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Degenesis

2011/12/17 / posted in Albums / Comments Off
The Rain

And finally fell the mighty Rain, drowning all living things, melting mountains, and changing streams into oceans. Then, for millenia, the world stayed clean and pure, devoid of humanoid presence.
Drowned Mountains

This is about a perfect landscape, where the horizon is only defined by the sky and the sea. Decades after the Rain, the world is nothing but an endless plane of tainted water. Sunken secrets, forgotten places and long dead beings are quietly resting in the fathomless depths.
Naked Shorelines

Centuries gave birth to new lands, shaped with the mighty acts of nature. No sentient being lives to tell the brutal beauty of theses primal landscapes yet. But soon, some will awake, and the Loop will play again.

Degenesis is the result of several live improvisation sessions from 2009 to 2011. Based upon drones simultaneously recorded while played looped over themselves, theses tracks go beyond the usual boundaries of Streams of Europe’s music. The album aims to epic, dantesque aesthetics, and describes the first half of the six ages that shaped Europe after the Rain.

 

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Degenesis by Streams of Europe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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Neorganics

2008/10/17 / posted in Albums / Comments Off
Orgy at the Subterranean Lake

This track was recorded live during a vernissage, on October 17th, 2008, at the Atelier Gustave, in Paris. The performance was based upon Meanders’ fourth track, Setting Suns at the Subterranean Lake.

Neorganics is titled after the exhibition of the same name. The original live performance had a duration of about three hours, but the second part (which was pure improvisation) was lost in a “not enough RAM to record everything properly” accident.

 

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Neorganics by Streams of Europe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.europeaftertherain.com.

The Many Lives of a Clone

2008/10/11 / posted in Albums / Comments Off
Airborne Approach of a Petrified Forest

The opening track of The Many Lives of a Clone is the longest of the album. It’s about a newborn clone freshly escaped from the Hive, running as fast as he can through a vast mineral forest that grew up after the Rain. He’s followed from the sky…
Conscience (Cortical Controller Dysfunction)

This track is about the main concept of Streams of Europe’s universe. Here, mankind’s extinction has been caused thousands of years ago, by a forgotten cataclysm sometimes referred to as the Rain. Thus, an emerging life form has managed to resurrect the human race, with various new features. Mankind is now a simple tool of flesh and bone, biomechanically enhanced, with no will of its own. Conscience is what may happen when something goes wrong with the cortical controller, which is now a part of everyone’s skull.
Vat Brothers, Vat Sisters, I Miss our Shared Warmth

This one is about prenatal nostalgia. It evokes the blurry and warm moments of existence in the collective artificial womb where clones are bred. Those who were conceived in the same cloning vat are supposed to share a special bond going further than their physical similarities.
Hear my Void and Sing

The fourth track of The Many Lives of a Clone is about the imperious feeling of nothingness one must face once awaken to conscience. Nothing exists in the mind of clones, but the very tasks they have been programmed to accomplish again and again before being recycled. That’s why in the first stages of their conscious lives, many clones who escaped Stasis sing continuously to fill the void between their ears.
Lament of the Recycled

This song deals with the fragments of personality a clone may have accidentally developed during his short life span. After twelve years, all clones get recycled, and while their bodies are converted into nutritive pulp, their embryos of individualities scream in unison, causing a slight disturbance in the psyflow.
Souls and their Biomechanical Counterparts

This is The Many Lives of a Clone’s sixth track. It deals with the dual nature of all human inhabitants of Europe after the Rain. They are flesh made machine, and machine made flesh. Their bodies are driven by something which could be called a soul as well as a program. There’s no evidence a real difference between these two concepts exists.
…and Mysteries of Death Were Revealed, Yet Despair Remains

Few are those who escape the life cycle of the clone. The luckiest ones lose their lives and their neurocores in places so inaccessible they cannot be brought to the Hive. Even fewer are those who discover the truth behind their artificial metempsychosis. Most of them wish they never did. This is what The Many Lives of a Clone’s seventh track deals with.
Five Minutes before Oblivion

The Many Lives of a Clone’s last track is based upon the five latest minutes of an unreleased studio version of Orgy at the Subterranean Lake. It’s about the inescapable void into which conscience slowly fades into when the Hive takes control again. This kind of painless agony is the last mental state before Stasis.

This is Streams of Europe’s second album. The first track was uploaded on March 26th and the last one on October 11st, in 2008. Compared to the first album, Meanders, The Many Lives of a Clone is probably more passionate than meditative. While the fractal structures are still here, the sound treatment is sometimes harsher, and globally tends more to raw emotion than contemplation. This album also goes deeper in the description of Europe after the Rain, revealing a bit of information about its inhabitants through slightly cryptic titles.

 

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The Many Lives of a Clone by Streams of Europe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.europeaftertherain.com.

Damaged Memory Strata

2008/06/02 / posted in Albums / Comments Off
The Shiny Trail of my Fragmenting Mind

This is a song about the numberless layers of memories, stacked upon each other, which give to their container an illusion of individuality. Such data tend to erode and blend with their neighbours. When read, they may form a self-evolving construct known as the mind, which may also collapse under its own weight, and go back to Stasis.
The Artificial Dream of my Unborn Twin

Mind is data. Mind can be replicated. There is no such thing as personal identity, only a desire to spread out of the Ocean. Some say the neurocore is not the origin of conscience, that conscience exists without physical embodiment. Some who are not born yet may be waiting for their turn.

Here comes a both unexpected and unusual release, first uploaded on June 2th, 2008. Streams of Europe’s Damaged Memory Strata was initially supposed to be a ten minutes long track included in The Many Lives of a Clone. However, certainly under Tim Doyle and William Basinski’s influence, it evolved to a pretty long fractal composition.

There was no way to remove anything. The longer just sounded the better. Finally a double forty-five minutes long track seemed a good idea.

Shortly after this, a hard drive formatting occured. Of course, everything had been carefully saved except the very folder containing the working files. After several long nights trying various data recovery softwares and browsing thousands of ghost files, only one low-quality preview of the second part was recovered.

This material raised from digital ashes was reworked in various ways. This is how The Shiny Trail of my Fragmenting Mind reappeared. But forty-five minutes were still missing… Then The Artificial Dream of my Unborn Twin popped out of nowhere, by reversing both horizontally and vertically its predecessor.

So Damaged Memory Strata is a symmetrical album. Reversing a track is a simple and dirty trick, yet it was unavoidable to get a feeling of completion and harmony. Furthermore, each track is also mixed with a reversed version of itself at a lower volume. The result is a one hour and half soundscape with a clear structure but no real beginning nor end.

From the Last FM journal of lectronice, Streams of Europe’s member:

I’d like to thank farangstar for his interest in the making of this album, which was somewhat motivated by his trip project. I also guess it would have been quite different if he hadn’t recommended Basinski to me.

 

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Damaged Memory Strata by Streams of Europe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.europeaftertherain.com.

Meanders

2007/11/15 / posted in Albums / Comments Off
Emergence

Emergence is the first track ever made under the moniker of Streams of Europe. It’s also the only track of the album composed without any fractal software. As the beginning of the project, it’s supposed to evoke the kind of blurry landscape the world becomes during the half second you spring up from underwater.
From the Top of the Mountain to the Bottom of the Sea

This track is the second of the album and the first to be based upon a fractal-generated structure. It defined most of Streams of Europe’s current aesthetics, not only musically but also because of its long title. It’s meant to evoke the sudden stream of comprehension that links the highest and the lowest place in the world, in the blank mind of a being awakening to consciousness.
The Ripples on the Grey Sand Dunes

The third track of Meanders is slightly different from the rest of the album because of its use of (synthesized) strings. It gives a bit of humanity to a desert landscape. As the title suggests, this track describes a rainy day in a desolated open place, emphasizing the hypnotic fall of water drops on the ground.
Setting Suns at the Subterranean Lake

The fourth track of Meanders describes a recurring quiet moment in a wide underground refuge, far away from the hostility of the surface. In this place, sat at the shore of the subterranean lake, you can watch the setting sun, reflecting in the gloom through an aperture hundreds of meters above.
A live act was also built upon this track (see Neorganics).
Gathering Storm over Stratoga

The fifth track of the album was composed with a feeling of emergency in mind. In Europe after the Rain, everyone lives after the rhythm of natural disasters. Storms are watched carefully. Stratoga is one of the very few cities that remain, built to endure devastating phenomenons such as the Rain. Its inhabitants know the only way to survive is to follow the same strict protocol they follow since the city’s foundation.
They Went Down into the Depths and never Came Back

Initially Meanders’ last track, following the chronological order in which the album was composed, this is also the last track made during this period. It deals with a group of clones going down and further down the subterranean abysses lying below the safe cave where they live. The fact they survived or not is unclear, all that we know is the communication was lost.
λήθη

This bonus track was originally only available on the CD-R edition of Meanders. In December 2008, only 10 copies were released. A little knowledge of greek language and greek mythology may help understanding what this track is about.

Meanders is Streams of Europe’s first album, first released on November the 15th, 2007. Most of the tracks are based upon fractal melodies generated and reworked through the use of various softwares. This album is a kind of soundtrack for an imaginary world, and the starting point of an upcoming independent video game.

The album’s title stands for its experimental aspect. It’s all about exploring unknown places and trying to draw a musical map linking them all, while sticking to a distant background story. Composing was like travelling down a river with many meanders and oxbow lakes: you know you’ll get closer to the sea in the end, without knowing exactly where nor when.

 

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Creative Commons License
Meanders by Streams of Europe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.europeaftertherain.com.