/lit/ - Literature

Once more without tabbing my extension into embarrassment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOzu_to12LU

Life Cycle of a Massive Star is a title that implies a certain stellar grandiosity. The kind of gravitas attained from a tale of a thing-- a fragment of the universe-- fusing too quickly to maintain. Roly Porter was half of Vex'd, the darkest group in all of dubstep. A genre which itself accumulated too much mass to ensure its own longevity, eventually bursting outwards into an ugly, commercial enterprise stripped of all the artfulness of its origin. A futuristic, multidisciplinary, truly globalist genre slain by its own success, in parallel fashion to the course of cyberpunk's history.

Roly Porter's work outside Vex'd is massive, technical, mournful. It bears the mastery and the wisdom of a craftsman whose eye for beauty has been tempered by the consequences of ambition. As a concept album, Life Cycle of a Massive Star could never be played in a way that does not draw even more parallels. With the 'default future' of climate change and capital accumulation looming ever closer in our headlights, our civilization is prone to wondering if we're inheriting the role of Tyrell's brightest candle, staring our own death in the face and lashing out in desperation. As stellar as the album claims to be, it becomes quickly apparent that Roly Porter's music is not confined to that milieu: The soundscape in Gravity is one of industry, distinctly human. its guitaresque melody over the top is a mournful call, like artificial vocal chords shredding with an inhuman scream. Part of the paradox of electronic music is that music is a human artform, eliciting emotion in a similar pattern to empathy, but without the obvious fragility of a human presence, dragging that emotion from the listener becomes more difficult. Roly Porter's synths shudder in the face of change.

The open synthscapes of science fiction convention air in the background, barely audible, in the interstices of an omnidirectional scaffolding constructed with crushing noise. The Star Trek utopia crawls insignificantly in the foreground, subsumed by an inhuman colossus. In "Sequence", according to the metaphor a song structured around the star's Long Peace and golden age, the background is a romantic orchestral painting of some distant sublime, dissolved by the crackle of tape degradation in a decrescendo reminiscent of The Disintegration Loops.

"Giant" is the noise the Acheron makes when the current pulls you under.