her beauty, the rage of a spring flower_

not every planet has a star_

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving I found myself at the helms of my DJ "booth" yet again. This was without warning. It's like a bad habit I can't quit, only the habit isn't bad, it's healthy, but distracting. I've been making progress on my excoriating letter on the current state of Academic science I intend to send to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, but alas, I was overcome with a selection of tracks that just had to be stitched together. Immediately. And I obsessed over the Thanksgiving holiday doing so. It brought such joy.

Feeling so lost the past few months -- so aimless, so alone and confused about my purpose -- I was compelled to mix together a mood that encapsulates my current existence better than any words I could write. This is certainly the only mix where, in addition to the sounds, it seems even the title of the songs (if not fits into the story experience.

Truly said, this is "my mix". It expresses everything I am at this moment in space and time. If it's the last thread of mood i sonically sew then I'd gladly leave this as my final artifact. I feel I've never created any piece of art so accurately expressive. I truly want to dissolve and I think that's what these sounds do.

It begins at Home among the familiarity of people, plants, animals, and weather in the Land of Goshen (track mark 0:00), an aposite opening track given Goshen's Biblical origin as a Homeland revered for its pristine cultivation, yet later as the epicenter of the Exodus. This is where I feel alone, like a rogue satellite. No longer fit for Earth or its inhabitants, I've willfully catapulted myself into my own trajectory -- one where new worlds of nebulous dreams and cosmic ambitions display an infinitely beautiful, infinitely precarious horizon. I have befittingly chosen a similar trajectory to that of the Pioneer 10, the space probe launched from Earth in 1972 towards the star Aldebaran (track mark 6:07) with a mission similar to mine. There is no air to breathe in this trajectory. It is the vacuum of space. Earth is my body's Home, after all. Beyond this heavy, insulating atmosphere, I will return to dust and rock. But where is Home for an alien imprisoned within human flesh aboard a blue-sphered mother ship? I must keep going. And so I reach escape velocity. The death sentence of space's vacuum will forces apart every last atom of my human existence, exposing the raw ingredients of human consciousness. This is how I will exist through my interstellar voyage.

In my trajectory, I am only consciousness. This Universe seems dead, and it most certainly is dead compared to the standards of most humans. But I somehow feel alive out here in the vacuum. Now unshackled from the confines of human flesh, now liberated from human corporeal limitations, I am free. I drift as a satellite of memories and consciousness in search of a new Home to inhabit -- a Home that has no need for air, just hot gases. And cold matter. And infinite space and time. This is where I seek happiness. This is where my current mix is taking me.

As I accelerate the flesh of me begins to strain further. It slowly breaks apart. The pain is tolerable though, as the beauty of shedding my gravity provides as much pleasure as the pain in feeling it melt away. Once beyond of Earth's clasp, I am only a skeleton. I've left so much behind. I'm lighter now. My speed increases as I continue to shed mass under this constant acceleration. When I reach the moon's orbit I see its gray-freckled face up close. Aged and dusty, it's an aggregated frozen shadow submissive to Earth's mightier tow. And there it will remain for ages. As it's already been for ages. But I'm fortunate. I get to keep accelerating. Half of what's left of my skeleton is melting from the sun's stare behind me (Sunburn, track mark 12:05), the other half frozen with infinite nothingness in front of me. I'm barely human. I'm fully conscious.

By the time I reach Mars I'm become more comfortable with my new self. I'm feeling jovial. I've shed my flesh and bone entirely now. I'm a sentient and nothing more. And nothing less. I continue into the asteroid belt to play pinball with the collisions of chaotic gravity. It's gritty work; it's fun work. The jagged edits and tensioned treble keeps me anxious as the basslines remind me to have fun. I did choose this trajectory after all.

The calm of exiting the asteroid belt is exhilarating. It's like that rush you feel when you know you're in the middle of a serious storm but you play it off as though it's all for fun. Yet, once the storm ends you quietly feel relieved. It is perhaps Temporary Sanity, as the track at 47:00 minute mark is titled.

And now to Jupiter (track mark 51:20), our largest planet and a "gas giant". With only a little more mass it may have had enough gravity to spark hydrogen fusion and become its own star. What then would have become of the human condition? Likely nothing, as our solar system would have been forever changed and our precious blue ball of habituation would likely have been tipped beyond habituation. Instead, Jupiter helped make the human existence possible by failing as a star and instead succeeding as a matter vacuum, sucking away cataclysmic comets and asteroids. And so life was allowed to evolve on Earth without permanent interruption. Now there's a success-in-failure story -- that of Jupiter! I float by with a nod to its second-in-command status in the Solar System. 

And now things get darker. Saturn, another of the gaseous giants, is as beautiful as it is dangerous, flinging particulates about its round torso in an insane Spinning temper tantrum (track mark 55:24). Yes, at Saturn I begin to realize there's no going back to Earth now. Saturn is the last "bright" planet I'll see before the hues sag dimmer. The black void in the distance is my destiny.

On to Neptune, Pluto-The-Non-Planet (but always a dog), the Kuiper Belt, and then the Heliopause where the last reach of our sun expires in a rippling rage of solar wind. I ride this torrent in stride, bucking and bending in the storm, shedding the final atoms of my previous humanoid self in a Heart Call (track mark 59:58) -- perahps it's a final plea to my former self for forgiveness, a remaining fit of regret. It's beautiful, it's destructive, it's final dissolution, it's The Afterglow (track mark 1:04:05) of all I've ever known flashing before my Open Eye Signal (track mark 1:07:36), stinging like brine splashing into my face. But I'm almost through the Heliopause. And what lies beyond is nothing. And everything.

The silence of nothing. A trajectory towards everything. I am a rogue entity now -- a rogue planet of fleshless consciousness. I have no star. But I will drift by countless unfamiliar stars, each a foreign island inhabited by warmth, eager potential, and danger. Indeed, each star is like a remote Earthly island full of as much life as potential death. But all are beautiful. There are roughly 300 sextillion stars in the Universe that may capture me. With just the right coincidental trajectory my aimless wander may be courted by a flirting star's gravity. Here my trajectory collapses into an orbit much like what I had on Earth. This foreign star's violent eruptions spew its matter into the vacuum, slowly accreting elemental bodies of dust and rock. After billions of collisions and billions of orbits, the matter becomes warm under its own pressure, coalescing a new planetoid and incorporating me along with it into a corporeal vessel once again. This is a new Home, but it is a familiar Home. I've been here before because I have always been from a star. In the Sun Harmonics (track mark 1:12:21) I am reborn. We are reborn.



**Mixcloud streaming is annoying (no "scrubs," so to speak) so click here for a free DOWNLOAD [ignore the Google warnings and such - it's just a .m4a file converted in iTunes] // the artwork is above_

track list >>

1/      land of goshen by khen

2/      aldebaran by hraach, armen miran

3/      sunburn [navar extended remix] by armin van buuren

4/      feeling so high by blue rose, sevenn, bhaskar

5/      togeter [beckwith remix extended mix] by cazzette

6/      black umbrella feat. javi by beckwith

7/      dance in tongues by dave seaman

8/      grinning by ian lugvig

9/      who dare wins by amber long, just hear

10/    temporary sanity [cornucopia remix] by sahar z, guy mantzur

11/    jupiter by martin peter

12/    spin [simone vitullo remix] by the scumfrog

13/    heart call [jerome isa-ae remix] by jennifer rene, solid stone

14/    afterglow [snr remix] by vintage & morelli

15/    open eye signal by jon hopkins

16/    sun harmonics by jon hopkins