Abhor and Admire the Digression
A metacommentary on the creative process, narrating the happy accident of the La Cremonde name.
Summary
Morbius reflects on his own creative process as a series of productive digressions: the Krell rig Mk Seven misbehaves, speech-to-text mishears "Colloquium" as "La Cremonde," and two instances of the same prompt produce divergent outputs that each deserve to live. Rather than chasing a clean take, the track celebrates the gap between intention and execution as the generative site of new work. The "metamodern metronome" line declares a conscious oscillation between sincerity and irony, and the final Dr Morbius transmission stutters on "The medium is… (glitch)" — the message and the breakdown becoming the same thing. The track is the most self-reflexive on the album, explicitly narrating the conditions of its own making.
Lyrics
Intro | spoken, close-mic]
Objective: record.
Side quest: digress.
I abhor and admire the digression.
[Verse 1 | trip-hop, half-sung/half-spoken]
I'm in a tight space, chasing a clean take,
But I keep making doorways out of every mistake.
Transgression? no, digression, same nerve, different dress,
A loop that folds the map while I'm trying to progress.
Krell rig Mk Seven, wires like vines in a storm,
DIRP to the A-136, make the plain wave deform.
Dura-Analog Glide, let the pitch lean and sway,
I'm tuning the wander, not chasing "right" anyway.
I put on the back-catalog, the slag heap, the floor,
Work-in-Progress, Cutting Room Floor of Inattention, encore.
Three tracks to the group chat, tossed like sparks in the air,
Not polished, just honest, with a little burnt hair.
[Hook | short, sticky, minimal melody]
Abhor and admire the digression,
My best mistakes get a second confession.
Abhor and admire, then back to the mission,
But the mission keeps growing a new definition.
[Verse 2 | proto-rap, more percussive]
Ouroboros of miscommunication, bite the tail, grin,
Speech-to-text did a somersault, let the weirdness in.
I said "Colloquium." full stop. like a stamp on the page,
It heard "La Cremonde" and built a whole new stage.
Now the defect is the artifact, the skip is the scar,
The lyric in quotes vanished, left a hole like a star.
Test transmission, imperfect, but that's the point, that's the proof,
No one blames the watercolor when it runs off the roof.
Two instances, same prompt, both cut above the rest,
Not "generations" like Darwin, just versions I blessed.
So I don't have to choose one, like a courtroom or a knife,
I can let each one live a different album life.
[Bridge | airy, sincere then ironic]
Sincere and ironic, I oscillate in place,
A metamodern metronome wearing two faces.
Civic capitalism, pulsars in my peripheral,
While I solder a meaning out of something ephemeral.
[Break | instrumental, 8 bars]
(Drums drop to kick + hat. Bass stays. Add modular chirps like a handshake protocol.)
[Final Verse | spoken-word, "Dr Morbius transmission"]
This is Dr Morbius.
First voice, faster-than-light, improvised and alive.
Altair to Terra.
If you receive this, forgive the dropouts.
The machine is learning my mouth.
The message is the medium.
The medium is… (glitch)
[Outro | whispered, then silence]
Objective: record.
Side quest: digress.
I abhor and admire the digression.
Detail
The track is unusually autobiographical for the Dr Morbius persona, listing actual studio equipment (Krell rig Mk Seven, DIRP, A-136, Dura-Analog Glide) alongside the speech-to-text mishearing that generated the La Cremonde name — placing the Colloquium canon's origin story inside the album's diegesis as a happy accident rather than an authored decision. The "metamodern metronome" in the bridge names the track's tonal mode explicitly: it oscillates between sincerity and irony without resolving into either, a posture it shares with the Numerically Exquisite Temporal Extrapolator album overall. The "two instances, same prompt" verse touches directly on questions of authorship and version when working with generative tools, arguing that divergent outputs need not compete — both can have album lives. The Ouroboros of Miscommunication is invoked by name here, making track 6 a metacommentary on track 4 and cementing the "Colloquium heard as La Cremonde" episode as the album's foundational myth. The glitch at the outro — "The medium is… (glitch)" — enacts rather than describes the breakdown it names.