Biography

Identity Archive

At its core, Breath & Decay is the story of a 300-year-old android and its human friend - both trying to survive, move forward, and keep something human alive inside a world built to measure, control, and discard. The title is a deliberate inversion: instead of “death and decay,” it’s breath in decay. It’s point-counterpoint language, insisting that even in a future that looks terminal, there can still be life, repair, and connection.

The project began in the mid-2000s (around 2006), following a pause in earlier band work (including PTI, a late-90s/early-aughts industrial futurepop project shaped by the era’s American scene). Where PTI was a band process - hands on knobs together, building music as a shared front - Breath & Decay became the outlet where Eric could chase a more personal direction. Over time, that meant harsher textures, heavier dance momentum, a clearer character focus, and songwriting designed to land like a hook first and a worldview second.

For years, the songs were the proving ground; the setting crystallized later (around 2015, with early transmissions like “The Way” and “NeuroJam”). “The Way” introduced an oppressive, state-sponsored orthodoxy - belief performed as behavior. “NeuroJam” explores corporate control via invasive implants and corporate-era body modification, but it still lands on persistence: strength that survives compromise.

Breath & Decay is set in a gritty cyberpunk future roughly three centuries ahead, with corporations, resistance movements, and competing AIs shaping the everyday. Much of the conflict is system-level: surveillance, telemetry, data-driven control, and the social consequences of technology that can catalog human thought itself.

One of the setting’s central systems is the MindWeb - a database of everyone’s thoughts. It creates both mystery and commerce. People can chase “rare” ideas as if originality were currency, while governments and corporations treat information as something to own, price, exploit, or weaponize. In this world, what was “about truth” can quickly become about leverage.

The protagonists are system-aware. E.M. August is the unwitting center of many threads: a cowardly, reluctant figure thrust into situations where opting out stops being an option - currently something of a corpo drone trying to keep a paycheck and a pulse inside the city sprawls. Eventually, the arc turns toward GR4P3 (Grape), a 300-year-old android whose free will is both privilege and threat. GR4P3 is free from the “old broadcast” commands that should have controlled or shut him down, but he is still bound by code: he can’t simply choose death. Instead, he must keep repairing, keep maintaining, keep existing - so “stuck” becomes a question of meaning rather than an endpoint.

Supporting characters expand the setting through different perspectives and “classes.” Baron (a monoscanner) hunts relics and historical data for evaluation through the MindWeb. Wren Sylva is represented through life-focused survival - growing things where growth is hard, then accidentally sharing horticulture knowledge through a future internet where food control is power. Even small absurdities belong here: cat magic is a funny, humanizing element, born from the instinct that cats are always watching like they’re casting spells.

Right now, Eric is developing the larger Breath & Decay intellectual property through short stories (roughly 3,000–7,000 words). The working plan is a collection of 10 short stories tied to 10 songs, with the long-term goal of publishing them on the website as the story system grows.

Release-wise, Breath & Decay is intentionally slow to surface in public. The one official standalone release is the Awakening EP (2014), a three-track EP. Many additional transmissions appear via compilation tracks. For the complete discography (release types, track names, and years), visit /releases.

Eric is affiliated with Bit Riot Records and Glitch Mode Recordings. Eric has owned and operated Bit Riot Records since 2007; between 2007 and 2014, it also focused on releasing other artists’ music. In the years since, the nature of labels has changed quite a bit - today Bit Riot Records exists primarily to support Eric’s own releases. Glitch Mode Recordings is a broader movement and platform: Breath & Decay typically releases first on the Glitch Mode Bandcamp, then syncs the listings across other digital platforms. For two decades, Sean Payne (Cyanotic) has produced, mixed, and helped shape the project’s musical direction - making the Glitch Mode circle a foundational part of the Breath & Decay world.

Finally, Breath & Decay doesn’t hide from modern tools. The music itself is human-written - built with synthesizers, VST plugins, samples, and performance. LLM models are used to help generate story prose from Eric’s concepts, beats, and character material; generative music services like Suno are not part of the creative process. The experiment here is creativity inside the boundaries: use machines to accelerate the archive, and keep the authorship where it belongs.