Armitage
By Disposable Planet on June 8, 2024 1:24 am
The Full Length Album Music Video on Youtube
"'Case.' He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. 'My name is Armitage." The dark robe was open to the waist, the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach flat and hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach. 'Sun's up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy.'
Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked the scalding coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation ricepaper wall. He saw the angular gold ring through the left lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled."
The Color of Television, Neuromancer-inspired album, Track #5 - "Armitage".
This week we meet the organizer of the job that steals Case away from the streets of Chiba City. Armitage, formerly known as Colonel Willis Corto, is a military man with a secret past and a split personality.
He was part of Operation Screaming Fist, a shadowy black op that took place during the War. His plane went down over a Russian military cybertarget and he was injured severely and completely destroyed mentally. Wintermute, one of the AI characters in the novel, conducts a clandestine rehabilitation experiment to their own mysterious ends where Armitage/Corto's mind is reconstructed by the aid of a computer guided therapy administered by Wintermute himself.
It's a dark track to say the least. Alarms wail, breakbeats morph in quality, dissonances screech, and the deep sound plays of Armitage's plane going down, taken out of the sky over Russia. While Armitage replays this event over and over in his head as he struggles with his own past trauma, you can hear Wintermute's voice teasing him and coaching him back into a broken patchwork existence. "What is reality?" it asks as the plane crash repeats. Running down the center of the bundle is a single bare and empty channel, splitting Armitage/Corto's mind into two disparate entities.
He's yet another tragic figure in Neuromancer - a person broken by circumstance and manipulated by the emergent artificiality of cyberspace. Wintermute uses him, programming him like a machine to plan the job that will result in Wintermute's Turing restrictions being circumvented so that he might merge with his sibling AI, Neuromancer, who resides in Rio. The gang doesn't trust Armitage, but they know he is in control, for now. He is a fractured man who has only known suffering.
Thanks for listening so far! More to come!
The full album is here for free licensed under CC Non-Commerical Share Alike with all M8 song bundles included: https://disposableplanet.bandcamp.com/album/the-color-of-television
All character names and quotes from Neuromancer by William Gibson.
This album is entirely unofficial.
Dedicated to my folks, Ralph and Sandra. RIP and infinite love.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)