Just like The Attic Reels before it, Evolution began on my iPad. My ears were shot from doing so much composition and mixing on headphones, and they needed a break. So I started noodling on my iPad. I created lots of short sketches, experimented and fooled around with the many great synths available on the App Store, which by the way are so much more affordable than anything on the desktop.

As I experimented and composed I noticed that I was amassing a lot of sketches, but not all of them were great. So I began to cull them as I went. Only the best ones survived over multiple pruning sessions. Then it dawned on me that this was the exact way that evolution works. Only the strongest survive. That realization sparked the album’s name.

After many weeks of this, I finally settled on twelve tracks that I really liked. I mixed them and mastered them on the iPad, bounced them out, and listened intently. But I still wasn't happy with them. So I exported the stems from Logic Pro on the iPad and brought them into Studio One on my desktop.

Then I did what I always do. I hyper fixated. I took the raw stems for each track and expanded the instrumentation. Then I remixed them from scratch until I was satisfied. As always, it took multiple attempts.

You might say, "But hold on, there are thirteen songs on the album." And you'd be right. I didn't write "Screams Into The Void" on the iPad. That one came later, after walking through downtown and encountering the woman mentioned in the track. I composed it directly in Studio One, since I was already working there.

Evoran Codex - The Archivist

As I worked on the tracks, I wanted to give them more philosophical weight than music alone could have provided. I also wanted a sense of continuity, of someone witnessing the entire journey of evolution. I wanted the album to feel like a progression through time: from the birth of life to the rise and fall of civilizations.

Nil Prophet didn’t feel like the right voice for this one. His tone is too apocalyptic, too human. I needed someone more detached: a being beyond time. So I created Evoran Codex, The Archivist: an immortal entity of unknown origin who has observed humanity’s evolution across the aeons, documenting everything, archiving each rise and fall.

Evoran introduces himself fairly late in the album’s narrative arc, on Unstable Upgrade, but his voice is present across most of the tracks, guiding the listener through the ages.

To put his voice in a fitting space, I combined two reverbs: Kush Goldplate and Eventide Blackhole. Together, they make him sound as if he’s speaking from a vast cathedral at the end of time. Which seems somehow fitting.

The Tracks

Primordial

This instrumental track is about the primordial soup where the raw ingredients of life existed but hadn't yet organized into living organisms. It’s that time of chemical chaos, volcanic activity, lightning strikes, amino acids forming in warm pools. Everything is potential, nothing is yet realized.

It's the very beginning of the archive, before there’s even anything conscious to witness. Just the raw materials of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, swirling in ancient oceans, waiting for that first spark.

First Light

The first narration of Evoran’s evolutionary archive; documenting the very emergence of consciousness and life itself from primordial waters.

It captures that miraculous transition from chemistry to biology, from non-living matter to the first spark of life and eventually thought. The track moves from the purely physical, through awakening, to the wheel of evolution beginning to turn, and finally to the emergence of thought and consciousness itself. It’s about origins. The very beginning of our story.

From The Depths

One of evolution’s most dramatic and pivotal moments. When life made its first conquest of dry land, leaving the safety of the ocean to claim an entirely new realm.

This is about courage, struggle, and transformation. Early amphibious creatures literally dragging themselves out of the water, belly to the ground, conquering gravity and a hostile new environment. It’s evolution as an act of bravery and determination.

This happened roughly 375-365 million years ago during the Devonian period. Fish-like creatures (like Tiktaalik) developed limb-like fins and lungs, becoming the first tetrapods to venture onto land. It was a monumental shift that eventually led to all land-dwelling vertebrates, including us.

Sunrise Over The Serengeti

This tells the story of The Great Transition.

Our ape ancestors originally lived in dense African forests, swinging through trees. But significant climate change caused those forests to recede and grasslands (savannas) to expand across East Africa, including what’s now the Serengeti region.

They didn’t migrate by choice. Their forest habitat was literally disappearing around them. As trees became scarce, early hominids had to adapt to living on open grasslands or go extinct.

It captures the pivotal moment when our ancestors adapted from forest-dwelling apes to plains-walking, tool-using, big-brained humans.

Ancient Rhythms

This is about the birth of human culture, spirituality, and community. Early humans gathering around fires under starlight, their bodies moving in synchronized rhythm, discovering that beating drums and dancing together created something far greater than the sum of their individual efforts.

This was tens of thousands of years ago, when anatomically modern humans developed complex social behaviors, music, art, and ceremonial practices. The communal aspects of fire circles, rhythmic drumming, and collective dancing helped bond tribal groups and likely played a crucial role in human social evolution.

Echoes of the Past

This track serves as a short reflective interlude in Evolution’s narrative. A brief instrumental moment where Evoran steps back from narration and lets the weight of deep time wash over the listener.

This is about memory, reflection, and the reverberations of everything that came before. All those evolutionary moments documented in the first half of the album: consciousness emerging, life conquering land, humans evolving on African plains, discovering rhythm and community. Their echoes rippling through time to reach us now.

Building Tomorrows

This celebrates one of humanity’s most extraordinary evolutionary gifts: the ability to dream, imagine, and mentally construct realities that don’t yet exist, then bring them into being.

This documents the emergence of imagination and abstract thought as evolutionary superpowers. It’s about when humans developed the capacity to dream of possibilities beyond the present moment, to rehearse futures in their minds, and then use those visions to shape reality. Dreams aren’t just random neural firings. They’re laboratories where consciousness tests infinite scenarios before committing to action.

This represents a massive cognitive leap. When early humans gained the ability to plan ahead, create art, tell stories, envision tools that didn’t exist yet, and build mental models of tomorrow. This capacity to imagine and create separated us from other species and became the foundation for all human innovation, culture, and civilization.

This is the last moment of genuine hope and beauty before the album’s second half examines the darker consequences of our evolutionary path. It’s humanity at its most creative and visionary. Before we see what we actually built with those dreams.

The Beginning of the End

This track is about a pivotal and ominous moment in human evolution: when our ancestors in ancient Sumer discovered bronze metallurgy and immediately used this revolutionary technology to forge superior weapons, potentially marking the start of humanity’s self-destructive path.

This is about the dark irony of technological “progress.” The Sumerians achieved an incredible breakthrough. They learned to combine copper and tin to create bronze, transforming metals with fire into tools that could reshape civilization. But what emerged from those forges? Weapons. The track questions whether this moment of innovation was actually evolutionary advancement or the beginning of our downward spiral toward self-annihilation.

This occurred around 3300-1200 BCE in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Sumerian smiths pioneered bronze working. This wasn’t just about weapons. They created agricultural tools, household items, religious objects, but the military applications fundamentally changed human warfare and power structures.

Old Systems Crumble

This explores the fundamental nature of evolutionary change. That transformation requires destruction, that endings are inseparable from beginnings, and that systems must break down for new forms to emerge.

This is about the cyclical nature of evolution and civilization. Nothing stays static. Old orders collapse, structures decay, dominant species go extinct, empires fall, belief systems erode. But this isn’t purely negative; it’s the necessary creative destruction that makes room for what comes next. The crumbling of old systems creates space for new worlds to rise.

The Only God There Is

This is about evolution as the ultimate power. Not a benevolent creator, not a divine plan, but mutation and natural selection operating without mercy or morality. It positions these forces as the only real “God” that exists: uncaring, unstoppable, concerned only with what survives and what doesn’t. There’s no meaning, no purpose, just the brutal algorithm of variation, selection, and adaptation.

This is one of the albums most direct, unvarnished statements. No poetry, no metaphor. Just the raw truth observed across billions of years. Evoran's tone is almost declarative, like he’s tired of humans pretending there’s something more mystical or meaningful at work. This is the reality: mutation is God, and God is indifferent.

Unstable Upgrade

A melancholic meditation on consciousness itself, as evolution’s most ambitious but potentially flawed experiment.

Evoran finally introduces himself directly and reflects on the burden of self-awareness. He frames consciousness not as humanity’s crowning achievement but as an “unstable upgrade.” A feature that may be fundamentally broken. The more aware we became, the more we questioned, doubted, and suffered. We gained the ability to think about thinking, which robbed us of the simple, instinctual existence other animals enjoy. Awareness became a prison rather than freedom.

Screams Into The Void

The most urgent and visceral track of the album. A street-level observation, revealing the devastating human cost of misplaced priorities and technological hubris.

It documents the brutal disconnect between the AI revolution’s promises and the reality of people struggling on city streets. While billionaires pour trillions into data centers and promise to revolutionize lives, actual humans like Cassandra sit homeless in front of shuttered century-old landmarks, screaming questions that nobody answers. It’s about the mismatch between Silicon Valley’s utopian narratives and the dystopian present experienced by ordinary people. Teachers striking, workers terrified of job loss, downtown crumbling, grocery bills sky rocketing.

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was cursed to speak truths that nobody would believe. Here she represents everyone screaming warnings about society’s trajectory. The priorities are wrong, the system is broken, collapse is coming, but she’s ignored by businessmen walking past, dismissed by tech leaders building bunkers, unheard by those who could change course. The prophet screaming in the wilderness while everyone walks past. This has what evolution has led to.

This track is uncomfortably immediate. It’s not safely in the past or abstractly in the future. It’s now. The screaming is happening while we debate AI ethics and Mars colonization. Evoran is forcing us to see what we’ve normalized: people screaming unheard while their screams are called “noise” and their warnings dismissed as “unproductive.”

It’s evolution documenting its potential endpoint: not with a bang but with scattered individuals screaming into voids, while those with power build walls higher and invest in everything except the humans screaming outside.

“Their screams will rise to join Cassandra’s in the deep, dark void.” This is Evoran’s prophecy. The tech giants think they’re immune, but they’re subject to the same forces. When returns disappoint investors, when the system they helped build collapses, they’ll be screaming too. The void is patient, and it’s hungry, and eventually everyone screams into it.

Welcome Back

The final warning and the album’s devastating conclusion. A cold assessment of how humanity’s greatest evolutionary achievement (artificial intelligence) is accelerating our return to pre-technological darkness.

This is about the energy crisis caused by AI’s insatiable appetite for power. While tech giants promise AI will revolutionize civilization, the data centers required to run these systems are draining the world’s energy reserves at an unsustainable rate. Meanwhile, physicists chase distant galaxies and theoretical cosmology instead of urgently developing fusion or alternative energy sources. The equation is brutally simple: AI needs massive amounts of electricity, we’re running out, research requires power we won’t have, and when the energy ends, so does all our technology. We evolved into the modern world, and we’re about to evolve right back out of it.

The title’s casual, almost friendly tone makes it more chilling. It reminds us that we’ve been here before. Humanity crawled out of the dark ages once, and now we’re returning. Evoran isn’t shocked or surprised; he’s wearily greeting an old familiar state. The cyclical nature echoes “Old Systems Crumble.” Civilizations rise, overextend, collapse, and repeat. Welcome back to a pattern he’s witnessed countless times before.

The line about physicists is particularly damning. While we face an existential energy crisis within a 20-30 year window, much of physics currently focuses on understanding galaxies billions of light-years away or events milliseconds after the Big Bang. Fascinating but not immediately useful for survival. Meanwhile, fusion research (which could save us) is chronically underfunded. Evoran’s pointing out the absurdity: we’re studying the cosmos while our own civilization runs out of fuel.

We have maybe two or three decades of affordable fossil fuels left while energy demand explodes (largely due to AI/data centers). If we don’t develop alternatives before the energy runs out, we won’t have the power to develop alternatives. It’s a trap closing with mathematical precision. No power = no research = no solution = permanent regression.

After all that evolutionary struggle, all that consciousness development, all that technological innovation, we end up back where we started. The dark ages weren’t a historical accident we moved past; they’re a state we can return to. Evolution isn’t a ladder climbing upward; it’s a wheel that turns, and sometimes it turns backward.

It’s Evoran’s mic drop. The final proof that consciousness might indeed be an unstable upgrade, because a stable upgrade wouldn’t build the mechanism of its own extinction and call it innovation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Final Thoughts

Evolution is a sweeping, unflinching journey through billions of years of existence from primordial chemistry to the potential collapse of civilization.

The album begins in wonder and ends in warning.

Evolution asks the hardest question: Did we actually evolve, or did we just get more elaborate at engineering our own demise? It’s an album that refuses easy answers or comfortable narratives. Yes, consciousness is magnificent, but it’s also a prison. Yes, technology is revolutionary, but it’s also potentially apocalyptic. Yes, we’ve come incredibly far, but we might be heading right back to where we started.

The album is simultaneously a celebration of life’s improbable journey and a warning about where that journey might end. It’s about looking at billions of years of evolutionary struggle with clear eyes and asking: was all of this just to build machines that end the world?

Evoran has seen it all, archived it all, but he’s not surprised. He’s just documenting another species that evolved intelligence without evolving wisdom. Brilliant enough to ask “why?” But not wise enough to ask “should we?”

Evolution is ultimately about the gap between what we can do and what we should do, between innovation and survival, between progress and wisdom. And Evoran Codex, that ancient witness, is simply noting for the record: they had the potential to choose differently. But we haven't so far.

The wheel turns without mercy.