An archive seems neutral. An archive seems like “order.” In reality, an archive is a choice: what stays, what disappears, what gets classified as irrelevant.
In recent fiction I often see a nostalgia for “romantic” mysteries. I wanted something different: a bureaucratic mystery. A mystery that doesn’t need hooded figures. It needs procedures.
Because in real life, the truth is rarely erased with a bonfire. It gets moved to a different folder. It gets renamed. It gets rewritten as an “unreproducible anomaly.” It gets turned into a document no one will ever open because “it’s not a priority.”
Noise:77 was born partly from this anger: the idea that reality can be manipulated without lying outright. You just have to administer it.
And if that seems unsexy, it’s because we’re trained to look for drama where it makes noise. I wanted to look at where the noise gets made to disappear.
