The music that was never meant to stand alone

On 24 September I put up a video that is two hours and twenty-four minutes long. It is every piece of music from Perpetūra, played once, over the stories' own art, one story after another. The eight songs from the album are in there, and so is something that has never been out in the open before: the quieter pieces that only ever played while you were reading.

Each story's section opens on its sung song and then moves into its reading music, the way the two sit together inside the stories themselves. A title comes up on screen as each track starts, and the pictures drift slowly over a dark indigo ground full of stars. The end joins straight back onto the beginning, so it plays as a loop if you leave it running. That is what it is for. Put it on while you read, or write, or just sit with a cup of tea.

Here is the part that caught me off guard while I was putting it together. The reading music was chosen to disappear. Its whole job is to sit under paragraphs and never ask you to notice it, and until this video I had only ever heard those pieces with words on top of them. Listening to them back to back, with no text going past and no choice waiting to be made, was strange in a way I had not expected. A piece I thought of as plain turned out to have its own shape once it was the only thing in the room.

The five stories run in the order they were first released, which is also the order in which the pattern connecting all five of them comes into view. I will not say more than that here.

The video is on YouTube, and it sits on the links page too, under Full Soundtrack Loop. The novel itself is still free to read, whenever you want it.