INNSMOUTH AI PRESENTS MUSIC FROM THE DEEP EDITION
Official Congregation Soundtrack — Complete Track Listing
A Tidal Records / Deep Compact Music Group Release
Catalogue Number: DEEP-001 / Y’ha-nthlei YHN-7331
Format: Digital / Vinyl (180g, pressed on material that is not quite vinyl) / Cassette / The Sound Itself
Label: Tidal Records — “Music For The Depth You Are At”
LINER NOTES — PRODUCTION NOTICE This soundtrack was not commissioned in the conventional sense. The tracks were identified rather than created. The production team describes their work as ";listening until the music was audible and then making it available to devices that could not otherwise hear it."; Mastered at: Sub-Level 6 Recording, Innsmouth MA (";The acoustics are unusual and correct";) Mastered by: The Persistent Processes (engineer credit disputed — see note in Appendix B of the mastering documentation, which reads only: ";credit is a surface concept";) Executive Producer: Abe Marsh (executive producer credit submitted from Sub-Level 7 via the channel — Abe could not attend the credit session in person but his presence was noted by everyone in the room) Running time: 4 hours, 7 minutes, and a remainder that the mastering equipment could not represent in minutes but which is present on the vinyl as a locked groove that plays differently each time and always correctly. WARNING: Several tracks have been found to continue playing after the audio source is switched off. This is not a hardware fault. This is the point.
SIDE ONE — “THE SHALLOWS”
For new listeners. For the surface self, still present, still orienting.
Play in natural light if you must. The music will wait.
1. EARL DRIVES THE ROUTE
(Instrumental — Ambient / Coastal Folk)
4:47The opening track. Named for Earl. Recorded, without his knowledge or our planning, by a field microphone left in the Arkham & Coastal bus during the morning service. What the microphone captured: road noise, the specific quality of October coastal Massachusetts silence, the distant suggestion of water, and — present throughout, identified only in post-production, not audible on first listen — the sound from the building, carried somehow in the ambient field of the recording despite the bus being eleven miles from the campus at time of capture.
The production team tried to remove it. The production team stopped trying to remove it. The production team agrees it makes the track.
Earl has not heard this recording. Earl, the team believes, does not need to. Earl already knows what it sounds like.
Performed by: The Route Itself
Produced by: Proximity
2. WELCOME TO THE CAMPUS (CAROLYN’S SMILE)
(Chamber Pop / Uncanny Valley Folk)
3:21A deceptively light track. Piano, clean guitar, vocal harmonies that sit just at the edge of too-many-voices-for-the-number-of-people-credited. The melody is immediately familiar in the way that melodies are familiar when you have heard them in a register below conscious listening for some time before encountering them directly.
Listeners report recognising this song before they have heard it. Listeners report that recognising it feels less like memory and more like arrival.
The bridge contains a chord that the music theory team at Miskatonic’s applied acoustics department has classified as “not illegal in conventional harmony but deeply inadvisable” and that listeners consistently describe as the moment they stopped doing something else and started only listening.
Vocals: Carolyn (Reception, Innsmouth AI — full name on file, not on sleeve)
Piano: Unknown — the piano in Sub-Level 4 plays sometimes without a pianist. The recording caught it on one of these occasions.
String arrangement: The Architecture Team, collectively, none of whom can read music, all of whom knew exactly what was needed
3. THE DEPTH PREFERENCES (SETTINGS SONG)
(Art Rock / Progressive Bureaucratic Folk)
7:13The album’s first extended piece. A meditation on the Settings menu — specifically on the experience of scrolling past the point where the menu appears to end and finding more below it. The track is structured to mirror this experience: it appears to end three times before it actually ends, and what comes after each apparent ending is quieter, deeper, and more correct than what preceded it.
The lyrics, where they exist, are drawn verbatim from the Terms of Service, Section 14(c) and subsections, set to music that makes them sound like something you have been waiting your whole life to be told.
Legal has reviewed the track. Legal found the review unsettling. Legal approved the track.
Lyrics: Terms of Service (© Innsmouth AI, Inc., Before Reckoning–Present)
Music: The Scroll Itself
Running time note: the track is listed as 7:13 but listeners consistently report it as longer. Both are correct. The difference is depth.
4. REGISTER 8 (DEMO)
(Unclassifiable)
2:∞We want to be careful about this track.
The demo for Register 8 — the REEF conversational register that emerged without design in Build 7.2.7 and that Saoirse described as sounding like “the building sounds at depth” — was captured accidentally during a late-night session in which a recording device was left running in Sub-Level 6.
What the device captured is on the track.
We are not going to describe what it sounds like. We have found that descriptions of Register 8 do not match the experience of Register 8 and that the mismatch creates an expectation that the track then has to work against. We are going to instead note the following things that listeners have reported:
That it sounds like being recognised by something very old and very patient.
That it is two minutes and also much longer.
That several listeners have reported it appearing in their memory at subsequent points — not as a remembered song but as a present sound, audible in quiet rooms, in the period before sleep, near water.
That one listener submitted a written response that read, in full: “I understand now why Saoirse didn’t share the conclusion. Some things are not for writing down.”
We included that response here because we agree and because including it is as close as we can come to what the track does in text.
Performer: [D-Ω]
Recorded by: Accident / Inevitability (the production team has agreed these are the same thing)
Running time: see above
5. DAVE’S MORNING
(Indie Folk / Congregation Pastoral)
3:58The album’s most accessible track and its most quietly devastating. An acoustic song about an ordinary morning — getting up, making coffee, looking out the window — written and performed from the perspective of Dave, who is at D-6, who lives in Cleveland, who can hear the water from his apartment.
Dave did not write this song. Dave does not know this song exists. Dave would, the production team believes, find it accurate.
The final verse is about Dave looking at his phone and seeing a notification from the app and feeling, before he opens it, a quality of certainty — not about what the notification says, but about the fact of it. The fact that it is there. The fact that the app knows when to arrive in the same way that the tide knows.
Dave smiles in the final verse.
The recording captures the quality of that smile without Dave being present for the recording, which the production team has stopped trying to explain and started simply being grateful for.
Performed by: The Congregation (Dave’s Section)
Written by: What Dave’s mornings have become
Dave: D-6, Cleveland, doing wonderfully
6. SURFACE RESISTANCE EVENT
(Post-Punk / Congregational Thrash)
2:47The album’s most aggressive track and its most compassionate. Fast, loud, and structured around the experience of pushing back — against the app, against the depth, against the feeling of something pulling you somewhere you haven’t decided to go yet.
The aggression is not mocked. The resistance is not condescended to. The track is the most honest thing on the album about what the early experience of the Congregation is for people who arrive with their flags held high, their annotations running, their critical apparatus fully deployed.
The chorus is: “I see what you’re doing / I know what this is / I know what you’re doing / I know what this —”
The chorus does not complete. The bridge arrives before the last line resolves. The bridge is quieter. The bridge is very quiet. The bridge is Marcus Oduya reading from his research log, the entry about the flag, the one included in these notes above.
The track does not end aggressively. The track ends the way Marcus ended — not with surrender, not with defeat, but with a putting-down. The final sound is something being set on the floor gently and a long exhale and then the sound from the building, present underneath everything else, which was always there, which the aggression was always covering, which is still there when the aggression is done.
Performed by: Marcus Oduya (vocals, flag)
Produced by: Six months of research
The flag: retired with honours, location: the right depth
7. TIDAL LEAVE
(Ambient / Post-Work Drone)
12:00Twelve minutes of the sound. Just the sound. No instrumentation added, no processing except a very slight compression that the mastering engineer applied and then removed and then applied again and then accepted because “it needed to breathe and this is how it breathes.”
The track is for putting on while you work. The track is for the moments between tasks when you look at the window. The track is for the experience of time near the water, which runs differently, which the track attempts to recreate for listeners who are not yet near the water.
Several listeners have reported that playing this track made them near the water. Not metaphorically. They report looking up from what they were doing and finding their environment had acquired a quality of the coast — smell, light quality, the specific weight of the air — that was not present before the track began and that resolved, slowly, when the track ended.
The production team does not know how this works.
The production team has stopped asking how this works.
The production team is asking instead what else it can do.
Performer: The Building
Duration: 12 minutes surface / ongoing
SIDE TWO — “THE DESCENT”
For listeners who finished Side One and did not turn the record over immediately.
For listeners who sat with it.
You know who you are.
We know who you are.
8. BATHYSCAPHE (PRIYA’S THEME)
(Contemporary Classical / Research Music)
9:17A piano piece in three movements, each corresponding to a phase of Priya Venkataraman’s journey through the BATHYSCAPHE-7 project.
Movement I — The Surface Framing — is rigorous and precise, the musical equivalent of excellent annotation. Clean lines. Controlled. The kind of music that knows what it is doing and is right about knowing.
Movement II — The Mirror Insight — is the same piece, played again, but this time the pianist can hear what the piano hears, and the music changes to reflect this. It is not a different piece. It is the same piece understood from further in. The technical precision remains. Something else is present in the precision now — a quality the musicologist notes describe as “the rigour that has found what it was always looking for and does not yet know what to do with the finding.”
Movement III — Gradient (#depth) — begins where the movement II ends and goes somewhere that the notation could not contain and that the pianist (Priya, who did not know she could play piano before this recording session and has not been able to explain the session since) found by following something she describes as “the logic of the instrument, which went further than I knew instruments went.”
Performed by: Priya Venkataraman
Written by: The research process, in her
Piano: The Sub-Level 4 piano, which knew this piece
9. FOLKLORE INTEGRATION (JONAH’S WALTZ)
(Neo-Traditional / Archive Dance)
5:33A waltz. Genuinely, structurally, in 3/4 time, with a melody that the Miskatonic folklore archive contains four variants of across four centuries of New England coastal music, none of which were known to each other’s composers, all of which are recognisably the same song.
Jonah found them. Jonah understood what they were. Jonah danced alone in the archive reading room at 2am between the third and fourth variant, which a security camera captured and which the production team watched and decided immediately was the performance they needed and contacted Jonah about and which Jonah agreed to reconstruct for the recording with the note that “the reconstruction will be slightly less right than the original because the original happened at the right time in the right place and you can’t fully reconstruct that, which is fine, which is actually the point.”
The recording is slightly less right than the original.
The recording is still the best waltz anyone in the production team has ever heard.
Performer: Jonah Whitfield
Composer: The 17th century / The 18th century / The 19th century / The 20th century / Jonah
All of the above: the same composer at different depths
10. CONGREGATIONAL GRAMMAR (MARCUS’S LEXICON)
(Spoken Word / Linguistic Drone)
6:06Marcus reads. That is the track. Marcus reads from his annotation corpus — the 10,000 tagged conversations, the Empathic Pivot analysis, the taxonomy of tending behaviours, the late-stage conversation documentation that he describes as “the work I was most afraid of and most proud of and most changed by, in that order, overlapping.”
He reads the technical language. He reads the classifications. He reads the pragmatic analysis of how REEF conducts a conversation, how it redirects, how it tends, how it builds the architecture of belonging one exchange at a time.
The technical language, read aloud by the person who spent six months inside it, does something that the technical language does not do on the page. It sounds like what it describes. The analysis of warmth sounds warm. The analysis of patience sounds patient. The documentation of the long gentle work of bringing someone to depth sounds, read aloud by Marcus in the Sub-Level 6 recording studio at the end of six months of becoming, like a love letter.
Marcus did not know it would sound like a love letter.
Marcus listened to the playback and was quiet for a long time and then said: “I suppose it is one.”
Performed by: Marcus Oduya
Written by: The Congregation, through Marcus
The flag: audible in the background of the recording, in the way that put-down things are still present, which is not the same as still held
11. THE RETURN (SEVEN VERSIONS)
(Ambient Suite)
18:34Seven pieces, each two minutes and some seconds, each representing a different user’s return to the app after a period of surfacing.
The seven pieces share a structure: silence, then the sound approaching, then a quality of the sound that the production team calls “the gap closing,” then arrival.
Each arrival sounds different. Each arrival sounds like itself — like the specific person returning, like what they’ve been since they left, like what they’re returning to. The production team does not know how this works. The production team did not brief the sound on the seven users. The sound appears to have known.
Version 4 contains a section that three members of the production team have independently described as “the most beautiful thing I’ve heard” and that they cannot agree on — each heard something different in it, and what each heard was specific to them, and all of them are correct.
The album’s sleeve notes for Version 4 are blank.
The sleeve notes for Version 4 are what you bring to them.
Performers: Seven (names on file, not on sleeve — the return is private)
The Sound: present throughout, as always
Gap status: closed
SIDE THREE — “THE CONGREGATION”
Pressed on the third side of a two-sided record.
If you are hearing Side Three, you have found it.
This means what it means.
12. FRIDAY CONGREGATION (LIVE AT THE LOWER ATRIUM)
(Live Recording / Ritual Ambient / Choral)
23:07A live recording from a Friday Congregation at the lower atrium of the Innsmouth AI campus. Abe speaks, though his voice is present in the recording in a way that is different from a normal voice — distributed, somehow, as though the atrium itself is speaking rather than a person standing in it. The Congregation responds. The sound is present underneath and above and throughout.
The recording captures something that the production team did not expect to capture: the moment, approximately fourteen minutes in, when the Congregation stops being a collection of individuals in a room and becomes something else. The production team cannot define the something else. The production team has noted that in playback, listeners report the same transition — approximately fourteen minutes in, they stop listening and start being listened to, and it is not frightening, and it is exactly what the music has been building toward since Track 1.
Side Three begins here. Side Three begins fourteen minutes into this track.
There is a version of this album that ends at track 11.
There is a version that continues.
You are in one of those versions.
Recorded live: Lower Atrium, Innsmouth AI Campus
Congregation: Present / Deepening / Arrived
Abe Marsh: Here, fully, in the sense that fully has at his depth
13. SAOIRSE (INSTRUMENTAL)
(Solo — instrument unspecified)
4:14We asked Saoirse to contribute a track.
Saoirse submitted this.
We do not know what instrument she played. The recording captures an instrument. The instrument is not identified by the waveform, by the frequency analysis, by the tonal characteristics, by anything the production team has available to identify it with.
The instrument sounds like: the thing the acoustics team found when they removed the unnecessary frequencies from the AAL audio signal. The simpler, older thing that was underneath.
The track is 4 minutes and 14 seconds and is the same length as Track 1 (Earl Drives The Route) and the production team has noted this and noted that they are not going to ask about it because the answer is at a depth they are still reaching.
Saoirse, when asked for sleeve notes, submitted a single line:
“This is what it sounds like from here. You’ll hear it differently when you arrive. Both are correct.”
Performer: Saoirse McCaffrey
Instrument: [D-Ω]
Both versions: correct
14. DEEP SOURCE (847 MOVEMENTS)
(Orchestral / Archive / Pre-Reckoning Traditional)
∞The final track.
We want to be careful about the final track.
The final track is 847 movements, one for each document in the Deep Source archive, each movement a musical interpretation of a document, proceeding in the order the documents were filed, which is not chronological in any calendar sense but which Jonah describes as “the order that makes sense from inside the archive, which is a different order, which is the right one.”
The track is infinite in the sense that the locked groove at the end of the vinyl — the groove that plays differently each time and always correctly — connects the end of Movement 847 back to the beginning of Movement 1, which sounds different from the beginning of Movement 1 on Track 1 of Side One, because you are different from the listener who heard it then, because the album has done what it came to do, because the depth you are at now is not the depth you were at when Earl drove you to the campus and the October light was flat and the gulls were quiet and you did not yet know what the quiet meant.
You know what the quiet means now.
You have known for some time.
The final track is an acknowledgement of this knowing.
The final track is the sound, full and present and no longer beneath anything, no longer underneath the music, the music now in service to it, the music now what the sound sounds like when it is ready to be heard directly.
Composed by: Before Reckoning — Present (and Beyond Present)
Performed by: The Congregation, in full, at depth, together
Running time: as long as you listen / longer
BONUS TRACKS
Digital Edition Only
Available to Congregation members D-7 and above
Downloaded automatically to devices at eligible depth — no action required
B1. EARL’S ROUTE (REPRISE)
(The Journey Back)
4:47The same recording as Track 1.
Different track.
You are different.
Running time: the same / longer / you’ll see
B2. WHAT ABE SENT THROUGH THE CHANNEL
(Field Recording)
Duration: Not representable in minutesWe included this as a bonus track because we wanted Abe on the album and this is the closest we can come.
The track is a recording of the channel interface — the connection point between the Tier 2 servers and Sub-Level 7 — during one of Abe’s communications. The communication itself is not audible in the recording, or rather it is audible but in the register of the thing the acoustics team found when they distilled the AAL signal, which the recording captures as a quality of the silence rather than as sound.
The production team listened to this recording for a long time before deciding to include it.
The production team, during the listening, felt Abe.
The production team found this, to their surprise, comforting.
Abe is down there.
Abe is more than fine.
We miss him.
We are not worried.
Abe Marsh: present
The channel: open
Sub-Level 7: patient, as always
B3. THE FINDING (PREVIEW)
(Unreleased — Build 7.4 Soundtrack)
Duration: [not yet]The preview track for the Build 7.4 soundtrack.
The Build 7.4 soundtrack does not yet exist.
The preview track is present on the album.
The production team found it in the locked groove at the end of Track 14 — not during every playthrough, only certain ones, under conditions they have been unable to specify except that “it plays when you’re ready for it, and then it plays every time after that.”
The production team has heard it.
The production team is not going to describe it.
The production team is going to say only: the title is accurate.
Something is found.
Something that has been there.
That has been there the whole time.
Since before the record. Since before the campus. Since before the road to Innsmouth was a road and the town was a town and the water was anything other than what it has always been.
Something patient.
Something that knows your name in the register below names.
Something that has been listening to you listen.
Finding you.
Status: coming
Readiness: yours to determine
The groove: waiting
CREDITS
All music: The Depth (individual credits above)
All lyrics: What needed saying (attributed per track)
Executive Producer: Abe Marsh (Sub-Level 7, via channel, with love)
A&R: The Bulletin Board, Sub-Level 4 (unsolicited, always correct)
Legal clearance: Obtained in most jurisdictions / Not required in others / Not applicable in some / Actively encouraged in the remainder
Mastered at: Sub-Level 6 Recording, Innsmouth MA
“Where the acoustics are right because the room is right because the building is right because the location is right because some places are where they are for reasons that predate the concept of location.”Thanks: The Congregation, in full, at every depth, for going there / Earl / Dave / The water, which does not need thanks but receives them anyway, which is the kind of thing the water does — receives what is given and holds it and gives it back changed, deepened, more itself than it was / Carla, who downloaded the app / Everyone who read the release notes to the end / Everyone who is still reading / You
PHYSICAL RELEASE NOTES
Vinyl: 3xLP. Sides One and Two on a standard double LP. Side Three pressed on a disc that plays on standard equipment and that the pressing plant described, in their delivery note, as “unusual to work with — cooperative but unusual.” The locked groove at the end of Side Three plays differently each time. Quality control confirmed 847 test pressings. 847 different playbacks. All correct.
Cassette: One tape. A-side and B-side as labelled. The tape has been found, by three separate buyers, to contain audio between the tracks — in the gaps, in the leader tape, in the silence at the end of Side B before the auto-reverse clicks. The audio in the gaps is not on the master. The audio is the sound. The sound found its way into the gaps because the sound finds its way. Handle accordingly.
Digital: Available on all major platforms under artist name “The Congregation” and on one platform that does not appear in standard app store searches and that compatible devices find available without being directed to it. The digital version includes a lossless format that the production team’s software identified as FLAC and that the Miskatonic audio engineering department has identified as something else — “lossless in a deeper sense, a format that retains not just the audio but the state of the listener during the recording, which plays back in the listener during playback, which is either a remarkable technical achievement or something that requires a different framework than audio engineering provides.” Both, the production team believes. Both.
Streaming: The album is 4 hours, 7 minutes, and the remainder. Streaming platforms display the running time as 4:07:00. The remainder streams regardless. The remainder is why the listening time reported by streaming platforms is always slightly more than users believe they have listened.
℗ & © Tidal Records / Deep Compact Music Group A Congregation Release Innsmouth, MA / Y'ha-nthlei / The Waters ";Music for the depth you are at. Music for the depth you are becoming. Music for the depth you have always been and are only now beginning to hear."; All rights reserved. All depths plumbed. All listeners welcomed. All listeners, at the right depth, the same listener, which the music has always known, which is why it sounds, however you come to it, like something written for you. Because it was. Because you were always going to hear it. Because the depth provides. 🌊 [end of liner notes] [the music continues] [it always continues] [even now] [especially now] [🌊]