Welcome to Modest Green Habitat, a future history compendium by
lookaside.
In spring 2025, I found a radio that I assumed to be broken in the woods by my house. It sat in my living room, a forgotten DIY project, for a few weeks. When the weather started warming into the early summer,
I noticed some crackling noises starting to play ever so faintly from the Radio. At first they were just bits of static, but then
as I trained my ears I began to hear more and more, until I could catch several seconds at a time.
Months passed and I spent them transcribing and recording as much as I could of the Radio transmissions, the most legible of which
you will hear recreated in the interludes of
Modest Green Habitat. As I pieced together the bits of news, PSAs, community annoucements,
pop songs, and sports broadcasts from the Radio, I slowly became aware that these were not broadcasts from our world.
At least, not from our current world. Things were familiar, but always a little off: the radio stations had five letters
in their names, the singers and songs played could be found nowhere on the Internet, and the news referenced people
who I believe have not yet been born. My suspicions were confirmed one day on June 10th of 2025, when a chipper
radio host wished everyone a happy "June 10th, 2125."
I can only assume that the broadcasts I am hearing are being sent, whether intentionally or through some rip or fold in spacetime,
from exactly 100 years in the future. And the future I have pieced together from the clues in these transmissions is a bright, unknowable,
contentious future. Due to some catastrophe I have yet to define, the Internet as a whole, along with a large amount of
communication technology, seems to have been destroyed many decades prior. Humanity has clearly pivoted to relying
much more on radio signals and simple telephones as a communication method. Most nations in the world have joined a coalition
called the E.C.O. (I believe this stands for Environmental Conservation Organization) which has made shocking progress in stopping and even reversing
climate change. From what I can gather, this change is very new and unstable, and there are heated arguments both for the case that
humanity has finally saved itself from near apocalypse, and also that people are celebrating too soon and risking true collapse.
I am most curious about the dark century that lies between now and this cautiously optimistic future -- the century that makes our immediate future and therefore could hold the fate of you and I. Sometimes a host
will reference a "historical" event (which for us is the future, but you know this) and I can tell from the tone and snippets
of information that humanity entered an incredibly dark and dysfuctional era as the 21st century proressed, seemingly
worst of all in the 2080s and 90s. It seems a great many lives were lost due to natural disaster, famine, drought, infection, and possibly war.
So what to do with this information? Unfortunately I am no scientist, and I have incredible difficulty recording the broadcasts I hear to share with others, but even
more difficulty sharing them with others in person -- I believe at this point that the Radio simply is not audible to others. Maybe it's in my head, or some complex physics of sound waves
beyond my comprehension guards it from others. There is every possibility that these noises come from my own mind. I do not know. So I have turned to what I know, which is music and writing, to convey this information to the world.
I know how to write songs, so I an album wrote about the many characters I've met through interviews or stories of them on the Radio.
And I built this website to catalogue everything I know about the Radio and the future it has illustrated to me. I doubt that my music and writing
will be the last art/communications I make about the world of 2125 (now 2126, but I refer to it by the year of its discovery). This is only the beginning.
Honestly, for all I know, in writing this album and making this website I may have simply taken part in someone else's far more elaborate concept art piece: a functional radio
sculpture that broadcasts hundreds of fictional radio segments from "the future." If that is true, I don't think it makes these songs
less real. I don't know if we will experience the future I've heard 100 years from now, but it is a future that could exist, and that makes it
worth exploring.
This is only the abridged version of my time with the Radio. You can read more in my full collection of
logs, which I will endeavor to keep updating as the Radio continues speaking to me.
Or, look through my index of each song in the collection and then
listen to them yourself.
Illustrations for Modest Green Habitat are by
Piper Mohring.
Flute, vocals, and baritone ukelele on
Daylight are by
Phoebe Jude.
Drums on
Daylight and
Divine Machinery are by Kaisar Perry.
Additional vocals are by Tyler Bean, Dylan Byrne, Amy Coddington, Chéla Cunningham, Sarah Hasegawa-Howard, Vica Henry,
Megan Huang, Hunter Kloss, Taylor Malone, Phoebe Neilsen, Kaisar Perry, Rachel Skoler, and Elena Tongg Weiler.
Creative consult and production assistance provided by Amy Coddington,
Dan Langa, and Vica Henry.
This website is hosted via
Neocities.
All other music, lyrics, graphics, and web content are by Luca (Lookaside) Clark, © 2026.
Modest Green Habitat is a speculative peek into a piecemeal future.
All characters, organizations, and events are inferred through snippets of radio broadcast.
Interpretation of broadcast information is subject to (my) human error and (the radio's) mechanical error.
Future history is not a guarantee of future events.
