This installment of In Synthesis can be streamed from the Internet Archive here for free
On this, the week of 3-13-20 Jeff and Evan explore some strange and unsettling soundscapes, the first improvisational live set being sufficiently ridiculous for nearly an hour. The Is then reviews a not so distant live recording called “Rover Automoton”, we pass a few announcements, then the second improv instrumental synth set escalates into a frothing blossom of exquisite, expounding, pounding.
Here is the opening live improv set
General Tovis aboard the finest warship ever conceived to that day, a frighteningly well armed tactical carrier called the HIVE, leads the first fateful launch into the infinite aether. A great ship needs deep waters, plunging the depths, you’ve got to carry fire in one hand and water in the other and don’t let the dead hand drop. The Buzzer buzzed and that narrow linear time crept forward, if you listen close you can hear the music between the bursts of radio modulation. This beacon carries with it a lofty flight of adventures, sideways into spacetime, into the soup of swirling suppositions. For the swarm may live as long as the Buzzer Buzzed, there was a way to go back, even if the closest you could ever come to again is an approximation, there was comfort in the memory. So much depended on that lonely signal, there was an enormous, carefully stacked string of scenarios that could end this one, insignificant branch of sapient souls in a ball of heat, plasma and poisonous fission products. There was no choice but to keep it going at all costs and Tovis built his army around that objective. He was the first great General to see the infinite possibilities of an intermultiverse spacetime traveling military. That signal would be the hill they die on when it failed deadly if need be and every Bot and soldier who volunteered took that sentiment to the grave, but they died free so long as the Buzzer buzzed.
Having sufficiently slowed relative to it’s quarry the rover automaton disengages it’s red and gold light sail and with a series of stiff vibrations sheds it’s ice jacket shielding in a cloud of jagged shards that refract the orange glow of the nearby star into a kaleidoscope, dancing around the sleek reflective ship. The retracted railguns and radio dishes slowly expand out from traveling position and begin a dance of motion self check procedures. Laser rangefinders begin to probe the unsuspecting planets bright, bluish white surface as the impulse thrusters raise out of the hull to fire an injection brake maneuver. As the first entangled contact, this Reticle Rover is primarily a survey scout, but it doubles as a deterrent beacon, which could serve as both a scientific mission and a military objective. This destination would have it doing both.
Here is the closing live set
He desperately wished he could take back what he said. His heart ached and his stomach dropped as he let out a long shivering breath. How could it be that with a few viscous words a whole lifetime of love and respect could be destroyed in a single sentence. It was a sentence indeed, one he would serve for an eternity. He stayed aloft as long as possible and could now feel the first thin upper layer of atmosphere as it buffeted the speeding ship. With so much damage to the outer hull, it would take all of his years of reentries worth of skill to get this bird on the ground without burning up. His eyes burned with tears as the gas started glowing in compression. There was a way to reverse this, but was he willing to chance it against the odds? All he could hear in the roaring hot maelstrom outside his windshield was that one first remark upon being told that nearly the whole of the planets inhabitants was infected with a deadly virus that would leave the once thriving and advanced civilization with a fraction of a fraction still living. “Nice to be in orbit”
Jeff deftly gets the opening live “In Synthesis with Infinite Is” improv set started
