KUNO. Portrait of the Album
By the year 2500, Earth seemed to have reached complete disarray. Rising sea levels, growing trash islands, ravaging droughts and fires, and worsening air pollution had made Earth nearly uninhabitable. As people sought refuge, they grew distanced from the nature they had destroyed, but they also grew increasingly distanced from each other. The wave of pandemics in the 2000s and 2100s pushed people further into isolation, and daily life never moved back in person as people grew increasingly reliant on technology for protection and connection. People grew more and more disconnected and isolated by the day and outside, their world quite literally crumbled.
The rise of private space corporations created hope for some, leading to the creation of new programs to colonize outer space. Desperate to provide a way to leave Earth as quickly as possible to find any margin of a safer alternative, one program offered the opportunity to live in a satellite community in outer space where food, water, and shelter were guaranteed. For those facing natural disasters, health complications, and food and water shortages at home, this experimental program sounded like a dream.
Participants were separated into individual cubicles on the spaceship for the duration of their travels. During this time, one man spent his days creating recordings. In hopes to document this revolutionary experience, he recorded everything from the rumbling of the engine, the news clips from his satellite radio, and his personal reflections on his life. The isolation this man faced truly became unbearable, and when the doors to his cubicle were opened upon arrival, it was discovered that he had died only days earlier.
Considered a part of the man’s belongings, the recordings from his trip were preserved and returned to his family on Earth. Discovered 67 years later by his nephew, these recordings form the basis of Kuno’s recent album, which both tells the story of his deceased uncle, and expresses his own fears about the future of humanity and life on Earth.
1. like heaven to touch
This song demo represents the memory of what life on Earth was like before the onset of extreme environmental degradation and social distancing. It features unedited nature sounds (waves, rain, fire, and wind) and the quiet intimacy of direct human interaction (a father and his young son). The inclusion of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” by Frankie Valli (2007 remaster by Craymer and AIIVAWN [original 1967]), starting with a record player needle drop, represents the nostalgia my uncle felt for a world he had never even truly known himself but that he hoped humans would one day create again in space. This demo also warns of what is to come: the nature sounds foreshadow the news reports in track 2; the howling wind that follows the child’s conversation with his father foreshadows the isolation humanity will soon embrace. The child marvels at his newfound proximity to nature and wants to share the experience with his father, not knowing humanity is soon to lose these things. The garbled old radio static that starts and ends the demo suggests that memories are harder to keep hold of than you might think. The past is not something we can fully return to or stay in, even in our thoughts. The passage of time interferes with our connection to our own past.
3. what a beautiful flight
This song represents the departure from the known and the entrance into the unknown. The overlaid tracks of commanders preparing rockets for takeoff points to the mechanized nature of change - while change is thought to be unexpected the process of deviation remains constant across any given change. More specifically, each subsequent countdown begins when the previous one says “ignition sequence starts”. This again, speaks to the mechanization and automation of these processes. Moreover, the inclusion of a synth which crescendos to gradually overtake the rocket launches demonstrates how my uncle is becoming submerged in what will become his new life.
5. 4:1
This song demo represents the growing sense of isolation and insanity aboard the spaceship. In track 4, my uncle’s thoughts were melodic and clear words could be discerned. In this track, his thoughts have devolved into incoherent and frantic whispers, and one voice has splintered into four as he talks to himself to the point of losing his sense of self. He paces around without anywhere to go. His footsteps echo as he walks over his own tracks. A door opens and opens and opens without ever closing. How does the door keep opening? He knows he has to leave but he doesn’t know how. Eventually the door closes. Music from an acoustic viola tries to preserve some sense of melody and combat the artificiality of everything around him, but these sounds are frantic too, and contribute to the sense of paranoia. Also included in this demo are the distant voices of a group of people talking and laughing, representing memories from Earth. And, of course, there is the ever present hum of the spaceship’s engine.
2. forest fires can be seen from space
This song seeks to represent the influence of the increasing amount of environmental degradation on the decision to leave Earth. The song starts with a simple guitar melody in E flat major to evoke a feeling of nostalgia and familiarity. The calmness of this melody is contrasted with samples of newscasts on environmental destruction layered with sounds of whispering and frantic writing, evoking and developing a sense of urgency and anxiety in the listener, conveying that an important decision is being made. Towards the end of the track, there are sounds of doors opening and closing, as well as the zipping up of bags that represent the finalized decision to leave. Over the course of the track, the guitar melody gets layered and distorted, representing the decision to leave what is familiar (Earth) for an unfamiliar environment (space).
4. first noise
This song represents beginning to become discontented with the isolation inherent in modernity. The song was created by feeding voice recordings made by my uncle through the Midi Choir plugin. The audio clips were also warped and stretched to create rhythmic and repetitive effects. The clips chosen give windows into my uncle’s mental state, while also serving as commentary on the nature of living in the world we live in now. The chords and notes chosen for the MIDI Choir work to emphasize emotional and metaphorical points the song is making with the recordings. For example, after the section where my uncle says “nothing left to talk to but myself,” the chord that the word ‘self’ lands on (bmaj)is extended for the whole next section, which consists of a wailing sort of singing I did myself. The wailing ends by moving up from an Eb to an E, which isn’t in the Bmaj7 chord and thus creates a sense of dissonance, representing how my uncle’s emotional release and mourning ends up corrupting and disturbing the self from which it evolved.
6.
This sign takes sections from each of the previous songs, excepting the album opener, in order to show a complete representation of my uncle’s journey and how that journey is represented in its end. It starts off with drums built by warping and repeating the door opening and closing sound that appears in a few different places on other tracks in the album. This is joined by the distant chords used at the end of What a Beautiful Flight to symbolize entry into space, followed by the dissonant strings from 4:1 that accompany my uncle’s insanity. These are joined by a brassy synth playing chords which align with the space-chords on an arpeggio meant to evoke old science fiction movie soundtracks and the idea of exploration, of journeying into the beyond. But this arpeggio quickly becomes dissonant and corrupted, building in chaos only to give way to the gentle, rustic guitar loop from Forest Fires Can Be Seen From Space. The news clips from this section further emphasize the corruption and chaos plaguing Earth, building further as the clip from First Noise comes in and the sci-fi chords rise again, all compounding until they break away to reveal a stretched out, warped and belabored filtering of the word “self.” As this fades out, all that remains are the distant space-chords, which fade away accompanied by one last gently dissonant note. The goal of this song mirror’s the goal of the album; to highlight that earth is our home and we cannot abandon it. If our motivation for venturing into the beyond is to escape the planet that gave birth to us after making it uninhabitable through rampant neglect, then the only thing that awaits us in the vastness of space will be the emptiness and hopelessness of losing our home.