Hi there dear listeners / readers! I wanted to write a quick post to check in and provide some updates on how things are going with the world of Breath & Decay.
Breath & Decay is first and foremost a musical project and I am happy to report that there are many songs in the pipeline. Specifically there is one EP I have been working on for too long now – 8 years!? – which is still over at Glitch Mode studios and which we will get finished soon. This is the WORK UNTIL YOU DIE EP. The songs investigate the nature of being a 300 year old self perpetuating android… it turns out being immortal is cool, but no one imagines themselves grinding it out for centuries.
At my home studio I have an untitled single pretty close to completion. This song details the confusing feelings that a human mechanic develops for a female presenting android he works on regularly.
Additionally I have a second EP, GR4P3, in the works here as well. This EP tells a bit of the android GR4P3’s origin story, and investigates the internal workings of a being with free will, but who is still bound by the rules of its/his free will.
Aside from finishing songs, I have been playing around with this new groove box I picked up, the MPC LIVE III. It is pretty rad but exceptionally feature filled, so I only know how to do a little bit on the thing at this point. I got it to run the live show and it should do swell with that. A little earlier tonight I uploaded a YouTube short showing off the cool sound I was able to get tweaking just one knob on a distortion plugin over a bassline.
On the prose side, I have been having a ton of fun. I have created a system for generating Breath and Decay stories using Cursor and various LLM models. The most fun is the codex building – populating all of the ideas I have had about this setting for the last 10 years into files that then inform story creation. It is very complicated and I will certainly write about it in the future.
A note about AI: I work as a software engineer and have the opportunity to work with LLMs and Agentic AI tools to achieve results that would have been unimaginable to myself 2 years ago. I am insanely enamored with these tools and find their only limitation to be the creativity of their users. I understand the very real and very defensible backlash against all AI inputs in the arts but Breath and Decay is a project about a goddamn sentient robot. We are going to utilize AI tools, it is germane to the artistic space. And frankly, when it comes to the stories I want to tell, these tools are allowing me to achieve things I could have never dreamed of. All of the ideas are mine anyhow.
To that end, for those who have not picked up on this, Breath and Decay should be viewed as an intellectual property. It is a story about a 300 year old android and its human friend just trying to get by. I have since 2015 been telling this story via music. But I am finally ready to start expanding the story into text. Most songs tell part of the story of Breath and Decay, and some songs will have stories tied directly to them. In other cases the stories will stand on their own. Right now I have 3 short stories totaling about 15k words. I want to get about 10 stories together to do the initial world building for the Breath and Decay setting. And then what to do with them? I am thinking about all sorts of distribution – audio book, pdf, amazon book, print on demand, comic book.
But first I need to keep editing the stories to ensure they are actually interesting and worth reading. It is hard to guage whether my stories are any good at all as I am constantly entertained and interested in this world of my own making.
Finally, in terms of housekeeping and content, and other efforts to make Breath & Decay real again I am happy to report that I created an email list for the project. You can sign up on the newsletter page, or via the form below! I also updated the cover image on the facebook page. That Laeather Strip show header was almost a decade old, so I guess it was time.
Hope everyone is doing so good headed into the holidays!