I get a lot of existential dread about "the end of the universe" and allat but its nice to have a piece of art just embrace it fully and accept it

Also cool album art too

thanks, im so glad you liked it ❤️ i was worried through the whole process the TTS would be the worst part of the album so it's nice to hear that it works and that people like it

heres some backstory for the project nobody asked for:

the concept for the album was originally a short story idea i tried writing multiple times but just never got it to stick. the story was going to be about a prisoner manning the energy station to reduce his percieved sentence while still technically being locked away from society for the full sentence, due to the time dilation of working around a black hole. something sort of like a lighthouse keeper, but in this case keeping the lights on for humanity rather than just for ships coming into harbor. his crewmate would have fallen into the black hole during a maintenance EVA and he would have been left alone, going slowly insane from the isolation and guilt of potentially, but not knowing for sure, having caused his crewmate's death. at the end, he would have plunged the station into the black hole in a misguided and self righteous attempt to atone for his crime and be remembered as a hero.

since i was struggling to make a good story out of it, i decided to turn it into music instead, and since i decided to work with a TTS, i thought making the main character the energy station itself was appropriate. that change made the focus of the story much more clear, being the emotional journey from confusion, through grief, and into acceptance, giving it a hopeful spin rather than a dark and sort of meaningless one.

turning the story into music also allowed me to focus fully on the emotional aspect of it, which is good bc a big hangup with the writing previously was that i couldnt decide how accurate i wanted it to be vs just being sci-fi with creative liberties taken on the physics of the situation. with music i could leave most of that stuff up to the imagination. it turned the project from hours of research about the penrose process and black hole time dilation math to 'what would it feel like to skip across the surface of a rotating black hole? what would it feel like to come alive at the end of time? and what would it feel like to know you'll be alone in complete darkness when your creators go extinct?'

characterizing humanity through the observations of the energy station was a fun challenge. i tried to imagine a scrappy humanity, using the very last of their resources to perservere for as long as possible. delusionally and desperately, they would be trying to invent perpetual motion and find a way to survive for eternity in a dead universe. of course being humans they would fight amongst themselves, but at the same time their unified desire to fight the ultimate darkness of heat death would somehow bring a new type of sentience into existence that would be capable of carrying their memory forward just a bit longer. i imagined them being very happy to recieve the communications from the energy station, realizing they had a collective duty to comfort this thing and give it a reason to live beyond them. and of course i imagined what the emotional consequence for such a sentience would be in that scenario.

there are of course ideas i have that aren't explored in the album. the hundreds of other energy stations. are any of them sentient as well? how did the energy station of the album gain sentience? where does humanity live in the cold dark? how does humanity ultimately meet its end, and how long does the station live after they're gone? these things are fun to think about, but not necessary to answer. i like to imagine the station drifting around the black hole, using its servos to sing the Dirge of Photons, letting the song reverberate through its frame, which it would do for hours before the material settles. going over whatever data humanity sent, including millenia old images of stars, galaxies, and earth. flowers and grass. and other songs of mourning and perserverence.

Penrose Chainmail

Dr. T's World of Chainmail

He does other tessellations, too!

i am doing things for these OCs that defy the bounds of reason