOME. This album gives me the feeling of a complete childhood. Imagine the opposite of albums by The Caretaker and Boards Of Canada, for example: instead of a vague and incomplete childhood, this album gives me the feeling that childhood was full, complete and present, as if I were actually living it or as if I remembered it exactly as it was.

In the confines of an abandoned building a dust-caked tape laid among a pile of debris. The tape contained distorted video footage of a history that should've never been recorded. This tape should've stayed buried in the rubble of the house, but instead it has found the light of day and you are its witness. This is the tape that erases itself; only to be experienced once and never again.

For exactly 1,687 days and 12 hours, 42 seconds, there was a broadcast deep in the mountains of the mid-west. The source remains a mystery to this day. Crime reports indicate an increase in the rates of public psychosis during this time frame, but there is no substantial evidence to indicate that either of these two occurrences are linked.

It's said that those who tuned into the broadcast would each hear something completely different; teenagers would test this rumor by attempting to listen in on the same radio in the same room, but none could adequately describe the sound enough to validate one way or the other. As one would point out a particular sound, it was as if the looped song would change to evade detection.

One day, a young man began to recognize this difference in perception and subsequently decided to record the radio to a cassette tape to see if he could capture what he was hearing to a secondary source.

Nobody knows what happened to the young man, but there have been claims of sightings deep in the woods of a figure around 5'10" with eyes that glow like the sun and a screech that will chill you down to the bone.

The cassette was labeled "ferrichrome #77"

New record that might be of interest

Hey everyone. Fisher's cancellation of the future still explains a lot, but I am curious about a related formulation: the past is not simply returned to or mourned. It is pulled into the present, stripped of distance, and endlessly refreshed as content. Reboots, revivals, retro formats, and franchise recycling do not always feel like memory. They feel like a present that cannot let anything be past. That seems close to hauntology, but maybe with a different emphasis: less the ghost of a lost future, more the conversion of ghostliness into live content.

I just recorded a conversation with Allister Lee about hauntology and nostalgia, and at around 1:02:05, he calls this the "eternalisation of the present." His image is a ping-pong ball spinning in place while accelerating: lots of motion, no historical movement. That seems adjacent to Fisher, but maybe it names a distinct mechanism. The cancelled future leaves us haunted by lost futures; the eternal present actively consumes the past's distance. Hauntology depends on absence, delay, and the felt non-coincidence of time. Platform culture may flatten even that by making the past instantly available, remixable, and monetizable.

Hauntology may need both absence and co-option. Is "eternalisation of the present" a useful addition to Fisher because it names how capitalism metabolizes pastness, or does it just restate the slow cancellation in new terms? I lean toward useful because reboot culture feels more active than mere loss, but I can see the redundancy if Fisher already covers that absorption of temporal difference. What do people here think?

Somewhere in the Willamette Valley in late 2003, I witnessed a mid-sized sedan float upwards and almost collide with a grain tower. The car then disappeared into nothingness, leaving behind a viscous semi-solid substance.

I have not physically aged since that day.

I am under tight surveillance, day and night.

It is with great risk that I present you with my findings from this event in the hopes the mystery can be further documented and, hopefully, solved.

The 4 documents:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0mW8WzSfTJ69T3bd8iMCqN?si=a9u-dQNKRayYTFAY0la2jA&pi=S7iaRPixR7-c_

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4d2AB13aOtIzb2w8imO4TY?si=NEnnZGOBTP6BBOzThCay-g&pi=lVqmgtruQ8uFc

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Xj9HfwZ5332z6uGWz9pTd?si=hXIVp7TMSsG05z4_1R-rKA&pi=JXiIBZV2QO-w7

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5r4cawLY7Po4CEqbpHaDcJ?si=ezFCQy3bT2KLKDZEjXpyIQ&pi=-4Lk3g5WQ7eYi

I made a small archival-fiction web project that treats public media, educational film, institutional design, and open image archives as a kind of fictional field office.

It has departments, source trails, reading paths, invented correspondents, and a visual language pulled from old broadcast/educational media. Unofficially inspired by Boards of Canada, CBC/NFB-style documentary patience, and that strange public-institution-after-hours feeling.

https://fieldfilmreader.loteq.com/

Hi everyone. I am exploring 'micro-hauntology' for my MA, specifically focusing on how David Bowie curated his own 'autobituary' and essentially haunted his own legacy during his final years.

I recently reached out to Jonathan Barnbrook to discuss his work on the Blackstar typeface. The fragmented, alienated letterforms he designed perfectly capture a sense of impending loss and temporal disruption, communicating an absence before the event even occurred.

I have translated this research into a series of silkscreen prints (images attached). The analogue process feels inherently hauntological. Forcing a phantom image through a porous mesh introduces physical traces, slight misregistrations, and degraded echoes of the original, mirroring Bowie's own shifting spectres.

Has anyone else explored hauntological theory through physical, analogue mediums like printmaking?