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lyrics

Rucksack Dreams


And this then hits the high spots,
such as tors that had been moved in and out
Now, they changed all the roads,
worse and worse
scuffed and splintered
trails flow like sands and fall from a sky turned white
Digital land masses,
terraforming twenty feet wide,
created from elements in the planet's crust
where chemical leaching computers
intersect it five times
and align the fancy water points
from St. Michael's Mount to the Avebury Stones
so we'll have to retrace our steps with divining rods.

So, I suppose, you know,
that the elevator was still there,
where it had left me in the old days.
When I first learned to hunt for ley lines
and memorize all sixty-four characters.
Yeah, in these rucksack dreams,
the symbol card catalogue system.

I swung away from the mic
and looked at that literate gorilla
while he sent down for whole buckets
of fiery red angels.

Oh no, no.
They were not marked or damaged,
but they might have been,
he probably radioed the discharge
of radiation-like energy through card files.
I didn't find out any more.

A layer of sixty-four bit zero point noise music
dissolved into a crashing solid blare.
The volume built up like a wave.
Yeah.
In a sequence that jigsawed haphazardly
together across a bare, tiled interior,
Everybody stood still for a moment
caught in it
they swayed back and forth.
Each person murmuring in Greek Sanskrit, Celtic,
dozens of men and women everywhere
talked crap about the printed word.

And in a few seconds,
the force was growing larger
as the rumble grew.
Rose up everywhere into the darkness.
And sometime later
wailed a slight background sound
a faint rumble before the last reverberations
ricocheted off
back into the large tunnel and stopped.
Silence!

There was a pool of vomit under the window
and more vomit crusting
on a mass of telex equipment,
phones and electronic calculators.
The whole setup in there, actually.
All the devices and a hundred others.
All those poncy rich kids.

Computers won't work.
It was a man next door
with a gust of something stale,
networked to a recycling timer
of exactly once every ninety minutes,
this one was a minimum setup
to rid the place of ghosts.

The old agent got a geological survey map.
The ley line hunter, looking for cutaways
that would put the event firmly into place,
needed mirrors of the present
and grease and sand to throw on it.

He stopped, he hesitated a moment
then shrugged and his eyes shut
a couple of feet from the geological survey map,
naked, surrounded with empty mugs,
fumbling along,
stepped back
towards the hi-fi stack in the corner,
the wooden desk,
the pair of chairs and the coat rack,
his fist opening.

He seemed to be looking for markers.
It was very delicate work,
a tap dripped, a
nd there was a low whirring from the fridge.
The telex machine typed out a message.
He took a step backwards.
He rapped at the door.
He reached into a rucksack
and pulled out a little screw adjustable magnifier.
With a few slaps and jabs
and hammering and pounding,
a prolonged period of hyperventilation
faces flow through the view finder.

credits

from The Pre​-​War Noise Encryption Standard, released February 3, 2023
Words and music by Nigel Ayers

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Nocturnal Emissions Cornwall, UK

Nocturnal Emissions' Nigel Ayers has continued to work with a strong underground of cult support, avoiding music industry fashions, and following his own creative path he concentrated on creating a strong sense of a wilderness identity through sound.

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