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Floodlights

by Coppice Halifax

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Floodlights 42:28

about

(Recommended for fans of Verdant Acre, Lowlights or Fissured Beach)

It's been six years since we left the Verdant Acre, or tried to. The past can be a romance that's hard to quit, sometimes like a warm blanket and sometimes like a drug. Other times, it sits waiting to be discovered in the backwoods of your mind, omnipresent, casting a shadow over your agency, informing the illusion of your freedom to choose.

So, while retreading a patch of wet landscape in my sentimental estate, to pull some weeds and transplant some particularly nice flowers, I tripped over a strange object in the muddy dirt. Initially, I thought it was just the root of a tree, or a stone - something to be ignored or bypassed - but upon closer inspection, I discovered it to be the edge of a much larger structure. After spending a week in the rain with some shovels and tarps, I laid my eyes on the strange object - a forty foot long primitive submarine, that somehow seemed to be made of wood that had long since petrified into stone. I began to wonder if this section of the Acre had ever been under seawater, and then further deduced that if it were, that would have made this vessel ancient.

Since then, I've been unable to sleep. Even knowing the unearthed object was far away from the valley I called home, I could hear it in my mind, calling for me to come back...and open it. And what was it, really? A piece of unexplained maritime history in the area, or something more sinister? Was it deliberately buried? Did it carry something that was never meant to be held? Did it contain something (or someone) that was meant to be sealed away? I had to know, and yet I wanted none of it. This surreal wreckage of the past, someone else's past, did not belong in my domain...and yet here it was.

With the help of some pills, I quieted my mind enough to pass out. What followed were vivid sensations of being carried away on giant waves, in all directions, with deafening white noise surrounding me and cold bullets of rain on my face. I couldn't open my eyes, and no matter how hard I swam, something heavy kept pulling my legs down. Once I thought of it again...that machine...I could feel it far beneath me, in the blackness of the water, slowly coming up to the surface like some eyeless marine hunter. The weight persisted, and I finally began to sink down toward what I understood were the dead and the damned, forever asleep in this deep hell. The last thing I remember was looking up at the surface of the water, from beneath it, and seeing no light.

Waking, drenched in a cold sweat, I rushed into my study to write all of this down, where I will now publish it alongside a tape of the previous night's recording. Sometimes, the past is something you need to exorcise from your subconscious, and there's not a non-violent or non-traumatic way to accomplish that. Sometimes, the past can be a romance that's hard to quit.

credits

released August 8, 2018

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at White Pillar Workshop, August 2018, using cassette recordings from a 2016 Botany Bay session as compost source, in tandem with Korg Volca Bass / Beats / Sample and several outboard FX, channeled through a Peavey FX2x24 mixing desk. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and photography by ABM&D. Photograph shot with a modified Holga 120 CFN using 35mm film, unaltered in post. This is Milieu Music number ABX87.

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Coppice Halifax Dayton, Ohio

Analog Botany, since 2005.12.08. Impressionist techno and bedroom fantasist electronics. Compost instead of composition.

I also release music as Milieu: milieumusic.bandcamp.com

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