goodluck/badluck

it’s the way i disappeared above and below is a multimedia fiction project about an island called San Sebastian. The story unfolds through radioplays broadcast from a pirate station in one of San Sebastian’s shantytowns, and it features young love, political kidnappings, cults, comas, new-indigenous psychedelia, Julian Jaynes, alternative currency models, space-junk, extremist body-modification, and more! With artwork and photography by characters in the story, music by musicians in the story, and assorted essays/historical fiction/reportage about the island, its history, and its inhabitants written by all sorts of imaginary people, it’s the way i disappeared above and below is narrative by way of actual artifact. The pilot episode can be heard, read, and seen below. We hope you like it!

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story, writing, artwork, and voices by greg korn

music, sound design, gifs, and voices by chris matule

(click PLAY before reading)

ESTHER APPLEPRIZE: Good evening. You’re listening to E.I.L.C Radio, San Sebastian. I’m Esther Appleprize and this is your world news briefing.

In local news, volunteer police forces continue to investigate the disappearance of over two hundred Maruko contract farmers from the Maruko-Palihar Border Cooperation Zone in northeastern Engualichaban. The incident marks the latest—and largest—in a five year string of mass disappearances along the Engualichaban-Palihari border, but is the first to occur in the Maruko Nation. At a press conference held yesterday in Sukha Balka, Alkema, Himmelwright and Palihar Foreign Relations officer Reiner Schwantzherz offered the condolences of the pharma-state and its citizens, but vehemently denied allegations of his employernation’s involvement.

REINER SCHWANTZHERZ (in German): No, no, it’s not in our interest at all. The Maruko Nation and the Alkema, Himmelwright and Palihar Corporation-State are both Sebastiani. There’s a reason we must work together. In fact, there’s two reasons: Necessity and mutual benefit.

ESTHER APPLEPRIZE: More on the Maruko reaction from bDP correspondent Michel Michale, following this brief.

In Siberia, an eponymous satellite of the agro-state Putingrad has claimed eminent domain over a major aquifer in Western Mongolia. The aquifer is the sole source of water for some five hundred thousand unaffiliated people inhabiting the private city’s hinterlands, and is one of the last unprivatized aquifers in Central Asia. Overpopulation, exploitation of Unaffiliated European refugee farmworkers, lack of arable land for the indigenous and universal fears of a depleted and polluted water table have led to riots in and around the Altaic mountains, and Unaffiliated Anti-Putingrad militants have moved north under the protection of powerful culture-state Tannatuva to deliberate their next move.

In other news, a twenty-three hour chase through the Eastern Ocean last Monday ended in a fierce naval battle just off the coast of Block Island, as Nova Scotian enforcement boats scuttled a music pirate ship from Brooklyn. The ship was believed to have been smuggling unsigned artists from the south European desert into the Nova Scotian sunbelt, where a loose confederation of wealthy entertainment-states struggles to retain the attention of wealthy Chinese and Putingradi vacationers.

But Brooklynist music pirates in Sukha Balka tell E.I.L.C. News junior editor Uli Appleprize that this is only half the story:

(ambient barsounds and shouting)

MUSIC PIRATE: Ah go fuck yourself, Appleprize… my A&R guy was there. He jumped off the fucking boat with a knife and a fuckin… blues band, and swam all the way to Block  fucking Island. Said the enforcement boats were all fucked up and couldn’t sail, and they anchored up for a minute to send a fuckin… a pigeon or some shit…

ESTHER APPLEPRIZE: And that, he says, is when two motorboatloads of Irrealistas arrived, launching volley after volley of ayto-derived psychedelic smokebombs at the Nova Scotian enforcers. Uli?

ULI APPLEPRIZE: Esther, that’s right. That’s when Cookie—the A&R guy—attempted to signal the Irrealistas with a small flock of large birds. An Irrealista motorboat soon responded, arriving on the Block Island beach to ferry the marooned executive and the surviving members of the blues ensemble to the enforcement boat, where E.I.L.N. neuroscientists were negotiating with its psychedelicized crew and E.I.L.C cooks were preparing everyone poisson basquaise. The next morning, all three boats sailed south.

ESTHER APPLEPRIZE: Indeed. Thanks Uli!

ULI APPLEPRIZE: Esther, thank you!

ESTHER APPLEPRIZE: From Sukha Balka, San Sebastian, I’m Esther Appleprize and this has been your E.I.L.C Radio world news briefing. Stay tuned for Michel Michale of booked DOWN phoenix, reporting from the Maruko-Palihar Border Cooperation Zone in Engualichaban.

(song: super space floaters)

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MICHEL MICHALE: Good evening, I’m Michel Michale, live from San Sebastian, here at the Farmer’s Market in downtown Sukha Balka. Now most of this place is like any farmer’s market anywhere— street musicians, fat tomatoes in wicker baskets, skinny chickens in wooden cages, frog buckets, apple piles, fish, vendors selling chocolate and steaming hot crickets on skewers—but what really makes this place stand out are the aytoreias. You come across two or three on every block, and they’re really hard to miss. Actually, they’re the first thing you see on the walk in, because in the center of each and every aytoreia is a forty-foot wooden flagpole with something like fifty flags on it, all of them covered in Maruko art and writing and each one telling a different story from the people’s hundred and fifty year history, and there’s plenty of Irrealista imagery as well. You’ll never see a repeat flag, anywhere… each one is handmade and totally unique. There’s been a lot of talk about Sukha Balka’s aspirations to Culture-Statehood, and it doesn’t take long in this city to understand why.

But why so much fuss and flags for what otherwise—while not without its charm—looks like a rickety and fundamentally unremarkable vegetable stall? Quick inspection of the items on hand at the aytoreia won’t tell you much—not the flowers or spices and salves, nor the racks of suspended tureens full up with thick, steaming soup… But look a little closer, though, at the big wooden bowls of fineground pollen and crushed petals, at the dusty stalks in bundles and bags, and especially at the lovingly-crafted measuring cups and small metal spoons that are always close at hand, then take a fleeting glance at the foreign clothing and fierce purpose in the eyes of a great deal of the customers and you’ll start to get the idea what’s going on here…

(ambient synth-ominousness begins to climb, and as the multitude of Farmer’s Market sounds rise up in volume, they seem to take on a sinister aspect…Karachi chicken market…Palestinian hash-connection… the 17^th Century…)

(song: or 2 or 3 or 4 – The Drawer Room (downloadable))

MICHEL MICHALE: I met a young Palihari employee-citizen earlier this morning. He declined to give his name, but he was a kid, maybe 16 or 17, and he’d come to Sukha Balka to get raw ayto, which is illegal in his employer-nation. He tried to dress like a local, but his paint was on the right hand side, he’d knotted his corda all wrong, and his shirt– Tower Bear told me– while having been white, was “white in all the wrong ways; white like a laboratory, not white like a cloud”. And he’d been scurrying around from aytoereia to aytoreia, inadvertently insulting every farmer in sight– the custom here is to go to one aytoreia only… the logic behind this being that different preparations and strains of the flower, consumed in different ways, have vastly different effects on the user– and a close personal relationship between the aytero and the buyer ensures that the right strain is sold to the right person for the right purpose. This is rule number one, and even though it’s written in air, it’s still written in stone. But few Paliharis seem to care, and this kid was no exception. So even while I found myself resenting every aspect of his naïve and entitled decision to come down here and try to get his selfish kicks from something the locals hold as holy and sacred… even as I found myself practically rooting for the kid to vanish mind and body down the drain of some parasite-cleansing, wallet-draining AYTO’ES cult in the Sukha Balka slums … even then I found myself feeling just a little bit bad for him. He was, after all, in his own selfish, awful, and deeply doomed way, reaching out to the Maruko culture—or at least what he mistook for the Maruko culture. And, you know, he looked… really afraid. Really rich, really helpless… that certain, you know, aching helplessness of distant riches pouring out of his eyes, and the locals had him made in minutes. But they let him wander around for two or three hours, endure the stony stares of old, tough farmers, and even chat for a second with me. But after the kid made a big show of buying a cricket-skewer and taking this nervous, sauce-less bite, two women—one Maruko and one Unaffiliated, EILN scarves flowing black and bright through their hair — slid out from a dark wooden doorway, calm as water, and took the kid lightly by the elbows, just like mom, just like his little sister back home, inside the wall. And how she’d pull him in close and whisper in his ear what’s safe…

(song: pancreas – VII=IIIIIII=IIIX (downloadable ))

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(song: intruder alarm/ closed seam – VII=IIIIIII=IIIX (downloadable))

RADIOGURU: –st look! Look! Like can you imagine how much your left arm is worth? There’s someone out there who needs your left arm so bad! …someone who would pay Big Money for it…We’ll figure it out for you! We’ll talk about wellness and wealth! We’ll talk about movement and travel! We even got this hook-up where you can be your own travel agent and you can travel for 70% off! I…I… it’s—

CALLER TWO: —In…spi…?

RADIOGURU: This—

CALLER TWO: —ration? Inspiration?

RADIOGURU: Look, that’s not important. You must remember that the brain—which is not where your thoughts truly come from—is toxic! Me and my partner found this Herban Elixir for the brain…it’s great! It’s a combination of herbs and resins for energy and brain detoxification…it’s perfect for confusion, mental-fatigue, stupidity, alzheimer’s, aneurysms, apoplexy, poverty-consciousness, spiritual homelessness, delusions of grandeur,and death.

Listen: a lot of people need to get rid of their friends and their family. Come see us. We’ll go out to the woods and talk to a deer.

Here…smell this sage:

(song: bath star - ancient  times)

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ULI APPLEPRIZE: You are listening to 267914296 E.I.L.C. Radio. I am Uli Appleprize, and this is your Sukha Balka Community Music Calendar for the week of May 1^st. Tonight, Lucienne Apikalia, a 12-year-old Engualichabani refugee, will perform Paso Fino, her moving drama which recounts the first 8 years of her life, spent in an abandoned magnet factory where she wrote her Manifesto on a Rotten Banana Leaf, and managed to manually reconstruct an American musical archive of over 30 lost cassette tapes dating sto ome 150 years ago. She will be performing at the Sukha Balka Farmer’s Market with fellow Engualichabani refugee and ex-AYTO’ES addict turned rapper, Spackled Breaks pioneer, activist, Swedish Tragedian, and fitness buff: Midas. Proceeds from the event will go to the We First! Foundation, and the Estoban, Ed, and Ed Edwards and G. Grand Grant and Fred Fund… For The Future.

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(song: handful of sand - faixa clara (downloadable))

MICHEL MICHALE: Seen from above, the Sukha Balka Farmer’s Market has a triangular sort of shape, the base of the triangle being the entrance to the Market, andmade up of 5 gates along 5 major downtown thoroughfares that all intersect about a mile or so later at a giant public park, sort of like a river delta, and in the middle of this park is an amphitheatre, where, if you’re lucky enough to come on Market Day, you’ll catch some of the most talked-about artists and musicians on the island. Fortunately for us, today is obviously Market Day, so we’re here at the Top of the Triangle, the Sukha Balka Amphitheatre, closing out our broadcast with the voices of Engualichaban.

(different kinds of engines lyrics begin and play for a few seconds)

MICHEL MICHALE: In a just a little bit we’ll be hearing from 12-year old Engualichabani musical phenom Lucienne Apikalia, who’ll be performing part 324 of her drama Paso Fino, which uses indigenous Maruko instruments and Lucienne’s homemade Spackled Breaks. Right now, you’re listening to Petomai, a local rapper,

(song: different kinds of engines – ancient times feat. petomai (downloadable))

who’s been performing today alongside Spackled Breaks pioneer and Georgia Boxing coach Midas, who, incidentally, is with me here right now and on his way back to the stage, so has about fifteen seconds to tell those of you who might not know, just what, exactly, Spackled Breaks are…

MIDAS: (laughs)… Well, I’ll do my best… basically, breakbeat culture goes back like 200 years, and, you know, it’s a really rich history. But a lot of the early stuff, the original stuff, you know, the foundational stuff, sorta got lost in time… they were recorded on these flimsy physical objects, y’know, and because of this a lot of them just got physically eaten away by history, by the rocks and the open air. So what Spackled Breaks does is search the whole earth for old fucked up fragmented tapes and records of the classics, and then we try to piece them back together and remake the parts that time destroyed. It’s about the past, the present, and the future all at the same time… It’s about rigorous restorative method, and fearless interpretation and alteration of your restorative results. It’s, you know, it’s Spackled Breaks, it’s Engualichaban, it’s filling in the gaps, it’s rewriting your own history… but only after you understand it. But yo, I gotta jump back on stage Michel, got a verse in a second… but thank you for letting me speak to the people man. Keep goin how you go…

MICHEL MICHALE: Thanks Midas… and with that, that’s all today from the Sukha Balka Farmer’s Market. We’ll leave you off with Petomai and Midas, followed by Lucienne Apikalia. I’m Michel Michale, bookedDOWN phoenix news service, live from Sukha Balka, San Sebastian. I’ll be with you again soon. Good night…

(song: lautaro song – midas)

(song: paso fino part 324 – luciene apikalia (downloadable))