Subtle Bodies, Subtler Sounds
Infinite Is
Outpost Charon/Radio Interferometry
(2019)
Vermont’s weirdest band, Infinite Is, creates freeform improvisational synthesizer music for our small, warm, damp, rock, floating aimlessly through the cosmos. The duo of Jeff Ramen and Evan Parks began playing synthesizer music in 2018, and were featured on a radio show called “In Synthesis with Infinite Is,” which was produced for WOOL.fm 91.5 in Bellows Falls “Black Sheep Radio” and Rewind 106.5 W293BH and WCFR 1480 AM in Springfield, Vermont, from 2019 to 2021. The show usually began with an hour-long, improvised set, followed by a review of a recording, then closed with another improvised set.
After we reviewed the show recordings, we would have a good time imagining the part of the multiverse that it seemed to sound like and give folks just enough of a story to get them started to connect all the music and stories together.
—Evan Parks
Editor’s Note: Below is the story for the featured piece written by the band. It’s there to act as an imaginal prompt to be employed by the listener as they engage with the sounds. This prompt inspired my musings while listening to the piece.
What follows this story fragment, in a round-robin collaborative writing exercise, is my input to this prompt. For contrast, I put my words in italics. I encourage all listeners to continue this game after checking out the music. Feel free to put your musings in the comments below.
With the strontium clock back up and running and the successful realignment of the fusion reactor it was time to shove off. The strangely familiar lifeless body that Hugh collected from the crystal caves which bore a disturbing resemblance to his beloved captain was found to contain an interesting version of an artificial brain which he could see had an obvious external power jack mounted at the base of her cold white neck. Laying her lifeless body into a spare sled, he patched in a temporary power cable to the port and strapped in her limbs just in case, hoping that she might somehow regenerate under refrigeration while he and the rest of the crew cycle in torpor.
“Huge, you had better get mounted, you know we are down to emergency rations and letting you burn four times any normal sized miner is putting us all behind, we will be lucky if we all make it back without sustaining permanent damage and you will probably be the first to get sick.” He breathes in a last deep breath soaking in her cheerful, quiet humming, with the intense pleasure of a house cat soaking in a sunbeam at a low purr and drifts off in his custom oversized sled. Oh, how such a fine beautiful creature can make a man ache for her happiness. He blurs out watching motes of dust dance around her angelic face twinkling like glitter among wisps of golden hair that float about her pink cheek. Just being near such beauty can refill a man’s desire to live and bring patience and hope where there was depression and pessimism.
Anastasia furrows her brow and squints as she does her square best to carefully lift the fully laden Diplogen from the surface of this strange black ball of heavy ice. With a sharp jab of the joystick the huge craft crinkles and squeals against the wall of the crater slowly gaining momentum. If the calculations are correct the porkchop plot puts them first near the trading outpost Charon, though there will not be enough fuel to stop the ship, they might be able to slow the heavy load down to about 7k, and with any luck there will be a few tugs at the ready to see them approaching without the benefit of a sufficient brake burn. The damaged main transmitting antenna array means that only short-range communication will be possible, so she sets the emergency beacon buzzing away in short sharp intervals.
Though limited in range, Anastasia uses the parallax between the subspace listening antennas and the emergency coincidence rangefinder, to feel and hear her way toward the origin system in a steely and somewhat reckless serenade of dead reckoning. Once the computer captured the signals from the Central Access Telemetry or CAT buoy, she finally puts herself into torpor with the rest of the crew, if they haven’t all been fatally damaged by heavy water poisoning by then anyways. So, with dreams of real food, a big payday and drug fueled warehouse raves, she slips off to the netherworld of torpor as the ship begins to accelerate into 3 Gs and the buoy telemetries sing from the dashboard speakers.
3.9 million parsecs from Charon outpost, the crew collectively drops into Circle 9 Torpor.
Back in the “olden days,” it took deep meditation and copious amounts of black-market Acme Ceremonial Halluci-tabs to even come close to reaching this state. Now, thanks to the good graces of Astercore—the largest mining mega-corp this side of the Belt—all rock jockeys were given a lifelong supply. Torpor at its finest: always on demand, always of the highest quality.
This was Astercore’s way of saying; you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
Circle 9 Torpor is typically a pleasant experience. The dreams are never off–putting, rarely even remotely disturbing. The chance of having a nightmare is a Planck length north of nil—let alone experiencing a Xvarnah dream.
But a planck length chance is not zero.
As the Xvarnah descended, it was already too late for the crew to notice, let alone take evasive action. There was no coming back from a Xvarnah boost.
Their bodies were encased in mentally fabricated, moist, jet-black tombs of obsidian. Due to the ultra-high humidity, decomposition was quick and painless.
Their senses were no longer routed through the reptilian brain. All neural nodes were severed and re-routed to a hyper-consciousness that had no need for such banal perceptual organs.
Their bodies were no longer composed of flesh, of blood, of bone—their bodies were… subtle.
Physically and mentally, they began to perceive the changes taking place—changes that, unbeknownst to them, were collectively manifested through the barzakh craters blooming across the skin of their foreheads like imploded stars. The selves they once knew, in an eternal flash of white—orders of magnitude brighter than the death throes of a star—were no more, annihilated into microscopic sesame seeds, scattered throughout the void.
As the Xvarnic dust—dreamed into matter—settled onto their supine bodies, what was once called “hearing” detected a blast of white noise that signaled the final absorption.
Real food and drug filled warehouse raves had nothing on this.
And as for that big pay day? Well just you wait…
Infinite Is has an overflowing SoundCloud page that’s rivals the combined mass of Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea.
Here is a link to the recordings of the complete radio shows at the Internet Archive.
Oh, and if that’s not enough, they have a webpage too.
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