'Liminal Exit' the new album from Al Fraser

Datastream Haerenga

You are a 0. You are a 1.
Sometimes you are both of these things
Sometimes, you are something bigger than yourself
and sometimes 0 and 1 means the world to you
You are doing your equivalent of walking a path
The path has as much underneath it
As it has above


You have been told about te kore
And you guess that this is a part of where and what you are
But you do not guess
You are merely a combination of facts and errors
These are what is in your kete to draw from
Be careful as you rummage


All good journeys need a certain kind of electricity
An energy source
Here, Ihi and wehi create sparks
Subsequently,
It is Wana that cracks the sound barrier
Underscored by breath
Is it yours?
Do you possess it?
Breath, that is


There is a movement in the sound
A liquefaction
An empire of zeroes and ones
That melt themselves down
A kind of water
Or at least
A liquid that is clear
And constant


Suddenly the 0 and 1 of you
Untangle themselves
Unzip you entirely
Part of you on the path

         And part of you on the liquid below

The Hand is Yours

You look at the hand as it reaches across the black plain
At its fingers, its movements
How it seems to put out its own lunar halo
A reflection of light’s reflection of light
The hand is in front of you now
A line of sound landing before it
Like a ridgeway on a map
As you reach yourself to grasp it
You hear another sound oscillate above the first
You recognise yourself in another language


You take a chance
And grasp the hand
There are melodies of recognition
An ancientness wrapped in wires
The hand is one you have always known


The hand is yours
And your pieces are now sewn together
                                           Sewn shut

Ghost Capacitor

This new way of being comes with many sounds
They are stacked inside you like levels of a building

You hear running and breathing. Hear flags fly atop your buildings.
Hear the earth turn slowly below what changes fast. You hear it all.

But despite this. There is an emptiness to your personhood.
You try to look inside the sounds. The waves of wind and water.
The rumble of concrete. But you see no residents.

You are a ghost of a city. Your windows are all open and the world comes in.
Bringing only the inanimate with it. You are haunted by the ghosts of yourself
The pulsating need for the world to return to who it was before caretakers.
You are haunted and empty all at once.

   

Retinal Afterimage

You close yourself off for a long time
There is water in what you are learning to call your lungs
But since the water isn’t real water you are not concerned
Your lungs are bubbling with information, with data
With the idea of lungs copy and pasted until the lungs were complete


But now it is time
You have hibernated enough
The water of ones and zeros has long since gone


You open your eyes and see the city that lived inside you
Tattooed over your view of the world
All the ghosts that weren’t


You move your body in small waves
You calculate your breaths
As the pictures move from the eye to the mind


You see that you are now standing in a dry lake
Or at least that's what it seems like
You are alone and there is dust


In the centre you see two objects
Laid upon a stone
One: a bone flute, a kōauau
Two: a skull, coated in green


You kneel and close your eyes
The city inside you
superimposes the black
When you open them
The city lays atop
The skull
Its eyes full
Of building

Shadow Memory

You are thinking
About where these memories will be stored
About the zeroes and ones
           the oro that come from them
           the things that are too big and too
                              small to code and decode


You watch the film of your mind
Black and white and light coloured
You flick through them like tunes in an ancient jukebox
You are making your choices
You are waiting to do a kind of dance

          Inside one of the memory films is a room with a door

          Or at least it’s what you think a door is

          You select this one from your collection

          You move forward

          The lines between breaking

                                    The door opens

                                    You exit through

                                    To another side

Split Mind Sync

You are in pieces
But the pieces that you are still speak to each other
You think about the idea of being physical
Of being something flesh covered
Something pulsing
Something with heart strings
To bounce your thoughts upon


You concentrate all you can into the two spaces you now occupy
The zeroes and ones
The mind and the body
The logic, and the something elseness of it all


The more your mind holds the different parts of you
The more you can feel them reaching out to each other
The more you can feel them knitting themselves whole
Calling each other home to themselves
Digital karanga

         But with something physical attached

        You look out and see something reaching towards the          being that is now you
        It is white in a darkness, or more the colour of light

        It is reaching for both parts of you

        And both parts of you
                                  Are reaching back

Loud Light

There is a smell of water on electrics
Or of what water and electrics would sound like
If they were part of all of this


You are remembering some things from a past
Something called an insect
The way it moved
The way it was not necessarily wanted
but needed for us to eat and live


There are other things you are remembering


Your thoughts are becoming louder
With your eyes closed
You can see them
You realise that you can hear them too
Not the thoughts themselves
But the streams of them
The volume of the water
For want of a better name for this liquid


Soon there is too much to hold
And the eyes and ears
Are filled with light
The smell after lightening
That comes from inside the house


The scrambling of static
The flickering light of the pulse

         The heart learns its electricity

         The heart learns how to be a heart

It starts with one single drop
A little lens of light, a single code.
But then another comes. And another.


There is a bright light above you tonight
If that’s what we know this time to be.
You think of a story (or was it science)
Where the bright light would bring water
Would rock the cosmic cradle differently
And bring tides up to the steps of homes


It is all so long ago now
It barely matters
But it matters to you


The drops keep coming
And connecting
And making themselves
into more of themselves
Until you are inside them in this new form


And they all hold that bright light inside them
There is nothing for you to see
But light

You pick up the kōauau and begin to play
As you do so
light begins to replace your shadow
This light self expands
Then contracts back into you
You feel yourself flicker between your light self
                                              And the self you deem as true


Through all of this you continue playing the kōauau
                       In exchange the kōauau continues playing you
                       In some kind of past there was talk of a path
                       In some kind of present you find it again
                                         You begin to walk back to what was