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frogesong

track cover

By CogentInvalid.
Cover art by Wights End opscat-productions SoundCloud OpsCatProductions YouTube.
Released 1/14/2017.
Duration: 2:34.

Listen on Bandcamp or YouTube.

Read artist commentary.

Artist commentary:

CogentInvalid: (Composer)

Frogs were invented in 1812 by William "William" Haversley, a British aristocrat and amateur astrophysicist best known for his bold assertion, in a research paper published in the Oxford Journal of Natural Philosophy in summer 1808, that the holes visible on the moon's surface were signs of a vast sublunarian tunnel system dug out by a long-extinct race of giant space worms and not, as the conventional wisdom of the time had it, caused by the gaseous excretions of propionibacteria. This claim, being in direct contradiction with the teachings of the Catholic Church, had him branded a heretic, and a hefty price was put on his head - the reward for his capture so valuable that by some accounts, the Pope himself snuck into Haversley's bedchambers in the middle of the night in an attempt to assassinate the man, only to find a wax dummy lying in bed and the man himself hours into a long voyage to Bermuda, where he would spend the rest of his life in exile. Life in Bermuda was comfortable, if lonely, and Haversley spent many an evening sitting on the beach watching the sunset and contemplating the many sorrows of his life - until one day when, having had enough of the solitude, he became determined to build the perfect companion for himself, putting all of his scientific knowledge to the test. For months he laid out detailed plans for his creation, accounting for every organ in the creature's body, every stitch in its recycled skin, every bolt in its artificial skeleton (this was, by the way, several years before the publication of Mary Shelley's seminal work Frankenstein and, therefore, predated the popular grave-robbery-and-monster-assembly craze brought about by trend-obsessed plebians). Finally his plans were perfected, and he began to set them in motion - only to discover that he had a severe dearth of biomass to work with, given that the custom among native Bermudans was to cremate their dead and scatter them to the winds rather than dump them someplace convenient like a graveyard. Haversley therefore had to make do with what he could find - a handful of fish scooped out of a nearby swamp, the occasional squirrel - with a heaping of algae lending both raw cellular material and a distinct green hue to the creature's skin. In the end, it came out looking little like the hominid simulacrum he had intended, but his creation, the very first frog, was nevertheless an incredible achievement: an invasive species that crowded out the surrounding ecosystem, spread unstoppably, and still terrorizes us even today.

Wights End: (Artist)

I just reused some of my own old artwork

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