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Behold A Fail Horse

by Various Artists

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about

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Behold A Fail Horse

I spent a summer clearing foreclosures after evictions. Days spent hauling the evictee's clothes, furniture, televisions, books, photo albums... into waiting dumpsters.

Sometimes the homes were nearly empty. Sometimes they looked neat, ordered, preserved for some future return. Others had been rampaged. Walls and fixtures broken, glass on the dying lawn. Trash poured down stairwells, urine stained walls.

I had seen the fail horse before. Always in another yard, peeking above a fence, gazing at me and disappearing before I could complete my work and find him.

I would visit the homes where I thought he'd been. There were never hoof prints, nothing ever damaged, nothing that would indicate a horse had made it's way through living rooms and kitchens into the fenced off decks and gardens; but doors I was sure I had closed were open, stapled notices of eviction or condemnation would appear piled with leaves or at the bottom of an empty pool.

The day on my last house was coming to a close in a second story bedroom when I saw him approaching. His limping shadow extended against the setting sun and climbed slowly up the asphalt to the garage. I went down to meet him.

He was waiting for me at the side of the road. A piece of paper fell from his mouth as I neared. I picked it up, straightened it and strained my eyes to read a single, scrawled word: GARY.

"Gary?" I repeated to the horse. His eyes fixed on me. They seemed darker and somehow flatter than our surroundings.

I tried to get some sense of the horse through our mutual gaze, but instead found myself becoming disoriented, my breaths becoming shallow and my thoughts constricted. An indeterminate moment and I found myself the horse's rider, the sun above, carried through the streets as they'd been 6 years ago:

An off-white dog barks at the driver of a pick-up truck flying thin blue line as he vapes Robitussin and his back bumper falls into the street unacknowledged.

A young women stares at a fist-sized winged insect hanging from a cactus shaped cell tower as a fentanyl laced ice cream cone melts down her hand.

Every tire in a packed Dillards parking lot begins to melt at once and converge into a steady molten flow. A "Space Available" banner whips overhead.

We are watched at every vantage point from doorbell cameras and broken blinds. Plastic bags full of food spontaneously appear and disappear from porches.

°°°

My memories became more fragmented:

I felt that I was a horse that I had to be ridden into the future, but my rider had fallen from my saddle in the dark and would never find me. I tried to continue on, but felt nothing beneath me in the darkness. I could feel myself growing thin and skeletal. My skin became more and more brittle until it cracked and released an unending stream of unjointed bone into the void. I rose as these bones accumulated, friction grinding them to dust and pushing me surely upward until I felt weightless. The weightlessness grew cool and wet and heavy.

°°°

My eyes stung and I lifted my head. I was in a stagnant, familiar swimming pool. I shakily made my way up the wet stairs onto the deck to dry in the new sun. I stood in exhausted sleep for several hours until I was awakened by the familiar gong of furniture falling into a dumpster. My ears circled to find the source before I craned my neck over the nearest fence to see what I hoped I would not see: my semblable, my last epoch fragment, still human arms and legs at work emptying a house.

It occurred to me that I could not remember the first house I'd emptied or say what occupied my time before I'd begun. It was possible I'd been at this work forever, even possible that I'd built and occupied every home myself and finally ridden myself out of time. I ambled to a window to check my reflection. My eyes were not those flat dark eyes. I was not the fail horse.

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Inspirations for Earthflesh's submission.

« For those in the picturesque Dandenong Ranges, it felt as if the whole mountain was shaking. In Gippsland [Southern Australia], it was worse than a cyclone.

The windows really started to rattle just after dinner. Weather forecasters had predicted strong winds that day [June 9, 2021], but by 9pm the trees heaved with a sustained violence that would not let up until after sunrise.

A screaming sound filled the air as high-speed south-easterly gusts whipped through the canopy’s leaves and branches.

Then the trees started to fall, like soldiers fainting on a long march. There was no chance of sleep, just the awful wait to wonder where the next one would land and what would be underneath it. »

- Tom Cowie, Benjamin Preiss and Erin Pearson, June 18, 2021, in The Age.

www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/like-hell-on-earth-the-night-the-trees-fell-from-the-sky-20210618-p5823c.html

credits

released September 3, 2021

All aspects of the creation of this album—conceptualization, music, artwork, arrangement, mastering, and production—were a collaborative effort between the members of the subreddit; check the individual track-info pages for more details.

All music tracks were created by and belong to the respective artists.

Cover art by u/expensivehospital (Consumer Reducer); additional artwork by Auditor an u/kitchen_ace.

u/KerleyB mastered and arranged the music tracks.

u/teduh, the creator and original moderator of the SixthWorldMusic subreddit, supervised the production of the album.

u/doggy_styles composed the liner notes (Soon™).

Gary underwrote the production of the album and provided motivation, catering, accommodations, and his very special love.

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about

Sixth World Music Omaha, Nebraska

SixthWorldMusic collects all forms of psychotronic audio mindfuckery; embracing the mutants and freaks rejected by the Social Control System.

We gather and promote eclectic/eccentric music that often defies categorization but may incorporate elements from power electronics, dark ambient, industrial techno and many other varieties of noise and sonic experimentation.

{EVERYTHING YOU HEAR IS WRONG}
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