Cover photo: Mws77, Wikimedia Commons

Midnight in the Garden of Grant & Enya
Released: July 2025
Recorded: May 2015, July 2017, December 2024, May-June 2025
Genre: Synthpop, Synthwave, Drum & Bass
Tracks: 9
Duration: 35:44

So far, all of my albums have been production music or gaming-inspired. Escape songs, basically; stuff you could listen to and take yourself out of the horrors of the modern age. No more. It was time to get political on main.

Instrumental-only songs are easy to take out of context, so let me make it quite clear: these are all anarcho-communist anthems with side-trips into transgender liberation. Rightwingers, fascists, and cops need not waste their time on this record, there is nothing here for you.

Let's start at the top, shall we? We'll go all the way back to the '40s in "Irradiated Population", to the victims of mystery radiation poisoning during the US nuclear testing and the hundreds of thousands of innocent people sacrificed in a vain display of American scientific ingenuity and military might.

How can there be such a thing as an "Illegal Human"? What is illegal about being a human to other humans? Nonetheless, pronouncing each other to be "illegal" is the way of today. The fascist regime holds a kangaroo court, stationing its agents in the corridors, allowing people to be expedited like paperwork; literally sucked up from their homes and workplaces, spat out into an immigration tribunal, and then fast-tracked out of the country like express mail. Certain humans make it their life's work to set up, maintain, and operate systems that are designed to declare other groups of humans to be illegal. Someone on Tumblr wrote once, "don't call people 'human', because that suggests the existence of 'inhuman' or 'subhuman'." Well, sure, if you're a filthy Nazi; and, as I always say, it takes one to know one.

In "D to the Third Power", we see an enterprising youngster of some persuasion or another take matters into his own hands and demonstrates his 3D printing project to the class. That man is the Claims Adjuster— not Luigi Mangione as many have accepted. Even people here on Neocities have shrines to Luigi, proclaiming him to be a Class Hero, while completely ignoring the fact that he was set up as a new-age Marinus van der Lubbe by a bloated, incompetent police force intent upon public relations damage control; parrotting a story fed to the lazy, undermotivated news media by the fascist regime, only with a leftist spin.

Who is the "Feminine Presenting Computer Glitch"? ENA, of course! To many trans feminine and non-binary people, ENA represents a secret third thing; not a boy, not a girl, but an unclassifiable entity beyond the ken of mortal beings. In the physical plane, I'm reminded of the story told by a fellow trans girl on Tumblr once (pre-Matt, of course)... after tiring of seeing the wrong gender marked on her driver's license, and being possessed of a unisex name, she put on her most feminine voice and went to the DMV on a hunch. She complained of a clerical mistake that someone made, which the office worker attributed to a computer glitch, and gave her a new license with the "corrected" gender marker.

I had been thinking about Ronald Reagan and the effect his regime had on the culture of the '80s, including the Church of the SubGenius, which I had seen John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants talking about on Tumblr a while back. I'm pretty well-acquainted with the Church through Devo, whose members were all disciples (though some took it further than others; I think Bob 2 genuinely believed in it from a religious perspective), so I've seen scans of most of their pamphlets and newsletters from the early '80s. I particularly liked the concept of orbital mind-control lasers, to the point I've made references to it in my writing work before; not because I like the idea of being able to control someone's thoughts through the use of low-orbit laser emitters, but the ridiculous notion that such a thing could be achieved in the first place, and how many millions of 1981 dollars the CIA would have dumped into making it happen. The phrase "orbital mind control lasers" to me represents the intense fear and paranoia that a cult leader can instill in his followers about something unknowable, but just plausible enough not to raise any red flags. This is usually done to deflect attention onto a particular target or to smokescreen something that would otherwise cause a PR crisis.

"Midnight in the Garden of Grant & Enya" is our smokescreen. A soothing, if somewhat off-putting jaunt down the corporate-sponsored nostalgia path. Take a 6-minute cruise back to the early '90s and don't worry about it. ICE is busting down your neighbour's door, but don't you miss the Super Nintendo? The United States is on the brink of nuclear war with Iran, but let your concern melt into the shakuhachi riff. Give yourself a mental massage for $14.99 per month plus ads.

But ultimately, Ray Bradbury was right about everything: ChatGPT giving flawed summaries of texts for people with a 3-second attention span, ad-supported dreck behind every paywall, subscription plans for everything but breathing, and a fascist dictatorship with its finger on the button. It's hard to imagine anything getting better from here as you find yourself praying for a nuclear reset more often than not. If we hope to live to see tomorrow, we need to start wailing, really fast. Chanting, even. Drumming out the fascist anti-intellectual regime and all of its lapdogs, yes-men, and apologists, before the last thing remaining of society is a fallout siren in Attack mode.