supermassive 01 (overture) produced 2019.01.19–24 From the perspective of one asleep in a hospital bed circa 2015, the purest passion and ambitions of the comfort character Jest Lanthorn are lay bare via a dream: she herself fantasizes about her prospective stage debut. she loves the sound of the electric guitar in a very childishly abstract sense; this permeates her very essence. after, she stands triumphant–exhausted–at the zenith of the stage. soon, her being will be wholly manifested and the dreamer will completely embody her, causing the dualism maintaining their otherness to erode. for now, the dreamer opens their eyes. --- THE SUPERMASSIVE EXEGESIS okay, i have so so many thoughts running through my head about all of this stuff, most of which i've never actually concretely written down, let alone told to anyone, so it's going to be a bit sloppy. i've laid it out as best i can for now; i will probably be filling these out with regular updates as things return to mind. maybe i'll collect everything into a master document and lay it out all formatted-like and literary, philip k dick style? probably. i spent a few weeks in hospital in 2015 recovering from a major corrective surgery. i think according to second-hand accounts i clinically died multiple times, particularly during periods of sleep. i never would have released any of my albums or gold medaled s3xmoditmania or experienced the beauty of transition or any of those things and that's always haunted me just a little bit. so here, at last, a partial demystification of supermassive. the story of supermassive is a principally Dharmic one, which i didnt really completely intend at the time, at least not as such, only because i didn't really know what that meant and it was moreso a vessel for exploring my own philosophy: ydwd, taken all together, including supermassive, is a tale of transformation, transmigration—pointedly samsara (sm in particular depicts bardo), the illusory nature of time, and nested layers of spirit-bound paracosmos, or a kind of animistic panentheism. it is about dreams-as-clairvoyance, and manifesting these fantasies into tangible being, for these internal and external worlds are one and the same, or that engaging with these parapraxes fundamentally identifies one with the divine and that this potential lies inherent in everyone. it also builds off of a bit of Abrahamic religion: the "red sea" symbolism and the deliberate likeness of the acronym "ydwd" to the tetragrammaton, for example; it is somewhat interesting in that it doesn't really assert a doctrine of non-self, at least not at the local scale of the universe which its inhabitants perceive, i.e. everybody's "paracosm" (inside world) is unique to them and houses its own litter of spirits, each capable of fostering their own and so on and so forth down the line (hence, "animistic panentheism"). chaos theory, in particular imagery of the bifurcation diagram of the logistic map, as well as that of strange attractors like the Lorenz attractor, played a critical role in informing the development of the project. on the original cd, disc 1's artwork was adorned with a phyllotaxis (with prime numbers off-color, forming a spiral outward), representing birth and order, and disc 2's depicted a polarized logistic map, dissolving into chaos as it approaches its center—a black hole leading towards death, back into the cycle of suffering. the digital art actually contains a variation on this too—the weird spiral in the middle is a really scrunched up rendering of the same; all of this i prepared with p5.js. my objective with these documents is not really to spoil anything outside the scope of the album proper, so i'm omitting a few details in trying my best not to do that. this is the first song on the album, although not the first produced. there's a video somewhere of me writing/recording a significant chunk of this (see 01 10_live.mp3). --------- COMMENTARY + HIGHLIGHTS --------- ◼ 01 ses 2.mp3 [2021.10.15] this was recorded really, really late into the project's development, during the finalizing stages. almost none of it ended up being used, save for the delay freakout solo around the 15-minute mark. ◼ 2m_4.mp3 [2018.05.04] one of the initial archetypes for the track's signature guitar tone, along with 142i3.mp3. i became very attached to this clip in particular and produced several iterations (q.v. 2m_4 2.mp3; 2m_6 2.mp3) but ironically none was used until three quarters through the song and i opted to use 142i3 for the intro instead. i think these all sound great bare. 2m_6 2 is my favorite. ◼ smin 01 sideb.mp3 [2017.06.12] excerpt from a battle of the bits one hour battle. this was the original intro for the track but at some point i developed a neurotic obsession with replacing all material featured on the album that either had already been released or i felt had too strong a tether to a past i was attempting to distance myself from. i think now that the overall project suffered some minor blows due to this, and i believe this to be a good example.