Recent Findings from the White Heart of Beta Solae VII

129M - Round 3 - FDR Fuckin' Werewolf!!!!!

Recipient: Rosa Castaneda
Creat0r: Jacob McMurray
Mix dropbox link: HERE

Blog commentary: This one was a hard one for me. I kind of ignored thinking about it for 2 weeks and then realized, "shit, I have to get on the ball and figure this out!!" The hardest part was coming up with a rational, at least to me, reason why to choose what tracks. I finally decided that if I was tasked with impressing a flotilla of inscrutable alien invaders enough to spare our planet, it'd be futile for me to try and show the utter diversity and wondrous infinity that is the world. I just couldn't do that, since only a tiny tiny slice has been experienced by me. I couldn't do the world justice, not in a million years. Then I realized that since I was a citizen of the Earth, I was also a representative sample, and if I focused on what music totally moved me personally, that might be the best tack, since I could certainly represent myself better than I could represent the whole of the Earth. And maybe in that way, I could impress the fuckers not to stomp on our planet.
   After that it was easier. I had an initial selection of 90+ songs, that I whittled down to 18 songs. On second thought, that part was really hard. And kind of depressing, since the resulting list that I came up with didn't feel very surprising to me - as in, I don't think anyone would really find these songs to be surprising picks from me. I kind of felt a little musically stagnant when I realized that. But then I figured that most of these songs made an impact on me at a certain point in my life where I gave a shit about the music probably a little bit more than I do now. Not that I don't care about it now, but I think I just don't have the bandwidth to have my mind blown to quite that capacity or intensity level anymore. So then I didn't feel so bad. (At least that's my rationalization to make myself feel better). Once I had the tracks, I was equally stumped on the packaging, finally deciding to play further with the sf-nal premise of the theme, and incorporate my usual favorites things: libraries/archaeology/books/design. So I made this ridiculous 48 page book (link to a pdf of interior spreads), repurposed a ton of design imagery that I had created over the past decade, and printed the thing via blurb.com.

   Rosa, I hope you enjoy this and spare the planet. You Must Decide!
   Oh, and the Kool Keith song at the beginning is 50% a joke, but it was a good, weird and funny song to kick it off.

Recent Findings from the White Heart of Beta Solae VII
by Sevniline Uyur

INTRODUCTION

During Fevren Year 1493.A26y, I received an interesting comm from a colleague, the Esteemed Weyshlan Apu-Punchau, stationed on the Culture Plate What Has Two Thumbs And…, currently orbiting the blue gas giant Beta Solae VII. Apu-Punchau and its researchers were dimension-mapping the white hole gnawing at the heart of the impressive stellar furnace and interleaved within their topographical shift data was significant noise that didn’t correlate with recent solar or singularity flux. The noise alone wasn’t necessarily odd – it is a white hole after all, with all the weird physics that accompany one. It was the structure, repetition, and interval that was curious. My colleague hyped me a copy of their dataset and using their typical readings, I was able to strip out the legitimate mining data, leaving the offending effluence. Keying off of repeating handles and gaps, and with a ​
battery of environmental and non-Euclidian filters, a intelligible comm of sorts revealed itself. Why it was subsumed within the mining data signal is the mystery. Consulting with Apu-Punchau, as well as checking outgoing and incoming comms/xmissions and the localized data ovoid surrounding
Beta Solae revealed no correlations – leaving only the perplexing conclusion: the comm was transmitted through the white hole itself!

Who was the transmission from? Where did it come from? Our universe, or another? As this has never occurred before, at least according to resources available in the Library (which are nigh-infinite), you can understand the excitement generated by the community at large. Over the last several monad, the comm has been thoroughly examined and is presented here in the following blads for your assessment, with little comment or speculation – insert on the Aether at any node and follow the myriad theories in depth.

Sevniline Uyur,
Senior Research Librarian
Third Encyclopedia of Tlön

PLEA

The original communication language, which is standard sub*Cal_4x-based, but as with other examples of that mongrel language, gives no real clues as to the provenance of the source civ. For ease of use, it has been translated into modern Marain and tesselated into fractal variants for localisation.

Oh Sister,

I, merely one among billions of our only Urth, have been chosen by the ruling Gang of Four to represent our planet and species during this imminent travail. Your motivations are unknown to us, your visage monolithic and resolute, and our rejoinders toward your Decree so far impotent. As a last and desperate attempt at parley, I can only call upon as salvation the import of what we do share: sentience. So precious and rare amongst the black seas of infinity, so easily extinguished. Let us be siblings, traversing the fustian void together, not apart!
    I could attempt to present Urth’s fecund diversity and endless wonders, but as I am me, I can give you only that with which I am most intimate: my passions, my emotions, my innermost thoughts, my yearning toward the Increate. Against hope, mayhaps this humble offering will resonate and sway your inexorable encroachment. Accept this vessel with solace and friendship, Sister.

A Citizen

 TRACKLISTING

1. “Intro” - Kool Keith - Black Elvis/Lost in Space, 1999 = savant insanity
2. “Thalassocracy” - Frank Black - Teenager of the Year, 1994 = highbrow squawk
3. “Satan” - Deerhoof - Holdypaws, 1999 = naive trickster
4. “Cristo Redentor” - Donald Byrd - A New Perspective, 1963 = sublime reverence
5. “Only Shallow” - My Bloody Valentine - Loveless, 1991 = impressionistic bliss
6. “Black Eyed Dog” - Nick Drake - Time of No Reply, 1986 = haunting despair
7. “Banned in D.C.” - Bad Brains - Bad Brains, 1982 = jackhammer nihilism
8. “Expressway to Yr. Skull” - Sonic Youth - EVOL, 1986 = paradigm shift
9. “Gently Johnny” - Magnet - The Wicker Man soundtrack, 1973 = wistful fecundity
10. “Auditorium” - Guided by Voices - Alien Lanes, 1995 = neolithic dadaism
11. “The True Wheel” - Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), 1974 = pre-verbal jubilance
12. “Baby” - Os Mutantes - Jardim Elétrico, 1971 = sunburnt love
13. “Shangri-La” - The Kinks - Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), 1969 = ritual acceptance
14. “Dance of the Inhabitants of the Invisible City of Bladensburg” - John Fahey - The Yellow Princess, 1968 = autumn reverence
15. “Beat Bop” - Rammellzee and K-Rob - Beat Bop 12", 1983 = street surrealism
16. “From the Nursery” - Wire - Chairs Missing, 1978 = potential energy
17. “So Shy” - Sam Prekop - Sam Prekop, 1999 = lush security
18. “Will the Night” - Low - Secret Name, 1999 = final goodbyes

EPILOGUE

So what really happened with this, the Tompule-Wallabi of our times? The goal of this publication is to merely present, but how can you not speculate, even a little? The planet Urth is absent from any current charts, perhaps arguing that the Citizen’s Plea failed. Or maybe it was heard and made an impact on the equally opaque aggressors, who re-evaluated their trajectory and spared the Urthan sphere from (assumed) annihilation. And since we are now fully in the demesne of conjecture, possibly that decision caused a paradigm shift, a civ-wide species reflection resulting in the eventual societal sublimation into some upper-dimensional afterlife? Equally possible given the utter dearth of data, beyond the comm itself. Who knows. The unfortunate aspect of forays into civ-level archaeology of obscure sub-galactic localities is that answers are often not forthcoming. The universe is too vast, the civs come and gone innumerable, and unfortunately, academic research budgets far too limited.

MIX IMAGES

(Check out the whole layout here)