Orbis Spike
Orbis Spike is a progressive death metal song composed with vocals augmented by a redesigned Aztec Death Whistle, refuting harmful pop-culture stereotypes embedded in the original instrument. By employing numerical compositional schemes, the song depicts contemporary climatological themes through diasporic literary works curated from the early Plantationocene. Complimenting the classical Nahua Flower & Song poetry and the redesigned instrument’s floral aesthetics, visual projections inspired by the flower garden from the Korean shamanistic tale of Igongbonpuri re-imagine environmental disunity through a queer cyberfeminist lens. In Flowers for Everyone from Nowhere, interweaving assemblages of viruses, flowers, and fountains envision the mythical garden in the age of agricultural bioethics. Synthesizing stories from across the globe through DIY music technology, Garden of Souls presents a Cyborg Storytelling performance problematizing the Anthropocene, connecting us with storytellers throughout time and space who faced the very problems we still struggle against.
An estimated 55 million Indigenous Americans died in the immediate aftermath of European Colonization. As wild vegetation reclaimed their cities and farms, 7-10ppm of carbon dioxide was sunk from the atmosphere, causing global atmospheric temperatures to drop in 1610. This event, named the Orbis Spike, is proposed as a starting point for the human geological era, as its toll is measurable in environmental and human extinction. What is immeasurable is the scope of Indigenous knowledge and culture that was systematically erased to facilitate subjugation. Pictographic languages were labeled by the church as nothing more than blasphemous iconography and consequently burnt. What survives of pre-contact Mesoamerican history is often misinterpreted through Eurocentric translations, which survive into modern pop cultural myths about Indigenous Peoples.
This project targets one such myth revolving around an instrument called the Aztec Death Whistle. Only two have ever been discovered at the site of a temple, yet the story goes that Aztec warriors brought them into battle to terrorize their enemies. By redesigning the instrument into a nose flute, the mouth can acoustically shape the sound into words, allowing the whistle to speak for itself and refute the colonial histories that produced these myths. A progressive death metal song was composed based on the Orbis Spike, using numbers related to the fall of Tenochtitlan (8/13/1521) and the genocide of Indigenous people (55,000,000) as compositional schemes. A PVC flute in the shape of a flower was built for the piece, and complex percussive rhythms inspired by teponaztli and huehuetl drumming were also incorporated.
Utilizing Gabriel S. Estrada’s queer Indigenous Mexican analytical technique of ’in nahui ollin’, lyrics were curated from translations of classical Nahua Flower & Song poetry, Shakespeare’s ’The Tempest’, and contemporary author Jennifer Rahim’s ’The Orbis Spike, 1610’ to create a constellation of perspectives on the start of the ’Plantationocene’ era throughout time and space.
The visual program Flowers For Everyone From Nowhere reimagines the mythical flower garden Seocheon Kkotbat from Korean shamanism, as depicted in Igong-Bonpuri. This project envisions the garden in a futuristic Anthropocene context, posing the question: “What if the garden’s manager were a queer figure of the 21st century?” By highlighting the garden’s role as a sanctuary against social corruption, each flower serves as a tool or weapon for justice, while external realities can cause the flowers to wilt. The futuristic Seocheon Kkotbat envisions a manager utilizing modern and future technologies. This includes monitoring the health of each flower at the cellular level, visualizing overall flower health through dynamic charts, observing the garden’s state in real-time via CCTV-like systems, and analyzing water quality with advanced imaging tools. These abstract elements are realized through custom shaders, blending technology with poetic imaginings to bring the futuristic garden to life.
Lyrics
Rock ice and sediment hold onto memories (telling their own stories)
Mark the martyred on empty fields of trees claiming the dead (that could no more labor)
Breathing hectares and breathing lungs and limbs torn flesh and bark (no more, no more alive)
Living wreaths sprung on the ungrieved, the leaves sucking out the sick (eras poison, cruel)
Air was breath again, yet not the same - the ghost of it all remains (spare me your forgiveness)
Forests burn like cancerous lungs and first nations first to die (ceases, desist, Orbis)
I bedimmed the noon-tide, sun,
And twixt the starving green sea
called forth the mutinous winds,
and the Azure vaults
Setting roaring war
Graveyards at my command
Wake them from their sleep
By my so potent arts
Never has joy or wealth been my lot.
In vain I till the soil,
and nothing but affliction bursts into bloom here.
Let my heart find its ease
there at your feet.
By your side,
in your presence,
Giver of Life.
What kinds of creatures are these men?
They cry out to no one:
they believe they will live forever on this earth.
I slake my raging passions when I see them
Swilling madness!
Though I’m poor
and in pain
in the Place of the Shorn
our true nature is revealed,
no matter what we are.
we dwell in mourning,
weeping we live
and then but briefly,
for it soon will end.
I buttress my hymn at heaven’s edge,
drawing it down from celestial residents.
Orioles, quetzals, and spoonbills,
trilling cranes that wing delight
to the Lord of the Near and the Nigh.
