Dark Ambient Album: Bootleg Virtue Injection
I've released another album under my Reality Scruncher music persona: Bootleg Virtue Injection. It's a droning, synthy, stormy dark ambient album in which I wanted to pay homage to the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. It’s the most compelling philosophy that I’ve ever studied or practised, and it is also one about which we only really know a tiny fraction of what they taught. I wanted to echo this in the way that I framed the album, sitting it in a future where even more has been lost. This is an “eyes closed, headphones on, comfy bed” type album, one in which the tones dance in murkiness and obfuscation, slowly edging towards a clarity and strength as the track progresses.
Description: The year is 2314. Life has devolved into a quantum-tech-infused dictatorship. Knowledge is lost daily, and even though the world appears to sparkle, it’s rotting from the inside out.
A lone hacker decides not to stand for it.
Trawling the most illegal avenues of the online world, they comb through the meagre bones of the Stoic philosophy and manage to create a dirty injection patch for their own black-market implants. A hack that aids the mind in uncovering the owner’s buried Virtues, hot-wiring synapses into behavioural inclinations that bring forth the innate Wisdom, Courage, Temperance and Justice that reside deep inside. It works.
Months later, the hacker creates an audio file that stealthily injects the Stoic code into the most common of hearing-boosting implants, one that more than ninety percent of the world uses. The layers of tone shift and obfuscate, creating twirling cascades that bedazzle the monitoring technology and seduce the listener’s mind.
For now at least, the security protocols can’t detect the hidden instructions.
For now at least, willing people have a way to jump-start their path into becoming what they were meant to be.
Just look for the owl.
It might be nesting in a hidden frame of your favourite show. It might be an after-image that you can see if a certain dazzling pattern flashes from an advert. It might even be a lone “hoot” whispering in your favourite audiocast.
Wisdom is watching.
Bootleg Virtue Injection is currently free on Bandcamp, with plenty of codes for people to add it to their library if they like it enough to do so. Thanks for checking it out :).
