Atop the Digital Heap

Listen to ‘Spirit forced into objecthood; waiting for the artefact’s revenge’ by Papaphilia

These have been an emotionally wrought few weeks. India is undergoing a national emergency, following the covert and swift enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Bill, now Citizenship Amendment Act — a policy fundamentally unconstitutional due to a multitude of reasons, but mainly because it discriminates on the basis of religion. Masses of protests have erupted all over India, even as the police force openly commits acts of extreme violence against Muslim families who in some cases weren’t even part of the protests and attempts to illegally confiscate their possessions including land and home. People continue to be shot dead by the police. A cursory Google search should do the job, should you be interested.

This may seem unrelated, which it may as well be, but it goes some way towards explaining my avoiding writing about Peace Was Never An Option. I found it necessary to step back from what was from the very first listen seemed to me a consumptive work, and most likely to make it impossible to attenuate an upheaval.

However, it is a time for discord and disruption. So, I was ready to tread back in and feel fully and here we are. There is no toning down the apocalyptic orgone of ‘Spirit forced into objecthood; waiting for the artefact’s revenge’, and it embodies an aggressive maximalism that does a great job of transmitting the incredulity I, along with millions others, feel at the resistance to the resistance. If you are in a repressive state — and today there is a greater possibility that you are than aren’t — perhaps you need a similar appurtenance for the incomprehensibility of the world. It’s a song to slap yourself in the face with, when you can’t someone else, because you are trying to remain a person.

And I shouldn’t have to clarify this, but I find I increasingly have to — I mean that entirely as a positive.

Listen here:

Released Sep 3, 2019

Music by Papaphilia
Mixing and mastering by Andrew McEwan
Artwork and layout by James Geoffrey Nunn
Coral scans by Lauren Olinger
Thanks: Dante, Simon, Mossy, Del — for endless support and feedback
This music was composed, recorded and mastered on Wurundjeri Country