Centaurus A by Spiral

A man steps out onto his lawn at midnight and sets up a telescope, just as he has done every night for the last thirty years. He points it directly at the sight he wishes to see, the event horizon of Centaurus A. He puts his yellowed eye up to the lens and focuses until he can finally make out the black dot on the event horizon, his wife’s ship, lost thirty years before, but still sitting, right in plain sight. He knows this is a trick. He knows that the ship was consumed years ago, but it is impossible to watch something fall into a black hole. Her ship is an image that is stuck there forever. He weeps, as he does every night. How can he grieve for something that is not lost?

Terra, the only survivor left onboard, tries to close her eyes just before she is pulled into the event horizon, but they open wider with fear. Before she knows it everything is stretched and eerily quiet. She is alone. Forever. Trapped in the last second of her life. She walks down a hallway that has been stretched infinitely long. She walks for months, aimlessly, until she starts to hear footsteps up ahead. She is not alone. Terror takes her and she turns to run back the way she came, but soon the fear subsides and she turns back around. Anything would be better than this loneliness. In a few minutes she can see something coming towards her from down the hall. As she gets closer she realizes that it is her own self. A reflection. But it is not mimicking her movements. It is moving independently. They both walk towards each other until they are face to face. Before she has a chance to speak, her reflection does.

“The universe is not so hard to understand, in stretches infinitely within you and infinitely beyond.”

A black hole, born in the thirteenth second of the universe, watches a speck of dust crawl slowly towards it. So it pulls. By the time the speck has reached its outer influence, the black hole realizes that this speck of dust is sentient. So it tries to communicate, but the speck does not understand. So, the black hole pushes it through, knowing that the speck won’t like what it finds on the other side.

Tracklist

1.	Centaurus A	58:26

Credits

released January 16, 2016

At the time of this recording Spiral was:

Chris Boat - Keyboards, Bass, Guitar, Vocals
Aaron Frale - Guitar, Vocals
Bill Hatfield - Guitar, Bass, Keyboards
Senda Linaugh - Vocals

Unlucky 13. For the full history of the recording sessions that spawned this album please read the notes for “Bellicus Prime” and “Joy’s Egg” here on bandcamp. This was originally going to be disc 2 for Bellicus Prime, but it was quickly kicked off when the original 12 demos began to grow much bigger. After it was kicked off I basically left it in a folder and whenever I was a little too “spaced out” to work on anything else I would pull this thing out and work on it. Eventually Aaron also started using it for the same purpose and finally, when Bill came on board, we gave him a copy to use as well. Before we knew it, this one little demo grew to be an hour long! We never really thought about releasing it, which gave us a real freedom to be as weird as we liked! Eventually we played the track for friends and family and everyone gave us the same advice. Release the record! So here it is, the 13th demo from the Bellicus sessions finally seeing the light of day!

But the history of this track goes back much further. All the way back to 2010! When we were done with Citizen I brought two ideas to Aaron. The first was about a man that wakes up in a forest, walks down a mountain, into a city and kills a man. It turns out the man he kills had tried to kill him and left him in the forest for dead. The other idea was a little more developed. The storyline was pretty basic: a beast, almost as old as time, falls in love with a young girl. The beast has been alive for so long that he basically just gives up and stands still in one place. His skin grows hard until everyone believes that he is a statue. This girl comes to him every day and dumps her heart out to him until he falls in love. Eventually he begins to move again and he must fight for her. Of course, I had demos sketched out for both ideas. We went with the man waking up in a forest story because the demos were musically much better. Unfortunately, the concept for Beast was left for dead. There was one demo, however, that I couldn’t give up on. It was a small piece that had a classical intro, followed by some heavy metal style verses and choruses. Aaron was also quite taken by this demo.

So, the demo kept coming back. The next time it came up we tried to put it on “Your Kindness Let a Monster In”. It was going to be sung by Senda Shallow, and the lyrics were based around the Greek myth Apollo and Daphne. Unfortunately, the sung just didn’t work well, so it got kicked off. It was so frustrating! The demo sounded great, but anytime we tried to work it into an actual song it all just… fell apart. However, when Casey Mraz came in to do work on the Kindness album, he laid down a finger picking track over the bridge of one section of the song. I liked the guitar part so much that I isolated it and started working on that one part from scratch. Eventually the song “In the Desert” was born and the rest of our album “Mind Trip in A Minor” was built around that song. So far, the track had built two entire concepts! One that was never brought to fruition and the other became my favorite album!

And then we gave up. I put it aside and just screwed around with it. I imagined it as a Science Fiction soundtrack for a story that plays in your head! Eventually, Aaron came up with the wonderful story for the record and we had a structure to follow. I love this record. I think it’s strength is the fact that we let it take it’s time! This is one of our weirdest records, but also one of the most fun. Senda’s haunting vocals are reason enough to give it a listen. We hope you enjoy!

License

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.