TO YELLOWKNIFE
To Yellowknife is a four album song-cycle, set in a speculative future 80 years after the Incident at Wakerobin Hollow, that follows The Kid’s journey from New Green Bay to Yellowknife. Accompanied and aided by loved ones, friends and sympathetic strangers, she risks a challenging traverse across a desertified landscape and a covert crossing at the militarized northern border. Her hope is that a better life awaits in booming, post-glacial Yukon Incorporated. Among her supplies, she carries a battered lùyīn (录音), an audio diary from her adopted father’s time as a field medic in the Second American Civil War. As she listens, she uncovers new insight into her family’s past and her late father’s life as she strives toward a brighter future.
To Yellowknife will be released in four chapters, on cassette and digital, beginning in March 2020 through 2021.
The Characters:- Father
- The Kid
- M
- Robin
- Prem
- Andy
CHAPTER 01: NEW GREEN BAY TO BISMARCK
{44X-88 to 47X-100} {March, Year 120} {1100km}
The Kid and M leave their home in Andy’s care and cover the first 800km of their journey on a rickety train. En route, The Kid explores the lùyīn, learning more about the hardship and danger of her father’s time in the war. Though they creak through a landscape blighted by climate change and past the detritus of a crumbling civilization, The Kid remains hopeful. As she and M embark on foot for a 300km walk across N. Dakota, she takes solace in her father’s voice, learns about the early days of his romance with Prem, and discovers that the lùyīn’s filestructure seems to be chronological.
CHAPTER 02: BISMARCK TO THE CROW TRUST
{47X-101 to 46X-106} {April, Year 120} {700km}
After a fraught resupply in Bismarck, The Kid and M walk a far-flung route across N Dakota to avoid dangerous superstorms that tear through the Badlands. These are hard, desolate kilometers past windfarms, ranches, and silicon factories long abandoned to the heat and smog. Before the lùyīn runs out of power, The Kid learns about the seasons of her father’s youth, his friendship with Andy, and her post-war trauma. The Kid and M finally find respite when they stop for power and meet someone who’s crossed the northern border. Buoyed by this hopeful news and her father’s loving recordings, they press on to meet Robin.
