april27 is building a world beyond the music.

Inspired by the strategies employed in video game open-world level design, he’s constructed a narrative that’s part spooky copypasta, part sleep paralysis hallucination. He says the music is all composed in a tunnel between a temple and a nightclub — a statement on liminality or purgatory, it’s not quite clear.

The aesthetic, all rendered and authored by april27, smashes the sparse smoothness of modernity against the unknowable contours of Eastern spirituality. It suggests a soul in crisis, or a society in decline, or perhaps something yet to be discovered.