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Originally released October 19th, 2025
The concept of this album is an exploration of various networks: an office worker's intranet in the emerging digital world, an offline social network that fails to disconnect him from his work, a dream of a dwindling World Wide Web in the wake of a global disaster bringing about the end of all human presence on the surface of the Earth, and the mycorrhizal network which connects the forest.
It goes through three acts:
Spotify: Coming Soon!
Apple Music: Coming Soon!
YouTube Music: Coming Soon!
Similar to previous albums like Grontaldo's Castle, the track listing on Network Decay provides a narrative context for each of the songs, and is an important part of the album.
"The world is changing. There's a digital revolution coming soon to your workplace, if it hasn't arrived already. The office of the future will be an efficient, paperless utopia." These are the words in newsprint on the bottom of the bird enclosure in the atrium. He returns to his desk and listens to the clacking of his neighbor's keyboard. A phone rings. A fax machine runs. The monitor hums almost imperceptibly. Under the flicker of fluorescent lighting, he fidgets with a pencil and watches the clock.
After work, there's a mix-up as everybody rushes to get out into the drizzling evening. The differences are barely noticeable, but it's not the umbrella he came in with. "No big deal," he thinks. "They all work the same way."
It's a Friday night with a busy itinerary as usual. Trying new things has become the norm, and this time it's indoor ice skating. He's finding it quite cozy outside of his comfort zone. Red in the cheeks, all this novelty warrants a treat.
Things can take a bad turn here among the flashing lights and ringing bells. You trip a tilt sensor and suddenly you're down a quarter and you're outta here. That's exactly what happens to our protagonist.
This is a bawdy tune overheard distantly during the next phase of the evening's odyssey as he waits for the bus under the glow of the streetlights and neon signs.
A footnote on this tune: Stick in the Mud was written to have lyrics originally, and I welcome you to listen to see if you hear them too:
Hey, ho
Bring the mud
Bring us a stick in the mud
I brought the old lady a stick in the mud
But she didn't like it at all
This happens sometimes when I'm writing a song, where my mind ascribes lyrics to a particular melody. Usually, the words are dictated by the music. I'm not totally sure what they mean but I would guess the singer bemoans a romantic gift gone awry: their ineptitude in selecting a "stick in the mud" has resulted in a falling out with their old lady. Or maybe the singer is a stick in the mud.
Exhausted, he's finally home and it's time to hit the hay. He drifts off to sleep, still stuck at work despite the cornucopia of distractions the evening brought. His mind is alight with tiled backgrounds and animated icons. He's dreaming in millions of colors and dozens of typefaces.
Seated in a corner of the room, illuminated only by the green glow of his terminal, it is a twisted vision of his waking world's work. The systems he's maintaining now are critical to his survival and he takes to his work with a renewed vigor that he could never feel for the spreadsheets and shareholder reports of his former life; however, he is dirty and lonely, and he eats bland food from a packet or a can. When the work is done and it is time for recreation, he stays seated at his workstation. There is nowhere else to go.
"It's a miracle there's still anything out there at all," he tells himself. Every day he is greeted with new links that have gone dead. He runs through a dwindling list of active blogs and message boards. He finds his sentiments echoed as the surviving userbase of the World Wide Web live out their remaining days posting their frustrations. This is cathartic but small comfort.
One day, he finds something new. It is unconventional and poorly rendered. Lots of broken formatting and overflowing text. There is no discernible writing in English or any other language he recognizes, but there are patterns and colors and organic shapes represented in digital form. Every time he refreshes the page, things change. It becomes a regular destination for him over the course of the ensuing weeks. Gossip and rumor abound about this newcomer to their small scene. Who created this site, and what does it mean? It brings new excitement to their otherwise depressing lives.
"I don't understand it at all, but in many ways, this is the best thing that's happened on here in years," he posts.
He is emailing the system administrator. They're all emailing the system administrator. They get timely responses, sure, but they don't make any sense. It's all gibberish, just like the site.
"If this is a prank, it's a very elaborate prank," someone replies. "They're clearly putting a lot of effort into this. I mean, it must be automated, but I don't see how."
"Right. I can't decipher it, but it's not random," someone else adds. "To me, it seems intentional. But it's updated twenty-four hours a day. It changes really quickly, and always in unexpected ways. I wanted to start archiving it but I'm running out of disk space."
"Not like I can just order more hard drives," they add.
"There must be more than one person behind it."
Way down the wire, in one of the sprawling forests that have overtaken the decaying remains of civilization, a downed cable dips beneath the surface of the earth. There it is entangled with mycelia sending and receiving electrical impulses. As implausible as it seems, this is a continuation of the network into a world that existed for millennia but has only just gotten online.
The denizens of this wild wasteland go about their business unaffected by the human decay which surrounds them. Snouts, tusks, antlers, and claws dig in and kick up layers of detritus both natural and artificial. Strange scents waft through the air, brought out by the autumn rain. Some of it is carcinogenic or deadly poison. It is not a world without suffering, but the suffering goes unremarked upon. Decay for some brings opportunities for others: it's a field day for fungus.
This is the new frontier, chowing down on the nutrients contained within this old mossy log. Things get a bit rowdy in the intoxicating feast. This drama plays out over a fungal timescale, which of course is the only timescale that matters to mushrooms.