Album Notes

Performed and produced by Stephen Ugo Rosin at Blood 'n' Tongue, 2001.
From the LP, "Lake of Fire". This LP is part of a seven disc set with each disc dedicated to a specific ruling planetary body. The ruling planet for this set is Mars.

All of this, every single bit of it, is of absolutely no value. It has no permanence, no future, no hope. It will cease to exist at some point and there is no escaping that reality. Oxide will flake off of tapes, metal celluloid in CDs will rust and decay. There is no permanent storage medium capable of preserving even a single bit of it. It may be copied and distributed, but even this is not permanent. Copies fade, corrupt, fail.

The greatest achievements of humanity are nothing and all fade into oblivion eventually. This is no great human achievement, so it is less than nothing. All of it temporal, temporary illusion and gone in the blink of a cosmic eye. History cannot contain the past. It can only make up stories of probabilities. The true events are always lost. The universe swirls like a great toilet, sucking all into some infinite sewer where matter becomes naught but an indistinguishable mass of nothing.

So why do anything? Why create? Why attempt to preserve? Why bother at all? Because it's fun to laugh in the face of fatality. Because EGO loves to believe in the impossible. Because it's a good way to pass the time. Accepting fate is boring. We're here for only a little while and with no purpose, so why not have a spot of fun? Spit in the face of death. There's nothing to be lost. Death can never do any more than kill you and that is assured, so there is no point in trying to appease it. You won't succeed in driving it off, but you can make it look silly!

All of this existence is a great joke at our expense, but turning the tables and cutting to the punch line first can at least make this whole thing tolerable and even joyful.