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Mixtape: Blood Letters
Our latest edition of Mixtape features author co-authors Ariel Gordon and GMB Chomichuk, whose dystopian wartime novel, Blood Letters (Great Plains Publications), unfolds through the correspondence of three siblings separated by a world of flesh-eating fog and mechanical monsters. Told through letters, sketches, and poems, their voices intertwine in a moving exploration of survival, loyalty, and what it means to stay human in inhuman times.
Read on for the soundtrack to their story of resilience.
By:
ALU Editor
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Blood Letters, an epistolary speculative fiction novel, was a collaboration, so this playlist is too. When we started out, Ariel wrote from the point of view of Kris, and Gregory wrote as Albany. Like Ariel, Kris is a poet. Like Gregory, Albany is a visual artist. When Millie rose up, we split her down the middle: Ariel wrote human Millie, the bored/lonely teenager left to take care of her family in wartime, and Gregory wrote machine Millie, the brilliant archivist who could look at data and make intuitive leaps.
We set the playlist in two places THE HEART + THE HORROR: Ariel was in charge of the Heart, and Gregory the Horror.
So, please enjoy our strangely-hopeful dystopian novel, our odd little hybrid, and the playlist that goes with it.
About the book:Blood Letters(Great Plains Publications) follows siblings Albany, Kris, and Millie as they navigate a world war of flesh-eating fog and mechanical monsters, clinging to survival, their humanity, and each other through letters, sketches, and poems.
Now, to the songs!
THE HEART 01
Album: Big Science by Laurie Anderson
Song: “O Superman”
Sample Lyrics: “So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. So hold me, / Mom, in your long arms. / In your automatic arms. Your electronic arms. / In your arms. / So hold me, Mom, in your long arms./ Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms. / In your electronic arms.”
Why: “O Superman” was on American musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson’s first album, 1982’s Big Science. It is a great and terrible song, about capitalism, about government and imperialism, communication and surveillance, It feels innovative and revolutionary, even if it was inspired in part by 19th century works by composer Jules Massenet, especially his 1885 opera, Le Cid. To my ears, it most resembles a spoken word poem with some vocoder effects to make it alien. (Speaking of alien, the section of the video where Laurie intones/sings: “You don’t know me, but I know you” and her head is in silhouette and her face dark, except for her mouth, which is incandescent, is…unnerving. Shudder.) Apparently, Anderson wanted her vocals to sound like a Greek chorus, which I also sort of love.
To me, this feel like a poem that Kris or his late cousin Brill might have written and performed, ten years after their war, broken but fierce, in front of a fierce and broken audience, intoning “ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
THE HEART 02
Album: The Bends by Radiohead
Song: “Bullet Proof … I Wish I Was”
Sample Lyrics: “Wax me, mold me / Heat the pins and stab them in / You have turned me into this / Just wish that it was bullet proof / Was bullet proof / So pay me money, take a shot / Lead-fill the hole in me / I could burst a million bubbles / All surrogate and bullet proof”
Why: I’m not a Radiohead fan but my partner and child listen to their music on repeat. So, when I mentioned that I was working on Blood Letters-inspired playlist, they sat me down at 10 pm on a Tuesday and INSISTED we have a listening party. And I could have made a Radiohead-only list—nearly everything on OK Computer (1997) was eerily appropriate—but I settled on this 1995 track. To me, this feels like a fever dream of Albany’s, after he was strapped into a Heavy Shell, late in the war. It feels like one of his quasi-telepathic messages to Millie, who put him there, thinking she could keep him safe.
THE HEART BONUS TRACK
Album: OK Computer by Radiohead
Song: “Fitter Happier”
Sample Lyrics: “An empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism) / Will not cry in public / Less chance of illness / Tyres that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat) / A good memory / Still cries at a good film / Still kisses with saliva.”
Why: This is a spoken word track from OK Computer that is a self-improvement to-do list. It could also be a list from someone—or instance, an automatic /self-aware android from the world of Blood Letters—who wanted to appear human. But it could be a poem from early on in Kris’s rehab at the Brick, where Millie is waiting to see if he reassembles himself into something human, someone safe to bring home.
THE HEART 03
Album: Speak for Yourselfby Imogen Heap
Song: “Clear the Area”
Sample Lyrics: “You find your way back down / And I’ll keep the area clear / Please clear the area / When you find your way back down / In one piece / Then I’ll just be waiting here (right here) / Right here (right here)”
Why: It feels like Anderson is Imogen Heap’s musical grandmother, but I have been listening to 2005’s Speak for Yourself, for 15 years and I just found Laurie Anderson this year. But art is like that: it time travels separate from its makers and its audiences.
What I like about this song, besides my familiarity with it—besides the way that the lyrics could have been written by Millie, patiently/impatiently trying to bring her brothers back home—is that the British-born Heap created the album with no outside help, writing, producing and arranging it herself. That kind of work feels familiar to me, because GMB Chomichuk and I worked on this book off and on for ten years, between other books, before and after the pandemic. I wrote and schemed but Gregory wrote, drew, and laid-out this book. We finished it together, spending days in Gregory’s office on our laptops, talking through plot, tweaking the layout, and following the flares of inspiration to see where they landed.
THE HEART 04
Album: Flight of the Conchords by Flight of the Conchords
Song: “Robots”
Sample Lyrics: “The humans are dead / the humans are dead / We used poisonous gases / And we poisoned their asses / The humans are dead / He’s right they are dead / The humans are dead /They look like they’re dead / It had to be done”
Why: The Flight of the Conchords is a comedy folk duo from New Zealand, originally formed in 1998 but also the subject of a scripted comedy TV series that aired for two seasons in 2007-2009. It features Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, who are part of the ensemble of actors/writers/directors around Taika Waititi. We watched it after finishing What We Do in the Shadows, both the movie and the TV show.
In “Sally,” the episode where this song is played and, coincidentally, the very first episode of the show, Jemaine and Bret are filming their first music video. It’s being shot by their manager Murray (Rhys Darby) in an alley with a flip phone, with Jemaine and Bret in foil-covered boxes, to which Jemaine comments: “Well it doesn’t look like Daft Punk. We wanted ones like Daft Punk.” Our nanite-laden fog isn’t the same as their gas and our automatics aren’t the same as their robots in this comedic/dystopian magnum opus, but I feel a little bit dead watching/listening to this song…
THE HEART 05
Album: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You by Big Thief
Song: “Simulation Swarm”
Sample Lyrics: “From the 31st floor / Of the simulation swarm / With the drone of fluorescence / Flicker, fever, fill the form / With a warm gush / Now I wanna touch / Like we never could before / I’d fly to you tomorrow I’m not / Fighting in this war / I wanna drop my arms and take your arms / And walk you to the shore”
Why: When my daughter Anna was small, I eschewed most of the kid’s entertainment currently on offer and bathed her in media from my childhood, i.e. Shel Silverstein and Dennis Lee’s poems, Raffi’s and Fred Penner’s music (“Bananaphone” anyone?), and early Disney/Pixar/Ghibli films. Her revenge was making me sing her a playlist of songs from the Jungle Book and Winnie the Pooh films at bedtime. I felt punch-drunk from sleep deprivation most of the time but somehow I was able to recall the twists and turns of the deeply and wonderfully silly Sherman Brothers lyrics.
Time is cyclical and now that’s she’s an adult, Anna is introducing me to the music she listens to, including Brooklyn indie band Big Thief. I recognize vocalist-guitarist Adrianne Lenker’s lyrics as being close cousins to poems: they seem to emerge from deep from within her subconscious. They have a dream-logic, akin to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. I like this song in particular because our book contains nasty swarms and characters refusing to fight in an all-absorbing world war. Save the world, the generals implore, but they mean the existing world order and/or political structures and/or capitalism or Kris and Millie and Albany just want to save themselves and what’s left of their family.
THE HORROR
These are musical cues that feel to me like the feeling I was trying to create in the individual scene surrounding the letters and images in Blood Letters. They are a pulse in our BLOOD LETTERS that is unsettling, urgent and startling. These are not sounds to tap your feet to but to make you feel that urge to look over your shoulder just in case something is there.
Our story is not, for me, a criticism of the future. It is a critique of the past and present set in the future. It’s low literature (science fiction) aimed at that high literary tradition of the epistolary novel. It’s full of monsters and killer machines to make it “fun,” but make no mistake it’s a warning more than a fiction. It’s a cautionary tale to remind us why you don’t blame a hammer for a murder. But it’s also a guide to what makes a struggle meaningful, what makes people powerful, what holds us together. Horror media isn’t about what scares you, it’s a meditation about what you would do to keep safe what you love.
THE HORROR01
Album: Beyond the Black Rainbow– Original Soundtrack by Sinoia Caves
Song: “Forever Dilating Eye “
Why: In a world of roaming monstrous unsleeping robotic killers there would be a FOREVER DILATING EYE.
THE HORROR 02
Album: Upstream Color – Original Motion Picture Score by Shane Carruth
Song: “Stirring Them Up as the Keeper of a Menagerie His Wild Beasts “
Why: Our characters each become a sort of beast in the MENAGERIE—and Millicent most of all their KEEPER
THE HORROR 03
Album: The Black Hole – Original Motion Picture Score by John Barry
Song: “Main Title” (Score Version)
Why: Teetering on the edge of an inexorable pull of the BLACK HOLE of technology and our little family is stretched very thin indeed.
THE HORROR 04
Album: Sorcerer – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Tangerine Dream
Song: “Abyss”
Why: They stare into that ABYSS and it looks back at them. It also whispers from the edge of a machine consciousness, an unfeeling place, that each character must nurture for a time to survive our story.
THE HORROR 05
Album: Lost Themes IV: Noir by John Carpenter, Cody. Carpenter, and Daniel Davies
Song: “Machine Fear”
Why: Within them each is a MACHINE FEAR—a methodical mechanical thing that pushes them away from each other at first, and then holds them together. A fear of the machine, and a fear born of it. They have felt the edges of their humanity and learned things, not all of it good.
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Author photo of Ariel Gordon
Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Gordon also works as a publicist for the WIWF and as a copyeditor for the WFP. Gordon’s essay “Red River Mudlark” was selected by Liz Howard as 2nd place winner of the Kloppenberg Hybrid Grain Contest in Grain Magazine and other work appeared recently in FreeFall, Columba Poetry, Canthius, and Canadian Notes & Queries.
Her most recent books include Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate change across the prairies, written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt and published by At Bay Press in fall 2023 and the essay collection Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest, published by W&W in June 2024.
Author photo of GMB Chomichuk
GMB Chomichuk is an award-winning writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in comics, graphic novels, books, role-playing games, film, television and theatre. He is the host of Super Pulp Science, a podcast about how genre gets made. His work in words and pictures ranges from the heartwarming to the bloodcurdling.
Other books by GMB Chomichuk include Apocrypha: The Legend of Babymetal from Z2, Will I See? from Portage and Main Press, The Automatic Age from Great Plains, The Eye Collector from HEAVY METAL, Dragon Nanny from Chasing Artwork, Dead Work from The Dead Work Collective.
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Grab a copy of Blood Letters to read along with [this rockin’ new] playlist. Many thanks to Ariel and Gregory for sharing the soundtrack to their…!
