Artist	Song
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks	Dark Wave
Spock	Time Machine
The Dandy Warhols	Mohammed
The Decemberists	Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect
Grandaddy	Ghost of 1672
Galaxie 500	Another Day
Howe Gelb w/Grandaddy	This Purple Child
Johnny Cash	Apache Tears
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young	Ohio
Giant Sand	1972
Built to Spill	Time Trap
Giant Sand	Centre of the Universe
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds	As I Sat Sadly By Her Side
John Vanderslice	Time Travel is Lonely
Yo La Tengo	Today is the Day [ep version]
Songs: Ohia	Cross the Road, Molina
Joy Division	Transmission
Guided by Voices	A Visit to the Creep Doctor
Sparklehorse	Come on In
Elf Power	Birds in the Backyard
Lexo and the Leapers	Time Machines
The Mountain Goats	Onions

Comment:

This is the third volume of an epic three-disc homage to B-movie science fiction, from classic films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Time Machine, and Year Zero, to modern films such as Independence Day that would rate B-movie status if not for their mammoth budgets. It was made for a friend.

Disc Three Story Overview

Since the invasion, the scientist has put all his efforts into developing a time machine that would allow him to go back in time and stop himself from sending the transmissions that brought the alien attack. However, his wife sick with radiation poisoning, he is reluctant to go back himself, leaving her to an uncertain fate should he fail to positively change the time stream (yes, this story will adhere to the precedent of completely ignoring time travel paradoxes). Resuscitating the man has given him an alternative however. It's always nice to have someone to clean up your past for you. With nothing left to lose now, the man agrees. There's been no time to experiment with the technology to allow any degree of precision however, and so he must skip through multiple time periods until gradually locking in more precisely on the day the scientist sent his world-ending transmission. The stress of these time jumps adds up, however, and the hero goes into a coma on one of them, finding himself in a glowing white version of the time pod, looking out the thick window onto a time-lapse impression of random events from every day tragedies of human history. Suddenly beside him is the woman he loved and lost in that field. She speaks the doubts and cynicism of his mind, while he attempts to defend his mission. Finally he chooses to turn away from her and ignore the thoughts she represents, and wakes up to find he has landed on the day he is looking for. He confronts the scientist with the ultimate outcome of his research and convinces him to seek knowledge of something else instead. Then he climbs into the time machine for the last time, and spins the dials to year -1. The thing flashes out of conventional space and he falls unconscious. He wakes up on the day our story began, only this time flying saucers don't arrive and our world doesn't end, and the woman he loves is there, smiling and the plants grow and the birds sing and so on and so forth.

Packaging

All three discs are packaged in a single custom-built gatefold jacket made of boxboard and wrapped in aluminium foil. The cover images were inkjetted onto transparencies, cut to a narrow width and wrapped vertically around each panel, leaving enough slack to allow the images to "float" above the foil. The effect is much like the old handheld lcd-display video games from Tiger, where the lcd screen was mounted above a fixed graphic backdrop, and if you held the game unit at a certain angle the lcd images would cast separate shadows onto the backdrop.

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