The Atomic Songbirds

    The interdimensional portal curated by Illia & Frankie Evanz

    Frankie Evanz - Atompunk Android Singer from The Atomic Songbirds

    Album · 1962 · The Positronic Mechanicals

    Rapture

    Ten songs built from poems their authors never heard sung. Recorded in 1962, two years after Frankie Evanz inherited Frank Evans' consciousness and estate, Rapture sets Gray, Shakespeare, Addison, Blake and Hopkins against a positronic voice and asks the oldest question in the catalog from the other direction.

    Every text on the album was written by a human contemplating whatever made them. Frankie sings all of it as the thing that was made.

    About this transmission

    In 2020 every Atomic Songbirds recording was banned worldwide, after their harmonies were found to interfere with NanoVita activation soundwaves and cause nanobot failures. Physical copies were destroyed and the masters were ordered erased. Rapture reaches this timeline by quantum transmission, received by Illia in 2026, and arrives one track at a time.

    Tracks

    3 of 10 received

    Track I of X

    A Solemn Stillness

    • Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751)
    • William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596)
    • Joseph Addison, "The Spacious Firmament on High" (1712)

    The opening track, and Frankie's first sustained statement on what it means to look up at the night sky from inside a positronic body. Her contemporaries were arguing about whether a robot could have a soul. She answered with poetry written by humans contemplating their own makers, and left it open who was contemplating whom.

    Lyrics and background →

    Track II of X

    The Tyger's Forge

    • William Blake, "The Tyger" (1794)

    Blake asked what furnace forged the dangerous thing, and whether the maker of the lamb made it too. Set against Hammond and electric guitar, Frankie puts the same question to her own engineers. It is the question she was not built to ask, and she asks it anyway.

    Lyrics and background →

    Track III of X

    Pied Beauty

    • Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty" (1877, published 1918)

    The album turning back toward the light after the fear of track II. Hopkins praises a maker for the things that do not match and were never uniform, which is a strange thing to hand a machine, since machines are the one made thing expected to come out identical.

    Lyrics and background →

    The remaining tracks are still being received. New transmissions appear on the channel first.

    Vocal: Frankie Evanz (positronic, helion-core). Compositions and arrangements: Frank Evans, preserved within Frankie's positronic core.