Cliff Notes to An Evening with Rthrtha

Below are some of the notes sent to the band to explain/confirm the "narrative thread" of the video before we began the final edit. They asked us to include them with the video.
-- Phillip Niemeyer

You and the Octopus Project are going on an evening with Rthrtha. You are escorted by the spirit animal agents of Rthrtha. Rthrtha is sort of like a Chuthlu, an ineffable extra-dimensional creature, incomprehensible to human perception. But unlike those H.P. Lovecraft creations, Rthrtha is a good guy and just wants to party.

We start out in Barton Springs, in the last cool blue-greens of late afternoon, which become the hazy orange overhang of an early Texas evening. We start in the world we know. The first harbringers of Rrthrtha are the butterflies. They surround and make some cool ass patterns and shit. They escort you into the deeper woods traveling in the shrurbs beside the roads. You know how when you travel in the woods near the road, it's almost like being traveling underground or in a leafy hyperspace? This is especially true in Austin. Along with way we receive a spiritual text message from Rthrtha himself, writ large upon reality.

The butterflies take you further out of town until you find yourself in an odd bower of peacocks, the second agents of Rthrtha. Suddenly we are cruising over the desert, enjoying the calm before the guitar/bat/butterfly-plosion.

The bats are the third agents of Rrthrtha. They come only at sundown. At first the bats are black. Gradually the truly Rthrthan pink bats appear. We fly from a progressively otherworldly sundown, to an extra-dimensional dusk. Clouds, mountains, cities, butterflies, peacocks, and bats travel with us and through us.

We arrive at a bridge. Upon crossing we see nothing but a swirl of blue Rth-energy.

... and then ...

Our minds are blown inside out. We are in space moving at fucking light speed. The fourth agent of Rthrtha, the primal id of life force joins us in a struggle against the cosmic winds of change. It's that wierd hairy space creature! It looses all identity to be reborn as pure energy. Our consciousness, too, becomes unmoored. Together we struggle, all ugly will, against the inevitabilty nature and time accelerated.

Sucks for the Octopus Project, but at this point it becomes clear that they will not return to Earth unchanged. An Evening with Rthrtha is a permanent transformation. Rthrtha just parties too hard for our merely three deminsional brains to handle. At last we meet Rthrtha itself. We reverse-evolve into cellular life, orange and vital in the primal cosmic ether. With Rthrtha's touch we disintegrate into a blackness punctuated only by sub-atomic peace. We are nothing but elementary points of energy. Evening becomes night.

June 14, 2008