A patchwork of archival dubs from both Angel and Peter, assembled to sonically terraform four fantasy environments, each of which was developed in tandem with a track on Angel Rocket’s debut EP ‘AM003’. This podcast represents a detailed insight into the lore of Angel Rocket’s music, with a narrator relating the experiences of a government-endorsed tour party round all four regions.

Day 1: Westernmost Horticultural Dome

Monsoon season in the Westernmost province. Sheets of water lash the panels of smoked glass which form the overhead dome. Knotted baobab buttresses curl round sharp corners all through the district, their expedited growth testament to unforgiving weather.

As the party is ushered through the dome, the panels start to sing with the wind – the tour guide is quietly concerned about the integrity of the glasshouse. This unease has lent their gait a strange and hurried character, and they slap the waxed saucers of parasitic plants aside, beckoning their followers down rambling arteries in the undergrowth. Each cuff sends flocks of canopy-dwelling birds soaring for the rafters, filling the dome with a panoramic warbling. The air is dense with the musk of damp pomelo bark – an strange fume begins to seep.

Day 2: Oyster Perpetual Saltwater Mollusc farm

The O.P.S.M.F facility straddles the two concave faces of the Northernmost drop off. Terraces of pastel green saltwater tanks cut blinking channels in the silty topsoil. Ostrea Perpetuus, the species of Oyster the facility was built to accommodate, is known throughout all four provinces for its spindly, elongated pearls. Pearl veneers are a pillar of the region’s economy and glisten in the mouths of government officials during televised dispatches.

The guide ushers the party along rubberised gangways in the humid facility, and in the tanks lining the clay vault, divers twist and plummet. The facility’s employees are trained from birth in deepflote antechambers to prevent seagrass gnarcosis. The guide’s snaking trail gives the party an insight into every aspect of the subaqueous harvest, from the cultivation of seagrass tankbeds to the arsenal of mollusc wrenches and deepflote apparatus at each diver’s disposal. A stray pearl catches the glow of the flourescent strips lining the gangway and is deftly whisked up into the sleeve of an opportunistic party member.

Day 3: Tunnelrunners Circuit

We follow the party’s descent down a wheezing escalator to the Eastern Settlement’s subterranean drag strip, the Tunnelrunners’ circuit. This sepulchral, community-built channel pulses beneath the rambling streets above, spanning the seventeenth-through-nineteenth districts. The subway walls are lined with soot-caked emerald tiles, and dim saucers on serpentine scaffolds light the descent. The escalator finally gives way to a standing-pit; already teeming with denizens. The walls and ceilings of the vault are hewn from charred mecha scrap and discarded xandroid spares. Strobing LED eyes survey the jostling denizens from the rafters, and an evaluator stands on a slender parapet delivering a nasal spiel through a sawnoff megaphone.

Karts squeal round the bend leaving sour plumes in their wake; bending the air in the cavern, and giving the impression that the walls are rippling. The gnoxious aroma of moist creosote permeates the nostrils of the party, who are also handed cones of a mildly opiated purple incense by gangly vendolas. These sales nomads sashay through the crowd, combing for newcomers. The party will pay on the way out. In dark corners, denizens copulate enthusiastically against kart tyres, doubtless stirred by the cacophonous tunnelrunners and handiness of budget intoxicants.

Day 4: Quadrennial harvest festivities of the southernmost plains

The last day of the party’s visit fortuitously coincides with the quadrennial harvest celebrations of the southernmost plains. In preparation for these revelries, deft stonemasons from all four quarrytowns are each tasked with presenting a foamstone totem. These four megaliths are poised in the centre of a vast field cleared by the harvest reapers, and bordered by towering ears of wheat, corn and spelt. The party are bewildered to see that this year, four designated quarrytown criers have been elected to holler directions through their sousaphones and lead in the merry dance. The criers are housed in hastily erected towers of driftwood positioned on each corner of the field, and beneath their perches, fine young riders parade inebriated stallions across the shimmering plain. They balter from bale to bale and leap through yawning craters in the porous foamstone.

All music composed by Angel Rocket.
Words by Angel Rocket.
Narrated by James Braddell.
Photography by Geray Mena.