CYBERGOTHIC
soundtrack for forthcoming MMORPG
http://www.webjam.com/cybergothic

As it happens, Cybergothic has turned out to be a long-term project, From initial concept as an unusual minimalist hi-tech sci-fi RPG environment to the development of that through various incarnations into a storytelling rpg and from that into 3D graphic artwork compatible with a computer-game engine. This journey became source for the soundtrack, as did many elements from my life that just seem to fit in so perfectly there...
For me, this was a turning point in my musical career, as I decided to become totally immersed in electronic synthetic technotronic atmospheric music. Aside from necessary life distractions that's still where I'm dreaming to be.
Having expanded my perceptions during several trips to Germany just a few years after the Berlin wall came down, I was as amazed at the accelerated westernisation process striking a gulf of difference between two generations, as I was by the freedom exhibited by the younger generation. The shackles thrown off! I was taken to a wide variety of clubs, a lot of which played German techno which later became a useful influence when I was playing with the band variously known as Headfry and Bite the Wax Tadpole (translation of phonetic Chinese "coca cola" according to our Nagual). Returning to the UK I am still sickened at how repressed and repressive the general society here is. Behind closed doors the girls are as naughty as your imagination dares, but they won't show you, that would be wrong. Mysandry is the order of the day in uk. Tribalism, Humanism, blatant all-out we-have-needs-sate-them animal nature flying in the face of dogmatic tradition. Feeling Alive worshipping Life and each other.
No slavery. Punch the sky until it gets out of your way.
"The future is ancient" Ridley Scott
I visited Magdeburg where the famous Witch-trials and scientific proof discovery of a Vacuum. I remembered the place, it feels so strongly of home, inexplicable as the memories of a former life that came flooding back to me, working on secret manuscripts and astrology and herbal remedies, living in a specific house, had I more time there to explore I am sure I would have found it. I went to the Hertz mountains which still famous for a colony of witches, bought a cauldron. Aside from satelite dishes and cars, the towns in this region of the world has not changed much in the past few hundred years. It all seems fitting since I grew up a student of the occult and a follower of HR Giger whose vision is the sci-fi counterpart to HP Lovecraft's archaic Cthulhu. It is all the same mythos. Seers of the same dreaming.
Visions of timeless and boundaryless environments consisting of steps and open spaces far below the canopy/ground level above. Tiny frail life-support pods, infested and self-reliant, lost journeying between impossible distances. The emotional pain of a teenage heart because my girlfriend was thousands of miles distant and experience was growing me up and away from her in directions faster and vaster than teenage insecurities could deal with. Deep yet fleeting feelings encapsulated by such as Type-O-Negative, Siouxsie Sioux, Transvision Vamp, Shakespeare Sister, the Cure, Bauhaus, Black Sabbath, Velvet Underground, theDoors, Metallica, Rage Against The Machine which even then I identified with Frank Herberts Butlerian Jyhad. We were promised technologies by Shadowrun, electronic toys that have fallen by the wayside to the progress of reality while Ziggy Stardust looked on laughing after we broke his hands.
I turned my back on the boy I had been when she was took away from me by powers greater than I had yet seen, and I discovered ritual sex magick and shamanic spirits hiding in the drug scene of the uk underground, to fill the void. And years later I returned to it, this bubble of dark innocence and honest desire, sweetness and shadows that I had spent a lifetime turning, learning, testing, besting, licking my wounds and wounding my licks on Cenobite bliss and Vampire's kiss. This time armed to the teeth with experience and second-hand designer musical toys that I had eaten from skips to afford.
So I set to work. As I began; it is a work in progress, like most of my concept albums, where an idea and a few scraps of sound, vibrations, moods, form the gist of what will eventually emerge into a track, and from these tracks, given time to make sleek and remix the idea's with craftier skills and new accessories, thus come the albums born as Product. Just in time for CD technology to become obsolete as digital freedom takes over and downloadable .mp3 makes musical culture omnipresent.
Visions of timeless and boundaryless environments consisting of steps and open spaces far below the canopy/ground level above. Tiny frail life-support pods, infested and self-reliant, lost journeying between impossible distances. The emotional pain of a teenage heart because my girlfriend was thousands of miles distant and experience was growing me up and away from her in directions faster and vaster than teenage insecurities could deal with. Deep yet fleeting feelings encapsulated by such as Type-O-Negative, Siouxsie Sioux, Transvision Vamp, Shakespeare Sister, the Cure, Bauhaus, Black Sabbath, Velvet Underground, theDoors, Metallica, Rage Against The Machine which even then I identified with Frank Herberts Butlerian Jyhad. We were promised technologies by Shadowrun, electronic toys that have fallen by the wayside to the progress of reality while Ziggy Stardust looked on laughing after we broke his hands.
I turned my back on the boy I had been when she was took away from me by powers greater than I had yet seen, and I discovered ritual sex magick and shamanic spirits hiding in the drug scene of the uk underground, to fill the void. And years later I returned to it, this bubble of dark innocence and honest desire, sweetness and shadows that I had spent a lifetime turning, learning, testing, besting, licking my wounds and wounding my licks on Cenobite bliss and Vampire's kiss. This time armed to the teeth with experience and second-hand designer musical toys that I had eaten from skips to afford.
So I set to work. As I began; it is a work in progress, like most of my concept albums, where an idea and a few scraps of sound, vibrations, moods, form the gist of what will eventually emerge into a track, and from these tracks, given time to make sleek and remix the idea's with craftier skills and new accessories, thus come the albums born as Product. Just in time for CD technology to become obsolete as digital freedom takes over and downloadable .mp3 makes musical culture omnipresent.
CHARACTERS
Characters in Cybergothic begin as simple gendered clones bred in the vats to custom designer perfection, and the same as everybody else but for a secret program code; their purpose to discover and integrate into the society. And with fortune and guidance from the omnipresent macro-computer entity controlling everybody, implanted in the palm of your hand with its touch-sensitive holographic 3D video-display cum OCTV Open Circuit Surveillance Camera; most people do achieve this useful goal.
The problem is that experience shapes them, gives persona and in a culture of equality where all are equal because all are identical clones granted one or other gender, the quest for self discovery and unexpected intrusions upon the perfectly machinated society from extra-dimensional influence pretty soon begin mutating individuals to far beyond their originally planned purpose, and civilisation begins veering rapidly beyond the computers ability to cultivate its desired long term survival agenda.
Thus is born a socio-political environment of spies and espionage, tiers of secret factions, revolutionary terrorists and zero-zones, militia-conditioning and the game of control. It is entirely an illusion. Self-aware individuals begin to question why they are able to do stuff, have capabilities for creativity and the flow of magickal essence channelling through them that is to be found nowhere else in the orthodox histories and public accepted schools and scriptures. And so physics are warped as characters expand their souls own personal essence and space into the external realm of maths, cogwork grid-based anti-gravity driven cubicles which form the dwelling chambers of the ever shifting city. And with experiments into the magickal dimensions, the witches and shaman attract the attention of those mystical denizens who themselves constructed the machine for their vast experiment, or else were drawn to it by curiosity and by mistake.
By the time you get there, the pacts you will have made with double-edged daemons will have caught you in a web of your own unique flavours. As madness and conformity collude and collide, you begin to understand why simple black and white are the dominating spectrums of this chess board tesserract universe. The simplicity is essential lest experience race vaster and faster than our frail souls ability to comprehend and keep grip with. Slipping, falling, all the way down to Abyss, where lay the bones picked clean by beetles and reconstituted into Gris, the major substance of which material-spiritual-digital realm is made, from spray-on rubber clothes to cyber-tools and dwelling-spaces.
In its simple elegance, this hell provides backdrop for the players to flare their colours bright, as long and as neon into the dark moonless night as they dare go before necessity of experience summons some deeper wraith to challenge us to grow. So it keeps changing and the city shifts. And who you were yesterday, and who you knew, factory-reset back to basics, download the skills you'll need today and the memories too. And the memories too. Where does that leave you?
And so to Now.
Every moment should feel like the Awakening, and that's one strategy to flow endlessly forward. Hence the techno backbeat with a drum&bass break rhythm. Hence dubstep basslines and sci-fi jungle drums beat, tribal from the inner past. Flashes of dream visions before your eyes, memories projected from before, the reincarnated soul remembering metempsychosis, remembering this vessel is temporal and has a job to do, and the City is good and the machine controller is good because its streamlined us down to bare essentials that we won't get caught in complexity again. This is zen techno. This is minimal goth. This is facing the confusion and telling it to bog right off.
Sounds echo up through the city and thats really what I wanted to take shape here. All the rest is mere backdrop and flamboyant exposure to something thats been done so many times, its about time someone did it so pure to set a benchmark. The trick and the deep teaching ritual is to make it sound as exactly much the same as everybody elses that no-one can tell who made it. And that's your hidden program code. Go forth and make it so.
This game deals with Dreaming our secret instinct into colour, into event. This game deals with the loneliness of cities and the loss of ego amidst crowds, aimless but to struggle on against overlords we cannot even dream. This game consists of searching for a soulmate, who might very well be someone else tomorrow but thats ok, because every day is the same and so the change is welcome.
Maybe thats why she moved on.
The problem is that experience shapes them, gives persona and in a culture of equality where all are equal because all are identical clones granted one or other gender, the quest for self discovery and unexpected intrusions upon the perfectly machinated society from extra-dimensional influence pretty soon begin mutating individuals to far beyond their originally planned purpose, and civilisation begins veering rapidly beyond the computers ability to cultivate its desired long term survival agenda.
Thus is born a socio-political environment of spies and espionage, tiers of secret factions, revolutionary terrorists and zero-zones, militia-conditioning and the game of control. It is entirely an illusion. Self-aware individuals begin to question why they are able to do stuff, have capabilities for creativity and the flow of magickal essence channelling through them that is to be found nowhere else in the orthodox histories and public accepted schools and scriptures. And so physics are warped as characters expand their souls own personal essence and space into the external realm of maths, cogwork grid-based anti-gravity driven cubicles which form the dwelling chambers of the ever shifting city. And with experiments into the magickal dimensions, the witches and shaman attract the attention of those mystical denizens who themselves constructed the machine for their vast experiment, or else were drawn to it by curiosity and by mistake.
By the time you get there, the pacts you will have made with double-edged daemons will have caught you in a web of your own unique flavours. As madness and conformity collude and collide, you begin to understand why simple black and white are the dominating spectrums of this chess board tesserract universe. The simplicity is essential lest experience race vaster and faster than our frail souls ability to comprehend and keep grip with. Slipping, falling, all the way down to Abyss, where lay the bones picked clean by beetles and reconstituted into Gris, the major substance of which material-spiritual-digital realm is made, from spray-on rubber clothes to cyber-tools and dwelling-spaces.
In its simple elegance, this hell provides backdrop for the players to flare their colours bright, as long and as neon into the dark moonless night as they dare go before necessity of experience summons some deeper wraith to challenge us to grow. So it keeps changing and the city shifts. And who you were yesterday, and who you knew, factory-reset back to basics, download the skills you'll need today and the memories too. And the memories too. Where does that leave you?
And so to Now.
Every moment should feel like the Awakening, and that's one strategy to flow endlessly forward. Hence the techno backbeat with a drum&bass break rhythm. Hence dubstep basslines and sci-fi jungle drums beat, tribal from the inner past. Flashes of dream visions before your eyes, memories projected from before, the reincarnated soul remembering metempsychosis, remembering this vessel is temporal and has a job to do, and the City is good and the machine controller is good because its streamlined us down to bare essentials that we won't get caught in complexity again. This is zen techno. This is minimal goth. This is facing the confusion and telling it to bog right off.
Sounds echo up through the city and thats really what I wanted to take shape here. All the rest is mere backdrop and flamboyant exposure to something thats been done so many times, its about time someone did it so pure to set a benchmark. The trick and the deep teaching ritual is to make it sound as exactly much the same as everybody elses that no-one can tell who made it. And that's your hidden program code. Go forth and make it so.
This game deals with Dreaming our secret instinct into colour, into event. This game deals with the loneliness of cities and the loss of ego amidst crowds, aimless but to struggle on against overlords we cannot even dream. This game consists of searching for a soulmate, who might very well be someone else tomorrow but thats ok, because every day is the same and so the change is welcome.
Maybe thats why she moved on.