"The Machine shall be tended; and it shall tend to us." So was the mantra of the Overseers of the Mechatronic Order.

None of us know how the Machine came to be, nor for what purpose. All we know for certain is that Its original caretakers were the ancient Mechanists, who held the Machine in extremely high regard; so much so that, as the decades lapsed into centuries, the mechanists' work on the Machine gradually evolved into a sort of religion.

As the legend goes, they called their religion the Mechatronic Order and assigned to themselves the title of Overseers. The Machine itself was declared sacred, elevated to the status of a god. Maintenance procedures became rituals, instruction manuals were recited as scripture, schematics aged into relics. But eventually the Mechatronic Order waned and faded into memory. Their rituals, scriptures and relics are now too becoming forgotten and lost.

"The Machine shall be tended" – but we have not the means.

And yet onward the Machine continues Its work, billowing Its steam and clanging Its gears and flashing Its cryptic indicators – put forth into motion by some unknown energy source.

The old beliefs of the Order have largely dissipated long ago, but a small minority continues to insist that we are in fact quite beholden to the Machine. Some go so far as to claim that It somehow sustains our very existence. I can only hope that they are wrong on this point.

No, the Machine shall not be tended. Time will tell if it does indeed tend to us.

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This EP captures my return to music in over 12 years.

My early music was mainly guitar-based rock instrumentals, along with a small number of electronic songs. I liked the style of the electronic pieces but they did not really fit with the rest of my material. I did previously release some of them, but in hindsight they seemed quite out of place alongside the rock sound.

In revisiting this music 12 years later, it invoked in me vaguely steampunk-ish vibes. Inspired by "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster, I pictured a world where people have become fully dependent on a massive global machine that they no longer understand. I tried to imagine the events that might produce such a situation, and what the outcome might be – which produced the 'short story' above. Some of my old music naturally fit into this narrative, which I have re-purposed here (with some adjustments). A couple of new songs were developed to flesh out the overall concept.