#Beyond Tannhauser Gate | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

drmorbius12 · 3 months

Text

Tannhauser at the Venusburg Gate

(Or Tannhauser's Quest)

Part the First

Her realm beneath the rooted stars endures yet beyond cold reach lest that land too be defiled with rotted hypocritic modernity

For her softest whisper he did seek another world spinning deep a sparkling orb untouched by diseased minds concurrent

To ask the blessed Venus for her pure kiss of bliss unclothed that he might wander thus along orgasmic revelatory lusted paths

Old minds he had left behind crept into his golden bed as guilt seeped astern with false belief in heavenly forgiveness

But the holy fanned cap devised in hubritic disguised obsession long sought the demise of such pagan beliefs stolen and reshaped

Now failing the misled Tannhauser thus built with lies ideas borrowed from unsorrowed purity of heart in idyllic realms beyond his ken

So he wandered back through long paths trod before that might return him to the world from which him his mother bore

Part the Second

The world is full of sorrow and pain wherein the wanderer must gain a foothold if such Quest might manifest in blind search

To seek the false redemption from that fickle source long held which cares not for true belief to consumed by greed and power

Such revelation brings disgust to pardon thus would demand no less than full bore lot of those roses they only might bestow upon his return

But declared most righteously denied the pardon he sought in disbelief he was decried no forgiveness for his worship of the blessed Venus hid

Was turned away without remorse while three day passed forsook those red petals only faded from his sight meant he must go back to her embrace

Back along the deepest corridors beneath earthen bowels possessed to beg forgiveness of truer kind to come back in blessed rest once more

And when long endurance of endless chase did Tannhauser seek her fair embrace once more did knock upon the hidden gates on abject knees

Part the Third

To beseech that Goddess beloved she who may grant him escape from this oldest garden of death where we dwell within our sorry flesh

But beg and bang and beat upon her storied gate his bloodied hands went unheard as he stood without that final grace he could not find

And in darkness over all his Quest yet unfulfilled to his wearied ears in harshest voice She spake these precious words he could not forget

Ye must decide which side you stand before I unlock once more this deathless door to thee who seek my eternal bliss filled state

To live forever within this mystic place among ancient gods that exist forevermore in the amber wells of silence

8 notes · View notes

hangingoninquietdesparation · 6 years

Text

Rishathra and Beyond

I've done things

and people

you wouldn't

believe

i've seen teams of nexus six

take on Eccentricia Gallumbits

i've seen sea men glitter

on re-entry to eroticon six

i've swam

with the bandersnatch

in their connubial pools

and stood erect

at the tannhauser gate

and all this sex

will soon be lost

swept away like ejaculate

in rain

DISCLAIMER

99% of this is totally stolen. Credit to the creators in the tags

#savage-words #groupsextravaganza #oh heck #oh well #there you go #Larry Niven #Blade Runner #Douglas Noel Adams #Julian May

32 notes · View notes

alhorner · 6 years

Text

Do androids dream of electronic beats? – cover feature and documentary

Blade Runner returns to cinemas this week, with a new sequel among the millennium’s most anticipated blockbuster movies. But for a generation of electronic musicians who grew up fantasising of C-beams glittering near the Tannhauser Gate, it’s like it’s never been away. Ever since director Ridley Scott’s ground-breaking original, starring Harrison Ford and scored by Greek composer Vangelis, wave after wave of artists have mined the science fiction classic for inspiration. Blade Runner’s influence has infiltrated pop, hip-hop and beyond – but it is electronic musicians who have proven most gripped by the film’s murky vision of a future metropolis where the line between what is human and what is artificial is dangerously blurred.

youtube

From Massive Attack and Goldie to Boards of Canada and Dillinja, plenty have sampled it. Even more have referenced it, or carried an atmosphere indebted to the film’s world. In 2017, electronic musicians continue to find inspiration in its neon dystopia, pointing to a movie that wasn't released when many of them were born as a key influence.

The movie, an adaptation of Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, told the story of Rick Deckard, a police detective specialising in the hunting down and “retiring” of humanoids, known as replicants, after violent uprisings among these AI machines. As important as the film’s plot, however, was its mood – an intense, opulent paranoia that pervades every corner of the dark, neon-lit Los Angeles seen onscreen. Vangelis’ music was key to this atmosphere of beauty and dread.

Since its inception, science fiction cinema had experimented with electronic instruments to help build the impression of eerie alien planets and futuristic vistas. 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still saw composer Bernard Hermann use theramin to give an otherworldly feel to its tale of a visitor from outer space. 1956’s Forbidden Planet meanwhile, was the first ever film set entirely in space, and used a score entirely made up of electronic sounds. By 1981, composer Wendy Carlos was using electronic synths to add a futuristic edge to Stanley Kubrick’s controversial classic, A Clockwork Orange.

Blade Runner was different, though. For Ridley Scott’s film, Vangelis used electronic instruments including the Yamaha CS-80 and Roland VP-330 VocoderPlus synthesiser, to create a rich, melodic score that was equal parts grand and anxious, fusing Greek and world music elements. It was also largely improvised. Vangelis refused to read a script, insisting on composing by simply watching VHS tapes containing footage and making up melodies at his bank of over 12 synthesisers based on the emotion each scene made him feel.

The result was a musical accompaniment to Blade Runner that has become as renowned as the film itself. “It sets an atmosphere that’s delicate and powerful,” Denis Villeneuve, director of Blade Runner 2049, told FACT for our new documentary, Do Androids Dream Of Electronic Beats? “It’s a piece of art that’s at perfect equilibrium, aesthetically and musically.”

Its eerie echoes and spacious synth noises were from the cutting edge of musical technology: the first ever digital reverberation machine, the EMT250, was built only five years earlier in 1976. The digital reverb used by Vangelis, the Lexicon 224-X, was released in 1978 and allowed sounds to decays for as much as 70 seconds. These cavernous echoes were vital in creating the impression of a vast and unsettling metropolis and planet, floating in an even vaster outer space.

“You get swamped by all these amazing ideas,” says Gary Numan of experiencing the film and its score, likening its influence to a sponge in a bath. The English electro-pop pioneer released Strange Charm in 1986, an album heavily influenced by Blade Runner that included a track which sampled replicant character Roy Batty’s now-iconic speech from the end of the film. “Consciously or unconsciously, it becomes such a part of what you love. It’s all gonna come out at some point.”

Blade Runner’s story is one of push-and-pull between man and machine – the same conflict at the heart of electronic music, an art form in which human emotions are expressed solely on machines. Maybe this is the reason for the affinity electronic music holds for Blade Runner. Whatever the reason, and whatever success of this new sequel – electronic music seems certain to replicate the style and sound of that world for decades more to come. As we explore in the above film, it’s not time to die for electronic music’s obsession with Blade Runner yet.

FACT, October 2017

#blade runner

2 notes · View notes

fakesurprise · 7 years

Text

The Closed Gate

(image credit: @denmysterywoman)

I lost track of how many I killed two hours ago. That isn’t the sort of thing one should forget, no matter what you are. Part of my training was to never forget anything, no matter what time would do to me. I am failing it. I find I do not have it in me to care, but that does not liberate me at all. They said that Crumoyx was just another colony world, made just before the human war against the Aendar ended. Unlike the Hingari, the Aendar could be fought. The war raged through space and time; thanks to certain sublight drives it was still going on in some places. But colonies were built to last, because of wars. It allowed them hide the Gate here. A door, a weapon, the kind of hope that wasn’t hope at all. You can call a weapon hope, but only if you know nothing at all.

It had taken years to find. Manifests, shipping records, faked accounts. Enough weapons and soldiers coming here to count as an anomaly. There were at least a thousand marines. Distantly, the fabristeel structure shudders under another explosion. Each trap, each bomb, each weapon I compromised. Poisoned food killed some. I hadn’t known that a Verkonis blade could break until it did, but I’d brought other weapons.

They sufficed.

It helped that many did not believe I existed. And fewer still understood what they were dying to protect. It made no difference. They died, and they died, and finally I entered the chamber.

The gate was left of centre. Not in the middle of the colonial compound, hidden by being unimportant storage. The records claimed it was part of the Lacuna network, remnants of the long defunct Niand Empire. A curiosity, a relic of a transport system long broken. They had two historians on staff to study it. Both turned out to be cyborg war machines. One of them broke the Verkonis blade. Somehow, that destruction did not level the world. Perhaps even such blades are not what they are advertised to be. It would not be the first time I had been lied to. I desire only this: that the gate was not another.

The room is made of stone. Old and real, the entire colony made about it. The gate itself is 8’ by 8’ and recessed into a wall. I activate six devices that are illegal across the entire Continuum. Two more after that, but the gate remains sealed. It is said that the Opal Key can open up even the dead and make them speak. It does nothing.

“You cannot open the gate.”

I spin. There is a human behind me. He is sixteen, not wearing any protective suit I can detect despite the fact that the poisons in the air should have burned the air from his lungs and stripped flesh from bone. “Hingari.” A shapechanger could survive this. “You do not belong here.”

“Not Hingari. You may scan me if you wish,” he says mildly.

I do. Human. Entirely, ordinarily human. “... no DNA reading it this – pure.”

He nods. “It’s not normally a problem, but you do have impressive scanners.”

“You are here to stop me.”

“I merely stated a fact. You cannot open the Tannhauser Gate.”

I fire a single entropy shot. I only have four left, and no way of ever getting more. The human – catches it. Somehow, impossibly, holds it between two fingers and just looks... disappointed. “No one remembers. Sometimes I love that, other times I do not. They made eight Montauks, I was told after I found out about you all. Not knowing what they did. Firing you through time as well as space. Trying to win the war by changing the past. I wonder if even the Aendar knew how desperate that was, understood what they were playing with.”

“The Aendar are gone. I am the last of my kind.”

“I know.” He doesn’t move, this human of knowing.

“The Gate has weapons behind it. Monsters I can unleash.”

“It does, Monfour. But it can only be opened by a magician. And for all you are, and all that was done to you, you are not that.”

“What are you?” I ask, though some terrible instinct tells me that I must know. That it should be impossible for this person to know my name.

“The only one of my kind. I am Jay.”

“You are bigger. In all the stories. Monstrous.”

“Sometimes,” he admits.

“There are other gates. Other weapons.” And I activate my nature. Montauk. To leap through time. A voice calls out my name, behind me, and I flee. I flee. I –

I am in a room. A windowless and doorless room. And Jay is standing there, carrying a terrible calm with him. “You don’t get to escape my binding, Monfour, not even on Crumoyx, in the journey to ir or from it. Only Cruxy Mox ever did that, and not for long. All attempts to flee my bindings end up here; even I do not know why.”

I raise the gun again.

Jay takes it. I never see him move. That much, the stories all told as truth. “I’m not letting you kill yourself. Not like that.”

“You killed the others.”

“I have a duty, to time. An arrangement. And the other Montauks dared far worse than you.”

I gape at that. I was willing to open Gates to let monsters into the universe. “... worse,” I manage.

“The thing about gates is that someone has to make them. Someone has to guard them, if they’re say sort of gate, or at least make sure the hinges don’t squeak too much. You don’t want squeaky hinges, especially not on gates that should never open.”

He gestures. A flick of a finger, at once a summons and a command. I turn. The room has a door now. It is stone, and there is metal in front of it. A mesh of woven steel, the stone behind somehow alive, breathing. Aware. “I made one gate so that anyone could open it. Because there would always be a chance it was needed.” “What is beyond that,” I ask, and my voice has almost nothing of a Montauk in it. “I don’t know. I think I made myself forget. I was ten once. Eleven the first time I came here that I am certain of. I didn’t find anything, but I think that is because I banished what was here. And that I put it behind that door.” I turn then, and look at Jay. He is old, for all that he looks younger. Older than anything else I know of. They say he destroyed the Lacuna without trying. That the universe is safe from monsters because of him. He put them behind the other gates, I think. But this? I do not know what this is. I think he is afraid.

“What happens if I open it?”

“I don’t know.” His laugh is somehow like my own. “I am Jayseltosche, and every story about me is true, Monfour. Even the awful ones no one talks about. Sometimes I feel like my bindings are the only thing that hold the universe together. The rest of the time I am relieved this is not true. But I move through space and time in ways even you can’t understand. What is beyond that door I know nothing of, and there is very little I am certain I know nothing of.”

I do not move.

“I am very certain it is not jaysome. I do not know what will happen if you let it out, but I think you might well win your war.”

“Everyone will die.”

“And everything, yes. Memory, fantasy. All traces of the universe gone, the wild places of Outside no longer with this strange stable anomaly within it. That is the simplest outcome of opening this gate. It is what all wars become, in the end. You wish to destroy the past, to say nothing came before you to make a new future. And then it is all destruction, until you break bindings because there is nothing else to do.”

“How many have seen this gate?”

Jay smiles, then. Soft and sad. “Seven others.”

“And no one has opened it.”

Jay does not move. I step toward the gate. I hold out a hand. “You could stop me. You said no one can avoid a binding you make.”

“I could. Perhaps even in this place.”

I drop my hand. “I don’t win. No matter what happens.”

“It is a dangerous thing to think in terms of winning,” Jay offers softly. “The desire to make others lose is a dangerous one.”

“And does anyone win against you?” I ask.

“All the time,” he says, and there are worlds of meaning under those words. “All the time, or there would be no jaysome in the universe at all.”

I don’t know what he means. But I want to. For the first time in longer than I want to know, I want to do something other than kill.

“Help me.”

He grins, and the grin takes years from him. His laugh is young, and somehow free, and we are far away.

I expected Jay to remove something of my nature. To strip me of the awful weapons they put inside me.

I did not expect the hot springs. I think of a gate that anyone can open, and that Jay had no reason to take me there. I think of other things too, but let the water ease what it can instead.

Jay is not here. But he might come by, some day.

And that is reason enough to wait.

#writing #prose #magician series #writerscreedchallenge #cruxymox #:)#futurejaystories

38 notes · View notes