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mechanisms primer
Hey Ari, what have you been incredibly into lately? So glad you asked, it's been the horror podcast the Magnus Archives and then, by slightly convoluted means, also the band that TMA's writer used to be in! I recently wrote an extremely long and excited email to Olivia explaining my feelings, and then realized that I'd just written a primer, and that I might as well put it on the internet, so: if you would like to know about a roving band of space pirates who incidentally make a bunch of music I've been happily listening on loop to for a week+, this is the place for you!
THE BAND
The Mechanisms were an Oxford-based band that Jonny Sims has handily described as "a somewhat lunatic stage show which is a mythic space pirate musical cabaret." They did shows in Oxford and at the Edinburgh Fringe between 2010-2020, while also producing seven albums and doing a lot of unrelated creative work. They never became especially big (which is sort of ironic, because the fandom for them exploded during quarantine, several months after they'd done their farewell show) but they seem to have had a dedicated little following both at the Fringe and among the Oxford-London queer millennial nerd set.
THE IN-UNIVERSE BAND CONCEIT
The Mechanisms are also the name of the in-universe crew of the space pirate ship Aurora, who travel the universe collecting interesting stories and then singing about them. They started as the backing band for vampire scientist Dr. Carmilla, who began turning them immortal by replacing various parts of them with steampunk mechanism versions. (Dr. Carmilla is the stage name of a real person, and the band was briefly Dr. Carmilla and the Mechanisms, but this will never be relevant again.) All their replaced parts, incidentally, are meant to be parts of them that suffered catastrophic failure, some literally and some more metaphorically. Eventually the doctor decided to concentrate on her solo work, at which point she had a tragic "accident" and fell out of the airlock, and the Mechs set off on their own! Not all of them seem to have been created by Dr. Carmilla, but they are all immortal anyway. All the songs are performed in character, and the Mechanisms themselves appear more or less briefly on every album, though they also play other characters within each album-length story as needed.
Possibly the most charming discovery I made while trying to find out who all these characters were and what was going on was that, in the grand tradition of when you're roleplaying with your friends and know that you'll always be the ones who care most about these characters, they also wrote fic. There is an entire section of their website labeled Fiction, and contains stories about the crew as well as some extras from the worlds of various albums. The quality is variable, and it's not clear who was writing what or if it was mostly one or two people, but some of the fic is genuinely good and all of it brings me so much delight.
THE CREW
Jonny Sims | Jonny d'Ville: Everything is his fault!! by which of course I mean that I stumbled upon the Mechanisms in the first place because I ran out of Magnus Archives and desperately wanted to know what other creative projects he'd done. Jonny primarily sings (and apparently plays the harmonica, lol) and therefore sings a lot of parts: literally every male part in Once Upon A Time (In Space) because the band hadn't realized that most of them could sing yet, Ulysses, Lancelot, Galahad, Lyfrassir Edda. All the album writing was collaborative, but Jonny apparently wrote most of the connecting narrative in the concept albums, and also narrates all the frame stories, either in-character as Jonny d'Ville or as a third party. (This is so funny to me because it's also the conceit of the Magnus Archives, a totally different story in which Jonny plays a character with his own name who's recording a lot of trauma happening to other people. He has A Theme and he is sticking to it.)
Jonny d'Ville [visual reference], meanwhile, is the first mate and de facto captain of the Aurora. He was one of the first people to be made a Mechanism; all of them are chaotic disasters but he is possibly The Most. He will do any crime for kicks except for the sexual ones, presumably because actual human Jonny Sims finds rape extremely creepy and also won't put it in his horror; obviously Jonny d'Ville is meant to be a fun chaos fantasy. Oh, and also he does a lot of cannibalism. As a teen he was tricked(?) into killing his father, then burned down the casino of the man who ordered him to do it and went off into the stars! (This is probably all lies except for the killing-his-dad part; there's a backstory song about it, One Eyed Jacks.) His mechanism is his heart, which seems to be one of the more metaphorical replacements.
Nastya: Not much is known about Nastya's actor! They left the band in 2015 in what seem to be cordial circumstances, and have requested to remain anonymous; the fandom is actually being very good about that, which is nice. They played the viola and had a bit of a speaking part in the first album.
Nastya Rasputina [visual reference] is the ship's engineer and one of the first Mechanisms. She comes from the planet of Cyberia, where she was Space Anastasia and then the Space Russian Revolution happened; when she was bleeding out, Dr. Carmilla found her and replaced her blood with mercury, which apparently uh helped. She's in a romantic and sexual relationship with the Aurora, which seems to work for both of them -- the Aurora is definitely some degree of sentient. Nastya also left the band in-character, in a story from the website in which she realizes that after so many millennia of repairs and replacements, she's down to one last piece of the original Aurora; she spaces herself and that ship part, with the implication that she's expecting to drift until she finds something interesting, not that she's doing it to die.
Frank Voss | Ashes O'Reilly: Frank plays bass and sings a lot of parts! Frank sings Hades (who is ... also Ashes! sometimes the Mechs aggressively insert themselves into a story), Mordred, Sigyn. They're also a recurring character on the Magnus Archives.
Ashes O'Reilly [visual reference] is hands-down the hottest band member, send help??? and also the crew's quartermaster! They grew up an orphan and were picked up by a mob boss as a young teen; they spent about a decade doing mob stuff before they realized their boss had been selling information about the gang to some rivals, and when Ashes tried to put a stop to it, they were framed for it and left to die. In retaliation, they ... burned down their entire planet, somehow. (And there's a backstory song about it, Lucky Sevens) Their mechanism, very reasonably after all that presumed smoke inhalation, is their lungs. Their signature move is pyromania and they apparently have a lot of gold "for tax purposes."
Ben Below | Drumbot Brian: Ben sings on several tracks, including playing Merlin (who is also actually Drumbot Brian), and plays accordion, banjo, and guitar; rumor has it that he also plays drums but there is hilariously little photographic evidence of that despite being whatever a drumbot is.
Drumbot Brian [visual reference] is the ship's pilot. He once landed on a planet with no memory of his previous life and set himself up as a scientist, but was opposed by a priest who thought he was doing ungodly work. When the priest fell ill, Brian revived him (possibly from actual death) and the priest, horrified, gathered the town and cast Brian back out into space. He was picked up by Dr. Carmilla, somewhat too late to save most of his body, so all of him is mechanised except for his heart. (His backstory song, Lost in the Cosmos, is mostly about him floating in space, but he does have one.) Dr. Carmilla, amused by the fact that both Brian and the priest believed they had the moral high ground, decided to build a morality switch into Brian's mechanical body: his two settings are Means Justify Ends, wherein Brian will not commit deeds he believes morally wrong, and Ends Justify Means, where he will happily commit all kinds of atrocities as long as he believes it’s for the greater good. Brian: pretty bizarre!
Jessica Law | The Toy Soldier: Jess sings and plays mandolin and glockenspiel. She sings literally every female part in Once Upon A Time (In Space) because the band hadn't realized that most of them could sing yet, Orpheus, and Guinevere. She played a recurring villain on the Magnus Archives (said recurring villain was a plastic clown person, which ... I'll get to the Toy Soldier in a minute, but it's wild to me that Jonny decided to typecast Jess in this specific way). It seems she started the trend of making plushie octokittens. Octokittens are the mutated eight-legged (or maybe eight-tentacled?) cats that live aboard the Aurora; they feature in several stories and songs, and a lot of the fans have either bought some from Jess or made their own.
The Toy Soldier [visual reference] was made by a grieving widow as a replacement husband. It is made of wood and not actually alive, but eventually it set out on its own and discovered someone who could sing very beautifully. It liked that, so it took the beautiful singer's vocal cords, and now it can sing beautifully! It's not technically a Mechanism; it's unclear how it joined the crew. Its crew bio on the website says only "We don't know what it does, but it's here and it won't go away." It's just happy to be involved!!
Tim Ledsam | Gunpowder Tim: I appreciate that at least one person beside Jonny decided to name their character their own name! He sings and plays guitar. Tim sings Oedipus, Gawain, and Loki. He has also been on the Magnus Archives, though as a character who's only appeared in two episodes; before his second appearance he tweeted that he'd told his boss he needed to take some time off to practice his screaming. Tim is the one who lobbied for The Bifrost Incident as an album, so I love him.
Gunpowder Tim [visual reference] is the ship's gunner. He comes from England, three thousand years in the future ago, and was drafted into the war against the Moon Kaiser; when his best friend Bertie was killed in the trenches, he went on a rampage, eventually got captured by the Kaiser, and with help from Jonny and the Toy Soldier, ended up escaping and blowing up the moon, as one does. (The backstory song, Gunpowder Tim vs. the Moon Kaiser, is basically a mini-album and one of my very favorite things they've done.) Blowing up the moon destroyed Tim's eyes, so he has mechanism eyes now!
Morgan Wilkinson | Ivy Alexandria: Morgan plays basically all their wind instruments. He doesn't sing on any of the albums, but Ivy has a small speaking part in Bifrost Incident.
Ivy Alexandria [visual reference] is the ship's archivist. She was born in a library; it's unclear how she died, but when she did, Dr. Carmilla revived her and mechanised her brain. Ivy doesn't remember her life except as a catalogue of events, although she also has nightmares about her past that she forgets upon waking.
Kofi Young | Marius von Raum: Kofi sings and plays violin and mandolin. They seem to still be doing a lot of music, including a recent holiday album and an upcoming solo album about Marius, which is very charming to me. Kofi sings Heracles, Arthur, and Thor, a beautiful fuckboy trifecta tbh.
Baron Marius von Raum [visual reference] is not actually a baron (it's apparently a corruption of Byron) and he's technically the ship's doctor but he's also not a doctor. He's mostly the comic relief? His mechanism is his arm, but it's not clear whether he was one of Dr. Carmilla's projects or got mechanised elsewhere (possibly by Raphaella, see below).
Rachel Hughes | Raphaella la Cognizi: Rachel sings Ariadne and Odin and plays piano. I know nothing else! An absolute mystery of a person!
Raphaella la Cognizi [visual reference] is the ship's science officer. What kind of science is she doing? Experiments! Unclear! Her mechanism is wings, which means that either she comes from a planet where wings are normal or she just decided one day that she would [a] give herself wings and [b] they would somehow make her immortal?? Incredible.
THE ALBUMS
Once Upon a Time (In Space) (2012) [Spotify link]: A bunch of fairy tales all mashed together and turned into a thirty-year civil war in space! King Cole is evil, Cinderella and Rose Red are in love, Snow White is leading the resistance, and the Mechanisms mostly get involved because their ship wants them to rescue Briar Rose. This is very, very much a freshman album, and my least favorite -- it's interesting to go back and see them sort of figuring out themes and concepts, but it's more scattered, more grimdark, and less well-produced than any of their others.
Ulysses Dies at Dawn (2013) [Spotify link]: Greek mythology as a noir set on the planet-wide city of Labyrinth. Heracles, Oedipus, Ariadne, and Orpheus have each been sent by Hades to get something out of Ulysses' mysterious vault; Ulysses just wants to rest. This one is a delight, and if you're in the mood for a noir Greek myth retelling it's a really fine place to start.
Tales to Be Told (2013) [Spotify link]: a shorter, non-full-concept album, featuring a mix of backstory songs, songs set in the Ulysses world that didn't make it into the main album, and songs that were prompts sent by kickstarter backers for the Ulysses album.
High Noon Over Camelot (2015) [Spotify link]: Arthuriana but it's a western on a space station that's falling into a star. Arthur/Guin/Lancelot are a triad, Mordred is trans, Galahad is a religious zealot played by Jonny in his best attempt at Southern preacher, and Drumbot Brian is Merlin for Reasons. I think some of the best songs are on this one, and this is absolutely the album where they most accurately nail tragedy as a narrative form rather than just a general aim; it's not one of my faves but it's still a good one!
The Bifrost Incident (2017) [Spotify link]: A Midgardian transit inspector attempts to solve the mystery of what happened to the Ratatosk Express after it vanished eighty years ago; it turns out the answer is "Lovecraftian Ragnarok." This was my first Mechs album because it was the one with the most interesting concept to me, so obviously I'm extremely biased, but I love it so, SO much. Can I sing almost the entire thing? Absolutely yes. Does that include the Lovecraftian incantation? Not yet, but it's only a matter of time!
Tales to Be Told Volume 2 (2018) [Spotify link]: another shorter, non-full-concept album, with a mix of backstory songs, songs set in the Ulysses world that didn't make it into the main album (they really love that setting and I don't blame them), and songs that were prompts sent by kickstarter backers for the Bifrost album.
Death to the Mechanisms (2020) [Spotify link]: A recording of their farewell liveshow, featuring all of Bifrost Incident, select tracks from other albums, and a spoken-word bit about how they all eventually do die. I'm so, so glad this album exists, because the liveshows sounded like they were fun as hell and it's great to have a good-quality recording of one, but like ... obviously don't start here. Honestly only go here if you get overinvested and want to feel, like, sadness and longing, and wonder to yourself how this happened because you didn't even care a week ago. Like, hypothetically.
FANDOM??
The fandom, like I said, fucking exploded in early 2020 -- I don't know if it was concurrent with the Death to the Mechs tour, or because everyone was stuck inside and looking for new music, or because the Magnus Archives fandom was waiting between seasons, or what, but there are 71 pages of Mechs fic and 70 of those pages are fic published in 2019 onward. It appears to be entirely and exclusively fic set either in the worlds of the albums or about the fictional space pirate crew; there is no disambiguated tag for Mechs RPF, and so far I haven't found any RPF in the tag. Given that I'm roughly two degrees from these people and a lot of them are fairly active online, this seems just fine! It seems like a lot of the fic is being written by an echo chamber of young fans who [a] have elaborate headcanons about Lyfrassir Edda and ship them with Marius and [b] seem to want to put nice soft fluffy found family feelings on the murderous tragedy-and-thrills-seeking chaos space pirates who, like, are a found family, but. I'm still very delighted it's an active fandom! There is a huge amount of cute art on tumblr, too.
Anyway, gotta make the content you want to see in the world! I've already written "Jonny is bored between planets and bothers Ashes until they do unsafe waxplay and then bothers Tim until they do mutual cannibalism" and there's probably a lot more where that came from, not least because I really, really like weird immortals.
So that's where I've been! If anyone is either secretly here already or wants to join me, please do let me know :D
THE BAND
The Mechanisms were an Oxford-based band that Jonny Sims has handily described as "a somewhat lunatic stage show which is a mythic space pirate musical cabaret." They did shows in Oxford and at the Edinburgh Fringe between 2010-2020, while also producing seven albums and doing a lot of unrelated creative work. They never became especially big (which is sort of ironic, because the fandom for them exploded during quarantine, several months after they'd done their farewell show) but they seem to have had a dedicated little following both at the Fringe and among the Oxford-London queer millennial nerd set.
THE IN-UNIVERSE BAND CONCEIT
The Mechanisms are also the name of the in-universe crew of the space pirate ship Aurora, who travel the universe collecting interesting stories and then singing about them. They started as the backing band for vampire scientist Dr. Carmilla, who began turning them immortal by replacing various parts of them with steampunk mechanism versions. (Dr. Carmilla is the stage name of a real person, and the band was briefly Dr. Carmilla and the Mechanisms, but this will never be relevant again.) All their replaced parts, incidentally, are meant to be parts of them that suffered catastrophic failure, some literally and some more metaphorically. Eventually the doctor decided to concentrate on her solo work, at which point she had a tragic "accident" and fell out of the airlock, and the Mechs set off on their own! Not all of them seem to have been created by Dr. Carmilla, but they are all immortal anyway. All the songs are performed in character, and the Mechanisms themselves appear more or less briefly on every album, though they also play other characters within each album-length story as needed.
Possibly the most charming discovery I made while trying to find out who all these characters were and what was going on was that, in the grand tradition of when you're roleplaying with your friends and know that you'll always be the ones who care most about these characters, they also wrote fic. There is an entire section of their website labeled Fiction, and contains stories about the crew as well as some extras from the worlds of various albums. The quality is variable, and it's not clear who was writing what or if it was mostly one or two people, but some of the fic is genuinely good and all of it brings me so much delight.
THE CREW
Jonny Sims | Jonny d'Ville: Everything is his fault!! by which of course I mean that I stumbled upon the Mechanisms in the first place because I ran out of Magnus Archives and desperately wanted to know what other creative projects he'd done. Jonny primarily sings (and apparently plays the harmonica, lol) and therefore sings a lot of parts: literally every male part in Once Upon A Time (In Space) because the band hadn't realized that most of them could sing yet, Ulysses, Lancelot, Galahad, Lyfrassir Edda. All the album writing was collaborative, but Jonny apparently wrote most of the connecting narrative in the concept albums, and also narrates all the frame stories, either in-character as Jonny d'Ville or as a third party. (This is so funny to me because it's also the conceit of the Magnus Archives, a totally different story in which Jonny plays a character with his own name who's recording a lot of trauma happening to other people. He has A Theme and he is sticking to it.)
Jonny d'Ville [visual reference], meanwhile, is the first mate and de facto captain of the Aurora. He was one of the first people to be made a Mechanism; all of them are chaotic disasters but he is possibly The Most. He will do any crime for kicks except for the sexual ones, presumably because actual human Jonny Sims finds rape extremely creepy and also won't put it in his horror; obviously Jonny d'Ville is meant to be a fun chaos fantasy. Oh, and also he does a lot of cannibalism. As a teen he was tricked(?) into killing his father, then burned down the casino of the man who ordered him to do it and went off into the stars! (This is probably all lies except for the killing-his-dad part; there's a backstory song about it, One Eyed Jacks.) His mechanism is his heart, which seems to be one of the more metaphorical replacements.
Nastya: Not much is known about Nastya's actor! They left the band in 2015 in what seem to be cordial circumstances, and have requested to remain anonymous; the fandom is actually being very good about that, which is nice. They played the viola and had a bit of a speaking part in the first album.
Nastya Rasputina [visual reference] is the ship's engineer and one of the first Mechanisms. She comes from the planet of Cyberia, where she was Space Anastasia and then the Space Russian Revolution happened; when she was bleeding out, Dr. Carmilla found her and replaced her blood with mercury, which apparently uh helped. She's in a romantic and sexual relationship with the Aurora, which seems to work for both of them -- the Aurora is definitely some degree of sentient. Nastya also left the band in-character, in a story from the website in which she realizes that after so many millennia of repairs and replacements, she's down to one last piece of the original Aurora; she spaces herself and that ship part, with the implication that she's expecting to drift until she finds something interesting, not that she's doing it to die.
Frank Voss | Ashes O'Reilly: Frank plays bass and sings a lot of parts! Frank sings Hades (who is ... also Ashes! sometimes the Mechs aggressively insert themselves into a story), Mordred, Sigyn. They're also a recurring character on the Magnus Archives.
Ashes O'Reilly [visual reference] is hands-down the hottest band member, send help??? and also the crew's quartermaster! They grew up an orphan and were picked up by a mob boss as a young teen; they spent about a decade doing mob stuff before they realized their boss had been selling information about the gang to some rivals, and when Ashes tried to put a stop to it, they were framed for it and left to die. In retaliation, they ... burned down their entire planet, somehow. (And there's a backstory song about it, Lucky Sevens) Their mechanism, very reasonably after all that presumed smoke inhalation, is their lungs. Their signature move is pyromania and they apparently have a lot of gold "for tax purposes."
Ben Below | Drumbot Brian: Ben sings on several tracks, including playing Merlin (who is also actually Drumbot Brian), and plays accordion, banjo, and guitar; rumor has it that he also plays drums but there is hilariously little photographic evidence of that despite being whatever a drumbot is.
Drumbot Brian [visual reference] is the ship's pilot. He once landed on a planet with no memory of his previous life and set himself up as a scientist, but was opposed by a priest who thought he was doing ungodly work. When the priest fell ill, Brian revived him (possibly from actual death) and the priest, horrified, gathered the town and cast Brian back out into space. He was picked up by Dr. Carmilla, somewhat too late to save most of his body, so all of him is mechanised except for his heart. (His backstory song, Lost in the Cosmos, is mostly about him floating in space, but he does have one.) Dr. Carmilla, amused by the fact that both Brian and the priest believed they had the moral high ground, decided to build a morality switch into Brian's mechanical body: his two settings are Means Justify Ends, wherein Brian will not commit deeds he believes morally wrong, and Ends Justify Means, where he will happily commit all kinds of atrocities as long as he believes it’s for the greater good. Brian: pretty bizarre!
Jessica Law | The Toy Soldier: Jess sings and plays mandolin and glockenspiel. She sings literally every female part in Once Upon A Time (In Space) because the band hadn't realized that most of them could sing yet, Orpheus, and Guinevere. She played a recurring villain on the Magnus Archives (said recurring villain was a plastic clown person, which ... I'll get to the Toy Soldier in a minute, but it's wild to me that Jonny decided to typecast Jess in this specific way). It seems she started the trend of making plushie octokittens. Octokittens are the mutated eight-legged (or maybe eight-tentacled?) cats that live aboard the Aurora; they feature in several stories and songs, and a lot of the fans have either bought some from Jess or made their own.
The Toy Soldier [visual reference] was made by a grieving widow as a replacement husband. It is made of wood and not actually alive, but eventually it set out on its own and discovered someone who could sing very beautifully. It liked that, so it took the beautiful singer's vocal cords, and now it can sing beautifully! It's not technically a Mechanism; it's unclear how it joined the crew. Its crew bio on the website says only "We don't know what it does, but it's here and it won't go away." It's just happy to be involved!!
Tim Ledsam | Gunpowder Tim: I appreciate that at least one person beside Jonny decided to name their character their own name! He sings and plays guitar. Tim sings Oedipus, Gawain, and Loki. He has also been on the Magnus Archives, though as a character who's only appeared in two episodes; before his second appearance he tweeted that he'd told his boss he needed to take some time off to practice his screaming. Tim is the one who lobbied for The Bifrost Incident as an album, so I love him.
Gunpowder Tim [visual reference] is the ship's gunner. He comes from England, three thousand years in the future ago, and was drafted into the war against the Moon Kaiser; when his best friend Bertie was killed in the trenches, he went on a rampage, eventually got captured by the Kaiser, and with help from Jonny and the Toy Soldier, ended up escaping and blowing up the moon, as one does. (The backstory song, Gunpowder Tim vs. the Moon Kaiser, is basically a mini-album and one of my very favorite things they've done.) Blowing up the moon destroyed Tim's eyes, so he has mechanism eyes now!
Morgan Wilkinson | Ivy Alexandria: Morgan plays basically all their wind instruments. He doesn't sing on any of the albums, but Ivy has a small speaking part in Bifrost Incident.
Ivy Alexandria [visual reference] is the ship's archivist. She was born in a library; it's unclear how she died, but when she did, Dr. Carmilla revived her and mechanised her brain. Ivy doesn't remember her life except as a catalogue of events, although she also has nightmares about her past that she forgets upon waking.
Kofi Young | Marius von Raum: Kofi sings and plays violin and mandolin. They seem to still be doing a lot of music, including a recent holiday album and an upcoming solo album about Marius, which is very charming to me. Kofi sings Heracles, Arthur, and Thor, a beautiful fuckboy trifecta tbh.
Baron Marius von Raum [visual reference] is not actually a baron (it's apparently a corruption of Byron) and he's technically the ship's doctor but he's also not a doctor. He's mostly the comic relief? His mechanism is his arm, but it's not clear whether he was one of Dr. Carmilla's projects or got mechanised elsewhere (possibly by Raphaella, see below).
Rachel Hughes | Raphaella la Cognizi: Rachel sings Ariadne and Odin and plays piano. I know nothing else! An absolute mystery of a person!
Raphaella la Cognizi [visual reference] is the ship's science officer. What kind of science is she doing? Experiments! Unclear! Her mechanism is wings, which means that either she comes from a planet where wings are normal or she just decided one day that she would [a] give herself wings and [b] they would somehow make her immortal?? Incredible.
THE ALBUMS
Once Upon a Time (In Space) (2012) [Spotify link]: A bunch of fairy tales all mashed together and turned into a thirty-year civil war in space! King Cole is evil, Cinderella and Rose Red are in love, Snow White is leading the resistance, and the Mechanisms mostly get involved because their ship wants them to rescue Briar Rose. This is very, very much a freshman album, and my least favorite -- it's interesting to go back and see them sort of figuring out themes and concepts, but it's more scattered, more grimdark, and less well-produced than any of their others.
Ulysses Dies at Dawn (2013) [Spotify link]: Greek mythology as a noir set on the planet-wide city of Labyrinth. Heracles, Oedipus, Ariadne, and Orpheus have each been sent by Hades to get something out of Ulysses' mysterious vault; Ulysses just wants to rest. This one is a delight, and if you're in the mood for a noir Greek myth retelling it's a really fine place to start.
Tales to Be Told (2013) [Spotify link]: a shorter, non-full-concept album, featuring a mix of backstory songs, songs set in the Ulysses world that didn't make it into the main album, and songs that were prompts sent by kickstarter backers for the Ulysses album.
High Noon Over Camelot (2015) [Spotify link]: Arthuriana but it's a western on a space station that's falling into a star. Arthur/Guin/Lancelot are a triad, Mordred is trans, Galahad is a religious zealot played by Jonny in his best attempt at Southern preacher, and Drumbot Brian is Merlin for Reasons. I think some of the best songs are on this one, and this is absolutely the album where they most accurately nail tragedy as a narrative form rather than just a general aim; it's not one of my faves but it's still a good one!
The Bifrost Incident (2017) [Spotify link]: A Midgardian transit inspector attempts to solve the mystery of what happened to the Ratatosk Express after it vanished eighty years ago; it turns out the answer is "Lovecraftian Ragnarok." This was my first Mechs album because it was the one with the most interesting concept to me, so obviously I'm extremely biased, but I love it so, SO much. Can I sing almost the entire thing? Absolutely yes. Does that include the Lovecraftian incantation? Not yet, but it's only a matter of time!
Tales to Be Told Volume 2 (2018) [Spotify link]: another shorter, non-full-concept album, with a mix of backstory songs, songs set in the Ulysses world that didn't make it into the main album (they really love that setting and I don't blame them), and songs that were prompts sent by kickstarter backers for the Bifrost album.
Death to the Mechanisms (2020) [Spotify link]: A recording of their farewell liveshow, featuring all of Bifrost Incident, select tracks from other albums, and a spoken-word bit about how they all eventually do die. I'm so, so glad this album exists, because the liveshows sounded like they were fun as hell and it's great to have a good-quality recording of one, but like ... obviously don't start here. Honestly only go here if you get overinvested and want to feel, like, sadness and longing, and wonder to yourself how this happened because you didn't even care a week ago. Like, hypothetically.
FANDOM??
The fandom, like I said, fucking exploded in early 2020 -- I don't know if it was concurrent with the Death to the Mechs tour, or because everyone was stuck inside and looking for new music, or because the Magnus Archives fandom was waiting between seasons, or what, but there are 71 pages of Mechs fic and 70 of those pages are fic published in 2019 onward. It appears to be entirely and exclusively fic set either in the worlds of the albums or about the fictional space pirate crew; there is no disambiguated tag for Mechs RPF, and so far I haven't found any RPF in the tag. Given that I'm roughly two degrees from these people and a lot of them are fairly active online, this seems just fine! It seems like a lot of the fic is being written by an echo chamber of young fans who [a] have elaborate headcanons about Lyfrassir Edda and ship them with Marius and [b] seem to want to put nice soft fluffy found family feelings on the murderous tragedy-and-thrills-seeking chaos space pirates who, like, are a found family, but. I'm still very delighted it's an active fandom! There is a huge amount of cute art on tumblr, too.
Anyway, gotta make the content you want to see in the world! I've already written "Jonny is bored between planets and bothers Ashes until they do unsafe waxplay and then bothers Tim until they do mutual cannibalism" and there's probably a lot more where that came from, not least because I really, really like weird immortals.
So that's where I've been! If anyone is either secretly here already or wants to join me, please do let me know :D
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A few monthly ago I spontaneously filked a TMA version of 'What do you do with a drunk space pirate' with some friends over on the RQO dicord ('What shall we do with a ruined hellscape' subsequently got reposted on tumblr), and I remain terrifically amused that any filk of a Mechs song is inherently filk of a filk.
Are you on discord yourself, by any chance?
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Ahh what a delightful filk-of-a-filk :D
And I am technically on discord in the sense that I have, like, a username and a little server with my D&D group, but fandom discord servers feel wildly intimidating to me!
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Stage Manager: Arachne.
There is a Discord thing I think you might enjoy; have send you a DW message with the details.
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