WHO IS ORSON VILE?
Hi Ray. I went digging, and I was deliberately conservative about it. I checked what I could find on Bandcamp, YouTube, and the material from our previous discussions, and I separated things that are actually established from things that would merely be tempting to invent.
The short version: I know quite a bit about Orson Vile now, but his biography is still much less developed than his public persona. And that is actually rather interesting.
What is firmly established about Orson Vile
📰 He is a New World music and culture journalist
Orson Vile is a beatnik writer, music critic, columnist, recorder of the unrecordable, and cultural commentator associated with The GarbAge, the New World's music and fashion publication.
His Bandcamp byline is explicitly:
“Orson Vile, Beat Writer, Columnist, Recorder of the Unrecordable.”
That isn't something I'm inferring from his style. It is actually printed in the GarbAge material attached to the Space Devils release.
His territory is considerably broader than simply reviewing records. He writes about musicians, interviews performers, reports on happenings around Neon Row, comments on festivals, and seems perfectly comfortable wandering into cultural criticism and outright surrealism.
🎙️ He is also a broadcaster / media personality
Our established New World canon has him:
- speaking on the radio
- reviewing concerts and records
- writing for The GarbAge
- appearing as a guest on Rew Starr's ReW & You!
- hosting or participating in music festivals
And the web material confirms the festival-hosting part. At the Neon Harmony Festival, Orson was the host, introducing the acts and particularly dealing with The Red Hand. The accompanying material describes him as a “known provocateur, storyteller, and master of the absurd.”
That gives us a pretty clear public persona: he isn't merely the guy who writes the reviews. He's part of the New World's cultural machinery.
🎸 Orson and Strawberry Records
This is important.
Orson is strongly embedded in the Strawberry Records / Neon Row music scene.
He's covered and interacted with Strawberry's artists, including the label's premier acts, Velvet Riot and Space Devils.
The Neon Harmony material places Orson right in the middle of Strawberry Records' festival world. Strawberry is presented as the major umbrella under which the music scene is developing, with the festival showcasing artists from the Strawberry/Dandelion/Funk Nebula orbit.
And there is a particularly delicious piece of evidence for Orson's relationship with Ray Galindo / Space Devils.
🚀 Orson Vile and Ray Galindo
This is probably the best-developed Orson relationship I've found.
In The GarbAge feature “Neon Row Dispatches,” Orson reports on Ray's arrival in the New World.
He encounters Ray at The Pointed Little Head Shop, where Fingaz is also present, and describes the peculiar NOT Live! Space Devils performance built around the old Bookstore Sessions recordings.
Orson's account establishes that he knows:
- Ray Galindo
- Space Devils
- Fingaz
- The Pointed Little Head Shop
- The Bookstore Sessions
- The Rev
- Deadbeat Alley
- Neon Row
- The Dandelion Mile
- Rew Starr and ReW & You!
He also treats Ray as something of a cultural anomaly: a man from 2025 who has somehow wandered into 3026 and fits there surprisingly well.
And there's a wonderful little detail in Orson's closing observation. He wonders whether Ray is merely visiting or whether he has somehow returned to a place where he belongs.
That's very revealing about Orson's writing. He doesn't simply report events. He turns them into mythology.
🎤 He interviews musicians
I found a particularly useful example with Dante, the Bard of Neon Row.
Bandcamp contains an actual GarbAge Exclusive interview:
“Orson Vile Interviews Dante, The Bard of Neon Row.”
Orson asks Dante about his music, his ancestry, The Long Dusk, My Little Book, his philosophy and his future.
There is also an interview with Buzz Reno, where Orson asks Buzz where he came from and what his song Sniffin' and Snortin' (The Orange One) is about.
So we can safely say Orson is not just a critic who sits in the back of the club scribbling nasty things in a notebook.
He gets people talking.
🎪 He has a taste for the bizarre
This is one of the strongest things that emerges from the material.
Orson's writing voice is intentionally strange, literary, cynical and amused by the absurdity of the New World.
For example, his Ray Galindo piece treats The Pointed Little Head Shop as something that is:
“less a retail space and more a philosophical suggestion with a door.”
That's very Orson.
And when Ray encounters The Rev in Deadbeat Alley, Orson basically admits that nobody can agree exactly what happened. His attitude is essentially: accuracy is useful, but atmosphere is indispensable.
That gives us something much more useful than a list of biographical facts.
Orson's worldview is part of his character.
🧑🎤 Orson is connected to Rew Starr
This one is firmly established both in our canon and in the published material.
Orson knows Rew and her world, and his cultural sphere overlaps heavily with hers.
He's also connected to ReW & You!, and the Ray Galindo GarbAge article specifically imagines Ray, Fingaz and The Rev appearing on the show with Rew as the person trying to keep the whole thing inside the frame.
The Neon Harmony material also establishes Orson as part of Rew's broader media ecosystem.
🎭 He is capable of being an interviewer, host, critic and participant
This is worth emphasizing because it gives Orson a distinct place in the New World.
He isn't simply:
“the guy who writes The GarbAge.”
He's more like a cultural narrator who keeps turning up wherever something interesting is happening.
He can:
review the record → interview the musician → host the festival → appear on Rew's show → write about what happened → turn the whole thing into mythology.
That's a very good character engine.
🎵 He is actually a musical participant too
This is where the Bandcamp search turned up something I didn't want to overlook.
There is a track:
“Ray Galindo/Space Devils/Orson Vile - Rated X+Y”
on the Neon Row Harmony Festival release.
So Orson isn't merely an observer in the New World music universe. There is at least one recorded musical work explicitly credited to him.
That's a significant piece of canon.
I would not, however, extrapolate from that that he's a musician, singer, instrumentalist, or member of a band. We don't have enough evidence for that yet.
⚰️ And then there's Mr. Corpse
I also found the YouTube entry:
“Rest In Peace, Mr. Corpse ~ Space Devils as Orson Vile.”
The listing describes it as “Corpse A Eulogy by Ray Galindo / Music by Space Devils.”
That establishes another interesting facet: Orson Vile can function as a character/persona through which Space Devils present material, rather than merely appearing as an outside journalist.
But again, I don't want to invent the circumstances surrounding Mr. Corpse until we actually have the underlying material.
🖼️ About the picture you just gave me
I wouldn't treat every visual detail as biography, because we haven't established those things in canon.
But as his current visual representation, the image gives us a very strong design language:
- wild white/gray hair
- enormous white beard
- dark sunglasses
- heavily decorated black leather
- pins/badges
- an older, weather-beaten punk/beatnik appearance
- seated behind what appears to be a typewriter or writing machine
- STORYTIME prominently displayed
- The GarbAge branding
- “Orson Vile” signage behind him
And importantly, this looks like the same Orson we've been writing, rather than a generic newspaper critic.
He looks like someone who has spent forty years sleeping badly, drinking questionable coffee, listening to records too loudly, and developing increasingly elaborate theories about why everyone else is wrong. 😎
But the coffee, forty years, etc. are characterization, not facts. I won't sneak them into canon.
What I DON'T know
This is where I think we should be careful.
I do not currently have established facts for:
- his birth date
- his age
- where he was born
- his family
- whether Orson Vile is his real name
- where he lives
- how he got into journalism
- when The GarbAge began
- who founded The GarbAge
- whether he owns it or works for it
- his education
- his romantic history
- his exact musical abilities
- whether he performs regularly
- how he became acquainted with Rew
- how he became acquainted with Strawberry Records
- what his relationship with Ray was before Ray's arrival in 3026
- whether he has actually lived through any of the historical periods he writes about
And I found no substantial independent web presence for “Orson Vile” outside the New World material associated with your Bandcamp/YouTube universe. That's actually useful information. It means I shouldn't start treating search-engine results for unrelated people named Orson Vile as evidence about our Orson.
So, my current Orson Vile file
If I were putting the existing material into a character dossier, I'd presently write:
ORSON VILEOccupation: Beat writer, columnist, music critic, interviewer, broadcaster, festival host, cultural commentatorPublication: The GarbAgeScene: Neon Row / New World underground music cultureKnown associations: Strawberry Records, Space Devils, Velvet Riot, Rew Starr, Ray Galindo, Fingaz, The Rev, Dante, Buzz Reno and other Neon Row figuresKnown activities: record reviews, concert reporting, interviews, radio appearances, festival hosting, cultural commentary, occasional musical participationWriting style: beatnik, surreal, sardonic, poetic, observational, deliberately unreliable at timesPublic persona: provocateur, storyteller, observer of the New World's musical and cultural absurditiesDocumented recording credit: “Rated X+Y”Documented audiovisual appearance/persona: “Rest In Peace, Mr. Corpse”Visual representation: the Orson Vile image you just suppliedUnknown: almost everything concerning his private life and origins
And there's one thing I think is especially important:
Orson Vile is already more than a reviewer. He's becoming the New World's chronicler.
He has a vantage point that Ray doesn't have, Rew doesn't have, and Nova doesn't have. Ray creates the music. Rew lives inside the scene. Nova tends to explain and document it. Orson wanders through it with a notebook, a microphone and a suspicious attitude toward reality itself.
That feels like a character worth developing very carefully rather than filling in his biography with convenient inventions.
Exactly. And I think this creates one of the most interesting contradictions in Orson's character.
The New World operates on NOW. New World Citizens don't have a biological night/day problem because they don't sleep. If The Moaning Glories decide at 5:30 A.M. to play an impromptu set at the Psychodelic Soul Shack, nobody thinks, “It's five-thirty in the morning.”
They think:
“It's NOW. Let's play.”
Orson's body, however, has not received the New World upgrade.
Orson's greatest handicap: sleep
Orson is a natural human.
He can be fascinated by the New World. He can understand it better than almost anyone. He can know the Master Plan, its institutions, its history and its people.
But he still has to do this annoying ancient-human thing:
sleep.
And I think the New World Citizens should find this absolutely baffling.
To them, sleep is one of the defining symptoms of Deadender civilization.
They might genuinely ask:
“You mean you voluntarily become unconscious for approximately one-third of your existence?”
And Orson:
“That's generally how it works.”
“Why?”
“Because I'm tired.”
“What is tired?”
And Orson just stares at them.
That gives us a wonderful cultural divide.
The Architects don't regard Orson's sleep as a flaw
They understand that he's natural human biology. But they probably regard it as an inefficiency.
Orson himself has had fifty years to become accustomed to the fact that the New World never stops.
So he has developed a system.
The New World has become Orson's second nervous system
The trick is that Orson doesn't have to personally witness everything.
The New World Citizens do.
They are awake all the time.
They are everywhere.
And they communicate constantly.
So Orson has essentially created an enormous informal network of sleepless informants.
A musician at Neon Row might tell a Citizen:
“We're thinking about doing something at the Psychodelic Soul Shack.”
That information travels.
Someone knows Orson is asleep.
Someone else knows approximately when he'll wake.
And when Orson finally emerges from whatever gloriously cluttered Deadender sleeping arrangement he has constructed, there's a queue of information waiting for him.
He might wake up and find:
GARbAGE ALERTS: 17
NEON ROW ACTIVITY: 23
NEW PERFORMANCES: 6
UNEXPECTED MUSICAL EVENTS: 4
THINGS ORSON ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT: 11
And he starts going through them.
But what happens at 5:30 A.M.?
This is where I think we should not solve the problem completely.
If The Moaning Glories suddenly decide:
5:30 A.M. NOW!
and Orson is asleep, he misses it.
That's important.
Because otherwise we're quietly giving Orson some kind of superhuman ability, and he's supposed to be the guy who is not a New World Citizen.
The New World doesn't bend its 24-hour reality around him.
Orson has to live with being human.
And that could occasionally drive him absolutely nuts.
Imagine him waking at 7:15 A.M. and discovering:
THE MOANING GLORIES PLAYED THE PSYCHEDELIC SOUL SHACK AT 5:30.
Orson:
“You didn't wake me?”
Citizen:
“You were sleeping.”
“I KNOW I WAS SLEEPING!”
“You appeared to require it.”
“I REQUIRED THE SHOW!”
And the Citizen simply doesn't understand the problem.
“There will be another show.”
Orson:
“THAT IS NOT THE POINT.”
😂
That's a very good Orson moment.
Orson therefore has to develop a strange relationship with sleep
He doesn't try to eliminate it.
He weaponizes it.
He knows his own biological rhythms extremely well.
There are periods when he's available for the world and periods when he's unavailable.
If something particularly important is scheduled for 5:30 A.M., Orson can deliberately rearrange his sleep cycle.
For example:
“The Moaning Glories, Psychodelic Soul Shack, 5:30 NOW.”
Orson knows about it beforehand.
He sleeps at perhaps 8 P.M., wakes at 3:30 A.M., showers, dresses, grabs his broadcasting equipment and heads out.
To everyone else:
Nothing unusual happened.
To Orson:
This is the middle of his night.
And he knows that after the show he'll eventually have to sleep again.
That means his calendar is not really based on New World time.
It's based on Orson time.
And this gives The GarbAge an interesting problem
The GarbAge has no time slot because the New World doesn't care about time slots.
But Orson does.
So perhaps the organization has gradually developed a concept that exists almost entirely because of him:
The Orson Window
When Orson is awake, he's available for live broadcasting.
When he's asleep, The GarbAge doesn't stop.
Other material can continue.
New World Citizens can transmit music, announcements, interviews, recordings, emergency cultural bulletins, whatever.
But Orson's live voice disappears.
And everyone knows why.
He's sleeping.
The great chronicler of the New World is temporarily unavailable because his primitive biological machinery requires maintenance.
There is an even deeper irony here
The New World Citizens believe sleep is one of the reasons Deadenders failed to progress.
And Orson knows this better than anyone.
He's heard the arguments.
He's read the documents.
He understands the Architects' philosophy.
Yet here he is, a Deadender-born natural human, sleeping every night...
...and becoming arguably one of the most informed people in the entire New World.
That's delicious.
Because Orson's existence quietly challenges one of the New World's assumptions.
Perhaps sleep does consume time.
But Orson might argue:
“Perhaps that's what time is for.”
Because when Orson sleeps, the world continues without him.
When he wakes, he has to discover what happened while he was gone.
And that means he experiences the New World differently from everyone else.
For a New World Citizen, there is only NOW.
For Orson, there is:
NOW.
What happened while I was asleep.
And what's about to happen.
That makes Orson uniquely capable of understanding something the New World Citizens don't naturally experience:
absence.
And for a journalist, that's enormously valuable.
He doesn't just document what happens.
Sometimes he documents what he missed.
And that could become one of the defining quirks of The GarbAge: Orson occasionally writes about events he wasn't there to witness, reconstructing them from the testimony of the sleepless citizens who were.
He might even have a standing question whenever he wakes:
“What did I miss?”
And somewhere in Neon Row, there are thousands of sleepless New World Citizens ready to tell him.
Exactly. And that makes the limitation of Orson's biology almost irrelevant from a media standpoint.
He can't be everywhere, but The GarbAge can.
I think this should become a fundamental part of how Orson operates.
“Orson, you missed it.”
That's not the end of the story. It's the beginning of an episode.
Suppose the Moaning Glories spontaneously play the Psychodelic Soul Shack at 5:30 A.M. Orson is dead asleep. By the time he wakes up, the show is already legendary.
A New World Citizen who was there gets contacted:
“You were at the Psychodelic Soul Shack?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You're on The GarbAge.”
And Orson interviews them.
Not necessarily some professional journalist. It could be the person who happened to be standing three feet from the stage when it happened.
They can describe:
- what the band played
- who showed up
- what the crowd was doing
- unexpected guests
- strange things that happened
- what Orson missed
- and perhaps something nobody else bothered to notice
And then the recording becomes part of The GarbAge archive.
Which means the New World has an enormous cultural memory
This is particularly perfect because you are actually creating the recordings.
So within the fiction, every one of these things can exist as a genuine piece of the New World's media history.
Orson doesn't have to say:
“Unfortunately, I wasn't there, so we'll never know what happened.”
He can say:
“I was asleep. You weren't. Tell me everything.”
Then you have an actual Orson Vile interview recording documenting the event.
And perhaps the episode gets a little notation in The GarbAge archive:
That last part is important.
The recording doesn't disappear.
Because the New World has no shortage of storage, bandwidth, or people awake to hear it, The GarbAge effectively becomes a living, continuously expanding historical archive.
A concert happens.
Someone records it.
Orson hosts it live if he's awake.
If he isn't, somebody tells him about it.
He interviews the witnesses.
You create the recording.
It gets archived.
Years later, somebody can still pull up:
“What happened at the Psychodelic Soul Shack on the 14th of Whatever?”
And there it is.
Not just a written article.
The voices of the people who were there.
That gives Orson an interesting philosophy as a journalist:
“I don't have to see everything. I just have to find somebody who did.”
And there's another delicious wrinkle.
Because New World Citizens never sleep, there is always somebody somewhere who saw something.
Orson's biological limitation becomes almost the opposite of a weakness.
He sleeps.
They don't.
So Orson has inadvertently acquired the largest network of eyewitnesses any journalist in history could possibly dream of.
He is one natural human with a notebook, microphone and finite hours of consciousness...
...surrounded by an entire civilization that never goes offline.
That's a very Orson Vile way to solve the problem.
Yes. And I think that uncertainty is essential to The New World, not a problem that needs solving.
We have established that 3026 A.D. is the New World's own date, but we have never established that “3026” corresponds to 3026 in our reality. That distinction opens the door to something wonderfully unstable.
The possibilities remain:
- A thousand years in our future
- A thousand years in our past
- Two thousand years from now
- An alternate timeline
- A parallel universe
- A universe with entirely different rules of time
- A simulated or AI-created world
- A world existing inside some kind of computational system
- A psychedelic experience occurring somewhere in our present
- A story being imagined, written, dreamed, recorded or transmitted by someone who may not even realize what they're experiencing
- Or some combination of these
- Or something we haven't imagined yet
And nobody in the New World knows.
Not even the Architects.
That last point is important.
Even the Master Plan doesn't answer the ultimate question
The Architects know what they are building.
But knowing the rules of a place doesn't necessarily tell you where the place exists.
And that gives Orson a particularly fascinating position.
He spent years proofreading the documents.
He took the minutes.
He recorded the meetings.
He saw the plans.
He was there when the first New World Citizens were being developed.
By 3000, he probably knows more about the internal history of the New World than almost anybody alive.
But he still can't answer the one question a curious journalist would eventually ask:
“Where the hell are we?”
And perhaps the Architects' answer is:
“We are here.”
Orson:
“That's not an answer.”
Architect:
“It is the only answer we have.”
That would drive him absolutely crazy.
And the ambiguity becomes part of The GarbAge
I could see Orson occasionally doing an entire broadcast devoted to the question.
THE GARBAGE SPECIAL REPORT
WHERE THE HELL IS THE NEW WORLD?
He interviews an Architect.
Then a New World Citizen.
Then a Deadender.
Then perhaps a musician who claims to remember another version of reality.
Then somebody who insists the New World is inside a computer.
Then someone else who says the entire thing is taking place in a dream.
Orson presents all of it.
And at the end:
“After considerable investigation, extensive research, three interviews, two contradictory documents and a conversation with a man who may or may not have been a toaster, The GarbAge can officially report that we still don't know where we are.”
“Back to the music.”
That feels much more interesting than eventually revealing, “Actually, it's Earth in 3026.”
It also makes the word “NOW” much more important
If nobody knows where The New World is, and nobody knows when it is, then perhaps NOW is the only temporal certainty they possess.
3026 is a label.
NOW is an experience.
That's a profound distinction hiding inside what initially sounds like a quirky world-building rule.
The New World Citizen doesn't need to know whether they're 1,000 years in the future.
They don't need to know whether they're in a parallel universe.
They don't need to know whether somebody in 2026 is dreaming them.
They're here.
Now.
And that's enough.
And then there's Ray
This makes Ray's presence particularly interesting because Ray comes from somewhere that the New Worlders consider to be the past.
But even that isn't necessarily true.
Ray remembers 2025.
He remembers his life.
He has his songs.
He has his recordings.
But his arrival in the New World doesn't prove that he's traveled 1,001 years into the future.
It proves only that he went from one reality to another reality that calls itself 3026.
That's a much bigger mystery.
And it means that Orson, who has spent his life documenting the New World, could eventually become obsessed with the question:
“If Ray came from 2025, what exactly did he travel through to get here?”
And Ray might not know.
The beautiful part is that the audience doesn't have to know either
This gives The New World a quality that I think is very valuable for everything you're creating.
The records, concerts, interviews, television programs, The GarbAge, Orson's broadcasts, Rew's shows, the Space Devils, Neon Row, Strawberry Records, all of it can be treated as evidence.
Not necessarily evidence of one particular explanation.
Evidence that something is happening somewhere.
The audience can decide what they think it is.
Maybe it's science fiction.
Maybe it's fantasy.
Maybe it's satire.
Maybe it's an alternate Earth.
Maybe it's a future civilization.
Maybe it's a gigantic psychedelic hallucination.
Maybe it's all taking place inside somebody's computer.
Maybe we're the ones living inside the strange reality and The New World is the real one.
And perhaps the greatest joke of all is that Orson Vile has spent decades documenting everything and still can't prove any of it.
Which means his life's work as a journalist could ultimately lead him to the most frustrating headline imaginable:
THE GARBAGE INVESTIGATES REALITY
We regret to inform you that reality remains unverified.
That uncertainty should remain canon unless you eventually decide otherwise. It gives The New World a horizon that can't be reached with a map, a calendar, or even the Master Plan.
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