Into The Couch lands on September 30th.
Nick Reinhart recently announced the release of his sophomore solo album under the Disheveled Cuss moniker. Previously led by the reveal of its opening track, the Tera Melos frontman and guitar experimentalist has now returned once more to share his approaching project’s second preview.
Into The Couch is set for arrival on September 30th and features guest contributions from a noteworthy cast of collaborators that includes Jimmy Chamberlain of The Smashing Pumpkins and Josh Klinghoffer and Eric Gardner of Dot Hacker. A physical edition of the album will take form as a 16gb USB drive housed in a cassette tape, featuring wav and mp3 files, liner notes and album commentary and individual stem tracks and video guitar lessons for each of the album’s songs.
Of the inspiration behind the album’s latest single ‘Remote Viewer’, Reinhart explains
“remote viewer is a song about an online puzzle called “notpron,” which claims itself to be “the hardest riddle available on the internet.” it was created in 2004 by a german guy named david munnich. my friend stefan and i started playing it in 2007 after randomly stumbling upon it. the riddle is made up of 140 levels. each level is represented by a webpage, and the goal is to get to the next level by solving the page- either by finding a username + password or by altering the url address. there’s a heavy emphasis on no cheating, which the game takes precautions to prevent. there are hints hidden all over the place, including in the deepest lines of page’s source code. the atmosphere throughout the site is a lot of unsettling weirdness filtered through the mind of a 2000s era computer nerd. when we started playing it no one had completed the puzzle, despite thousands of attempts. most players drop out before level 10. by 2009 stefan and i had gotten all the way up to level 76 with on and off playing. then we got stuck for a couple years. by the mid 2010s the puzzle had grown in popularity and the site had logged millions of player attempts. 31 people had solved it by 2014. we would continue to play here and there with little bursts of momentum but then ultimately get completely stuck and step back for awhile.
when the pandemic hit and we were quarantined we decided to start playing again consistently. starting in april 2020 we’d video call everyday (stefan lives in texas) and grind the riddle for hours. sometimes we’d spend multiple days just staring at our screens fully deadlocked with no ideas and then there were periods where we’d blast through multiple levels in an afternoon session. we picked up a lot of momentum and by june we reached the final level- “level nu (real).” at that point there had been 78 solvers. up until then each level was solved using all sorts of practical methods, stuff like- outside the box problem solving, html programming knowledge, learning new software, complex detective work etc. we’d heard that level 140 was something different.
turns out the final level of the hardest riddle on the internet was about remote viewing. remote viewing is “the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen subject, purportedly sensing with the mind.” each person that reached level nu was to contact the notpron creator, david m, and you’d receive a random twelve digit number that corresponded to a target image that only david knew. it was your job to determine what the image was through remote viewing- no guessing, no researching, no brute forcing- just straight up remote viewing, and you get as many solve attempts as you need. the solve didn’t need to be precise, but within reason, as determined by david m. so if the assigned image was, for instance, a sailboat, and you submitted a drawing of a triangle and the word “wet” then you would likely have passed. if the image was a tiger and you wrote down “orange jungle,” that’s probably a pass. yes- after 13 years of grinding this brilliant puzzle built on logic and knowledge the final level was a fucking guessing game.”
Hear the sparse and hypnotic ‘Remote Viewer’ below.
Into The Couch releases on September 30th. Pre-order the album on USB cassette tape here.
Words by Sam Wilkinson.
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