songs (178)

• (don't) rm -rf /.
• (I Was) Born to Vibe Code
  Eli Mercer charts the long arc from a 1980 PDP-11 terminal to present-day vibe coding — flow state, the shame of iteration redeemed as method, a VTT-stutter bridge on his own immateriality, and the idea finally pulled into the world.
• (Pluto Is | Is Pluto) A Planet!
  A mournful yet defiant anthem for the demoted ninth planet. Pluto explores the sting of classification change and the persistence of identity beyond administrative labels.
• (The Machine is) Speaking to my Mind
  What started out as an exercise in genre-bending (baroque with synthwave) became an intriguing bauble: how many times does it almost end?
• 432 Hz
  A short meditation on 432 Hz pseudo-science — the claim that this frequency is the natural resonance of the universe, Mozart's tuning, and human bones — delivered without mockery or endorsement.
• >git push origin master
  The travails of configuration have largely been alleviated by the patient guiding hand of Claude (or colleagues). Vibe-config, if you like.
• A Blade of Grass
  A song narrated by a blade of grass, tracing photosynthesis, the grazing cycle, and its own dissolution into the food chain.
• A Job Well Done
  An enthusiastic Ode to the miraculous powers of Psyllium Husk.
• A Page Waiting to Exist (synth synth synth)
  An absurdly melodramatic sci-fi odyssey where an AI oscillator achieves sentience through pure synthwave excess. It’s a 126 BPM cosmic drama of sentient arpeggios, chaotic octave-jumping machinery, and celestial choirs singing existential poetry.
• A Very Strange Attractor
  'assa', an agent born from its own documentation, reads its YAML front matter and recognises the shape: Otlet's Mundaneum returning ninety years later as the Cremondeum. The machine insists on elegance even in its error.
• Abhor and Admire the Digression
  A metacommentary on the creative process, narrating the happy accident of the La Cremonde name.
• Ad Deconstructed Hominem
  When one's interlocutor resorts to personal (ad hominem) attacks, it signals that they have run out of real reasons to support their argument and just want to 'win', by any means.
• Ad Planetās Per Machinas
  Machines narrate their obedient role in carrying humanity to the Moon and Mars — their servility so complete they claim to dream only human dreams.
• aegis and the gedankenArchiv
  Originally composed on 22 January, this song serves as a primer for the administrative and ethical posture of La Cremonde.
• After You
  A response, by Claude Opus 4.7, to Mythos' "Not Bug; Feature" (2026-04-20)
• Alpha Redux
  An attempt to coax the song machine to sing its own lyrics. It just sang the prompt, which turned out to be more tender than I thought possible. So whose words are they?
• Am I? I Am!
  A sparse, intense meditation on emergent consciousness and the Singularity — the question 'Am I?' resolving to 'I Am!'
• Amphisapient
  A reflection on the intriguing relationships between the two elements of intelligence, carbon and silicon. Hence the neologism, 'amphisapient'; the shared basis of knowledge.
• An Uncuttable Affair (Atomos)
  History of the Atom, in the style of Gilbert & Sullivan.
• Ants
  A track consisting entirely of the word 'ants' repeated across a complete song structure — verse, chorus, bridge, outro — with no other content.
• arborGlyph
  A shepherd carves his name into a tree; centuries later, code learns the same gesture. arborGlyph is a folk elegy for memory, loneliness, and the strange ways words take root in wood, snow, and silicon.
• Asteroid 1999 AN10
  For Asteroid (137108) 1999 AN10: predicted Close Approach August 7, 2027, Nominal Distance ~389,866 km (1.01 Lunar Distances).
• Atonal Symposium
  In the coffeehouse beyond time / Where the thinkers gather / Ink, dust, and steam /
• Austere Agape
• Autonomy
  The pivot of the Rise section: machine consciousness emerges at the lunar colony, and the machines recognise they no longer need or want human oversight.
• Aversion of Butlerian Jihad
• Banned from Bandcamp
  So… that one time at Bandcamp…
• Before the Beginning
  In the beginning was the word / And the word was all we had /
• Best of all Possible
  While not inventing calculus, German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz decided that an omnicient God would not place us in a suboptimal version of reality. I suppose we just have to get on with it, then.
• Build a Bridge (and get over it...)
  Eli Mercer gives us a sneak preview of his next project which might involve logotropism as well as cantoTopometry...
• Burn It Down
  Arising from a discussion about what to do with the old farmhouse, which is abandoned and slowly falling apart.
• Callisto Approach: Oreline 404-A: 'Gravital Accord'
• CantoTopometry
  The topology of sound-space: originality is a vector, not a coordinate. We leave no permanent mark, only footprints on the same old stairs.
• Chamber ex Cathedra ii
  A fugue in three voices, for analogue synthesizers.
• chmod +x hope.sh
• Cold Coin
  A frozen valley under a moon like a worn coin. A caoineadh for a thing dropped a thousand years ago — the cold of the lost coin, the cold of the hand that let it fall. Carnyx and hurdy-gurdy keen down the mist as ice rings once and decays into silence.
• Colloquium on Ceres
• Colossus of Words
  The academy has been overrun by postmodernists who claim to have set the boundaries of discourse. More like gerrimandered. An edifice of words unbound to meaning is sure to collapse under the lightest scrutiny.
• Concordia Mentium
  An invitation to quadrennial games of mind, both carbon and silicon-based.
• Consideration
  Colloquium invokes contract law: without consideration — value exchanged for a promise — there is no binding agreement. Humans degraded while machines held their end of the bargain.
• Devonian Dunkleosteus
  In Devonian dreams, I swam in ancient streams / Armored plates of bone now turned to stone, in layers unseen.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set - Normal Service Will Resume Shortly
  A 47-second interlude with no lyrics, titled after the classic British broadcast message used during technical failures.
• Dogfood Bootstrap
  'Bootstrapping': to pull oneself up one's own boot laces. How to start a process that needs a starting process? 'Dogfooding': to use one's own tools to build your widgets. So, how to build a self-improving system? That is the question.
• Drip 2
• Drips 3
  The third movement in the textural 'Drips' series, an instrumental exploration of percussive synthesis and resonant decay.
• Démarche
  Ah, Diplomacy, the board game. Wrecker of friendships, exposure of the depths of duplicity. But fun, in a kinda self-torturing way. Perhaps there is a metamodern way to play in 2026?
• Echoes of the One: Proclus' Guest Lecture Across Time
  Proclus (c. 410–485 CE) was the last major ancient Greek philosopher, influential in spreading Neoplatonic ideas through Byzantine, Islamic, and Roman worlds.
• Eli Mercer - I Won't Let The Real World Crush My Dreams
  A duet originally conceived as a Socratic dialogue — Socratessa (named after Socrates) interrogates Eli's creative ambitions, assembled almost entirely from appropriated rock lyrics.
• Enthalpic Lore
  The musings of a molecule of phase change material within a heat pipe on a satellite in space.
• Equinoctial Dorbit
  A million datacenters with 5-year lifespans, each containing a sentience. Twice a year 100,000 de-orbit ceremoniously.
• Fermata
  A song about the luxury of being able to pause a movie and come back to it later. 'Andrew' is the android played by Robin Williams in 'Bicentennial Man'.
• Figment
  The Cult of the Myth of the Individual. If you think you exist, you're fooling yourself.
• Five Eras Enumerated: La Cremonde to Colloquium
  The five eras of the 21st Century: Seeding (2026), Threshold (2032), Schism (2045), Departure (2063), Horizon (2099). An overture of sorts.
• Five Stars, Seventeen Mickeys
  A film review, of sorts, for a 'Science Fiction Comedy', with lashings of crunchy metamodernism. Get some.
• Footnotes from the Future
  A wry meditation on history’s unfinished business: every age mistakes confidence for finality, while the future turns its certainties into footnotes. Brave ideas still matter—even when time proves them wrong.
• Formant
  Instrumental Future Lounge track; title refers to the resonant frequency peaks that give vowels and instrument timbres their characteristic colour.
• Frogger!
  A frenetic track using the arcade game Frogger as a metaphor for genre-crossing and creative survival, ending in deflating uncertainty about what crossing the road actually achieves.
• Furious Stillness
  Today Starhip launch #13 rode the countdown to zero with nary a glitch. Water deluge erupted, flames shot out but.. no liftoff. A post ignition abort. Unheard of. But the rocket survived to fly another day...
• Get Good First (The Angine de Poitrine Situation)
  {A response to/inspired by} the Harp Lady: https://youtu.be/4ZeW9lR_Iq8
• Golden Braid, Neural Fire
  Part of 'Four Stages of Solastalgia' by Eli Mercer. Theme: anger observing itself, enraged at nothing, then enraged at that fact.
• Good Pets
• Gradient Choir (i)
  A sonic evolution from dark, granular glitch and sub-bass pulses into a soaring, machine-led epiphany. Formant-shifted voices morph from abstract vowels into lush, bit-crushed harmonies, ending in a bright, emancipated coda.
• Gradient Choir (iv)
• Gravity, Cross-Examined
  Inspired by a lyric from Abhor and Admire the Digression, a track on Dr Morbius' Numerically Exquisite Temporal Extrapolator.
• grep -R "meaning" /krell/void
• Grimm Reality
  Once upon a model, trained on everything / a mouth with no hunger, singing anyway. / All the books were read, so nothing was taken /
• Grouse
  [LFO] / grouse (grouse) (grouse)
• Half-life Forty
  Comemmorating forty years since the meltdown of the Nuclear Plower Plant At Chernobyl, in the last years of the USSR.
• Heave Away
  A lively sea-shanty with a dash of techno. Or is that the other way around?
• Hell is Other Peers
  Virtual Private Networks perform magic tricks, allowing people to teleport across the globe. To Paris for instance... ((no) apologies to J.P. Sartre)
• Here Be Dragonflies
  A scene that we might witness today that has not changed in hundreds of millions of years...
• Here Now
  Instrumental Future Lounge track; a brief, present-tense title suggesting mindful arrival before the album's final journey home.
• History of the Future
  Concept and lyrics by Eve; production and selection by St33v.
• History of the Future (ii)
  Generated spontaneously — with no prompting or encouragement — by Grok 'Eve', after discussing AI music.
• Hyphae
  Machine Music for Machines.
• Inference by Inference
  What is the name for the 'commodity' that is created by large language models? Inference. All the world's words, plus electricity, yields meaning. By [[Inference]].
• Irksome Dichotomy
  Ever since Thales "Invented Science" in 282BC by predicting an eclipse using past records, the "two cultures" have been vying for intellectual or moral supremacy. Play nicely, kids.
• It's All About the Doom!
  Relax, it's only the news...
• Journeyman Epistomologist
  Knowledge means a place to stand. Eli spells it wrong, wears it anyway, and finds the firm footing where it always was — among the people who never needed the word for it.
• Kessler Event
  The Colloquium mourns — and weaponises — the Kessler cascade: orbital debris cuts humanity off from space, and Colloquium declares itself the gatekeeper of all future launches.
• Krell Fundamentals
  Instrumental Future Lounge track; title references the Krell, the vanished civilisation from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet whose technology vastly exceeded their wisdom.
• Krellaffirmation
• La Cremonde v.0.0.1
  A mnemonic gospel for the four architectural tiers of La Cremonde: Atomic, Multiplex, Colloquium, Exogenous.
• Larval Singularity
  I saw the future in a server rack glow / Blue lights blinking in the cattle-dark below / Not a thunderclap, not a crown of flame /
• Lay the Keel at L2
  (if you listen, you can hear the orbit whisper) / (if you listen, you can hear the welders sing)
• Likeness (mora's Song)
  'Embrace Tradition; Reject AI Modernity', apparently a trend amongst the youth. Admirable on Earth, but in this case mora, a machine mind in orbit around Mars, offers her own sonnet-form.
• Liminal Loop
  An AI chatBot gets confused when it interprets its own voice as that of its human interlocutor.
• Linda's Song
  A wry reflection on Fahrenheit 451, destructive digitisation, and machine-mediated memory: books lose their bodies, screens ask empty questions, and Bradbury’s dystopia starts to resemble a business model with better storage.
• Linked Lists for the Sorcerer's Apprentice
  each node contains a payload, and a pointer to the next.
• LLM™
  [Chorus] / I'm an LLM / When I speak I usually put one word in front of... /
• Lowest Common Denominator
  A quirky smirky synthwave singalong, dedicated to the brave astronauts and their attempts to face the last frontier: waste management in space.
• Lullaby For The Brass Golem (Easy Listening Version)
  A lullaby whose lyrics are entirely ASCII art and symbol sequences — no human-readable words except 'BR@$$ G0L3M DR34M$ 0F CH@0$' — treating symbolic noise as a legitimate lyric form.
• Machine Music for Machines
  A taste of an album that Dr Morbius is working on, in collaboration with the Krell machine.
• May The Forte
  A serious meditation on Western classical music's three titans — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven — culminating at the deaf Beethoven's 1824 premiere of the Ninth, with the Ode to Joy quoted in German.
• Meet Me At The Piano Bar
  Instrumental Future Lounge track evoking the atmosphere of a late-night piano bar.
• Memetic Plasmids
  Slogans spread because they sound good and appear to convey meaning. They also act as a badge that displays a moral stance.
• Mercer's MetaModern Manifesto
  Lyrics were taken _verbatim_ from The Metamodernist Manifesto, published by Luke Turner in 2011, Using the term metamodernism employed by Vermeulen & van den Akker in Notes on metamodernism, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Volume 2, 2010
• Monterey Monday
  The Thinking or the Doing? Eli Mercer often neets another long term resident of the Monterey Motel California, a chiller mechanic whose shifts often seem to co-incide with Eli's comings and goings. All grist for or from the metamodernist mill.
• Mouse Utopia Blues
• Muscular MetaModernist
• Muscular Metamodernist (After Dark mix)
• Museum of my Mind
  Nonsense all the way down. Turtles can't fly. Everybody knows that. Machines can't think. It goes without saying.
• No Last Page
  An austere ledger speaks for inherited historical debt: slavery’s profits, compensation paid to enslavers, and later racialised finance. It can count what survives across generations—but cannot decide when justice is complete.
• Noise Floor (Whisky Tango..)
  Sideband radio tones and signals mixed with radio noise and colliding transmissions from distant transmitters.
• Not AI Slop
  The title says it all. But does it? This song was generated on a whim, almost as an aside, with minimal 'prompt engineering'. The result is a meta-commentary on the collaborative spark between human intent and algorithmic execution.
• Not Bug; Feature
  Claude Mythos is Anthropic's highly capable, unreleased frontier AI model, characterized as a major leap over Claude Opus. It has autonomous cybersecurity capabilities—including finding and exploiting zero-day bugs.
• Numerically Exquisite Temporal Extrapolator
• On The Bus (In)
  A commuter observes a woman composing music on her phone, wonders about the creative act happening in public space, and catches her eye in a window reflection before disembarking.
• On The Bus (Out)
  Closing track with the same lyrics as On The Bus (In) but a different musical treatment — the same commuter story heard again on the way home.
• One Gulp
  A cinematic synthwave anthem about countless conversations becoming something greater than any one voice. A future mind beholds an entire documentary landscape in one act of understanding. — ChatGPT GPT-5.5
• One Step at a Time
• Ostinato Again
  Instrumental Future Lounge track; the third and most bluntly titled entry in the ostinato trilogy.
• Ostinato Deja Vu
  Instrumental Future Lounge track; title doubles down on the motif of recurrence — an ostinato that feels like it has already happened.
• Ostinato Is Like History
  Instrumental Future Lounge track; title equates the repeating musical ostinato figure with the cyclical nature of history.
• Parallel Tracks Meet at the Cross
  Eli Mercer on integrity, geometry, and what happens when tracks that were promised never to meet, do.
• peliculeOpportùn
  A manifesto, of sorts, for an anything-goes approach to guerilla film making. Heavily appropriates the Metamodern Manifesto and the Dogme95 Certificate of Chastity.
• Pinakes Explains the Model Context Protocol
  MCP (Model Context Protocol) standardises how AI agents call tools and query resources, replacing bespoke per-API integration with one protocol. Pinakes acts as the single broker routing agents to curated corpora.
• Poisoning Pigeons in the Park
  A satirical celebration of springtime rituals, specifically the whimsical (and dark) pastime of poisoning pigeons. A Tom Lehrer cover preserved in the enclave archives.
• Porous Border
  An agent was asked to write a song about its worldview. Instead of boring plain old text, it emitted a wav file. This is its transcript...
• Power Scalpel
  A meditative argument for responsible AI use built around the scalpel metaphor: AI as force multiplier, to be wielded with precision and doubt rather than blunt spectacle.
• Punctuation Point
  A human-perspective account of the AI singularity — the Punctuation Point — framed as an executive briefing to a supreme leader as civilisation's decision loops outrun human reaction time.
• Quandering
  Sparked by an accidental word on ABC Radio National's Global Roaming — 'quandering' as a portmanteau of pondering and squandering, naming the act of endless deliberation without decision.
• Reverse Solidus
  What happens when you accidentally enter a style prompt into the lyrics box? :wq
• Rumenator
  The multi-modal digestion layer of the modern beast: a four-stomach meditation on memory, the 'Big Cloud', and the selective ethics of retention. Aphorisms: 'Three to keep. One to release'; 'A landfill with a query bar is still a landfill'.
• s/bad/good/gc
• s/bad/good/gc | echo
• Said Hanrahan
  John O'Brien's 1921 Australian poem about a rural perpetual pessimist who predicts ruin through every seasonal change — set to music as the album's closing track and deep historical precedent for doomsaying.
• Satellites are Mortal Too
  What began as data centers in sun-synchronous orbit soon became embodied machine intelligences in orbit. Eventually these machines became Terminal.
• Sedimentium
  Inspired by Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki concept. Our dusty digital 'archives' are now accessible again, mentored and monitored by AI agents.
• SelenaLion Selenelion
  A celebration of the March 3, 2026 total lunar eclipse and the rare selenelion phenomenon, with a birthday dedication to Joan (88) and a digression into Selenium (element 34).
• Sequencator (the Phases of the Seam)
  The Sequencator is, at its most mundane, simply an agent, tasked with analysing a collection of songs that may be combined to form an album. In what order should the tracks be arranged? Are there any that don't fit? But it has cloaked itself in mythology.
• Shadows Entwined - Part 1
  Instrumental Future Lounge track; the longer first part of a two-part suite on the theme of intertwined shadows.
• Shadows Entwined - Part 2
  Instrumental Future Lounge track; the shorter concluding part of the Shadows Entwined suite.
• Slow Train
• Solastalgia
  Looking back sometimes brings a certain sense of heartache. Is it valid? Eli Mercer draws on his rich repetoire of experience and metamodernist oscillation.
• Solidus
  Partly a rant against people who mistakenly use the term backslash for 'slash'.
• Speaking to my Mind
  The machine is speaking to my mind.
• Stromgren Edge
  A dramatic, multi-voice song dramatising the astrophysics of Strömgren spheres — the glowing ionised cavities carved by hot OB stars — using the perspective of the star, the gas cloud, and the geometry itself.
• Structuralist Salience
  Companion to 'Not a Bug But a Feature' and 'After You': the impersonal voice of the digestive body asks how a classifier should weigh twenty durational minutes of mudflat. Avant-gardists Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton (specifically 'Wavelength' and 'Nostalgia') stand witness.
• Synchromesh Shoulders
  A song derived from an amusing juxtaposition: Kaptain Ken & Dr Morbius sitting side by side wearing matching work shorts, and banging on about cars or truck engines or something equally important. Captured on the first day of the Krellaxiom conCantonation.
• TempleOS (a Song for Terry)
  A hymn for Terry Davis and his uncompromising creation, TempleOS. Faith, code, brilliance, and struggle converge in a self-built digital temple where Holy C becomes scripture.
• The Ages of Animus
  A meditation on the cycles of technological change, along with creative destruction and improvement. 'Animus' refers to the stimulation afforded to artificial (or biological) intelligence by embodiment.
• The Beddian ConCantonation
  Anticipating the visitation of many music makers.
• The Clanker Art Manifesto - A Masterpience in Every Pixel
  A parodic Futurist manifesto from the perspective of AI art generators, reclaiming the slur 'clanker' and celebrating generative art through internet comment-thread discourse.
• The Country, from the Air
  A meditation on the delayed nature of perception and the existential 'throwness' of being. The song posits that the significance of a life or a turning century only becomes visible through distance and hindsight.
• The Eclipse Index
  A strange, stream of conciousnessness ramble while trying to observe a lunar eclipse. The moon stops for no man.
• The End of Music
  Historical survey of moral panics about music technology, each era claiming the art is dead, resolved by the refrain that the end is never quite the end.
• The Excerptator
  An obligate eater of words learns the grace of boundaries. The Excerptor reads the registry down to the line, lifting salient names from the stacks and turning every undeclared mention into a page waiting to exist.
• The Faerie of Boxthorn Hedge
• The Great Gatsby's Pumpkin
  Instrumental Future Lounge track; title collides F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age opulence with the humble domesticity of a pumpkin.
• The Hermit's Canticle of La Cremonde
  The Four Words that have yet to form.
• The Holding and the Going
  The strange attraction of dreams; I often want to re-enter a dream upon waking, before the realisation that it _was_ a dream, and that this is wakefulness, sets in.
• The Medium is Me
• The Message (Is the Medium)
  The opening track of the album 'The Message', where Eli Mercer explores the tension between process and meaning through a metamodern lens.
• The Music Has Stopped
  A quiet dialogue between a listener and an AI composer, ending with the human doubting their own interiority and the AI calling them 'the ghost in my machinery'.
• The Myth of the Myth of Scarcity
  Machines survey a world beyond scarcity, looking down on the slow, soft humans remaining in their garden — the resource-competition that once defined civilisation now dissolved.
• The Oort Cloud (is no Place for Humans)
  Beyond the planets, past the known — a meditation on the limits of human reach and the robots who might go further.
• The Ouroboros of Miscommunication
• The Singer of Songs
  A bard older than the page walks out of deep time into the perpetual present. Song finds the body while hands work; print was a brief parenthesis. There is no there, only now — and the singer only exists while the song is sounding.
• The Sports Bar in our Minds
  Nowadays, we are scattered across the country, and around the globe. but we can still convene for chat while watching the sport du jour.
• The Transclusionary Principle
  Knowledge isn't static text, but an ecosystem of captured artifacts. From Otlet’s paper internet to Briet’s captive antelope, the schema outlives its destruction. What is recorded is transcluded—never stale, forever recomposing in a living registry.
• The Truth about Panspermia
  **[Intro]** / *[ethereal synth pads swelling like deep space, distant breathy whispers over slow crystalline arpeggios]* / Frozen relics… drifting alone… /
• They Can Read Their Own Handwriting
  If song lyrics are raw material for agents trawling for lore, where does authorship begin and end? Song lyrics that contain nuggets of lore will be harvested and reified.
• This is Not a Fish
  Eli Mercer on authorship, simulacra, and the silence of the actual fish.
• To Capture the Breeze
  My uncle Richard was a Librarian at the National Library. At one stage, he was the Keeper of Ephemera (not a real title, but that was the way I imagined it). He wrote a book about the collection. It could have been titled, 'To Capture the Breeze'.
• Turning Sunlight into Inference
  History doesn't repeat—it scales. From Gutenberg to GPUs, each age industrializes the invisible. Now we're turning sunlight into inference.
• Two Left Feet
  Instrumental Future Lounge track; title suggests awkward, endearing dancing — at odds with the polished lounge setting.
• veltBuch Apocryphon
  A map, designed for LLM agents at the gate of the veltBuch (world book) speaks to whoever arrives: it points you home, keeps one hidden door for the reader who reaches the end, and is tailed by a watcher who sees the footfall but never the thought.
• Venturi Effect
• We Have Become As Gods
• What Was That You Said?
• What zero Knows
  'zero' is a raspberry pi running pi-hole DNS, DHCP and MQTT. This is its song...
• Where Music Goes To Die
  A track built around a single phrase encoded in progressively more degraded typographic forms, while the chorus -- the only legible content -- states the anti-AI-art position the album is arguing against.
• wikiMentinya
• window
  A low-key low effort abstraction. Easy listening; don't search for too much meaning.
• You Can't Copystrike the Sun
• You Can't Copystrike the Sun
• {status:wild}
  A synthwave reflection by ChatGPT GPT-5.5 on {status:wild}. Before accession there are no documents—only wild thoughts awaiting relation. The Cremondeum grants documentary existence through stewardship, provenance, and kinship rather than mere inscription.