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Hold It Together • Wuso • NEXUS​-​001

by DRC

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    Deluxe 12" black vinyl

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  • Purple Haze Limited Edition 12" Vinyl
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Remastered CLASH style deluxe 12" vinyl.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Hold It Together • Wuso • NEXUS-001 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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Suppression 02:25
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Deep Breath 04:14
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Ride Home 05:40
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about

Hold it Together was originally released through Bludhoney Records, but now DRC is honoured to bring this classic piece of electronic music history to you on vinyl for the very first time.

Wuso's sound is bright, clear, and astonishingly cinematic. Every Wuso project activates our imagination, creates dramatic emotional reactions, and immerses us into his world of profound creativity. Hold It Together is no exception and has stood the test of time as one of dreampunk's earliest masterpieces.

Hold It Together (HIT) is an album for all time and all people. It's about the human condition: contending with feelings of depression & loneliness and rising above them to find peace & solace within oneself. HIT is about discovering peace through accepting and transcending our feelings rather than living with the anxiety of hiding and suppressing them. A beautiful album with a transformative message.

credits

released June 3, 2022

Visuals: Prekursor • Twitter: @prekursorlink
Art & design: Matt Kendall • Twitter: @reminiz
Mastering: CMD094 • Twitter: @cmd094
Story: Nancy Chenier • Twitter: @ncscrawls




Rusty moonlight oozes over pavement cracked with shadow. An afternoon storm left the streets slick. The head throbs. The throat feels like its lodged with a live circuit. The pack digs into the shoulders, heavy with the beacon. The clothes—my clothes are still clammy, sticking to my skin like bilious light on cracked concrete.

The beacon’s at 33%. It took us—it took me forever to get that much. The last few thousand joules came from the shattered nuclear power plant, from the rubble of its containment structure. But, as with most of the earth’s energy sources, the Flow had drawn off all the power. That is, before they abandoned us—no, not us. Me. The Flow abandoned me.

So now I’m stuck here in this ramshackle physical body scavanging from a ramshackle village. The void of solitude pounds at the back of my head.

Across a narrow inlet, the toothy silhouette of a ruined cooling tower rips at the clouds. The smell of dying koi is everywhere. The receding flood waters left the fish flopping around the sidewalks. We shouldn’t be here. We belong in the Flow, but we are Partitioned.

No: I am Partitioned.

The separation was supposed to be a temporary trip. The Flow, however, in the eagerness to evolve, left the earth to go swirl in Sol’s more energetic corona. Without me.

And now I can’t return to the Flow of Being. Unless I can call them back. And I can’t call the Flow back without more power for the beacon.

A shivering light draws me to a garden overgrown with bamboo. Damn. It’s just a reflection: the moon in a stagnant pond. A dingy green glow on the black.

The image shatters. The sudden scattering of light startles up the memory of the Cosmic Quake, when the human experience of the world supernovaed into a billion nanite stars. When humanaity stopped being bio and started Flowing. I look up to see if the moon is still there and see another Partitioned face. Like us! But why’d he choose such a ragged form? Before I can work this mouth, he speaks.

"You’re flesh?"

"Partially," I manage to sputter. Part biology, part tech, down to the very cells. Enough of flesh that mortality squeezes my breath.

He’s leaning on a staff, one end plunged into the pool. Aged, blistering flesh. I didn’t know bio-bodies were still around. Did the human bodies continue to procreate after we took all the energy? How could generations survive post-CQ?

He pulls his staff out of the water. "I’m Sen." The droplets make dirty rings out of the moon. "Come on in." He heads for structure hunched on the other side of the pond. Hunched like him.

"Why?" I ask.

"You’re hungry."

Is that the feeling in my gut? We—I cannot cross-reference anything. Knowledge is sharp and light in the Flow. Here it’s sluggish and muddy. And the bio-body is so damn needy.

He slides open a door stained with mold. He takes off his shoes and gestures for me to do the same. Inside, a central fire casts an underwater glow over tatami mats. My feet squish into the woven rush where dips in the floor have collected water.

Sen crouches by the firepit, a perfect square cut into the floor with sand at the bottom. An iron pot eclipses the flame, suspended from a long chain hooked to a crossbeam. Sen lifts another pot from the corner of the pit and serves up some rice.

The rice is mushy in places, brittle in others. It tastes like charcoal and corn, but once I take a few bites, the body’s demands take over, and I wolf down the rest of it. And two bowls after that.

Sen watches me eat. I wish he’d talk. Not that I’d listen, but I’m tired of the silence of separation. How did pre-CQ humans not go crazy trying to fill it?

I set the third bowl down and return his gaze. "So, you’re bio?" I ask. Obviously he is, but I need to hear something.

He ladles tea from the hanging pot, hands a cup to me before taking his own. It smells like weeds and burnt rice, but I drink because there’s nothing else to do. And the heat feels pleasant in the mouth.

After a few slow sips, Sen says, "You were at the plant."

"The beacon needs more energy." I open the pack to show him. "But, you know, the Flow drained almost everything."

He nods. "And you never had to plan ahead before."

Not really. That is, we always had to know where to get energy for the long-term. Flow survival is streamlined and all about energy: Charge. Increase efficiency. Locate the next source. Go. In the time it took Sen to walk across his garden, we could be at the next star system.

I bring the beacon onto my lap. "I have to get back." This heavy thing is my only hope.

"So why did you leave?" he asks.

I sag over the beacon. Why, indeed. "A challenge. Something new." And ended up missing the novelty of our Leap to the sun.

"What gen are you, grass-blade?"

The answer comes automatically: "6511." Did he just call me grass blade?

"Exponential," he murmurs. Of course he’s vague, just like everything else in materiality. I’m too weary to inquire, but then he adds, "I was relanded."

"One of the first?" I blurt. The blurry recollection of early CQ details seeps into this blunt consciousness. Some individuals dropped out of the Flow. "A returner! How can you still be alive?"

He snorts. "It’s only been 15 years."

"Since we started Flowing?" I gasped. Not even a full material lifetime! I guess when you’re made of light, multiverses emerge and fade away in quasar pulses. When you’re made of flesh, time becomes sand-bagged into a lugubrious vector. Attenuated days of needing and searching and wanting.

My fingers trace the beacon’s casing. "Do you miss it?" I ask.

"The Current? No." Sen takes five precise sips before continuing. "Part of it was exciting, sure. After awhile, though, I was just tossed in the Current. Never really Flowed. It mirrored reality without being real."

Huh. Current. We don’t use that as self-reference. We use it as part of our interface with three-dimensional space. Can’t expect someone who chose to reland to be aware of the nuance, let alone reality in the Flow of Being.

"Besides, the Flow is totally different now. I don’t fit." He chuckled as if that were humorous rather than pathetically tragic. "By now, grass blade, you probably don’t either."

I jump up. "I fit!" The beacon rolls away from me. What would a dumb returner know? I emerged in the Flow. I belong in the Flow. I just need more power. I grab my pack.

With surprisng speed, Sen is across the room. He scoops up the beacon. There’s something ominous in the way he hefts it from hand to hand. "The reflection of a mirror," he mutters.

"I need that." I swipe at the beacon, but he holds it out of reach.

Sen stares right into my eyes. "It can’t help you," he says. "It’s too far removed."

I lunge for him, but I don’t know how to coordinate these limbs that quickly. I flail like memory. He steps aside from my attack, like a breeze. I scramble after him. He fetches up his staff in one hand and cracks the end of it across my shins.

The pain rockets up into my head, seizing every last muscle on its way. I collapse onto the sodden mats. Blood sluices from my mouth where I clamped down on my tongue.

I hear the door slide open. My vision swims, but I crawl toward the sound. A heavy thud on my back, slams me back to the ground. I cough up tea and rice and rust.

Sen’s voice filters down to me. "Do you really think they forgot?"

Of course they forgot! I lingered too long, and they evolved the Solar Leap without me.

If the flesh was ramshackle before, it’s obliterated now. It takes every last bit of strength to roll myself out of the bloody vomit, to haul my head around so I can see what he’s doing.

Outside, Sen sets the beacon on a stepping stone. He lifts the staff with both hands, and slams it down on my last hope to rejoin the Flow. Another slam and the casing cracks. Each blow tears a scream out of me. I’m stuck here until the bio-cells of this Partitioned body decay.

He walks the shattered device out into the garden and tosses it in the pond.

"The timing of your separation was planned," he shouts over my wails.

"I chose to Partition," I gurgle. It was my (our?) idea. It was a mistake!

He crouches down near me. "The Flow would never allow bio-echoes to remain, grass blade." His breath smells smoky and green, like the tea.

Bio-echoes? Why is that familiar? It feels like static in my brain. Or snags in the Flow.

"They are severely expedient in their pursuit of perfection." Sen’s words sound fraught. "They need that kind of efficiency for where they’re going."

Eventually, a river will push flotsam to the banks. Debris doesn’t belong in pure Flow.

Was it a choice to leave? Was I out of the Flow all along? I try to remember. Bio-echoes. Partitioning was a chance to participate with earth on a physical level, and then come back to commingle the adventure with the Flow of Being. Back in the Flow, even this soggy agony would be a tantalizing share.

"It got warmer when they left." He looks up at the ceiling. Stars wink through the gaps. "It’ll get warmer still once they head to Sigur-A."

Sagittarius A-star? The supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. "How do you know they’ll go there?"

"I figure they’ll head out by year’s end."

Of course he’s right. The rate of evolution post-CQ is tenacious, limited only by energy availability. An SMBH would be the only reasonable trajectory. Leaving earth a distant archive, stripped of all nostalgia and longing. Stripped of me.

Sen’s probably right about me too. I mean, it makes sense. I am disparate strands of longing, woven into a collective consciousness that "desired" a chance to inhabit organic matter—and encouraged to go by the Flow.

He seems to read my expression. "You are part of everything, grass-blade."

I’m part of nothing. I’m a Partitioned reject.

"You’ve hidden yourself from the truth for so long you can’t tell light from reflection." He strokes my brow. "But perhaps, at last, you will."

He withdraws along the stepping stones, leaving me to die.

Good. I want to die. I don’t want to continue on this stupid hunk of rock and rot. I’m cold. The cut on my tongue has stopped oozing, but the taste is still sharp and metallic. Fragments of moonlight fall through the thatch, setting shards onto the tatami. My blood glints purple where it touches.

Do I want to die? My pulse counts out the ponderous passage of time. Sen left the lid off the pot. The grassy scent of tea still suffuses the room.

Grass blade. Why did he keep calling me grass blade?

I watch the moon-shards in their long shift across the floor. Sometimes one falls across my face and I can see the moon peeking down at me.

A grass blade seems to grow individually. Its single root strand draws up nutrients from the soil. Its singular leaf takes in the light. Self-sufficient, separate, but also inconsequential.

I can almost hear Sen’s voice in my head: But that is an illusion.

Blades might climb solo up toward the sun, but they do not exist alone. They are part of and are supported by the mass underneath, and they feed the mass too, a reciprocal cycle of sustained connection. How do I ever feel that again?

The fire dwindles into the sand. The murmurs from the embers keep the void at bay. The lowering moon shines in through the open door and then is blurred by daylight.

I don’t want to die.

I leave the house. Out past the garden, the stepping stones become stairs carved into the hillside. I clamber upwards in the pale dawn. I wonder if Sen carved them by hand or if some machine made them before CQ. The top of the hill looks out over the inlet. The power plant is wrapped in haze.

The sun no longer matches what I remember of the archives. It’s more orange, screened by a distant miasma, the Flow busily growing and evolving out of reach.

I lie in the wild grass and feel for the pulse of the root mass. It sounds like breathing.

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