Tales from a Red Universe | Part Two of Four: Universal Conscience

"Tales from a Red Universe" is a four-part exploration in which Thomas takes you behind the scenes of the lyrics and concepts of URIZEN's "Universe:Red." Slip on a spacesuit and join us for the ride, won't you?

(Haven't read Part One yet? Foolish human, view it here!)

A Budding Consciousness

I will not tolerate this boundary, I find it troublesome indeed. I will not yield to limitation.. in fact I'll never yield again. I'll find a way to save my blissful state and backwards facing dream. The simple "I" that became, will not be made to live as "we". Ah, every moment it worsens... this, thickening awareness. Cluttering and corrupting my peace. Wretched questions with seemingly no end! I can see it in the distance... my doom! The cursed "why?!" I find this state of mine to be a harsh eventuality. And I shall not fear nor oppose. I'll find what it means to "know". I'll find the substance of my glee. I'll take it back to when "I" was the answer to most everything. I'll find the surface of my glee and suffer fate no more. I want to make this whole world go away. (Lyrics: Thomas Drinnen)

Here's where things start to go wrong for poor old Mr. (Or Ms... or Mrs... or Dr.) Universe. Having burst onto the scene with a great deal of pomp, we find the universe in an awkward and unforeseen predicament: it is growing a multiplicitous consciousness by way of universal laws, the developing order of the settling universe, and, of course, humanity's ever growing awareness of the universe from within (or, as Carl Sagan put it, humanity is: "a way for the universe to know itself").

Tales from a Red Universe | Part One of Four: The Big Bang

"Tales from a Red Universe" is a four-part exploration in which Thomas takes you behind the scenes of the lyrics and concepts of URIZEN's "Universe:Red." Slip on a spacesuit and join us for the ride, won't you?

In The Beginning
The tale of Universe:Red begins many moons ago... like, a whole lot of moons. It traces its origins back to 2007's Universe EP, and even contains a track (Nothing is Epic) that was recorded a few months before the completion of URIZEN's 2005 debut: autocratopolis!

The Universe EP was something of an embarrassment to me, I must admit. I marked it as my first big failure in the Uri-realm. Initially, It was a CD brimming with potential, but that potential was never fully realized in its first incarnation. Essentially, we had given ourselves a deadline as a band to have an album finished and, in an effort to solidify this deadline as absolute, we went ahead and booked a "CD Release" concert which would mark the day that we needed to have the CDs back from replication. Unfortunately, the results were... less than favorable.

At the time of Universe's birth as an embarrassingly underproduced CD, I was working full time during the week and, as a result, the final moments of Universe's completion came down to two very sleepless weekends in a row. During this time, we made sweeping last minute changes to the music, fought terribly with the vocal melodies in "A Budding Consciousness," and left ourselves without enough time to mix or master the album properly. Then, for some reason, we released it anyway. Oops! At some point, I do plan on going into much more detail about the creation of the original Universe; the turmoil I personally suffered at its disappointing hands, and the decision to re-record, re-mix and re-master it, but that's a story for another day. The subject of this blog will be the lyrics of Universe:Red and the overall concept that they attempt to convey.