SONG: Your Catalogue

SONG: “Your Catalogue”. (OGG version here.)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: NBC News, “New wild cat species is identified for first time in 100 years, researchers say“, 17 Sep 2026, as used in the post, “First new cat species IDed in a century.”

ABSTRACT:
I feel like I kind of had to climb a mountain to get this done this month. Upheavals everywhere — loved ones with broken bones, loved ones prepping for chemotherapy, loved ones mourning other loved ones… and then for whatever reason, after I’d whacked down a ukulele part in the middle of the night and added some mumbled half-lyrics, then fell asleep and put the computer to sleep as well, when it awoke there was no more desktop. Like the icons appear briefly and then vanish, leaving a pointer on a black screen.

I refused to let this stop me. Brought up every program used to record, label, upload, and post this song one at a time in the command line. Got it done.

The song itself I feel like is one of those progressions that’s just always going on in the back of my mind, and maybe in everyone’s mind. There are not a lot of surprises here harmonically or melodically.

There are some interesting textures, I think. The main instrument is that ukulele pitch-lowered by two octaves to a bass register. There’s a real organette, a MIDI Rhodes piano, a strummed 3/4-size guitar for a rhythm track, and another track of lead guitar that was fed through an amp and a delay. A contrabass to round out the bottom end.

And then some half-whispered vocals about a cat being catalogued, and taxonomy being taxing. Because I guess the real discovery here was kind of a sorting-and-filing discovery.

And the thing with cats, all cats, is that they really don’t care about any of your organizational systems. They are agents of chaos and dangerous beauty.

I see no reason why the tilcayo tiger cat would be any different, however we want to measure and sort it.

LYRICS:

Add one more cat to your catalogue tonight
Index the secret names in the jungle light, the jungle light
Tiny tigers

Add one more cat to your catalogue, my friend
Classify every circle within the patterns on skin
The space between whiskers and chin
The feline mysteries now awakening
Tilcayo(x3)

Add one more cat to your catalogue at last
Tax your taxonomies, past these tiny tigers
Claw your categories
Tilcayo (3)