I feel like the long-awaited release of Efrim Waite’s final album has somewhat overshadowed the simultaneous strange events in Paris, so I wanted to take the opportunity to write up my thoughts regarding Waite’s whole deal. I’m pulling together the themes of Efrim’s work, their investments, the “life-changing experience” in 2019, ill-fated bandmates, colloids, ADIRA and interest in religion. Some of this is almost certainly a massive overstretch, and I’ve probably missed some details or I’m repeating ideas someone smarter than me already said
A life-changing experience and a first obsession
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Efrim’s 2019 experience was their instigating event, sparking an obsession which led to their overindulgence in colloids and all the (often-fatal) consequences proceeding from that
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It’s unclear what this experience actually was, but the clues we have – THE SONG-WEAVER BEHELD US and “the sublime saw us” – are suggestive of something mystical, spiritual and potentially substance-influenced. Note footnote 2 on Efrim’s page, where Polysemic Sortilege’s hiatus is attributed to “clashing visions”, and the fact that the band members had already planned to work together prior to this “life-changing experience” – I posit that it’s entirely possible that Efrim’s interpretation of the friends’ shared trip was different, and profoundly more intense, to that of the others, leading Waite down paths where they did not want to follow (remember footnote 6, “They made us record our dreams”)
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So, let’s say that the friends imbibed 2-C-I (A+, would recommend) and Waite came out of it profoundly altered, feeling a connection to their soon-to-be bandmates and feeling seen by the song-weaver, the sublime, the architect of the universe
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Waite’s a clever cookie with a Cambridge PhD, so they go down the rabbit hole of emerging biotech, founding DebteraPharma and investing in Sanial before the release of their first solo album. Despite this, For That Which Howls In Multiples is described as pulsing with chaos and loss: I think Waite is lamenting something lost to them in their 2019 experience, but it’s not clear what. Either Waite longs for the sense of connection, the melding together of individuals into a multiplicity, which they have been trying to achieve with new biotech but have not yet reached; or the inverse, that Waite feels pulled out of themself, stripped of their individuality (which they are again trying to restore via technology, where drugs and religion have thus far failed them)
Technological multiplicities
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In 2032, the technology catches up to Waite’s aspiration and they receive (what they think is) the first human colloid, and their first of many. The evolution of the themes in Waite’s work, as they take on more and more colloids, is enlightening. Chimeric work referencing particle physics and miasma, Waite talks of multiplicity or the “many in one” in a disturbingly ambivalent way. Their last album before 2049 is a rebellion against Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenesis; a call for humanity to “unbecome machine” and “become other” once again, potentially a warning against the impending singularity heralded by the rapid growth and expansion of AI and biosurveillance
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Waite has over 100, possibly 100s, of colloids, leading to them requiring a constant intake of drugs to fight ADIRA and presumably other side-effects. I think Waite’s obsession with multiplicity, emerging from their 2019 experience, drove them to this. We know colloids can stimulate neural activity, and we know from Atakan Selvi’s work on APF (and probably from Cupoid’s Arrow) that colloids can be directed to cause “empathy towards someone else’s plea”. Waite wanted to perpetually relive the ephemeral experience of 2019: to quote Walt Whitman, they wanted to “contain multitudes”, even if that meant “contradict[ing] myself”. Recall that Waite sings in 8 languages in 2033, despite being recorded as speaking only 3-4; and that they wears clothing spanning different religions and time periods
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On the subject of APF, let’s go back to Waite’s footnote 6, “They made us record our dreams”, and the “clashing visions” that led to Polysemic Sortilege’s dissolution. I think Waite originally believed their bandmates and friends had experienced what they had in 2019, and would willingly accompany their journey into the Squirming Multiplicities. It seems that they went along with Waite’s creative vision at first, allowing Waite to record their dreams, but over time Waite’s intensity and obsession grew tiresome and then alarming, and the rest of the band pulled away
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Unknown to them, though, they could never pull away entirely: 3 of the 100s of the colloids that make up the thing called Efrim Waite are artefacts of Djebarri, Bentoumi and Touissant, created through the recording and colloidification of their dreams. They live in Waite against their parents’ will, and it’s just possible that this affective closeness played a part in their deaths. Djebarri and Bentoumi at least died in the same way, with Djebarri killed by a hand which wrote with Waite’s handwriting; but Waite was in London City (or perhaps in one of 4 other countries). Could Waite use APF across a much greater distance than Selvi imagined, empowered by the Omnius servers and G6 hubs which are apparently more widespread than was previously believed? Could Waite use Djebarri to kill Djebarri, reminding him of an experience Waite thought they’d shared in the medium of his own blood before he passed?
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Skynet (2045) is thematically consistent with this thread, being a story of consciousness-hopping where human bodies are treated as meat puppets with value only as a means to an end. I think the thing called Efrim Waite has been just such a meat puppet for many years as of 2049, a squirming of multiplicities bound in something which, while alive, is ontologically-speaking little more than an animated corpse (a corpse, in Zoroastrianism, being a vector for decay)
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As an aside, Efrim’s pronouns are potentially interesting in this context. Perhaps they are simply nonbinary; or perhaps they is meant as plural (or why not both?)
