Something happened on the 27th June 2024. Electrical charges were generated by the vibration of thin metal wires in close proximity to magnets. Similar effects were generated by the movement of air into a capsule. The end result was the movement of large paper cones, and an observation by a roomful of people.
Author: Alexander
I can’t escape my past. Nostalgia (“the pain of remembering”) means I have to attempt to exorcise the demons of my childhood, by whatever means at my disposal.
I found it. An mp3 file on an old hard drive. A recording of a numbers station. Mandela Effect. A new song. A release date – 11th March 2022.
Those numbers – 35719 – are written on a sticker on one of the suitcases I got from the storage unit. I don’t remember seeing the sticker before, but perhaps a decade ago when I packed everything away it stuck in my subconscious somehow.
I still don’t know the significance of the numbers, or why they appear in my dreams. I don’t know what/who the woman’s voice is, but I continue to research.
On the face of it, the woman speaking sounds robotic, like a numbers station. I will update as I find out more.
I haven’t been sleeping well recently.
I’ve been having strange, vivid dreams, often waking drenched in sweat. Not scared, necessarily, but confused – disconnected, you could say. Like I’d just travelled back from a long journey.
A five-number sequence seems to be the recurring theme in these dreams, injected into dialogue, heard on tannoys and snippets of TV static.
I’ve been trying to get back up to speed, re-reading the posts on this website. I don’t remember writing them. I can’t remember how much of it, if anything, is true and how much is fiction. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It was a long time ago.
35719. It could be a combination to a lock, or a safe. I’m not great at cyphers and codes. CEGAI is just as abstract as the numeric equivalent. Guessing the acronym would be futile without any context.
So it just keeps circling my mind. My wife says I’ve been mumbling it in my sleep some nights.
I got one of the Glass suitcases out of the loft again. I haven’t opened it.
GLASS has returned. The man and the music, into my psyche and out of my fingers and mouth. I can’t say any more at present, but I’ll try to get you all up to speed as soon as I can get my head round the past 11 years.
…But, it’s that magical chemistry that results from the clever lyrics and bizarre arrangements, that will make you feel like you just can’t help but admire the ingenuity and abandon that Glass brings to the fore.
– Lisa Torem
Read the full review here
“There is a fine line between artistic merit and pretension, and on paper a debut concept album, inspired by the life of a 19th Century inventor most listeners will never have heard of, slides firmly over to the latter side of the scale. This is one of many reasons why music can never be judged on paper. ‘The Sound of Glass’ is a gripping and exquisite blend of post-punk and dark pop akin to current NME darlings The Horrors that is sure to storm the mainstream. This is an album of ballads in the purest sense of the word, an all-too-brief collection of seven tales that will take you out of the mundane realities of your day to some kind of dim and distant dream state, crisply produced and artfully arranged without stretching any structural boundaries – indeed, there is nothing overtly complex here. Herein lies the beauty of ‘The Sound of Glass’ – too fey for those with heavier tastes, but a batch of songs that can provoke such an emotional response while still providing hummable and memorable rhythms without any real visceral impact is to be applauded.”
– Greg Porter
Devolution Magazine
“This album was inspired by the inventor from the 19th Century, Anthony Philip Glass. He apparently invented a machine that could transmit sound through time. This is quite an apt title for an album that actually sounds like it has fallen through time from an unspecified decade. ‘Driftwood’s Daughter’ kicks the album off in a crisp indie style, not particularly dark or alternative but good all the same. What is immediately apparent is what a great voice vocalist Alexander King has. ‘Without’ is a much darker track and the bands Post Punk influences become more apparent with a bit of White Lies thrown in for good measure. ‘This Odyssey’ is a rocking little number that is on your free covermount CD. ‘Nothing in the World’ is a track which starts quite sorrowful and then gradually builds into something much more powerful and rocky. The next track ‘When the Rain Falls’ is probably the darkest track on the album. Alexander gets a chance to show off his impressive vocal range with some intelligent lyrics and a catchy but emotional chorus. ‘The Last Transmission’ has a different feel in that it sounds like poetry set to music if that makes sense, and ‘My Elan’ sees the album end in a quite Punk/Deathrock fashion. This is a band that definitely has mainstream potential as well as alternative appeal, but still manages to pull off that tricky task of maintaining a style all of their own.”
– Mark Smith
Unscene Magazine
Martyn Rudd of Screaming Tarts magazine has kindly published an interview with me discussing my research into Anthony Glass, and the music that has been created as a result.