Stop! Hold on! Stay in control... I'd like to tell you about something I heard. Something I shouldn't have noticed but did by fate or folly. I want to tell you but I'm afraid they'll hear. You know who. There is a microphone circling my head like a buzzard stalking a sun-stroked armadillo. A nest of copper vipers is nesting in the walls of my apartment. There is a small red light in the smoke detector above me... watching with the burning intensity of a lit cigarette, it drinks me in and regurgitates my flat, fuzzy digested image on a monitor somewhere underground. I wonder if the man they pay to watch that screen smokes. I wonder if he has a family who worry about his health. I wonder if his kids care what Daddy does for a living, and what keeps the gravy flowing and puts braces on their teeth. I could invoke the name of the thing I heard, but exposing that I know the proper nomenclature might cause the watchers to stop drying their eyeballs before the flickering image of my sweat-stained face and get active. I have too much to live for, I'm not ready to be swarmed. But I have to get this knowledge out of me; even as the hiss of a hundred camera lenses adjust their focus and act to jam my signals with a sense of self-preservation and just plain fear, I have to say what I've heard. I have to relay the message. Offer for consideration a thing observed. There is a group out of LA that I am in contact with. They delivered a package early last fall under a derivative and noxious code name. They hide the truth under so much blather. It's all just Talk Talk Talk until you seam of the crystal ball. Then you can crack it like an egg. Fry it and serve it with hash. I can read the white spaces and not just the hotty words that hem them in. I pierced the veil and found eleven ciphers inside. The first was a little space-dusted wavelength that I was able to tune into only to get tangled in its stretchy, tickling grooves and spiking gradients that heat up the blood like condensed gas station coffee. They call this the first cipher "BWP" to confuse those who don't know how to see with their god damned eyes open; it pretends to be about a shitty Spotify playlist, but it's actually a dare, a shot of courage to accept a skeleton key pressed to the palm, it's begging me to proceed and I obey. The next message is wrapped in a thumpy, throbbing, bassy throttle that clings to its brail-like bristles like mercury frosting to a hamburger birthday cake and treats the sense like they were the sequence of a combination lock, twisting and tapping out its missive with diligent momentum like it was a countdown to the last rocket off an exploding space planet. They call this one "Lizzie," a name that sends a chill down my spine (have they also been tracking the reptilian men in our midst? What else do they know?). "Lizzie" is not their final briefing- not by a long shot. Did you know that we're all slowly being replacing us with plastic? Not all at once, of course, but bit by bit, particle by particle, they're making us all docile Barbie and Ken dolls. You can feel it right? Little polyurethane pebbles rolling around under your skin, your mind becoming flat like a magnetic strip, the culture transforming you into a plaything in a process of commodification through commodities. It's all there in the half-lidded waver, midday martini-fueled Nissan cruise and sandtrap sliding stupor of the cipher "Single Origin Experience." The scales have fallen. Don't you see?!? Your ocular receptors can be as unclouded as mine. Listen to the reckless bobblehead funk of "Freak Out" and the pointillated patterns that make up the steel-framed ramble path that trips towards an antithetical, detonating crescendo of "6th Street Bridge" and tell me that you are not suddenly awake! Can you hear the music? It's getting louder all the time! It's sticking to everything and drifting through the walls like radiation. Chemically altering the enclosure, splitting its atoms and prying open the gate. I feel it! The weight is lifted and the path is clear. I'm finally free and it's all thanks to [REDACTED]!
***
There is a gunshot heard in the distance. And then everything near becomes still. A cigarette-smoking man near a street lamp drops his coffin nail and snuffs it with his shoe. He then recedes into the dark. The stillness persists and will forever.
Avoid being the odd man on the outside with Third Man Records.
