ear Cancer Conspiracy,


I demand the other half of your album The Audio Medium. Black-suited men in wood paneled offices high in the city skyline have plotted a new way to ensnare the youth of America, and I have fallen victim. Your record is their soundtrack. Each song starts smooth, with a silky smoking haze massaging away the pain of modern life, eventually erupting into fiery angular riffs which seem to build and build, striving for some grand resolution -- but it never comes, and I need another cigarette, and the album goes on. This is music for chain smokers, and I demand more!


The half-songs you have here are good, don’t get me wrong. At times it’s smooth; it immerses me in a smoky haze of distant piano lines and barely-audible overdriven guitar, and I strain to hear vocals, expect them, but they never come. The smoke clears as a piano morphs into guitar, and dies out altogether, and with the guitars cough loudly to announce their arrival. However, every time, after such a good start, the song fades or simply sputters out, and you leave me unfulfilled. But the void is soon filled, as the next song inevitably sparks, and I’m drawn back in. You surprise me, as well. I never would have expected the “Wish You Were Here” sax solo, or the layers-upon layers of synthesizers lifted from Vangelis’ Blade Runner outtakes, or the GYBE!-esque sound montage, but these things never seem out of place between the rapid-fire guitar rants. It’s all dynamic, emotional and skillfully executed, not to mention complex, polyrhythmic and generally quite cool, but it’s missing something, and I’m convinced you’re holding it back, perhaps fearful of the fame and fortune inevitable when you release it.


Where are you hiding it? And what is it? I need to know! Were all the vocals and transcendent lyrical messages meant to be layered upon these backing tracks lost on an errant ADAT? Or was this merely disc two of an aborted double album? Or have you hidden the rest within this album? Perhaps it’s here after all, but I simply can’t hear it without repeated listens, and I will need to dig into the heart of the album before I find it. Where is the rest?!? I need to know! There must be more!


Please respond quickly, Cancer Conspiracy, because I’m afraid I’m addicted, and I won’t stop listening The Audio Medium until I find the missing resolution, the conclusion. Yet, I’m afraid there is nothing to find, and this quest will spell my untimely demise and turn my lungs black as I struggle with the unanswerable question.


Sincerely,

Evan Chakroff