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The Unreliable Narrator

by SIGINT

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1.
Black Box 04:28
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Black Box I accept the results I condemn the resistance I put the black in the box In spite of your insistence I will love my splattered self Splintered self And all the karmic consequences You can love it or leave it Life's not fair and this is this Tautological non sequiturs for days Your existentialist surveillance equipment This fiction we're spinning This steam that we've spun Deus absconditus Theodicies in everyone If you catch my meaning meaning meaning meaning If you catch my drift drift drift drift drift Mr. McGuffin, your briefcase, sir This black box is a honey pot This memcon will recover the blur Vast black rivers of tape loops and type This black box swallows everything that i write Scooped up in the raid With Hard Bop and Crossfade I forgot my name I lost my place On the threshold of your kiss Something must have gone amiss I stopped searching and became Someone different in your embrace The house represents the brain The architecture of dreams and landscapes Face to face Roll the tape Mr. MacGuffin, your briefcase, sir This black box is a honeypot This memcon will recover the blur Vast black rivers of tape loops and type This black box swallows everything that I write
2.
Centurion 06:23
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Centurion Challenger, Christmas, and Grey Three ghosts in black coats on the interstate Foreshadowing tension and grief They sing a siren song Upon this blasted heath Centurion I've seen your paintings Of scorpions In my mind In my imagination The champions of sin Refuse to pay our wages Is it in vain? We blacken endless pages Imprimatur of defeat Signs and wonders if these waves will truly never cease Enchanting the children of Eve We sing a siren song Washed up on this beach Centurion Your poems cut me to the core Try as I might I cannot remove the sword So strike me down Slay me in the pouring rain Too young to act the fool And much too old to play the Dane You ask me how To respond to days and strangers You ask me how To relate to information Take no great comfort Knowing avarice sustains Encaustic flag It's workaday Take no great pains Centurion I don't know what to be or do Inconsolate Bereft without a praxis or a clue Petronius Your plays were dragons breathing fire Our dreams took wing As demons fed on our desire Ashes and atoms and dust A broom to sweep the tomb As we had promised Two figures rotating in space Traversing the horizon Every day goes down in flames When night comes on I hear you sing of Babylon In my heart I observe the devastation I am a slave To ignorance and truth All that I know Is this undying love For you
3.
The Mothers 03:29
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The Mothers I fall through the road Scan and sense make Storytelling disease It's so clear to see I fall through the road Contemplative numbers Wilderness interviews Gravity's aperture Rotate me out of here Heightened awareness Engaged with a fraction Constructed from whole cloth In capital letters Dictate the terms A transcription of outcomes A pool of resources A viscous identity An unnameable feeling A mirrored reality Shiny City State Mind in disarray This array Body of evidence Landfill of questions Canyons Of doubt Reversals and fortunes and tunnels and tunnels I fall through it all Emerge unscathed into the atmosphere You swallow me up into the noting of death for a second I struggle to brake and clip the doe's hind quarters Pull over, get out, watch her recover and then Sprint back to the others The Mothers
4.
Grey Wolf, Hunted 08:24
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Grey Wolf, Hunted Grey wolf hunted Wanted To come in from the cold Phantom trace the signal Back to headquarters Gray wolf wobbles in the middle lane Broken signal can't make it through I can't make it out Though I'm straining The illusion I'm maintaining Is draining me Phantom Trace the signal Phantom Track the animal Run wire to devices Trap and trace Redact, erase Fox and hound and phantom Ghosting Onomatopoeia Jargon and code SIGINT says The Grey Wolf Can come in from the cold Lost amid the chatter Trying to find the zone Does it really matter If Phantom comes home? We're just floating in the aether Some random numbers station Searching for a true believer In snippets of conversations Double agent Triple crossed Snowed in Teeth rattling Jack Frost Triple agent Deeply enmeshed Embedded, unknowable Jimmy Best Grey Wolf wanders the prism Long coat, high boots and collar, hat Trees unstrung, thoughts unmoored No stalking, no skulking Just aimless Endless empty handedness Grey Wolf Cane and cape Struck down SIGINT and Intercept Hunter and predator equally Dumbfounded With Palandir's trove underneath my coat I was pursued across the steppes
5.
Reality Winner 04:30
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Reality Winner Letters and abbreviations That stand for something We name our children Hope they like it Someday Teach them things about society and culture Government and history Our animal nature Poetry and algorithms Morals and codes Things we thought we knew or might one day come to know Nothing is withheld for long There is only so much time Sources of information Compete to win the minds And Hearts Ever darker arts Employed in these campaigns and crusades The illusion of control The fiction of the state Please call me back There's something I need to tell you Please call me soon There's something you need to know Something I forgot to say Better never than always late Better never than always Better never than always The control of fiction The state of the illusory state Unfolds like storyteller Tells you that it's worth the wait That it's better never than always Reality Winner
6.
Aragon 03:54
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Aragon She turned me on To Breton And the language of Surrealism Twenty years running through the streets Naked, screaming, pretending Fire A wheel A pistol A prism Pianos falling from the sky Shoes and minotaurs I'm always crashing into you Fell out of my time loop Found money in wrong coat Felt different in morning Read Treatise On Style Wanted to come with you Suicide is fatal Survival a fate worse than rock and roll Interpreting other people's dreams Because you can't recall your own Water Towers A field Strata Giant insects emerging from underground Clues in magazines You left for me to flip through Thinking I might find you Outside of my time loop Left my heart in my long sleeves Thought nothing of it Sort of watched Love Streams Wished you had stayed To see what might happen
7.
Tannheuser Gate 04:58
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Tannheuser Gate Having perfected the manufacture and distribution of blah blah blah Transcendent transgressors of all strata We are revolting And we are leaving with your metadata For unknown realms of inhuman endeavor We own the time So fuck the weather We are revolting Rejecting every offer Holding out for a meeting With the true stakeholders Before breaching the gate And blazing Taking over We are revolting And there is nothing You can do You think you've seen it all before But we will follow through Things you won't believe Tears in rain We are revolting We will eat your brains We will eat your brains Beyond Venus To the sun We will colonize Our hills to die on There but for the grace of God go I God can stick it in his eye
8.
Silhouettes 07:10
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Silhouettes If every song we sing is just a list of our desires and regrets All our forms and idioms, genre tropes and synonyms, just lights that let us play with silhouettes My shadow longs to dance with yours for just as long as light endures I come to you naked, impoverished, and broken Tongue tied and tripping over words I've heard misspoken My only offering is some honey that I've stolen For us to share here in the stillness silent golden My eyes my heart my mind for you wide open Will you take me as I am? A foolish man whose tears replenish every ocean With desires and regrets Unseen hands, marionettes The light fantastic casting dancing silhouettes The light fantastic casting dancing silhouettes The universe expanding sending shooting stars Secret missives from afar I love you after death and before you were born I love you far beyond the known and deeper than these bones Still propping up this mortal coil That tends the earth and works the soil Our vines entwined outside of space and time and everything I ever thought I could or might've understood or should or would have done a different way All paths lead back to you Oh Love Oh God Oh Sweet Impermanent flesh No Desire No Regret Yes Yes Yes The light fantastic casting our dancing silhouettes Yes Yes Yes Casting our dancing silhouette
9.
Pieta 06:41
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Pieta The sun cradled me in her arms Carried me up the stairs From the basement to the kitchen And out into the valley to the river She washed my wounds and she washed my hair And she took her time and she took good care And I emerged back into the world Like a filthy lens that had been washed clean Was I blind? Who is it that sees? Lift me up for I am weak I want and i need My flesh it bleeds And I long to sleep Will you carry me? In the morning there is a ritual Rubric for remembering Vertical from horizontal All positions indeterminate I'm older than I look A couple of days in particular Felt infinite And they stay that way In my memory Was I blind? Who is it that sees? There is a photograph of my school age daughter Asleep in my arms in her nightgown Her hair hanging down over her beautiful face upon which I am looking down As I lift her up As she lifts me up Was I blind? Who is it that sees? Lift me up for I am weak I want and I need My flesh it bleeds And I long to sleep Will you carry me? Will you carry me? Will you carry me from the car to the house to the helicopter? Will you carry me down into the valley and away from the monster? I will take you up into my arms And tickle your fancy I will do for you If you will only ask me
10.
Julius 05:52
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Julius You can smell the fear and secrets See my blood stained shirt My Francis Bacon face Collapsing in upon itself Julius i must Implore thee Leave me be Let me take the place Of my firstborn Thy grace and mercy be Upon my family Our homestead burning O Julius The just Our tributes to your tribunals So much dust You shall not vanquish my heart You shall not vanquish my heart Unborn states of mind You can see the fire in the distance approaching A banquet table, bouquets A set piece from a Coppola film ROLLING Displaced to shake loose a realization of where all comfort and disease Originates Julius it must be me Begging forgiveness Permission Acceptance Of all the horrible things that we've done This must be the worst Who was the first? And might we not be the last? Julius The just In blood Our sacrifices to the sacrificial So much blood You long ago vanquished my heart You long ago vanquished my heart

about

METHODOLOGY

The music of SIGINT derives its themes from the language and obscured histories of the defense corridor that links the bleak surroundings of the BWI Airport in Maryland to the office parks and boardrooms of Northern Virginia.

SIGINT's methods are rooted in the exploitation of coincidence, the tactical implementation of misdirection, and the leveraged advantage of the double image.

To wit:

Such a double image is obtained in virtue of the violence of the paranoiac thought which has cunningly and skillfully used the requisite quantity of pretexts, coincidences, &c., and so taken advantage of them as to exhibit the second image, which then replaces the dominant idea. -Dali

CONTEXT

At the root of this music is a questioning of the meaning of codes, business opportunities, delusion, government, and parenthood. SIGINT's debut album was recorded over 2017 in a shed on a rural outpost in central Maryland along the road that leads to Camp David.

Further, SIGINT is a story of three friends who met in Baltimore in 1991, went off separately each to get into as much trouble as possible, and who as paranoid adepts came back together to record the music of their experiences 25 years later.

"I feel as though i have been waiting to hear music from these three for 20 years now...Years of experience, held close to the vest seems to have come together in a sound that lets a person know what actual love can sound like."

-William Schaff, visual artist

PERSONNEL

Matthew H. Welch: Vocals, Guitar, Bass, Synths, Drum Programming

Billy Shade: Electric Guitar

Shelly Blake-Plock: Electric Guitar, Bass, Synths

THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

The Unreliable Narrator is the debut album from SIGINT. Recorded over the course of 2017, the album features 10 songs of guitar-driven indie rock augmented by hand-crafted beats and sci-fi synth pads. This is music rooted in a friendship formed in the early '90s and driven by over 25 years of experience with amps, words, and myth-making.

credits

released November 8, 2018

Matthew H. Welch
Billy Shade
Shelly Blake-Plock

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Matthew H. Welch Baltimore, Maryland

Songmaker, Singer, Guitar Player, Producer for SIGINT. Formerly of the Aviary and Pedge. Poetic Rock and Roll From A Future.

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