“Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams, Christopher Dexter Greenspan, a.k.a. oOoOO, did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the 'net and of the mouldy, unhallowed bedroom studio where he wrote and studied and wrestled with beats and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap laptop whose exhaust fan had come to seem like a syncopated thunder of artillery. At night, the subtle stirring of Tumblr feeds about exorcism, the sinister scurrying of severed samples, and the creaking of repurposed trip-hop were enough to give him a sense of mellow yet strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound — and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
Possibly Greenspan ought not to have studied so hard on Our Loving Is Hurting Us. Lady Gaga and Lindsay Lohan are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with folklore and tries to trace a strange background of multidimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the blogosphere, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Greenspan comes from San Francisco, but it was only after he had signed to Tri Angle that he began to connect his science with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary label worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Bris(tol)katonic had urged him to slacken up and had voluntarily slowed (as well as throwed) his rhythms at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from playing the ominous acoustic pieces that had appeared on previous releases. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Greenspan had some terrible hints from the dreaded ButterClock, the fragmentary Silk, and the suppressed Auto-Tune to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the melancholy linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds — perhaps from regions beyond genre — trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the compositions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate...
Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment the critics exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Greenspan unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case? What did all this mean? The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon his necromancy, but later burned candles of gratitude in the Missionary Church of Kopimism because of the ghostly, bassy tittering they felt they would never hear again."
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