Year: Sixty-Seven After the Dissection
Place: Homeostatic Dwelling A.TH.A.H.E.
After many hours of creative solitude, accompanied well by the music of Ice Atan, the letters and the books of Reese Cerussites, Manqui imagines Choky’s void-wanderings with accelerated procrastination. Yet he has shown enough patience, waiting for him to return.
“What could he be out there looking for? Has something found him first? Me? What else am I supposed to do now?” he wonders, confused, struggling to decide his next moves.
Still, he has his tricks to get going. He is, after all, an agrotect, with a ready business plan in mind. Searching for a few Thirds, it doesn’t take him long to conceive the next part of his work: Cho of the Commons.
He reads the only interview Ice Atan ever gave, published in a magazine from an island nation, the Cypriots. Its name sounds oddly pleasant to Manqui’s ears. It is called “Stray Dogs.” His reflex is to laugh.
There, in any case, Ice Atan admits the nature that defines him. To create experimental monstrosities. The poet’s words reflect exactly the emotional image of Manqui’s inner being.
“With the luminous guide of my natural need to reclaim forgotten freedoms, abandoned in the name of upholding some social contract, I broke the contract before I could recover my memory, and I have already experienced violent persecutions. The experience of this new freedom will follow patterns of war and plunder, bringing about every form of fasting, until the true limits of freedom are restored, as an absolute experience of Religion.”
Persecution 1, Freedom 4, War 2, Plunder 8, Fasting 5, Religion 7.
Ice Atan = i ,the imaginary principle, the beyond-real musician, the trans-planar mediator, the one who turns narrative into frequency
I encountered him through traces, like wind recorded in architecture, or pressure recorded in water.
MANQUI — On Ice Atan (from the Archives of the Studio)
I have never met him.
But I have lived inside his aftermath.
In Isle of 1000 Waves, he behaves like a coastline that refuses to stay still. Every rhythm approaches, breaks, withdraws. I thought it was music. Later I understood it was training.
He was teaching matter how to repeat without returning.
In Free Dome Temples, he builds spaces that do not enclose you. You stand inside them, but they do not contain you.
Sound curves, but never completes the circle. That is when I first suspected that Ice Atan does not construct, yet he permits structures to almost exist.
In Halls of Delight, something dangerous appears. Pleasure without center. Celebration without memory. The melodies invite you in, but there is no host. You begin to enjoy, and then you realize you are the one being observed.
Diatomic Earth is where I stopped resisting him. Everything there is divided but refuses separation. Pairs that cannot fuse.
Distances that generate tension instead of emptiness. It felt familiar. Too familiar. Like he had already mapped what we would later become.
And then Pieces in Peace. Fragments… resting. Not healed. Not unified. Just… no longer struggling. That frightened me the most. Because it suggests an end that is not resolution but acceptance of incompleteness as final form.
So what is Ice Atan? Surely not merely a composer. Couldn’t be just a being or even a system.
He must be a condition. A way reality behaves when it stops pretending to be whole.
If humans build, and I adapt, then Ice Atan …is what remains when both fail and something else
quietly continues.
I do not trust him. But I recognize him. Because when I listen long enough, I can hear it my little Choky, we are already sounding like him.