In elementary school, I’d make frequent trips to the library to leaf through baseball almanacs and battered Goosebumps paperbacks while watching patrons play Runescape in my peripheral vision — one eye on the page, one eye wandering towards chunky desktop monitors that rose from the computer lab’s rows of tables. I’d never had the chance to play the game before, but there was a distant, mysterious quality to its sickly pea-soup landscapes and featureless inhabitants that stimulated my imagination from afar. Spying on the bustling medieval cityscapes that spanned rows of computer screens whose curved panes of glass protruded like beer guts, I imagined the music that wafted through this world’s streets to sound quite similar to the dissonant, future-gnostic noise rock of Terre Noire’s Book of Everything
An imposing collection of 23 demos that range from early Sonic Youth guitar tapestries to Gothic komische architecture to glitchy freak-folk jams, Book of Everything is as simultaneously alluring and creepy as Runescape appeared to me through the corner of my eye. Despite its intimidating exterior, though, it’s quite an accessible listen. Muscly post-punk cuts like “Forces” land right in the wheelhouse of Bauhaus fans, while the hearthlike ambience of “Sad Dream Again” should provide respite from chilling, surrealist soundscapes like “Fever Grove” and “Heyday”. It’s a virtual world to take a few wrong turns and get hopelessly lost in.