The Origin of Consciousness

After Feel, there were no more releases. But the band's biggest project was still in motion — and it stayed in motion for three more years.

The Origin of Consciousness took its name from Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a book Micah had been reading since around 2005. In July 2008 — weeks after the Middle East tour — it became an album: in the band's own words, “a concept album about the origin of consciousness in the biblical (and universal) pattern of life, death, and resurrection to a higher level.” It was designed as the capstone of a trilogy the band had already been building — Green Shag Carpet as the wall and the path, The Physics of Immortality as the stage and the tower, and this album as the audience and the door. The three records were meant to loop: the last song of each linking into the next, ending back where it began.

One night in Nashville

The album told a single story, set over one night in downtown Nashville — real geography: the Arcade, 5th Avenue North, a green-and-brick wall on 3rd. A man is swept along in the crowded night streets. A stage master pulls him out of the crowd and into a spotlight. He's starstruck, then in control, then climbing — and then he falls, humiliated, in front of everyone. On the floor, called by name, he gets up and rejoins the crowd — “on an equal and higher footing.” The awakening of a self out of the crowd: the origin of consciousness, told as a night out.

“You are a shy kid. You've never stood out, and nobody has ever noticed you… until you find yourself in a crowd, focused on one person — and that person turns to you, and asks you to participate… you step out frightened, open your mouth, and speak… you begin to feel yourself as bigger, as more than you were… and before you know it you've begun to show off… you overstep and fall on your face, embarrassed and humiliated in front of everyone. And so, after a long agonizing moment, you step back into the crowd — this time as someone who has tasted the air of uniqueness — rejoining them now on an equal and higher footing.”

That paragraph is from the band's working notes, written in the summer of 2010 after Gabriel pressed for a clearer answer to why this album. It is the whole record in one breath.

The work

The paper trail runs three years deep. A conceptual burst in late 2008 produced the narrative, a symbol system — the two trees of Genesis, light as awakening — and the first song maps. Through 2009 and 2010 came recording sprints, a location-recording gear budget, a private working wiki, story-structure analysis run through professional screenwriting software, and demo compilations grouped into three “Books.” By 2010 the songs were entering the live set; several became staples of the band's final shows.

On July 7, 2011, a tracklist was locked under the heading “OOC COMPLETE” — eighteen songs in three sections of six. Per-song recording notes followed that August: tempos, keys, vocal arrangements. Those notes are the last dated work. The band was winding down, and the album was never recorded to release.

What remains

The album exists. It was written, storyboarded, sequenced, and arranged; demos of it fill three Books. They stay in the family archive, unreleased — this page shares the story, not the sound. The Origin of Consciousness is the band's true ending: not a farewell show, but a last, largest work — finished on paper, never sung into the record.