Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, the first in his Dark Tower series, is a collection of novellas connected by a shared protagonist, Roland Deschain, and a common setting, a post-apocalyptic American desert. Some of the book’s most striking passages draw on mundane connections to a shared past. In an arid landscape abandoned by society, superficial marks of human life—“The Rain in Spain,” Oreo cookies, “Beans, beans, the magical fruit”—take on almost religious connotations. The mind, King seems to suggest, is desperate to grasp onto the familiar.
M. Geddes Gengras, the prolific synthesizer maven, came to The Gunslinger after seeing his late father suggest the book in a dream. I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World is an album loosely based on that novel. Gengras, mirroring King’s prose, disorients the listener through a series of interconnected compositions, where small moments of familiarity become breadcrumbs leading to a shared musicology.
Opener “Zoltan” starts quietly, with chimes that ring out in irregular intervals and high-pitched synths that resonate and expand. Dusted with static, the track has an eerie, dream-like effect, and as the song builds with no clear central rhythm, the synths take on a human quality, like a church service that has decayed to reveal a wordless choral echo. Within an album that often sounds like an alien world, Gengras employs familiarity carefully. It is a profoundly disquieting effect, not nearly consistent enough to serve as passive, “lo-fi” ambient background music—but unlike the pleasant synth soundscapes for which he’s known, there is little comfort in close listening, either.
With a shared sustained tone, “Zoltan” progresses into “The Pump at the Way Station,” which takes its name from the second novella in King’s book, “The Way Station.” In The Gunslinger, the station seems like a mirage, a shack that’s outlasted society; Gengras illustrates the scene with synths that conjure a fried, reverberating guitar, like sounds out of a pulp Western. Its flirtation with Americana recalls the twang of David Bowie’s “Moss Garden,” replacing that song’s warmth with foreboding dissonance.
“Cellar/Oracle” begins with low, moaning groans and rippling squeals, halting progressions that seem to reverse and repeat at random, like a computer breaking down halfway through booting up. When the song finally finds a beat, it’s a discordant, muted drum that continues into “Passage Under the Mountains,” which, for readers following along in The Gunslinger, corresponds with Roland’s mescaline trip. Here things fall into a more natural rhythm, as the wooden beat from earlier meets a rubbery, featherlight synth progression. Halfway through, it locks into a chromatic techno groove, as hazy synths, reverberating echoes, and the crackling sounds of the sequencer layer recursively, as if to replay the past hour’s compositions in a new context.
Gegras leaves us with “The Drawing,” likely named for the next book in King’s Dark Tower series. The alien-like ripple effect retreats as slow synths melt into each other, foregrounding the sound of falling water droplets. Spa-like tranquility eventually gives way to more sinister notes, perhaps foreshadowing the darkness awaiting our protagonist. I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World finds Gengras pulling at the underlying psychosocial questions of the book—what strange connections do our synapses light upon after the familiar is gone?—and making a home for himself in the cataclysmal ooze.
