take down the sun: Port of the Sun

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Port of the Sun is the sonic arts project of ocean, concoctor of cavernous ephemera and odious noisescapes, bedraggled melodies mangled in locust mandibles and stolen nightmares refabricated. Urgent opuses lost by messengers drawn into hallucinated desert oases. Recording devices smuggled into the bardo. Swamplands of hypnotic psycholactian soundscapes. Tectonic upheaval and seabottom volcanism. Gargantuan moth flutters and backwater hooch revivals. Jovian arias lost in interstellar deeps. Insectile textural alphabets flung like fishing nets over the stars. Swallowing contact mics and live speaker autopsies. Sweltering binary microandroidal love affairs. Labialism. Foreskinism. Cocks and cunts united at last against the blob threat. Wailing hetaerae dubbed in raided pharaoh’s tombs. Burbling mucosal contagion the color of tamarind roots. Floating forests of subaqueous crystal. Shimmering hymns writ on sea waves. Ribcages inlit by swinging ruby lanterns. Virulent proteanism vs. flatlining. Amplified larvae wriggles. Insides of stones. Resurrection. Wet dreams of alien invasions. Tunneling escapes into magnified interstitial terrains. Counterfeit Venusian currencies glinting in parallaxes of prepucal light. Hot air balloons of sewn Icarine skin rising triumphantly Solward.
Prior Halcyon, prior Divinorum, prior Rain, prior Food. Overcoming lithic obfuscations, Port of the Sun now collaborates regularly with the legendary maestro of cathartic cacophony take down UAV.

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Long long ago, in the time of myth, in the time of wonder, before the great disease of Gray came, lived an old woman. Though sometimes she felt that she was dragging her bones around in a sack of skin, for her age she was actually quite sprightly of muscle—and her mind?—sharp as a nail. One morning, while she was down on the sand gathering kelp to weave a basket, she became enthralled by the patterns of froth in the waves. She rolled up her knickers and waded farther and farther out, enchanted by the distant whitecaps which kept disappearing into layers of darkness beyond her sight. She swam and forgot herself. She swam and an enormous fish surfaced and swallowed her up. She thought of Jonah as she was hauled in the lamplit rib-room. It smelled of salt pickle in there and rumbled and wavered, and soon enough the old woman with white braids was delivered to the mouth of the catacombs beneath the sea. The old woman had heard of this place in the tales of her youth, the tales from the old country. There, it was said, in the passages beneath the waters, can be found the domain of the tentacled prince, and his trove of songpearls. She very much wished to hear the harmonies of the singing pearls, and, figuring that she had little to lose and nowhere else to go, the old woman with the white white hair set out into the undersea caves...

Down in the dawn of time, and time dawns again and again, the rains fell high above and didn’t cease and caused the earth to hold her breath. The old woman grew older still but she remembered the little girl inside her. The snails and the willow trees were my companions, she spoke to the crystal-lined caves, and her voice echoed and sounded strange to her, strangely familiar, that voice which arose in her throat but spoke back from the cave walls all around. And they are still though i am buried here beneath the waves. Her sky was miles of water. And beyond that sky, another sky which drowned itself in sheets of rain, gray as the old woman’s hair and both silver sheen’d. She pressed on through the darkness and knew it to be the darkness of her own chest, the ribcage cracked open to unprotect the beating muscle there: if only she could find it. My ruby treasure, she thought aloud, and the caverns spoke back in their crystalline voice. The tentacled prince—with his artery limbs reaching, reaching everywhere... perhaps one of those strings leads back to the surface! And that surface of which she dreamt drowned even the sun.

The sour sunshine penetrated but metres beneath the rabid waves. Far below, in the caverns ceiling’d with barnacles, our heroess progressed steadily into the jowls of the sea. Perhaps through the hollow flutes of a skeleton she tramped? Gradually shawls of seaweed gathered about her shoulders, and her eyes adjusted to the murky emeraldine light. Phosphorescent lichens arrayed like torches lit her way, and she climbed and descended the steps cut from volcanic stone. Then out on the distant edge of her hearing she began to discern a hint of melody, a melody she tracked through the caves with her deft ears. The rhythms were of an unfamiliar time, ragged and loose yet strung together and looping back in on themselves in familiar echoes. The tapestry of sound was complex and folky, and she could not help clicking her jaw in time and running her hand along her thickly ribbed braid of gray hair. The music grew louder as she travelled deeper into the resonant tunnels, when of a sudden she found herself at the end of the passageway. The steps led on into darkness. She stretched out her hand and felt a curtain of thick black vines. Just on the other side was the music. She reached her arm through, pressed her body into the cool living drapery. Cold blind birth. Then of a sudden she popped through...

The old woman was in a huge undersea orchestral chamber. A symphony of unidentifiable instruments were being masterfully handled by an assortment of mutated underwater denizens. Others were dancing, undulating, squishing about on tentacles and probosci. The scene startled her but it wasn’t scary at all and it felt so festive and simple and unintimidating that she thought, Why not? and the old woman joined in the dance, trying not to step on any of the smaller marine life. Her silver hair flecked with chestnut brown whirled about her head. She tromped on thighs vibrant and muscular, she raised her arms and swung her head, her lungs filling and pressing out the thick air. For hour upon hour the musicians worked their lifelike tubes and tambourine-like skins, and the woman laughed and sweated and spun with the revellers enflamed with an electric energy she hadn’t felt in years. Then, on one round over the cave floor, she saw, where it hadn’t been a moment before, a pillar covered in polyps, anenomes, and urchins of all colors, and resting atop it in a great mass of writhing prehensile meat the burgundy TENTACLED PRINCE. She stopped and stood still amid the festivities, which carried on about her. So alien yet so incredibly familiar. He was looking at her, with his tentacle face, the pillar draped in his tentacle body.

He was beautiful.

She was beautiful.

And her chestnut hair fell about her shoulders and she trembled with excitement and fear that rose from the center of her body and she looked down at her hands and she was young.

The young woman moved toward the prince as though drawn by an invisible force. The pillar on which he reclined, gilded by its rainbowed organisms, slowly descended into the floor until she stood face to face with the unbreaking gaze of the tentacled prince. His red and purple iridescent body spread out all around her. She could see it pulsing rhythmically and he seemed to extend in telescoping ventricles to all quadrants of the chamber. She realized that the musicians had fallen silent and she turned and where they and their audience once were now only dozens of ivory pearls glistened on the porous stone floor. The song pearls, she spoke to herself. And then in a voice both as distant as her childhood and as near as the tissues of her own flesh, she heard the prince speak.

The pearls are my distant cousins. And yours, my lady.

Then you, prince...?

Yes, closer than you can imagine.
They were alone together in the echoing chamber. Beads of moisture formed and fell from the ceiling, reverberating off the cavern walls. The prince in his rose tide was before her, and he was everywhere at once. Even—

She felt at her chest—

My lord?

My lady.
Leagues above, the sea boiled and churned in explosions of broken glass.

Waters slipping into illimitable waters.

And below, from a mouth small as a violet, Are you—? The child’s golden hair fell over her smooth shoulders and drifted and tangled like spider silk about the red capillaries of the tentacled prince.

Yes, his voice resonating through the catacombs and bouncing inside her ribs, are we not reflections of that which looks in no mirror? And you: have you relished your youth refound?
The girl combed her fingers through the long grain-colored hair and looked on it a while. I have loved dancing in your quarters, prince, and my young body enchants me as it did those impossible years ago. But i am an old woman. I have lived a life. I am ready to go home.

Come home then, the prince spoke, a smile roaring in his eyes.

The sound of a throbbing red room.

Eons beneath the breathless sky a dark shape opened its arms. The crone went to him hair streaming, a shock of white burst from a total red embrace.

Far above the smouldering sun gazed on itself in the glass of the endless sea.

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