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.
{filelink=4}
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.
Subscribe