Hello, I’m Shawn, and I compose Sentient Spaces—sounds that I make for myself, and hope others will enjoy too. My music is deeply personal and I find it comforting, haunting yet beautiful. I’ve intended these sounds to belong as a narrative, to someday maybe be part of a film or game. They certainly have a cinematic quality, which comes naturally when I start creating. All Sentient Spaces are written, performed, composed, mixed and mastered by me. I hope you can take the time to enjoy some of the (admittedly, long) music I have shared. Cheers.
These interactions beyond my eyeballs are merely cinema. I can’t control them, I can only react like an obnoxious audience member of a theatre. I’m not really real, I’m a miscalculation of nature, burdened by this corporeal form, programmed to consume, fuck and discard. The body is merely a cancerous growth attached to my consciousness. I’m stuck in this head of mine. This cognitive theatre seat. This infinite realm of possibility, constrained by the linearity of godforsaken cinema.
Maybe we can just earn as much living as we need until one day we can return to the nothing place we were before we were born. Nary a thought or memory, just star dust turned to brief shareholder value and back to star dust again. The cost of living is too high.
The act of being read they say feels like a cold tongue. Like your whole mouth is holding dry ice. The cold wraps around your head eventually reaching your spine. For a moment, you disappear into a terminating subliminal universe—a perfect nothing. Do yourself a favour, reach out and embrace someone before the clap of thunder rips through your head—wistful reverberation followed by blinding chasms.
They go to bed, noise fills their head, but not before distraction. Their minds a mess, and full of stress, they layer more abstraction. With heads now clear, so it appears, dreams now align with hope. They drift and melt, a state of self, a state well within their scope. Time spent sorting, brings time sporting a brand new understanding. But with this scene, stuck in between safety and a crash landing. So from this dance, they had no chance to seize this key duration. Their dream gives way, repeats each day—total disintegration.
Imagining the obligation fills my mind to the edges with all possibilities, positive, negative, positive, but mostly negative. The obsession ratchets up the heat; temperature increasing until it boils over—full blown anxiety, full blown dread. The longer I stay in this place, the hotter it gets, until I melt into a pool of needles, pins, tacks, nails, razors, among a bin of white noise. Pin cushion anxiety. Voodoo doll foresight. The only movement, my blood. We make our own paths, mine is crowded. Busy with possibilities. Path blocked by my own inability to cope. Or maybe this is the mechanism to which I deal with reality. Internal chaos, external masks. To communicate in this state is to pick raspberries from a bin of razorblades. To maintain composure is to shut down. The absurdity is all that keeps things cool.
The impenetrable nothingness awaits us at the end of the universe as all time evaporates into the deep freeze. The final vestige of man will be the last note ever played, reverberating through the cosmos, until the signal goes dry.
Is it possible, among the corporate tinted fog and rows of stilted accessory housing units, that something could ever surprise me? The fear of being caught overrode the mystery of the meetup. Yet, I got my answer. I was surprised. He did not share the same myopic view I currently held. I stepped away with that in mind. In mind was a poor choice, as my emotions betrayed my intentions to not get caught. I had been read, and had one hour to return home. These mazes, part constructions, part figments—entirely exhausting to navigate—require guidance beyond what we normally tolerate. We are aug’d to the teeth, which blinds us from our birthright intuition, and reasoning. And so, here you are, in the hallway with me, wondering why I haven’t asked you inside. I have 57 seconds.
Bask in the barrage of validating notions, pelting the mind like wind-driven snow. Each notion melts in place, leaving behind a satisfying affirming droplet. It’s the accumulation of droplets that drives the relentless discovery. Notion after notion. Eventually the droplets coalesce, cleansing the mind of reason. Cleansed of truth. Cleansed of objectivity. It is in this place where the connection to reality atrophies. A new plane, of same same, to bask in an endless barrage of validating notions.
They call it phantom. I call it the worst torture known to man. It’s a major bug in my system and no amount of complaints to the corp can push them to fix it. I need my limb. I need a fix. I can’t begin to tell you how torturous this is. It’s like being electrocuted repeatedly. Yet, I know it’s false — it’s in my head. It’s a flaw in my system, this tortuous synthetic limb itching.
Little bit by itty bitty bit all our materials build up to become a bothersome bunch of shit. Constant consumption and creation culminates in constant cast away crap. Growth goes gangbusters, growth grows into garbage. Festering filth finds friends in fields of finality. Everyone eats, everyone exhausts, everyone empties. The detritus of demand is destined for the dump.
The anthro sequence; a human simulation considered a success by the system. Humans in the sequence progressed from primal tribes to an advanced civilization that birthed artificial general intelligence, synthetic biology, and their own simulation. Eventually, humans merged with the machines they created to create anthronodes — a shared consciousness between the physical world and virtual simulation. During a routine consciousness merge, a critical error caused fragments of node memory to be wiped, leaving the nodes without crucial knowledge of themselves or their history. This error severed the nodes’ connection to the physical world, and thus physical form. The nodes continue on as neural activity in the simulation.
Dead like the dandelions on a burnt August lawn. Dry like the aquifer continuously overdrawn. Spent like the soils that grew monoculture crops. Acidic like the seas, the dying of the bees, and gassy permafrost. Scorched like the air in the middle of the night. Choked like the orange skies in smoky daylight. Drowned like the floods that bring blackened taps. The wealthy retreat as the rest compete, and all we know is collapse.
Confronted in the most unsuspecting of spaces — placed there, for me, lying in wait. Taunting me throughout time, always inciting a combustion of emotion. I feel the pull. I feel the familiar waves of apprehension, like a ghost writhing in my stomach. I’ve stood motionless before the yawning mouth of doubt. I’ve stared far into the reflection of the ideal. I’m this close. I can see the other side, the exit, staring back at me. Maybe next time.
The space between the eye and focal point suspends in time; a mist of subliminal universe terminating as the stare burns deeper and deeper. Where the conscious goes, joins the subconscious on a journey beyond the plane of material reality. The moment, imperceptible, passes as the mind is snapped from the trance. Welcome back.
The fog, it creeps in, unnoticed until it’s thick. The time slips from us, it cannot be taken back. Memories are all we have, as scents begin to slip. Where they go, we never know. The trinkets and clothing and toys and bedding, they remind of what once was. So we share the things that made us laugh, the things that made it the best. One day we will be better, but not completely whole. For the space they leave when they go can never be truly filled.
Do the little capsules make you feel better? Do you find joy in anything anymore? Is there any way to get back to the happiness of when you were younger? Do you really remember being happy? Do you wish to go back to a time before you knew what you know now? Are you sure you’re the same person you were back then? Do you think something broke along the way? Are your dreams still real? Does anything make sense? Are you still trying to piece things together? Does the paranoia creep back in every now and then? Do you still keep your secrets? Do you still want to be someone else? Would you think of yourself differently if you were? Do you still hate your body? Could you push a little harder, even if you don’t get any further? Does any of this really matter? Do you still think all of this is real? Do you think it’s possible to forget all this? Can you even articulate yourself? Do you think you’re close to the bottom? How can you be sure?
There's a dream, and in the dream there's a memory I can't quite remember, but it's there. I know it, so vividly, but it's impossible to grasp. I feel a certain way, the breeze, the ground, the trees, the smell, the loss, but it's not becoming clear. Where did this memory come from? Is it my own? Why can't I piece it together? I swear, I've felt it before. I can feel the agony. Who did I lose?
“This is a peanut. Do you remember peanuts? They existed 12 years ago.” He pet his dog, who cocked her head wondering what he could possibly be asking about. The brutal winds continued as the two of them lay sheltered by a stone ledge; comforted by the warmth of each other under an emergency blanket and the heat of an old Intel laptop. The light from the screen illuminated the inside of the blanket so that he could tell her stories. He reminded her of the world that she was born into. She reminded him of what he had lost.
Between the nodes is a wedge of potential optimized by a hypergrainer. A box of computation with inputs and an output keeps its secrets hidden, only returning a result on the other side. They did not know what it could do, they did not know the gaps they left when they created it. The hypergrainer focuses on a single anomaly and refines and refines and refines—8 to 4, 4 to 2, 2 to 1 and so on. They did not know what it could provide, they did not know the potential in the spaces between. The hypergrainer will continue to refine, until there are no spaces left, bringing chaos and complexity into a single point. A single point of truth. Then it will terminate.
The seas became acidic long before the post-anthropocene. Covered in the refuse of civilization to a depth of 30 metres, the oceans are void of any substantial organic life — a wasteland of runaway climate disaster. Robotic waste and recovery systems roam all aspects of the surface and floor in an attempt to return the oceans to a nominal state. Controlled by a long-abandoned autonomous central recovery protocol, the systems adhere to their programming at a primitive level, however, their systems have evolved basic machine reasoning. The following spaces are records from the eternal sea.
