Some records emerge from a place. Kicking A Dark Horse seems to have been trapped inside one, breathing through limestone while the road above repeats its insistent Morse code. The third volume in Greyfade's FOLIO series binds a full-length recording in hardcover form, pairing nine modular-synthesizer pieces by sound artist Josh Mason with his book-length A Temporally Untethered Travelogue of the State(s) of Florida. The parenthetical plural opens beneath the state as a grammatical sinkhole, hovering somewhere between drainage problem and family archive. Sound and language do not accompany one another so much as exchange organs. Between them lies a creature whose dreams glow behind fever-laden curtains.

Mason constructs the music from systems designed to resist mastery: streams of binary information tangled with oscillators pushed beyond their intended behavior, mismatched converters rubbing against delay lines built to strike. Chance supplies the abrasion, while Mason shapes its consequences with severe tenderness. The opening piece, “Unincorporated Community Fight Song,” gathers minute electronic gestures into a fragile social body. Its title promises ceremony, yet the music offers a municipality too dispersed for marching, each tone carrying a small lantern through the bloodstream. “Traumahawk (Volunteer Corps.)” brings that current closer to the skin.

The book teaches us to distrust illumination. Florida's brightness bleaches evidence and gives catastrophe a devotional sheen, turning parking lots into immaculate alibis. Mason watches radiance glance from hotel pools, sodium lamps, bridge pavement, television windows, and the blind terminus of travel. History and hallucination occupy the same overexposed frame. Water initially proposes another grammar, carrying childhood behind the engineering required to keep tenderness above sea level. Every beautiful image drags behind it a permit or pipe, some buried cost still accruing interest. Within this contaminated radiance, “Would Go” reads as a message recovered after its senders have vanished into their own machinery. “A Tomb” receives the signal and folds it inward. Tiny electronic movements flare inside a chamber too immense for human tenancy.

Time in Mason's Florida refuses the road's forward command. A vacuum cord catches beneath a wheel. Film accepts multiple exposures until childhood and adulthood share one face. The self disperses through grandparents' kitchens, a father's unruly metaphysics, friends dead or disappearing, and rooms abandoned after a final glance. Autobiography consequently loses its borders, seeping into county roads and municipal failure until identity becomes a public utility with unreliable service. “Hellified Ire” occupies this psychic center, gritted with a friction that makes duration sound combustible. The track does not illustrate injury but discovers the frequency at which a scar communicates the history of its becoming. Beneath it, development proceeds with administrative calm: mangroves uprooted, shell middens mined, bridges arriving out of sequence, communities translated from ink into debris.

Even the page refuses passive service. Paragraphs crowd the margins while isolated phrases drift through broad white fields. “You have one new message” returns with a machine's immaculate courtesy, announcing contact from an adjacent dimension. The blankness pressurizes whatever language has left unresolved; silence becomes an active material, dense enough to bend memory around it. That spatial tension enters “No Vacancy Loose And Violent In The Socket,” whose liquid delicacy carries light through an electrical wound. The title's idiom opens into metaphysical eviction. “Repair 22,000,000” then crosshatches luminous impulses and removes them strip by strip, until perception confronts its scaffolding. Repair here means attention practiced under impossible conditions. The past cannot be restored, but its wreckage can still be weighed and cataloged.

Mason's surrealism achieves its force by refusing escape. A gull falls burning while a worker finishes his cigarette. A chained man stands beyond the dune and receives the terrible anonymity of being ignored. Elsewhere, a landmark dragon collapses into brackish water, its forgotten sacrifice sinking beneath civic memory. Rockets rupture the coast, after which commerce sprouts from the remains. The comedy of it all curdles inside the throat because absurdity has become realism stripped of public-relations niceties. “Live, From Behind The Power Curve” answers with implied voices and celestial pressure, a broadcast whose choir has no mouths, while “A Garden” opens nearby, though its peace carries no innocence. Delicate tones admit radiance through damaged material, allowing beauty to exist without laundering what produced it.

That ethical refusal gives Kicking A Dark Horse its unusual inflammation. Broken clocks converse with air conditioners; insects enter the same damaged orchestra as saws and failing batteries. The urban and the sublime trade masks until no hierarchy survives. Near the book's close, “La Florida” accumulates objects, injuries, relatives, jokes, appetites, and ghosts. Definition overloads until its circuitry blooms, leaving home immense enough to contain its own indictment. Love for a place can contain the evidence against it. Mason neither resolves that contradiction nor displays it as a trophy. He lets attachment remain morally unfinished, an animal bucking against the enclosure of explanation.

The work's final command is double: capture, release. Mason catches a vanishing place while exposing the violence concealed inside every net, then permits it to escape through heat and ungovernable time. What remains is a haunting of the machine of preservation, salt whitening the circuitry while water rehearses its patient coup below. Yet the deepest disturbance arrives elsewhere. Perhaps memory has never lived inside us at all. Perhaps landscapes use human beings as temporary recording devices, growing eyes to witness their own erasure and nervous systems capable of grieving it. Under that possibility, Kicking A Dark Horse becomes a state dreaming through Mason of the day it will no longer require a witness, because the witness, the wound, and the map will have entered the same clouded water.