The Devil's Staircase - Mother Mycelium (CD)
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The Devil's Staircase returns with Mother Mycelium, a second album that carries the band's central project forward: taking the mathematical rules that give rise to order in nature and composing music that reflects that ethos. Written by bassist Luis Nasser and performed by a four-piece spanning Chicago, Stockholm and Mexico City, the record was made with the support of National Science Foundation award PHY-2110425.
Chapter 1: The Illusion of Knowledge resumes the Gravitation suite begun on the debut and pushes past Kepler and Newton into Einstein. Parts 3 through 5 pull a physicist into a black hole and hold him there: kinematic time dilation rendered as the same music heard by different inertial observers, then the center of gravity as tonal center as spacetime stretches around him, and finally his last second drawn out into a wormhole paradox that erases its own cause.
Chapter 2: The Folly of the Human Parasite turns from spacetime to the ecosystem. Las Sirenas de Valparaiso was written on a Chilean balcony in winter, an ocean requiem for sirens with every reason to hunt us. The closing title track models mycelial growth using L-systems, the parallel generative grammars normally used to describe how plants develop, interpreted here as music. It is a composition about who is really running the show in our ecosystem, and a call to wake up while there is still time.
Line-up / Musicians:
Luis Nasser - Bass & Sound Design
Mattias Olsson - Drums, Percussion & Mellotron
Aaron Geller - Electric & Acoustic Guitars
Tim McCaskey - Acoustic & Electric Guitars
With:
Sarmen Almond - The Voice of The Sirens
Pablo García Valenzuela - Synthesizers & Sound Design
Jamison Smeltz - Saxophone
Tracks:
Chapter 1: The Illusion of Knowledge
1. Gravitation pt 3: Clockwork Echo
2. Gravitation pt 4: Chronal Abyss
3. Gravitation pt 5: Polchinski's Nightmare
Chapter 2: The Folly of the Human Parasite
4. Las Sirenas de Valpar
5. Mother Mycelium
Format: CD
Artist: The Devil's Staircase
Release Date: October 9, 2026