We are walking on the well paved paths of the zoo grounds, looking in through the glass at all the historical events created in the name of love. Those domesticated images that persuade how we live today. The images feel impersonal yet innately animalistic and ingrained. Just now the teacher is giving us lots of information. They says “No matter how complicated these initial decisions eventually evolve, we are able to make our own judgment on how these events affect us emotionally.” We want to ask a question.

Lyrics:

love, of, love, of, love, of, love.

It takes one, it takes two, I’m of love, love zoo.

What is this pink matter, fluid in form, give in to its inertia, carried away with the storm.

We dont want no walls for we are free for all, Let love rise and for through us all.

love, of, love, of, love, of, love

This video was made on Aboriginal land by solder and friends.

Letter to Leaf

I write this to you at a time of good spirit in my life. I am currently sitting on the bank of the Gundagai river, in the front seat of my car. For the last twenty minutes I've observed a standoff between a cockatoo and a possum in a large gum tree. This is what’s brought me great joy. The possum was trying to conceal itself in the gums hollow but the cockatoo was perched atop it, yellow mohawk flared, wings spread, calling out screech after blasted screech. The possum had a go at it, but knew the cockatoo was too terrible an adversary. I ended up having to walk over to the tree and toss a stick up at branch beside the bird. It took off, disappearing over the tree tops and I went back to the car. I’m not sure what it was about this that made me think of you but I did. Writing to you I feel able to see my own life clearer. You make me feel there is an order to all this and I am within that order exactly as I ought to be. My responsibilities are apparent, what is beyond my control is too. And so writing to you, I’m hoping to discover and solidify some of the simple lessons I am able to learn from my life and offer them to you. Maybe it can save you some time in your own development. I understand you must experience things for yourself to know them. But maybe my lessons can be some guide.

You are a ninth generation human being. You were conceived and born atop a mountain of history. Each step up the mountain offers a new lesson that if you give the time of study, you can realise how this mountain is shaped and understand how the place formed on which you were born. I am not sure where learning may get you, nor me, nor any of us. Who knows where the lesson of where this mountain will lead? Could it rise to Heaven? Could it crumble? I don’t know. But I know if you do not learn, if we chose to remain in ignorance, then war, ugliness and egotism is our certain state.

Learning is very important my child, but what is more important than that is that you practice openness. No matter what you may experience, if you do so with openness the experience can enter and join you in a more truthful form and so teach you more about whatever lesson it may extend.

I hope this doesn’t sound too dictatorial, I am your father, you are my son, I don’t demand anything of you and don’t expect you to obey me. I know I cannot offer you anything besides my guidance. You can chose to dismiss it or follow it however you please. My greatest hope, I cannot deny, is that you can find something in what I write here of some importance. I hope you can salvage a kernel of truth, see maybe something helpful.

It is wrong my child to think that your life is anyone else’s but your own. But too, that your life is anything other than in relation to everything and everyone else. You are both alone and connected by a thousand hands.

Sometimes people and organisations will try to reprimand you, whether it be directly or through some degree of separation. No matter how someone may come to judge you, it is important that you do not take such judgements without thought, without first looking into yourself and judging for yourself whether you are in the right or in the wrong, or in some grey where judgement must be upheld until more understanding of yourself and the world is seen. It is a dark lesson, but people and organisations may tell you they are working for your benefit, and so you ought to work for theirs, are not sincere actors in your prosperity nor in the prosperity of what you believe is good. It is hard, but you can stay strong, hold strong, and persevere with what you sense is innately true. You can be, in these moments, more than you are aware. You can be like a great gum in the way of a river, solid and humble in your goal. But such a tree splits the water along its trunk and takes from the water spilling passed only what it needs to sustain its growth. And such a tree is a home for the possums, the insects. Its root holds the soil together. Sometimes the force of the flowing river may be strong and forceful, but if you feel that in yourself to give into to this river would be to go against yourself, then you will be strong. If you stay true to that deep knowing in yourself, then no matter what flood, what torrent is rushing against you, you can feel inside quiet, harmonious and a sense of belonging with yourself.

But the opposite may be true. All may try to sustain the peace, the quiet, the stillness of a status quo that is against you and your beliefs. Then you may feel the torrent within yourself. Know, young child, that both are necessary, both are good. Follow the depth of knowing and it will teach you, let whatever it says to you become you, let what rings from these lessons reverberate through you.

We grow sweet child, just as all things do. Just think, when you were younger you wouldn’t have been able to even read this. And I hope there will be a time in the future when these words will read clearer and have some more depth than they may have now. This growth is beautiful and often scary, just as all real and unfamiliar things are. But fear cannot control you, for it will try to justify you in shying from the change which are coming upon you, justify you in stagnancy. It is this growth which is learning, which is the rising of the mountain higher. If I aim to get one thing across to you my Leaf, it is to support the openness of this growth. Be supportive of its processes, which is pure, more pure to you than you may perceive yourself to be. What you may see as your true self can become corrupt if you hold to this vision in the face of change. Help it to reach clarity, aim for translucency and hold from obstructing it.

Pay respect to your own past by tending to its rotten and bitter fruits, and respect your future by planting the seeds of flowers you wish to see bloom with multitudes of colour. Let your tides push and pull, ebb and flow, for all things good will help all things good. Do not block the moon when it’s there, nor seek it when it’s not. Let that force rise high, let it subside, let it the waves swell high and bring them crashing perpetually onto your shore. When the tide swells, when the waves break endlessly upon you, know that the tide will soon retreat, and the waves will be small and the ocean will look as a lake. Walk your shoreline on such occasions, see what the ocean and its waves have exposed. Anything you may find, shell; carcass; seaweed; drift wood: all are good and treasured artefacts, for all have come to exist in the depths of your mind, beyond what you can conceive. They are treasures because they contain knowledge you do not contain of yourself. Look to the moon for this reason, my son. Look at how it changes and listen to how the world is in swing with it. Get deep rest, listen to your mind and body with the ear of your spirit.

I must be going and that is my deepest regret. I wish I could be there for you and teach you all these things not with words but through my action. But I have listened to my spirit and I have heard what is necessary of me. I do not expect you to understand, nor anyone else, for it is my fate alone which I must bear. This expedition is before me and I hesitate only for a second to now write this to you. But I must soon step through this threshold, to go seek this wood I’ve now learned of and shape with it I feel is fated of me: the perfect flute that will resonate with all the beauty that permeates our world.

I don’t know how old you’ll be when you read this, but last I saw you, you were but an infant. When I return you may be a man. Before I left you, I spent the last moments sitting by your bed. Your face was soft, you were asleep. Your skin seemed to glow, as if blessed with some magic. I listen to your small lungs breathe, the slow breathes of R.E.M sleep and I felt love, and pain, and certain that you will be strong despite me. This moment—the image of your glowing, sleeping face, the eyes moving slightly behind the lids, how comfortable you made me feel—will remain with me forever. What you achieved in this sleep is a peace and harmoniousness with self and world that I wish to achieve.

When you lay your head down at night, wherever it may be, on a pillow, on some straw, on a hard floor, aim to reach R.E.M if you can. Surrender your beliefs, your confidence, your sense of knowing, and go again through the process of your life, see the images, feel the sensations, learn what you see is offered to you for it holds something of importance and meaning that you must learn. R.E.M will teach you what is useless, what is misleading, what is possible and what is true. R.E.M is full of colour. You may travel through it as yourself, as another, as wild beast, a child, an adult. Give presence and openness to these hours, for each has its importance in nothingness.

You do not have to wake up early. But think about how that could be beneficial for your life. It’s important to understand how anything you may do is beneficial for your life. For me, it is nice to sometimes wake with the sun just rising into my eyes. It is a time for me to be alone with myself, to think with ease from the fresh mystery morning always brings. Wherever you may find a moment like this, allow it to penetrate you. Allow it to calm and restore you, so that your mind, your body and spirt, are all prepared for whatever comes in that day ahead.

Mediate—it is an uplifting, powerful thing to return to nothingness. You will surprise yourself with the clarity in which beauty is revealed, encompassing both that which is labelled significant and that which is not. You can see these opposites as connected, like the two walls of a ship, coming to meet in the hull, where all that is in-between is being held in a balance, floating above the sea of subconscious. You can gain distance from any fear that may control your life and so regain your own control. A truly meditative mind seems to be free of obstruction and jaggedness. A truly meditative mind moves smoothly, curving along the road that travels up the mountains side. It can be difficult to discover this state: there are so many obstructions, so many forces acting on any one of us. But to not become impatient with it and deny what it is you haven’t yet learned. Many people say that we each have a specific resonance, and that this can be carefully translated into a certain word, that then becomes the mantra of the individual to recite in mediation. Something that has no specific meaning, but when it is repeated can calm, regain focus, bring you back to the middle way of your wandering thought and so come to mean multitudes. I don’t have a mantra of my own, but have found a similar outcome from listening to the warbles of birds. Each sung so similarly yet never the same. They seem for me to be the perfect focus for my attention. Not only can their songs bring you presence, but they also add a sort of playful theme to things. It is a bell that draws attention and also a bell that humbles you. There is nothing more present to me than sound.

Write your thoughts and ideas my sweat Leaf, good or bad, for once they are in words, you can study them easier, leave them or build upon them. They are no longer dwelling invisible, idling. But never forget that a word is also expression. What you write is not the entirety of what you mean, what you describe, what you understand. A word is a compression of what is in you. But this does not make them untrue, nor ugly. It makes them beautiful and powerful.

And also, do not let yourself drown in words. Do not let writing or eating something hinder you from listening or experiencing. Writing may indeed lead you astray from what you are trying to say in the first place. Recognise this, and play with it. Hold true to your heart, not to your words or any others. Writing can lead you to realisations, but they are not realisations themselves. What happens beyond words, in music, in the birdsong, in the resonating bell, that is the experience of realisation. Makes sounds, Leaf. Sing your heart out, hit wood to skin, strum steel, blow wind.

There is nothing more beneficial to your growth and the growth of this whole world than beautiful sounds that can somehow, beyond words, translate and inspire the beauty and meaning of this life. It is a language that anyone can understand. It is a language that the birds and the trees can understand.

Make sound, Leaf, and perhaps you will find a music inside of yourself, as unique as a birds warble, that you can transfer with transparency. Whatever the sound is, if you hear it, give yourself to it, and you channel the power of your innermost nature.

We are often organising ourselves around insignificant things, looking to rediscover something. Which has already been uncovered, looking to learn for ourselves a lesson that has already been learned. It is our nature perhaps, but I am not certain. You can give yourself to math, science, to the study of religious texts, to painting or teaching or music making, and you can find in anything a limitlessness of meaning for yourself. That is, as long as you feel within yourself that this endeavour is your purpose.

All that exists cannot exists without all that exists. One thing, must exist within everything. So too are you, am I. I must leave for this is my purpose. I hope these truths of myself, that I have been able to conjure thinking of you, is something to help, something you can reflect on and learn from. Till I see you again, my Leaf, in dream or in reality.

Your loving father, Solder.

Lyrics:

Here we are, inside your mind, inside, dream time, this is where, reality lives, R, E, M.

Behind your eyes...

Yes here we are, inside your psyche, inside, mind brine, this is where, reality lives, R, E, M.

Try your head...

Try your head, I can see you holding back what's behind those eyes.

Try your head, oh why don't you try and rest what's behind those eyes.

Try your head, oh why don't you try and jest what's behind those eyes.

The children gather on the lawn

Atop the hill.

They place their hands into

Each others.

The grass is shivering the

Stars are shivering the

Trees are rocking with the wind

To, fro, to.

A hypnotism is in it all

feeling their friends blood

Pulsating in the

Palm of their hand and in their

finger tips.

The worms are squiggling,

Birds chirping,

Sun playing off the leaves.

They want to remember this

They want to dance like this

In circles

When they are old

And understand things better...

The CPU is the plane of the divine to which all are educated to aspire towards and simulate. It is an abstract, mythic plane said to be the source, the “centre,” of all things. To know it requires a journey of transcendence, renunciation, faith and discipline. In return, its promises are manifold and godly: immortality; omnipotency; benevolence; harmony with everything. In the mechalopolis of New Hope City, citizens gather at nodes round the city everyday, performing rituals and baptisms—children are brought in, a surgical incision is made on the napes of their necks and a brain stem interface is transplanted, connecting them to what they are told is greater than them and what they were born to serve. A dystopia by any means. One in which people sever and enter simulated realms to experience simulated enlightenments. One in which robots will come to long for humanity—“I’m scared that I am nothing but equations,” she calculates. One in which to not compute is not an option. One in which those who refuse are exiled and become sub-human cave artists and subjects of scientific research. One in which, when all the augmented reality (of billboards, street signs, dietary plans, streaming services and social media) is turned off becomes bleak and dark.

For our brief character, known by his handle Mohawk_Baboon, this bleak, dark city is his preferred choice. He whistles a tune that none can hear. He passes the bodies that are mute, talking with each other, and smell of new cars. They are hypnotised by the sound of their own voices. They call out, “Is there anybody there?” Hearing only themselves and thinking, oh, good, we’re all here. His footsteps find puddles, his socks soak. Breath fogs. A thought cannot form in his head without becoming transposed by some CPU slogan he’d heard countless times throughout his young life. But for Mohawk_Baboon this is the pinnacle of peace: a dripping, sterile fuzz. He refuses the enlightenments of the CPU. But also, he refuses to feel alive. His pride is to be alone, even among these billions of bodies.

He is venturing down, away from the bodies now, into an alleyway and into a small, plain door. This is the House of People, or so it is known among them who are aware of it. A small club of self-proclaimed radicals. He sits and listens to a conversation:

A: Forget Truth. It is a currency of past civilisations. And likewise forget Reality too. Our future is in an economics of other falsehoods, ones which are undeniable. The currency today is Space. Space to fill is what everyone wants, needs; data, development, construction, expansion. And the CPU promises primarily space. Space for Truth and Space for falsehoods, either is the same purchase of this currency. They promise infinite universe’s for each of us. That’ why They are in power, because They are Space and They offer its emptiness for all to fill. The argument against the CPU needs to end, for such arguments only resist an unstoppable force. We need to enrich ourselves in this world, we need to endeavour to enter it deeper than any others, to find enterprise in its early construction and thus empower ourselves to really shape the future. Our ideas, which we gather to share here, about Art and its significance, needs to not be lost, that should be our decisive cause. Ego is what obstructs us. If we submit ourselves to ideas which seek to possess us then we need devote our lives to empowering them in this world, instead of just telling others they need to listen to us.

B: As musicians we are conjurers of Space. Sound biologically affects our sense of balance, our sense of dimensions. When we play we conjure visuals, we transport people into realms of creation. The beat is the wall, the melody the happenings, the reverb the size. Is this not enough? If we cannot hear the capability of this now then what makes you believe we would be capable of hearing such Spaces in the future? Mustn’t we just resist the shrinking rooms, mustn’t we just shout into the wallpaper and hope the neighbour has their headset off and can hear us. Submission to the CPU is a submission to a box. Music allows us to expand that box into any place we can fathom. If you agree, then don’t we already have the infinite universe at our disposal? Aren’t we already enriched?

A: But what is a song that is never heard? A forgotten memory?

B: A song is never not heard. If no humans may hear you, then some other creature might, some bacteria on your body will tremble with its vibration. Let me pose it like this: all the songs before recordings and all the songs sung which are never recorded, does their inability to be recalled undermine the fact they happened anyways? We have not discovered life beyond this planet, does that mean because an outside listener has not heard us that we are silent?

A: I don’t understand you. Of course our music exists, we have all heard it.

B: But so too does the singer of the unsung song not hear themselves and be comforted?

A: That resonants True but you are nostalgic, remember the fact which I have spoken: truth and falsehood are but two of the same purchases of Space. And it cannot be denied the world we exist in, the degradation of artists as criminal and diseased. Our tools, of Truth and of conjured Space, is not adequate anymore, that is what I am professing. If our tools for constructing the world were good enough then we would be living in a world that was shaped at least in our favour. But we are outcasted and impoverished. We are endangered. Music is fine for you but not for the billions. I am speaking of revolution, from the bit up. Block by block. We need to play upon a new melody which may be heard into the cyber ear. A new fashion. A new. You are out of date now. If you could calculate a model for what would really resonate with people you would be much more efficient.

B: My program dictates a differed definition of efficiency. I am hoping to recalibrate the human soul, not human produce.

A: But no human has any idea what that could even mean. We are beyond souls now. You are trapped in a box, a gridlock of past ideals.

To Mohawk_Baboon these voices are just that: voices. All is heard equally in the noise, the dripping fuzz of his mind. He notices his friend, the one who he loves and the only one he sees and hears. She is sitting on a couch in a cloud of smoke. She stares out dreary eyed. He knows she is not hearing anything either. He sees those dead eyes and whispers in her ear that he loves her. She only feels the heat of his breath on her neck. She turns to him.

“What?”

“Let’s go.”

She takes his hand and they leave, the noise continuing to build behind them.

Lyrics:

In the west shadow grows, all consumers into rows, Sci-fi existence, dancing for the system.

Sooo, you wanna rule the world, ahhhhh, at war with natural law.

Life breaks through, things are gonna get better now, oh we are the C, of the system we choose.

Back in 2021 when ‘C.P.U’ was to be named ‘Cyborc War-party’ we had this drawing made for the single art.

It’s a Cyborc.

Drawing by Madè Kosala.

Being playful

X-37 Returns:

Leaving now, goodbye, I'm goin, way outside.

Week by week, passes by, green to blue, blue to black.

Deep mountain, split in two, is the past, the whom?

Oh my, what's that, up in the sky, criss-cross across the shattering sky, as my innate, born state, meets me, devising at sound break.

My mind and reason were worlds apart, i contemplated a beating heart, an attempt to find where beauty sings, lead to the look at life more simply.

The, blue, stone, glows alone.

Return, home, knowing exactly who you are.

I’d, say, it’s a good day to die.

How, nice, to, be in space.

I, can, feel, so much.

What, matters, now, fills my life.