Ruinology (2023)

Ruinology is by far Metamyther’s most ambitious work to date, and arose from Kneschke’s growing frustration with the human race in the face of widening political divides, a neglect for an encroaching climate crisis, and an increasing celebration of public ignorance. A fantasy of departing the human race began to form in his overactive imagination.

The album centers around an enigmatic cybernetic entity known as Model M who has shunted off his human form, and roams a devastated Earth eons after the last human has expired from an unspecified climate catastrophe (its stage set by “Terra Nullius,” a latin phrase for “No Man’s Land”, as well as “Permanent Kenopsia”).

The entity prepares a gloomy version of the Nasa Voyager Record, sending the album’s sixteen tracks into space as messages about the human race (as heard on “To Send a Beacon”). Across two hours, Model M speaks about concepts like remembrance (“Oxidized Memories,” “A Life’s Wreckage”), the presence and formulation of hate (“God Never Existed,” “Anatomy of an Ugly Thought”), its changing relationship to the self (“The Syntax of Ego Death”) and the desire to leave love itself behind (“The Vestigial Heart”). The specter of ruination is omnipresent, Ruinology concludes with “Immolated Vista,” which finds Model M staring off at the burning wreckage of a city. However, he is not the only one looking on; the vista zooms in to a flower petal, where an insect is perched. In the album’s final moment, the song is eaten by a horde of insects, where just like so many of humanity’s ruins, are reclaimed by nature.