Alice & Bob Through The Looking Glass

[I am choosing the order of this track by track blog using a random generator, and not necessarily loving the order it’s coming up with….]

Digging quite deep into the memory banks to try and talk about this song. As with Theory of Everything I can remember this song floating around when I was working on Dinas Powys. Probably even earlier. I believe it was recorded and mostly finished in around 2014.

Musically where are we? Somewhere between Broadcast, Field Music, and the theme tune from Pugwall. I reckon I was listening to Summer Camp a fair bit around then too, which could explain some of the sounds on here. 

Let’s not overlook the elephant in the room, the structure of this song is downright odd. Whilst there are repeating sections, they never repeat in the same way. This made it very difficult to teach to the band I was playing with in 2019. There’s also no obvious reason why anything happens the way it does.

I don’t remember trying to make this song odd. It all just made intuitive sense for it to flow this way. I will often start out with an intention to make something odd or straightforward, long or short, or whatever, but in the end intuition always wins. 

Lyrically where are we? Alice and Bob are the names given to particles in explanations of quantum entanglement. The most commonly cited use case for entangled particles is absolutely uncrackable encryption. If Alice encrypts a message, she can give Bob the other particle in an entangled pair as the key. 

I suppose in this song Alice and Bob are in love. Bob sees Alice as she passes through the looking glass, and maybe starts to move away from reality. Because they are connected by entanglement, messages from the other side can still get through. No one else can understand, even as they intercept them. We all know Lewis Caroll’s Alice books are, on some level, about madness. We all spotted the Cheshire Cat reference in 1984, right? (and Light Pollution?).

Another reference in this song is to Permutation City by Greg Egan – a very dense sci-fi novel where competing computer generated realities vie for dominance. What kind of reality is Alice disappearing into? 

I also feel this song forms part of the continuity from Spy Numbers / One Time Pad and onwards into another album I hope to complete someday with a working title Bletchley Park. If being incredibly difficult to finish is any kind of indication of quality within the PWL canon then that record should be the best thing I ever do.