The Evolution Chamber (ft. Sub Neon)
by Pashang 爬上 ft. Sub Neon
Kruger winced.
Four sets of shining clamps snapped into place around his biceps, thighs, wrists, and ankles with a metallic grip that threatened to pierce flesh. The inscrutable face of the hideous amalgamation of metal, alien flesh, and sinew spared not a glance for its hapless victim, as it readied the Evolution Chamber for what came next. Kruger’s body was rotated, then stretched painfully taut as the Chamber zeroed in on his dimensions.
Kruger laughed.
“I’m gonna call you Bob, motherfucker. You’re fucking Bob Jenkins, the alien robot…thing.” Maybe getting torn to pieces by a Bob would hurt a bit less.
Of course I’m the fucking one that gets rounded up.
Of the eight people in his ‘Resistance’ cell - if one could call his people’s pitiful attempts at mucking up whatever the fuck the Infinite Legion’s plans even were on this planet a resistance at all - Kruger had been the only one stupid enough to fall out of the bed of the goddamn truck, while the brave resistance fighters fled like rats from their latest aborted attempt at ‘insurgency.’
Now he was next in line for Evolution.
No one knew exactly what it entailed, but everyone had heard the unending chorus of muted screams emanating from the repurposed factory that now housed the Chamber, and everyone had seen what emerged from the Chamber in a steady, shuffling column every 17 minutes. Still human in places, but most certainly not people any more. And now he was next.
Kruger gasped.
Four simultaneous wet thunks as the clamps around his wrists and ankles suddenly contracted. His hands and feet fell away, hitting the floor of the Chamber with splatty thuds.
Kruger shrieked.
Four white-hot lances of PAIN slammed into him at the same instant. Four sets of servos whirred as four rings of wire and heat met the clamps encasing his upper limbs, then slid effortlessly down to his stumps, efficiently stripping skin from flesh, leaving the glistening meat of his arms and legs exposed to the air for the briefest of moments before four simultaneous hissing schllllunks encased his limbs in searing metal. Bob Jenkins silently continued its work; a dozen manipulator arms zipped to their tasks, installing motors into joints, connecting nerves to wires, attaching new mechanical hands and feet. Kruger was unfortunate enough to feel every last nuance of this crescendo of agony, as he, unlike so many of his fellow Evolved, had not passed out or suffered cardiac arrest. Instead,
Kruger screamed.
He screamed and screamed and screamed, thrashing vainly against the growing atrocity that his body was enduring, wishing for death, wishing for nothingness.
“FUCK YOU BOB FUCK YOU FUCKYOUFUCKYOU” -
- “Why do you struggle?”
The robotic voice thrummed from some internal speaker embedded in Bob’s inner workings.
- “Why do you rail against your own salvation?”
The creature sounded almost curious, but Kruger was in no position to assuage its curiosity. He continued to scream wordlessly as his sanity began, mercifully, to fade under the onslaught of torment.
Disdain now.
- “We have existed, undying, invincible, for untold eons; long before your impotent race crawled from the murky oceans of your speck of a planet.”
Kruger barely heard him.
- “We fear not the decay of time, for we have entrusted our forms to the permanence of steel.”
Kruger vomited.
The manipulators were shredding his shoulders now; installing armor plating and unknowable technology with the precision of millennia.
- “Shed your brittle bones and decaying flesh and embrace the infinite.”
Kruger finally succumbed to blessed unconsciousness as the manipulators veered toward his stomach.
- “It is inevitable. It is evolution. It”-
-the outer wall of the factory exploded inward. Bob Jenkins’ face followed suit a moment later, the top third of its mass vanishing in a blast of metal and viscera and black ichor. Battle cries and gunfire erupted suddenly into the space, and several rough hands hacked at the Chamber’s wires and cables, tearing away Kruger’s restraints and hefting his half-Evolved form, still miraculously breathing, onto a stretcher.
The Resistance had finally gotten a win.
(Here's the third single from the Resistance EP! Thanks for following along with the Summer of Shred so far, and thanks to Sub Neon for shredding it up on the robot-vocals and the booming, tearing synths and bass on this track! The full EP is soon to come...stay tuned!)
released August 3, 2023
Written and produced by Pashang and Sub Neon (subneon.bandcamp.com)
Mixed and Mastered by Pashang
Bob Jenkins the Alien Robot Thing performed by Sub Neon
GTFO ft. RAN
by Pashang 爬上 and RAN
The Evolution Chambers were working overtime; the screams of our friends and loved ones echoed in the streets day and night as they suffered the cruelest torture imaginable. Flesh and bone stripped away; organs scooped from stomachs and discarded as circuits and wiring took their place. But they always left the eyes. Always the eyes; no one knew why, but once you have seen the depth of hopelessness, awareness, and agony in the eyes of a newly-Evolved soldier of the Infinite Legion, there could no longer be any inkling of doubt: our species would cease to exist if we did not resist.
Plans were made and discarded in sewer tunnels and abandoned buildings; poorly-executed suicide bombings and ambushes left more of the ‘Resistance’ dead than the Legion, and every time any attempt was made to disrupt the Legion’s plans, 100 random civilians were tossed screaming and writhing into the recyclers, later to re-emerge as ‘organic nutrient packs.’ The efficiency and well-trodden…normality of the manner in which the Legion broke our spirits, disemboweled and reshaped our loved ones and neighbors, and carried on with our genocide…it broke all but the most determined of us. If botched Evolutions were the #1 cause of death on the planet, suicide was #2, and who could blame them? All was lost.
Or was it? Word began spreading through our patchwork comm system of a safe place in the Badlands; a haven for those insane few willing to face the Legion head-on in the impossible task of saving our species from extinction.
But we had to get there first.
We had to get the fuck out.
And so we did.
(Thanks for jamming this second single from the upcoming Resistance EP! Huge thanks to RAN (ransynth.bandcamp.com) for his amazing shreds and mastering work on this track. Stick around for the next single dropping soon, and make sure to pick up the full EP when it releases before the end of the Summer of Shred!)
released July 21, 2023
Produced and mixed by Pashang 爬上
Guitars performed by RAN (ransynth.bandcamp.com)
Mastered by RAN
Lockdown (ft. Dimi Kaye)
by Pashang 爬上 and Dimi Kaye
The Infinite Legion arrived completely without warning. The sky simply opened a perfect square of red light and high orbit was overrun with impossible vessels of ceramic and metal bristling with arcane technology. The Grid went down planetwide less than 30 seconds later, and less than 10 seconds after that, crimson beams cracked the sky as their first cohorts entered our city centers in a perfect lockstep of clanking metal on pavement. Yet they were not uniform in appearance. Gleaming skeletal constructs of every conceivable branch of countless trees of life from planets or systems or galaxies utterly foreign to us. Their only commonality was their hideous nature - amalgamations of ancient alien bodies and gleaming metal and circuitry dripping with ichor, their ‘faces’ lit from within an intense, evil glow.
Resistance was not futile; it was simply nonexistent. WorldCorp went dark as the Grid winked out, and just like that, we were no longer a unified body; we were tribes and individuals, and the animal instincts we had so carefully tucked away rushed to the forefront. Fight or Flight. Millions chose flight, attempting to flee the city centers in any manner they could, and fewer chose to fight, but they were both wasted, fatal efforts.
The streets soon reeked of blood and rot as those of us that remained weighed our options.As long as we did not show aggression or attempt to escape, we were entirely ignored, but our cities were cages and the Legion grew in number with every passing hour. And their freshest reinforcements were something new; something recognizable. They had been wrenched and torn and molded into biomechanical horrors, but they were still very clearly once and very recently human.
Lockdown it may have been, but we were clearly serving the Legion’s purpose by waiting. Cowering in basements and slums and tunnels waiting to be found and made into…whatever they were; it was not the way we wanted to go out. It was time to escape. It was time to resist.
(Thanks so much for listening to this track! I can't thank Dimi Kaye enough for his masterful guitar skills and expert guidance as we worked through this song together. If you've been living under a synthwave-less rock and have never partaken in Dimi's excellent and expansive catalogue of amazing music, please drop whatever you're doing and head to dimikaye.bandcamp.com ASAP - you won't regret it! Big thanks as well to RAN for his outstanding work mastering the track; for more amazing sci-fi synthwave goodness, head to ransynth.bandcamp.com).
released June 30, 2023
Produced and mixed by Pashang 爬上
Guitars performed by Dimi Kaye (dimikaye.bandcamp.com)
Mastered by RAN (ransynth.bandcamp.com)
The Outer Darkness ft. RAN
by Pashang 爬上
Music is therapy for me, first and foremost. When I say that, I mean it in every sense of the word: this hobby/obsession/lifestyle/whatever is one of the only things keeping me out of my head and present in my life. When I heard RAN's final master of this song for the first time, I wept like I haven't in a long, long time; it felt SO FUCKING GOOD to get this out of my head and into my ears and make it somehow external to myself, if even for a short while.
The Outer Darkness is where I end up when I let myself stop and listen to my own internal monologue reminding me what a useless piece of shit I am; how incapable I am of being a success, or a father, or a functional, useful human being in general; or how stupid I was to bring a child into this dying, collapsing, greedy cesspool of a planet; or how much better off everyone I love would be if I did them a favor and ceased to exist. It's foggy and cloying and pervasive and it makes even the smallest decisions or baby steps of progress insurmountable and terrifying, and most of all, it brings with it a lingering, abiding fear of things going right, because that is where disaster waits to drop me back to rock bottom if I let myself indulge in even the briefest moment of positivity.
My producer handle is Pashang 爬上, which comes from the Chinese "to climb up" or "to mount," and for me, it represents my ultimate goal in music creation: to climb up and out and away from the Outer Darkness and remember, even for a little while, that it doesn't exist everywhere all the time.
So this song is for me, and for you, if you find yourself curling your toes over the cliff face of oblivion, staring outwards and inwards at the endless expanse of nothingness and still find it within yourself to raise your voice to the universe and say "FUCK YOU, NOT TODAY." It does that for me and I hope it does for you, too. Thanks for listening.
released April 29, 2023
Arranged and mixed by Pashang 爬上
Mastered by RAN (ransynth.bandcamp.com)
Guitars performed by RAN
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