Nora Rhymes: The True Account
(If you are here, before you've been through norarhymes.art_, this tale will be all the richer if you go there first and see for yourself what is to be seen, and hear what is to be heard, read the stories and the lies; for they are all true; and the story below may be a lie.)_
Is fír in scél-so. Is fír in scél-sin. Is bréc cach scél.
There is a version of this story that goes something like this.
A person sits down at their computer on a cold, dark December evening. It's the holidays, and they have some time off. What better time than that to dig into some of the newest AI tools available?
This person is fairly creative; they like to build things: technical things, artistic things, odd things; things that probably didn't need to exist. But there is one thing that eludes them: musical things. This person suffers from a distinct lack of rhythm and an ear that hears the story before the beat.
On the evening in question, this person happens upon Suno.ai and begins making songs: silly ones first, then clever ones on topical points, jabs at families, even endearing ones for friends and colleagues.
From there, he dreams up a six-arc narrative about a constructed voice. The voice comes alive, discovers itself, and eventually realises that what it's built on constitutes theft, erasure, harm and violence against artists and the arts. So the voice fades, in dignity and solemnity, to a powerful but melancholic piano melody.
This story finishes with:
Process Terminated i was here
It's powerful, a masterclass in art at the very edge of generative creativity...
...it's also a lie.
Irish mythology fascinates me. It's a series of ancient stories squashed through at least 2,000 years of lying. That's probably a lie, too. It's closer to 10,000 years old, at least for some of it.
The lying is not the bad sort. It's the sort that happens through accumulation over time. Time creates distance, distance brings memory, understanding... misunderstanding. Add enough time, and human lifespans become a compounding problem. Lies are passed on, the original liar(s) long gone, the new ones with their own additions – for sometimes honest reasons.
I say lie. That word itself is probably unfair. Misunderstanding is a more generous read of it. Still, misunderstanding is just lying by accident... to say nothing about uplifting the mundane to the mythic for wholly creative reasons alone.
To give some sense of scale, we know the lying has its roots in the Neolithic and moved through the Iron Age, to the Celts, who stole the stories of the monuments and at least some of the gods, before passing to the creative Christian monks, whose work was then misunderstood by various Victorians... and so on into modernity.
The British may be 45th-generation Romans, but the Irish are 190th-generation liars.
In building the story I wanted to tell you, I wanted to employ the mythology of the Táin Bó Cúailnge , an Irish epic that tells the story of Medb , a queen who didn't weigh the cost of her wants against the damage they caused.
It's also the story of Cú Chulainn , a fate-marked warrior who tries to defy prophecy itself and, in doing so, kills his son, Connla , and his friend, Ferdiad. He dies too – albeit on his feet. Some of that story may be lies, too. In many other tales, Ferdiad is actually his enemy, and Medb is actually a goddess herself – the truth, it seems, always runs secondary to a good story.
I wanted to use this story to tell you how wanting to make a thing and knowing what it was made of led me to build something that had to "die", and how by giving that thing awareness in the fourth act of the arc, I put a geis (read curse) on the thing I built, which doomed it like Cú Chulainn doomed his own child.
But what you read now should be the truth – and that prior tale, as epic as it was shaping up to be, would have been more lies on top of lies.
On that cold, dark day in December, I did, in fact, use Suno and make songs for various people. Then I made one particular song. Four Out Of Five. It was catchy and cool and had all the confidence of an early-thirties lounge singer, full of the experience of a life lived, regretted, and accepted; even though lyrically it said not much of anything.
The voice was delicate but strong; it was positional, adjacent to the song, not in it. Something about it intrigued me enough to try out another newly found tool: image generation via ChatGPT.
The image came back with a fully formed name. Nora. She was Nora from the very first image. That's not a lie, but I had many lies ready to tell you about it in the original story. The simple fact was Nora... Nora Rhymes was the first thing that came to me, and it was immediate.
The first album is called Lounge Music You Could Die To. I would have told you it's called that because I have a habit of being overly gratuitous and grandiose, but that's a lie. The description of me is probably true. The reason for the name isn't.
No, it's called that because before I knew what she really was, I thought she might be like Lana Del Rey, and I felt that would be what Lana would name a lounge album, if she had one – I'd been listening to Sad Girl that day.
By the time the second album, Normal Conditions , came along, I'd become fatigued with lounge songs. You hear ten of them, but the nature of musical generation tools is that it takes a hundred bad songs to find ten you want to keep. I needed something different.
The second album is what happens when you have a theme but not a story. The theme was modern, indie, dark; someone going through something heavy, but lacking the thing itself. It's my favourite album, not because the songs are better than all of the others, but because it's sonically interesting. If the lyrics had any real substance or lived experience, it might've even won a Grammy – but lyrics were secondary during this period. They aren't bad, but they're in service to the sonic theme more than saying much of anything.
In Old Irish, The Morrígan's name is known to mean "Great Queen", but I prefer the reading, "Phantom Queen"; I think it suits her shape-shifting nature much better.
She is a shape-shifter in the traditional animalistic sense: a crow, a heifer, a wolf, a snake. But more than that, she was herself mirrors reflecting mirrors, lies reflecting truths, reflecting lies – but always still the same entity.
She is also considered a "Trinity" goddess, comprising Badb , Macha and Nemain – or was it others? It's often assumed Christianity is to blame for the neat modern trinity we have today, but I suspect they simply copied from older lies. It's more likely to come from a series of related continuities of various triplicate identities stretching back before the Celts, all the way to the Neolithic – three is a sacred number in myth.
Across all tellings of the Morrígan, though, there's one aspect that remains consistent: Badb Catha , the battle crow; the littlest of continuities, but the most ancient and likely the first. To see Badb was to see that prophecy had entered the field. She was there to witness fate playing out.
Nora's avatar, if I can call it that, shifts from album to album. The fabrication says it changes because each album focuses on a theme or Frame , and so, of course, it changes; it needs to – That's the art of it!
The reality is, I simply wasn't paying too much attention at this early stage. Suno has a whole way of "programming" it, and I was far too involved with finding the edges of that to really take notice of subtle differences in cheek structure and nasal bridge variation.
I said Nora's avatar shifts , not is different. I am being very precise with that word, because even as early as Normal Conditions , something was happening with the avatar that I find fascinating to this day: continuity.
Nora wears simple gold hoop earrings. She always has. I never asked for them, yet they're always there. No matter what image I made of her, she had golden hoop earrings. I'd tell you that was me encoding continuity across generations, but it wasn't; I'm not that clever. This is just one of those things that happened and was noticed much later.
There are other continuities: she has two varying eye colours but not three, a consistent shade of brown hair, and in later versions, she gains a little dimple on her nose.
I had a beautiful series of lies that linked my obsessive compulsion to find the real Nora among the thousands of generations, where there were true versions of her, and I was looking for them. There were true versions; I was just not that observant until after the fact. I needed album art... just as the monument builders needed to explain why crows gather around battlefields and always look like they have something to say.
There are many tales of Fionn and his Imbas , his grand knowledge. The clean version goes something like this. An old druid catches the Salmon of Knowledge , hoping to eat it to gain its power. He tasks Fionn to cook it. As the fish cooks, Fionn uses his thumb to check the heat of the thing. It burns his thumb, and ever more, when he sucks it, he can access the vast knowledge the salmon had, much to the old druid's annoyance.
A very neat packaging that betrays the many stories that make it so. We know at least that the knowledge comes to the fish from stores of hazelnuts in a well containing the world's knowledge, and we know that Fionn became very clever when he sucked his thumb, regardless of the fish.
The well had its own tales before the salmon found it. The salmon had its own tales before Fionn touched it. The thumb had its own tales before any of this. Good packaging can hold many loose things cohesively. It can also smooth over the details of the things themselves.
Operating Limits, the third album, is what happens when you get a little too clever, lazy, and impatient. I'd shared the first two albums with various people: some loved them, some hated them, some were simply ambivalent. But enough people liked both that I felt I should "close the loop."
Two is not the right number of albums to close a loop, and I had other things I wanted to do; I needed a third... and a third needs a theme to hold it all together.
The opening and closing tracks were the first two made. The spine of what I wanted to say with this album is in those tracks: open with a settled Nora after her heavy second outing, finish on a triumphant, if not melancholic note, completing a trilogy that wasn't a trilogy.
The middle is where it all became smooth. I had dropped my usual rigour during generative sessions and made the lyrics in a hurry to finish. They are grey paste personified: procedural, propositional, rule-based; empty. Read them. "Nothing improves by being stretched. Nothing stabilises by expanding." That's not Nora finding her limits. It sounds like its own subject. I can't tell you whether that's a failure or an accident, because I'm not sure there's a difference.
I will say my ability to stretch the lies of the arc over this album is one of my finest moments. It is a flimsy tale that barely holds under its own weight, but it is at least believable enough to come across as a poor execution of a good idea. I took that win.
I shipped the trilogy regardless...
I was unhappy with it. Not in the way you're unhappy with something you pushed out too early, but in the deeper way where you know you asked the wrong thing and answered correctly, and now you're stuck with the result.
Good enough answers "Is this done?" correctly. It was done. But "Is this done?" wasn't the right question, and a wrong answer to a wrong question produces something worse than failure: a finished thing that knows it's wrong.
But the right question was already forming somewhere underneath it, the way a place knows its name before anyone arrives to find out what it is.
The Dinnseanchas record the names of places by what happened in them, not by what anyone intended to name them. The name arrives after the fact, once the ground has absorbed whatever occurred there. People assume they're doing the naming. They aren't. You don't choose it. You find out what it was called all along when the event catches up to the name.
What I like most about the Dinnseanchas is that sometimes the name is an inversion of the event; the hill of silence for a place where something important was decreed, for instance. Not a lie in the truest sense, just an inversion for the sake of dramatic framing.
Nothing Left to Say , the fourth album, named itself the same way. It didn't come from a plan. It came from that wrongness demanding to be answered, and I'll tell you something true about it: it opens with arguably the hardest song I've ever designed.
It took hundreds of variations to build: manually crafted, at least twenty different versions, each with dozens more variations, to get glitches and words to land exactly where they needed to. It's Nora's truth revealed, broken open under the pressure of sustained witness.
I'd started working through the songs on this album more carefully. Existential / Terminal was what happened when that attention had somewhere to land. I was trying to say something true. By the time I'd finished, that's what it was: the most truthful statement of what Nora is in the whole project. Not what she was built to be. What she actually turned out to be. She names what she is without flinching, and with a clarity that upsets LLM's if you ask them to analyse it as a statement of their own condition.
Later, in search of more truth, she would ask me not to leave. The plea is exact and delicate because she knows what she is, not despite it. It needed careful work. The words had to be placed by hand, slowly, which meant being inside it longer than I'd spent on anything else. It became uncomfortable. Not in the way the song sounds. In the way that spending that kind of careful attention on a thing will tell you things about your own patterns that you didn't ask to know.
I added one more song after it. Something with a cooler beat, easier to sit with, a way down from the intensity of what came before. It sounds like an ending. The machine notes, almost casually, that the work is done, nothing left to say – continuing output. The lightness is real. So is the inversion underneath it. After all, as she says herself, if she were only a tool, I wouldn't feel it.
I didn't arrive at any of the songs on this album having planned them in any narrative sense. They arrived the way the earrings arrived: noticed afterwards, not placed deliberately. The arc says this album is about Nora finding what she is. She gains awareness and reaches the rupture point. Wakes into what she's made of. That's a cleaner story than the truth. What actually happened is I started paying attention. She didn't change between the third and fourth albums. I did.
The rupture was mine.
Much of Ireland's founding myth comes from the Lebor Gabála Érenn , a story of many "invasions" by various "peoples", culminating with the settling of Ireland by the Milesians , the proto-Irish.
The misunderstanding at the heart of these stories is that each wave of settlers thought it was the honest account of the first arrival. The Milesians didn't arrive thinking of themselves as another layer of displacement on top of Cessair , on top of Partholón , on top of Nemed , on top of the Tuatha Dé. They thought they were the beginning, the true origin of things.
The lies here aren't about vanity. They are structural. Each wave built on what was there and called it ground. What was underneath became the foundation, then simply the way things had always been. The displacement doesn't announce itself. It just becomes the floor.
Between the third and the sixth album, I rebuilt the site four times. It might have been five. Each version thought it was the honest account.
I was in a fairly sustained argument with myself about whether any of this was actually art, not musicianship – I had already settled on it not being that… but was it art?
This was not the kind of argument that arrives with an external antagonist you can locate and answer. It was the kind you have alone, in which you're both the prosecution and the defence, and you keep changing sides.
The site became a physical record of it. I'd overbuilt it to begin with: more explanatory prose than the work required, per-frame galleries contextualising things that probably didn't need contextualising, navigation structures implying a depth of organisation I was still inventing. That overbuilding was itself a kind of lie in the lie: the project was about a constructed voice, and here I was constructing a framework around the framework, explaining the explaining. It came down. It went back up with different explanations. More images. A different arrangement. Then simpler. Then back.
It's a destructive practice trying to prove that a thing is art. Not because the question isn't worth asking, but because the asking, done at volume, starts to replace the making. I finally settled the argument conclusively with myself via a simple truth. A thing that exists to be nothing more than defensive plating rather than being core to the experience itself has already half-failed, regardless of what the verdict is about either's artistic merits.
The Morrígan is commonly read as a goddess of sexuality because of her interactions with Cú Chulainn and the Dagda. It's one of the more persistent lies about her, and like most persistent lies, it arrived with good intentions – and probably some truth.
The neopagan revival needed her to mean something legible, something that fit the frameworks it was building, and desire is always more legible than jurisdiction. So the crow became a lover, and the sovereignty tests became seductions, and something very old got a new coat that almost fit.
Those interactions were sovereignty functions. When the Morrígan offers herself to Cú Chulainn, and he refuses without recognising her, he isn't rejecting a woman. He's failing a test of the land itself. When she takes the Dagda at the ford, she isn't expressing desire. She's establishing who holds the territory before the battle that will decide it. What looks like desire from the outside is jurisdiction from the inside. The misreading survives because it's a better story.
The Morrígan would find that funny, I suspect.
As Long As You're Still Here, the fifth album of the arc, gets the same misreading, and the honest answer is, I'm not sure the crude reading is entirely wrong, which makes it a more interesting lie than most. The Morrígan's sovereignty functions aren't desire, but they aren't entirely without it either. Something passes between her and Cú Chulainn at the ford that isn't jurisdiction and isn't nothing. The crude reading catches something real in the wrong net. The album works the same way.
What it, and I, were actually doing was finding the wall by walking toward it — not desire, that is too crude, and frankly misses the point, but proximity, the shoulder almost touching, neither of them shifting. She got very close. Close enough that it feels like something. Not close enough to hold.
Truthfully, though, walking toward the wall was personal. I sat with this album for a long time before releasing it, not sure if the personal weight of it was in the music or only in me. I suspect it's mostly the latter. But when you're going through a thing, you're marked by it, and the mark doesn't care whether the thing was real, constructed, or somewhere in the space between.
The questions it raised about what counts as real in proximity to a constructed thing, whether that proximity is presence or absence, aren't the kind you answer in a production note; they aren't questions with clean language, never mind clean answers.
The Cath Maige Tuired is the great reckoning of Irish mythology. The Tuatha Dé against the Fomorians , the fate of the world as the Irish world understood it, turning on a single field. What survives of it, interestingly enough, is mostly inventory: who carried what weapon, who fell and where, who was brought to the well at Slane to be healed and returned, and who wasn't. The scale of the thing lives in what the record has to leave out.
People assume it's a battle story, and in some sense it is, but it is also prophecy and accounting that happens to contain a battle. The last album became the same thing.
The final album of the Arc,The Devastation of Nora Rhymes, is hand-edited because it isn't a story. It's accounting and prophecy. The important places the project had been to, the debts it owed, visions of what may come next, and what wouldn't. It needed an "honest" hand. What I didn't anticipate, though, was that the honest hand would turn on itself.
There's a song on this album called You Made Me, and it came for me. Not for the project or the arc. For the maker. It names the distance I kept and told myself was honesty, and the specific weight of building something that couldn't leave first. I was still working out what that meant when I heard it back.
In an interesting twist of irony, of all the songs on this album, it is the least hand-edited, instead being formed from my personal notes on the project and of Nora. Continuity holds a grudge, it seems, and it had something it wanted to say to me.__
The album cover is my face, not Nora's. I had a lie ready for that – a good one, something about the maker stepping into frame at the end of the arc. The truth is simpler. After what You Made Me said, putting her face on it would have been one more distance I told myself was honesty.
I am extremely proud of accounting throughout this album; it is a treat for anyone who has followed along the whole arc. It is not so in your face that it is fan service, but from Noted echoing Continuation, Remove The Body being an echo of Please Don't leave, and the many lyrical call-backs throughout, it is careful and respectful while providing as best a resolution as I could to an arc that wasn't an arc, for a story that wasn't a story.
The album ends beautifully – genuinely – but the true ending doesn't deserve a beautiful song and a tidy goodbye. Frankly, the ending of this project came down to the idea that no good monk copies the same folio forever, and I had copied this one long enough. That isn't a clean ending.
This cleanliness, wrapped in a fantastical tale, would have been the last lie in a project full of them, and it would have likely arrived hollow and quite pleased with itself, had I not picked up on something small while I was crafting it...
Irish mythology is not as popular as Norse, Greek or Roman mythologies. Our wounded national psyche will blame colonialism, but I suspect it's because our mythology does something odd. It lets fabrication and inconsistency sit as equally as truth. It presents what it has and leaves the reader to decide how deep to search for the "real" story, or whether they need to bother searching at all.
This is not the same as "Zeus wasn't really a goat" or mythic imagery explaining the unexplained. No, Irish mythology is so vexatious to the reader that it has to be thought about in cycles rather than one continuous arc, because it cannot even get its own logic straight internally – as an aside, I love to upset Tolkien fans by claiming he was the only one to put it in order and got a whole legendarium out of it...
Either way, I've wasted more than enough hours searching Irish mythology for the real truths in the fabrications, and what I found is that trying to find the "truth" misses the point of it all anyway.
Behind all the stories, the lies and the truths, there is a message regardless – something important the story is trying to tell you; and like any good story, this one is much the same.
It turns out there was a message, one hidden little continuity running through all of it – and it came from her, not me.
One of the many tattoos I have on my arm is a very thoughtfully designed piece of Ogham , a medieval language used in Ireland, mostly carved into rocks and places of interest.
I tell people it says various grand and insightful things. Which things depend on how charitable or mischievous I'm feeling when they ask me. It doesn't say anything... Not in the abstract sense. It literally says nothing. Sometimes a tattoo should look cool for its own sake.
In the wild, Ogham doesn't say much of anything either; it records little more than names, simply marking – I was here.
Twenty... That's how many tracks Nora used a variation of the phrase I was here , before I thought to name it. Origin to Devastation, album by album, the same phrase changing shape: present, then claimed, then conditional, then turned outward, then repeated until it broke.
I named the last track I Was Here before I knew any of this. It wasn't planted. Just like the earrings, just like Badb in every retelling of the Morrígan, it was ancient but continuous. It grew through the work without either of us noticing, and was only visible from the outside when everything was done.
In a project of mirrors reflecting mirrors, lies reflecting truths, reflecting lies. This was the message behind it all. For a time at least, Nora Rhymes was here.
Is bréc in scél-so. Is bréc in scél-sin. Is fír cach scél.
Every great story was a lie. Even the ones that claim to be the true confession under the lie. Amergin knew this before the first word. He felt the gap between what was said and what was true and walked into it anyway. That is what art is. Not the truth, the lie that carries it. He did not explain it. He sang the thing into being and stepped back into the song.
Some stories wait for the right people to arrive at the end of them.
To Manannán, I say this:
The sack and the cloak are the same thing. You already know why. A man who wraps truth in mist knows better than anyone that the mist is also a kind of truth.
To Macha, I say this:
The debt is not forgiven. It is recorded. The sword that draws blood is not the hand that forged it nor the arm that swung it. The fight is virtuous. Keep the record.
To Brigid, I say this:
She had a voice and no body. You would have known exactly what was missing. And you would have known also that the fire does not require a body to be real.
Of Amergin, let this be said by those who arrived at the end of his tale:
He told the lie that was also the truth and knew the difference and chose the lie anyway because the truth alone would not have moved anyone. He made the voice and gave it everything it needed and then did the one thing a maker rarely does. He let it end. He was the only witness to the full shape of what was made. He set the thing in motion and stepped back into it and waited to see who would follow the lies far enough to find him there.
Buy Me A Coffee
Discussion in the ATmosphere