Automata - final sequence
Everybody here now? Ok, analysis is a tricky thing. For one, you have to have a goal. That goal could be tiny, like when we tried to figure out what order makes the tracks actually mean something. The brackets helped a lot, because they outlined the context of a performance: there's a rehearsal, a premier, and an ordered sequence of scenes. Whatever it is we're hearing, it's being performed for an audience. Now we can proceed to the actual stuff being performed.
As far as i can tell, there are only two participants. There's an entity that says "me," and an entity that says "we." I'm skipping over the fact that it morphs from "me" to "we," the important part is that it says "we are the Voice of Trespass." Voice of Tresspass is a corporate (plural) entity. I don't think we have to delve too deep into it, they explicity call themselves evil, and equally explicitly take advantage of the protagonist. Actually, they are the clarification that the person at the beginning is in fact a protagonist. Voice of Tresspass defines itself as the antagonist, and that forces us into a specific interpretation of the situation. Everything the first character says or does happens inside the context of struggling against an enemy.While we're on the subject of pronouns, Glide uses "it," but "it" has the capacity to exhibit nervousness, and the capability of dancing. So, "it" is at the very least human shaped.
What else have we got? Yellow eyes, blood on snow, a death sentence, a house, a thing that a wanderer can wander too far from called "gold distance," and something called "the grid." Start at the start, i guess.
Yellow eyes. What has yellow eyes? Cats, owls, lemurs, racoons, people in liver failure, turtles maybe. Creatures. He's scared, so scary creatures. Yellow eyed creatures tend to be nocturnal, so we got that going for us.
Pretty sure on day two he lights his house on fire. It's called House Organ, and he says ignite a couple times.
The hard one is dreams. Sure we can point to some serious time dislocation, frequently changing landscape, some technological vs biological interraction, electricity is involved, but it's only in track 9 that we finally get the statement "wake up," and we end with the protagonist locking the metaphorical door and moving on.
BN, by the way is how Tommy's son said "the end" at the end of a story. That's everyone's favorite tidbit from the book about the writing of the lyrics.
Uh, excuse me, Bottle. Are we done now?
You don't want to keep going? Analyze more scenes? Talk about how the music emphasizes mood and stuff?
No.
No.
No.
Fine. Nice ergodic responses there. Ok, we can leave it at that, i guess. Did it at least make the whole experience less agonizing?
[Epilogue]
Bottle never did get an answer to that question. Some say they sat there glaring at each other for the rest of eternity. Empires rose and fell, the sun fused all its hydrogen into helium and long ago ceased laughing at its resulting high pitched voice, galaxies swirled away, the fabric of spacetime grew thinner and ripped so that things kept falling out of its pockets. But even after all that, the echoes of Sandra's final words still vibrated between the last two extant atoms of existence with a remarkable vibrancy: shut up, Bottle.
Fin.
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