Playing today ... Black Iron Prison

This track is special to me in a number of ways. Black Iron Prison was only played live, since it is the superimposition of the sequencing parts of two independent tracks. There is no "original" studio recording version. It was exclusively released on the LIVE AT SI tape cassette issued by Nexialist in 2001 in the "Halforganic" series. Live, it turned into a juggernaut that paved the way towards the angry metal noise machine that Fragment King would soon become. And then, the title ... it is, of course, a reference to Philip K. Dick and his novel VALIS. Dick writes about the idea of the Black Iron Prison in a way that resonated with me as a reader. The feeling of being caged in is a powerful and pervasive one – the superimposition of multiple forms of incarceration of the mind and the soul – and music seems to be the only force that can liberate one from this feeling.

Dick states: "Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, [Horselover] Fat [Dick's "alias" in the novel] had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it."

And further: "During his religious experience in March of 1974, Fat had seen an augmentation of space: yards and yards of space, extending all the way to the stars; space opened up around him as if a confining box had been removed. He had felt like a tomcat which had been carried inside a box on a car drive, and then they’d reached their destination and he had been let out of the box, let free. And at night in sleep he had dreamed of a measureless void, yet a void which was alive. The void extended and drifted and seemed totally empty and yet it possessed personality. The void expressed delight in seeing Fat, who, in the dreams, had no body; he, like the boundless void, merely drifted, very slowly; and he could, in addition, hear a faint humming, like music. Apparently the void communicated through this echo, this humming…"