Fallen Nation Audiobook

Calling all cars!

I've set up the bandcamp to begin releasing the chapters of the Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End audiobook as unique albums (one per chapter). Some old albums and collaborations that tie into the narratives of the novel are included on that page, but the real purpose of that page is for the audiobook albums.

These will have a great deal of original soundtrack material. I already have many hours of material from my work and past collaborations with many other musicians, but there is still plenty of room for new material- your own, or for us to work on together.

I am not aware of anyone else having done an audiobook like this before. (Though it wouldn't stop me if someone has.)

Contact me if you have material you'd like included. It is preferable if you can provide it as .wav or .aif though high res .mp3 can work.

It'd also help if you are actually familiar with the book.

I would also consider voice actors though if you're interested in that, I need reliability. It'll be a real hassle if someone is reading a chapter and drops off the face of the planet halfway through. So if no better and fully reliable options present themselves I'll be reading a lot of it.

Music will all be used under a creative commons license. I'm asking permission to use submissions, not rights to own it. PLEASE include your name as you'd like to be credited in the title of the files, and contact me immediately if when these are released I manage to miss crediting anyone in the shuffle. I try to be very careful on big group projects like this to credit everyone on each relevant item but as these credit lists can get very extensive, a second pair of eyes can't hurt. I look forward to seeing what we can do together!

Time-frame: I'm aiming to have at least the first album released in 2012. The sooner the better.

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

Merry Media-Mas You Cheap Bastards

Fucking lunacy.

For a very limited time, you can download a 1.2 GIGABYTE archive containing madness of almost Lovecraftian proportions. This includes selections of music and podcasts produced over the past 10 years, occult weirdness, conversations, audiobook episodes, as well as a few tidbits I've yet to put out publicly. There is also a smaller selection of documents, and many clues and portents of work to come.

Every year, I like to clean out what came before and plan a bit for the year ahead. This coming year I have a lot of exciting projects waiting in the wings which draw on all of my past experience, but also supersede it.  I feel like I'm putting many thing behind me, erasing the past and trying to build a mythology anew-- and it's maybe not entirely coincidental that this represents breadcrumbs along a decade of collaboration and production, as this decade comes to a close (in my book, 2010, not 2009.) It's like an aethyric spork that I'm digging into my innards to clear out room for more innards. Except...nothing at all like that, thank God. But if you put these tracks in your iPod I promise you'll get an erection that'll last at least seven days or your money back! (Male, female. Doesn't matter.)

DOWNLOAD before this buff eagle devours the shit out of that poor girl. (.RAR archive. Save as.)

While you're at it, buy something new. Tequila isn't free and my laptop needs spinning rims. 

Join My Cult! ebook introduction

Here is the new introduction to the Join My Cult! ebook presently available on Original Falcon's website.

Rewind the tape to 2000, suburban America. Our progress had reached an apex, and while it would in retrospect be seen clearly as Hubris, at the time, there was no end in sight. At this time, it seemed there was the beginnings of a second (or third?) wave American counterculture that never actually completely coalesced, derailed by the conspiracy theories and atrocities that defined the following near-decade.

1998-2000 is when the core of Join My Cult! was written, despite the publication date. I organized and wrote a great deal of it, but really it owes itself to a group of friends that shared a similar experience moving out of adolescence at that time. The bulk of the conversations in this book are real, derived from online and off-line interactions as we delved headlong into exploration of psychedelics, the occult, and sex.

One criticism often leveled at this text has been that "real people never speak like this." This makes me laugh because, although it is a perfectly valid criticism- sane people certainly don't- in this case, we did. And it is with a tongue-in-cheek mockery of our often overly enthusiastic, nevertheless earnest state that I left this material mostly as is, even though I shudder to think some might take it purely at face value.

It has been interesting, over the past six years or so, to receive letters from readers- most of them telling me, to my surprise, how much the book effected them or even "changed their lives." Of course, amongst these were also plenty of people who felt the need to tell me how truly awful it was, and the notable few who actually went so far as to threaten my life. (I take this as the highest compliment.) When I wrote this book, I was unsure it would ever be published, and certainly many of my friends told me it would be for the better if it wasn't. After it was accepted by New Falcon, I had some hopes of it becoming a break-away cult hit.

In the end, it was neither of these, remaining that odd book you might stumble across one day in the corner of an independent book seller. A puzzling, hilarious, train-wreck of an oddity.

I have come a long way since I wrote Join My Cult!, and (I hope) have grown a great deal as an artist and writer since. But there is an intensity that comes with the blind, youthful enthusiasm of a project like this that I doubt I could replicate. New Falcon never properly edited the first edition, and in retrospect, I'm not sure I can blame them. There are many things in this text that seem like grammatical mistakes, that are intentional (particularly changes between tense and point of view with psychotic frequency), and I can only imagine they gave it a go and threw their hands up at the prospect. I occasionally consider giving it a thorough edit myself, but that thought is quickly washed away when I plunge into the text. This edition does have some minor edits from the original which saw its way into print, and you will find some new additions in the appendix, but there is little I could see changing without possibly disrupting the oddly symmetrical whole of this book, which at first glance looks a lot like total chaos.

So I'm offering it for free now, warts and all, to whomever wants to come along for the ride- and I hope in the process I will introduce some of you to a repository of common experience that might seem strangely familiar.

James Curcio
2009

For more of my work, (writing, music, interviews & more) see http://www.jamescurcio.net This free eBook is released under a Creative Commons License. You can share and print it to your heart's content, though you must get my permission for any other use at jamescurcio at gmail dot com

Read the PDF:



(Link for the image impaired.)

Sign up to the Fallen Nation blog feed (includes the Join My Cult! audiobook, presently in progress.)

Join My Cult! audiobook ep 2-6

iTunes long ago picked up this feed but the one from the Fallen Nation blog isn't showing yet so for the time being I guess I will continue to link the mp3s here.

Check 'em out if you haven't already, it's an odd ride.

Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6

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Join My Cult audiobook iTunes & more

The psychedelic prologue to Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning, Join My Cult! has been rewiring drug-addled brains for the past five years. Now, here, for the first time (because we never bothered to get around to it before), is an installment of the book in audio form.

Rather than post individual episodes on this blog, you can go here to get episodes as they run, or sign up via iTunes, Odeo or the reader of your choice:

Join My Cult! feedburner, episodes past and present.

Join My Cult! audiobook episode 1

The psychedelic prologue to Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning, Join My Cult! has been rewiring drug-addled brains for the past five years. Now, here, for the first time (because we never bothered to get around to it before), is an installment of the book in audio form. LISTEN (mp3)
Want to read it instead? :
Join My Cult! eBook (PDF)

Add this to your iTunes or check out all the episodes as they run


Episode 2 is also now live. Check back here soon for more.

JamesCurcio.com updates

Whew. Organizing content for this site has been much more time consuming than coding it was.

Enjoy.

Lives of Ilya Episode 3

“Melisande? I’ve never heard that name before,” he said truthfully as he bit into a butter cookie.
“It’s French,” she said turning around and sitting back down. She looked passed him for a moment remembering how the name had rolled off Lux’s tongue.

Melisande, my little honeybee…

It was important to live under false pretense in those days. A name could be a death sentence and Lux had crowned her thus…Melisande. It was a good memory; those few years of peace before it all erupted in a bloodbath. She could still see his flaxen hair, his black eyes and that devilish grin as he leaned in to kiss her again.

Lives of Ilya was written by Tara Vanflower and narrated by Jarboe. Soundtrack music by Tara Vanflower.

The Lives of Ilya illustrated novel is available now from Mythos Media and Amazon.com.

Listen to part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning Audiobook Episode 6

Jesus' dreams from within the hospital.

No longer right here, right now. Here operated under different rules. Here was a deserted asylum, being slowly eaten by the encroaching forest, vines replacing windows, morning glory augmenting the brick facades of what appeared to be a college campus. Here was timeless.

Interrupting his musings, the aging Chevy passed, windows rolled down and some Styx love ballad blasting from the tinny speakers. The fortyish man behind the wheel didn’t slow, didn’t even look around.

Jesus waited a polite moment, then crossed the cracked pavement. Dead streetlamps flanked the overgrown paths, some tilting crazily like drunken soldiers. Rusted iron railings drove straight lines through shapeless shrubbery, and as Jesus crept along them, he could hear, in a near-perfect circle around him, the rodents, the insects, the creeping things fleeing at his bow and in his wake. The wave-front of the presenthad passed, failing to take this quiet place along with it. His carefully
reddened flashlight didn’t cast enough light for anyone but a nocturnal pothead or a cat burglar.

Jesus smiled to himself at the thought— Been both of those, I suppose.

Order Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning through Amazon.com now.

Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning audiobook feed.

The original chapter of Join My Cult! excerpted in this episode written by James Curcio, co-written by Ari & Jason Stackhouse.

Fallen Nation audiobook: episode 5

Agent 139 has a chat with his doctor. Music by Johan Ess. (LISTEN.)

Order Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning through Amazon.com now.

Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning audiobook feed.

Fallen Nation audiobook: episode 4

Agent 506 hatches his plan. (LISTEN.)

Order Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning through Amazon.com now.

Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning audiobook feed.

Fallen Nation audiobook: episode 3

Listen to episode 3.


Order Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning through Amazon.com now.

Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning audiobook feed.

Fallen Nation audiobook: episode 1

HOW ROCK AND ROLL SAVED THE WORLD (play now).

Order
Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning.

(For the other episodes in this series,
go here.)

Fallen Nation audiobook: prologue

The story begins with a glimpse of the future, from the swamps of the deep south and a tide that never rolls out...

(Order
Fallen Nation from Amazon.com.)

Direct link to audio.

(Art for this episode's header by Jessika Kaos.)