Artifacts of the Pre-apocalypse 04: Eagle is the fourth of a five EP series to be released this year on Son of Cataclysm, a label Stewart Walker started to reconcile creativity and its place in a dying world. Taking inspiration from Philip K. Dick's feverish nightmares of VALIS, awaking with the cry of "We need medical assistance!" Find Me Infirmary delves deeper into a psyche twisted upon itself under the thumb of totalitarian government and too much psychedelic exploration. We Betray Our Mission with Words builds upon the timbral exploration of naive Orientalism, adding pointillist bitcrushed synthesizers to tambourines and flutes before arriving at a heavy post-punk bassline, played by hand with the precision of a machine.


SON-004 Find Me Infirmary

SON-004 We Betray Our Mission With Words

Recorded live at the MDH Club in the basement of Miles Davis Hall, in Montreaux, Switzerland. 

I am in the process of making some new live show variations for an upcoming tour, and it's always instructional to replay some older sets. This set from Montreaux was special because I spent a month editing the Concentricity cuts to make special edits that I could interact with onstage. I think these edits have never surfaced anywhere else. 

Stewart Walker-Live at MDH Club, Montreaux Jazz Festival 2008

In the summer of 2010, months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, crude oil continued to gush
into the Gulf of Mexico ultimately creating the largest marine oil spill in history. Coming from the southern
United States, Stewart Walker and designer Easton West watched as familiar beaches were smothered by oil slicks and deemed not safe for life. Jared Diamond’s Collapse provided valuable historical perspective of how even advanced civilizations can bring about their own extinction.

Techno music has always had its basis in futurism, from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock to Derrick May name-checking Kraftwerk and Parliament. But the future as a concept no longer captivates as it once did during the space race. Technological growth is constant, and yet it has not saved us from ecological or humanitarian disasters.

Son of Cataclysm, in its first series Artifacts of the pre-Apocalypse embraces the premise of the end of the world and sets about cataloguing the warning signs with a historian’s precision. The website Sonofcataclysm.com hosts an ever-growing series of primary sources, photographs and original projects by Easton West.

Musically, Stewart Walker has developed a new palette of processed instruments based on electric guitar, and drums which he continues to intertwine into baroque orchestrations as he began on his original Persona Records label. Only this time composed with more expressionist noise and urgency; spanning Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance.


Son of Cataclysm

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