Day Zero Breakdown
Day Zero Breakdown is an audio accompaniment to dementia lyrics, Dennis Hinrichsen’s twelfth full length collection of poetry and his fifth title overall from Green Linden Press. The poems are an exploration of systemic failure on multiple levels beginning with the diagnosis of two friends with very different forms of dementia, but then branching out to include the failure of late-stage capitalism to address the needs of the homeless in Hinrichsen’s hometown of Lansing, Michigan, as well as issues related to freshwater mismanagement and the death of aquifers on a broader scale. The running motif is water, the body as water, brain as water, body and brain as aquifer, all under extreme forms of stress.
The LP tracks are from the section of the book titled “Day Zero Sequence” and pull all these motifs together as they move from the micro act of grieving to a more macro celebratory gesture of the water cycle and how it sustains us. The subterranean soundscapes ambient artist Worm Moon provide the perfect sound design for the first two tracks: “Body. Bedrock. Synapse.” and “Thirst (the thirsting for after the thirsting after).” Both poems focus on the water motif and spill down the page in a way that mirrors the spreading of water through bedrock. The water is trapped in body, in bedrock, we are trapped in consciousness, dying is an interiority filled with the sounds of that seepage and the cyclic turning toward the wall.
bioPrism works with a broader ambient/electronic palette embracing noise and dissonance but without ever losing a lyrical feel for sound and how it can shape a wide spectrum of emotions. Three tracks are presented here, “Pedal Steel Death Song,” “Aqua America” and “Aquifer Manifesto,” all with varying sound designs and instrumentation that listen to and enrich the phrasing and flow of ideas in each one of the poems as the sequence opens to broader concerns. A sixth track, “re●ac●tor●se●quence,” functions as a coda as it reboots the speaker’s determination to be a witness in a world that is shedding half-life all around him.
Full album releases on Bandcamp 8 February, 2026.