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MONS28
track 9 from PLUTONIÅ (Album)
YOU COULDN’T LEARN ABOUT ME. IF YOU WANTED TO IF YOU EVEN NEEDED TO. HOW WOULD YOU LEARN ABOUT ME. YOU’RE WRAPPED UP. YOU’RE WRAPPED UP WHERE’S THE TIME? I GET IT, GET IT. THAT DAY REALLY LEFT A WOUNDING. BUT I’M STUPID IF I TELL YOU HOW I FEEL. STEP TO THE BACK, YOU’LL NOTICE. EVENTUALLY. IT’LL BE NATURALLY. NATURALLY EVENTUALLY YOU WILL SEE HOW IT WAS. HOW WE USED TO BE. I CANNOT SAY I’M DIFFERENT. COS MY HEAD IS DOWN. I’M ADDICTED SAME AS YOU. THEY SAY IT IS A SYMPTOM OF A SICKENED WORLD AND I’M SICK OF WHAT IT’S DOING TO YOU AND ME. WE AIN’T WE NO MORE. WE HAD CARE. WE HAD JOY. WE HAD TIME. WE HAD MORE. WE HAD PLANS. WE HAD PURPOSE. WE HAD LIFE. WE HAD US. WHEN THE HELL HOUNDS COME, WE’RE UNDIGNIFIED. WHEN THE HELL HOUNDS COME. AMOR VINCET OMNIA! WE HAD JOY. AMOR VINCET OMNIA! WE HAD TIME. AMOR VINCET OMNIA! WE HAD MORE. AMOR VINCET OMNIA. WE HAD LIFE.
AM0R VINCIT:0MNIA
In reference to the Battle of Mons in WWI, where soldiers recounted huge angelic beings appearing in the sky at the peak of the massacre, MONS28 depicts a current and potentially far more dangerous war: humans vs technology. The song begins by grieving the loss of a close relationship to phone addiction and ends with a prayer that, like the angels seen in 1914, a guiding force ensures we tread carefully into this new decade of cyber upgrade, protecting our connection to each other as living, feeling beings.
MONS28 began with a strange sound and a small image: two people drifting apart through the slow erosion of attention. Two bodies in the same room, but never really, truly with each other. the new normal?
A few months later, I was back in the UK living at my Dad's house, working out of a makeshift studio in the garden shed. It was a painful in-between period. Many things were falling apart. I was going through a big lawsuit with a record label, and an emotionally turbulent relationship was consuming everything underneath. But the time spent with my dad during that stretch became unexpectedly precious.
I’d hermit myself in the shed making music and art all day. In the afternoons, he’d bring out buttery toast and tea, and we’d sit talking about music, physics, astrology, and the things he was building.
One afternoon, I returned to MONS28 and began building the second half of the track, layering big choral vocals. It didn’t have a title at that point. I played him what I had so far, feeling stuck where to take it. After listening, he said the music gave him a sudden image of the Battle of Mons - a moment in WWI when soldiers later described seeing vast, angelic figures in the sky during one of the war’s most brutal days.
The story stayed with me as I finished the track, and it shaped how I understood what the piece was really asking.
FURTHER
DAD REFLECTIONS
Photo: Dad composing music at Birling Gap, Eastbourne, 1998
"The cosmic implications of Alyss’s latest song, ‘MONS28’, are potentially of unfathomable depths both in this universe and all parallel universes.
With a seemingly innocuous beginning, the song features banter about slot machines and the effect they have on the people who use them.
One could surmise from this that the song’s pathway seems pretty much without hurdles from a psychological perspective.
However, soon menacing conflicts emerge between the silicon drug we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, victims of, and life itself.
That innate ability, desire, and need we all have to be able to communicate with our fellow beings in a physical way is slowly but inexorably being eroded away by the relative ease of using cyber communication.
A further problem is clearly becoming apparent, but one we are not easily aware of and, to a large degree, do not care about anyway, and that is that our minds are being sterilised on an enormous scale.
Following this is the final tragedy, one that is unthinkable but very real and happening nonetheless, and that is the loss of our souls.
Civilisation is being reduced to ashes of the cyber kind. We can only hope that divine intervention will come before it is too late and show us the true way, as it did one hundred years ago for the soldiers on the battlefield during the Battle of Mons".
DAVID BUTLER
Violinist (London Royal Opera House), Composer, Inventor, Astrologer
MONS28
From the PLUTONIÅ album
MONS28 written by ALYSS in Koreatown, LA
recorded, performed, produced and mixed by ALYSS between Hitchin, Hertfordshire and Brighton, UK
video directed by ALYSS + LunaBlack
shot by LunaBlack
C4D by LunaBlack
cover artwork by ALYSS + LunaBlack
filmed on the dunes of camber sands, Sussex
special thanks to Naymlis
2020 © ORYX Records
© 2026 by ALYSS