Get all 66 Michael Bell releases available on Bandcamp and save 90%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Nothing Dies, Magic Hat, Funeral, Breacher, Utburd, Recurrence, Symbiogenesis, End of Days, and 58 more.
1. |
Oxygen
06:13
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The first time I saw them beneath the lens, I was helpless to tears. Tiny green filaments danced within a droplet of oil.
Cyanobacteria. The things that made our sky.
2.4 billion years ago, they created a disaster of immeasurable scale. Verdant mats of cyanobacteria learned to absorb light and exhale oxygen — A rarefied gas in those early skies. It was a fickle, reactive thing, transforming all that it touched. As verdant scum produced ever more oxygen and their stromatolites rose higher and higher, the world began to rust.
It took land and sea alike. Sandstone cliffsides turned ferric red as oxidizing winds howled. Viridian waters turned deathly clear, bleeding shimmering bands of magnetite. As rust took the planet, there was nowhere left but the skies. Oxygen flooded that primordial atmosphere, and the creatures of the ancient world choked on a strange and deadly air.
What few survived learned to breathe deep the calamitous haze, exhaling forms of intricacy untold. Uncountable more were lost forever — Too small to fossilize. Too small for us to remember.
We are children of disaster, blessed with memory and volition unbound.
Once more the sky burns with acrid air not meant for us.
This time it can be stopped.
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2. |
Necropolis
04:51
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The two of them, mother and daughter, tool their car through a grid of empty lots and sandy streets. Curbs and signposts map empty foundations. Desert light glares from rusted iron and concrete.
A gutted cinderblock hotel looms over the lake shore. Pale sky glows through empty window frames. Dirt and garbage overflow the swimming pool in the courtyard. Messy graffiti splashes its walls, and black water swirls in its flooded basement.
The rocky beach steams in the sun. Flies buzz above the empty eye sockets of desiccated carp heaped on crystallized salt. The lapping water reeks of rot.
The girl and her mother stand at the waterline, whispering observations. Their voices die in the air. They stop talking. Far across the water a motorboat pulls a skier, in silence.
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3. |
Trilobite
01:18
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4. |
Sea Ice
04:02
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I live at the edge of the San Juan Archipelago. Today this is a
region of rainy forests grazed by low cloud, and expanses of calm
gray water, but 50,000 years ago this landscape was under a
couple miles of ice, the vast movement of it carving out these
bays and islands.
A bit further south, giant sloths as big as grizzly bears once
reached into the trees for leaves, and herds of wooly mammoths
shook their steaming heads in the cold morning air while saber-
toothed cats watched them from grassy hills.
And to the north, in inexorable advance, lay the migratory paths
of the ones fixing knapped stone points to their spears with tight
coils of sinew as they rested in their houses of bone.
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5. |
A Circle of Ash
04:56
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When I was eight, nine years old what I loved most was monsters. If I could scrape together 25 cents I’d add another issue to my collection of horror comics, lurid anthologies crawling with risen corpses, bloody fangs, and portals to hell. A punning, sardonic ghoul introduced each story.
I also loved spooky short story collections. My parents laughed at me and said, “get your head out of the coffin!” but still wrote checks to send along with the Scholastic Book Club order forms, my selections carefully X’d. Eventually the box would arrive to the classroom, and the nuns would look on with disgust as I retrieved my books.
One decaying paperback I’ve kept to this day is “Ghosts, Ghouls, and other Horrors.” Beneath a cover replete with a languorous corpse-faced ghoul facing a winged skull grinning under a full yellow moon, I found stories of sadistic prison poltergeists, ceilings that dripped blood, and unquiet family tombs. Reading with a flashlight, the shadows of bedtime came alive, and my nightmares took on a vivid, terrifying clarity.
But the book that haunted me most was “Stranger than Science. Among these purportedly true stories was the tale of David Lang, who stepped out of his carriage one day, walked striding across an empty field to his watching family, and disappeared, never to be seen again. Rushing to the spot where he had vanished, his family found only a burnt circle in the grass.
Later they swore they had heard their father’s voice, calling, as from far away.
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6. |
Ammonite
01:24
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7. |
Urban Meadows
05:34
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In their dying industrial world ruins fascinate them. Once they would have demolished and rebuilt, but now their empty malls and department stores and parking garages go dark and rotten, moldering in the rain dripping from fallen ceilings.
Video documentarians strap lights to their foreheads and walk streets broken by new forests. Their beams sweep the debris of shattered rooms, and grainy images of sodden magazines, broken display cases, and gutted electronics appear on distant screens. The explorers narrate their discoveries in urgent whispers.
And always looking for the hidden door, the descending staircase to places yet deeper and darker, their lamps flickering in an enveloping silence.
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8. |
Unfixed
05:16
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In time, the wan light filtering through the skylight took on a thick, liquid quality. Motes of dust hung suspended in it, as unmoving as insects in amber. The woman could not remember having woken, or having slept. It had always been late afternoon, and she had always been in the house, alone.
She herself felt both fixed and unfixed. Sometimes she rushed through the house, pulling out drawers and upending furniture, searching for some lost thing she could not remember, and then she stopped for long vague moments, sitting on the floor among scattered clothes and cushions.
Through her living room window, the driveways and lawns of the street outside the house looked like grainy video, blank houses under a blank sky crossed with wire. Occasionally a shimmering shadow crossed her view, emitting a distant buzzing, like a voice in a dropped phone.
The wan light of late afternoon descended from the skylight. The dust hung suspended in it. The woman could not remember having woken, or having slept. It had always been late afternoon, and she had always been in the house, alone.
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9. |
Drowned Cities
08:48
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This machine has built itself. It rises in the desert, from the oil, in blood and flame. Lines of robot soldiers advance in the poisonous haze. People and animals flee before them. Refugees pick their way through broken concrete, scattered clothes, and smoldering bodies.
It’s not the bright future we imagined. Where are our flying cars, we ask, our hotels on the moon? Those fleeing the sun gather at the steel fences raised by the north. They squat under their frayed plastic tarps and count coins. Men in hulking pickup trucks gaze at them through the bars, tapping their rifles.
The species of the Earth are dying. The forest is burning, cleared for beef. The sea is filling with plastic, and Amazon warehouses loom over vast cities made of cardboard and wire. The documentary images appear on our screens, but we don’t believe them. We are sure they are deep fakes. Someone used an AI to make them. It’s a scam. We only see what we want to believe. Until it arrives in a box it’s not real.
But we can close our eyes and peer a little way ahead. We see white crosses leaning over pyres of blackened bone, and ragged tents on the white house lawn, and a smoking sky humming with drones. The sea is churning through downtown Los Angeles, and. overloaded SUVs creep north on choked highways, men raging at each other through their windshields.
Trailing behind them, the pitted earth, pocked with bleeding holes.
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10. |
Graptolite
01:22
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Michael Bell Bellingham, Washington
A Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too.
Some of this is music for video games. The rest is a fairly raw document of my ongoing attempt to find something new among the blinking lights in my studio at home.
Michael Bell recommends:
Noveller got me started. This is essential listening for guitar explorers. Always inspires me to continue the search for new ways to shape the air.
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This is the sound of music after music. For brave listeners (or those, like me, who aspire to be).
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Some Music for Robby Müller
by SQÜRL
If you find yourself washed in blissful guitar feedback as you play alone in your attic studio at 3am, this is for you.
go to albumIf you like Michael Bell, you may also like:
Disasters for Piano
by David Peacock
David Peacock reimagines the Disasterpeace score for piano.
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Mini Metro: RMX KIT
by Disasterpeace
Disasterpeace's latest game soundtrack is packed to the gills with samples, mimicking the background noise of the subways in the game.
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featured on Bandcamp Radio Nov 5, 2013
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