The City is a world of noise. Traffic on continuous motorways, recycled music blaring from shop fronts and onto footpaths, construction banging and clanging out across streets to rebuild what has decayed; It is a city where residents must wear cancans to isolate themselves from the pain of constant aural attacks and have them replaced with soothing sensory stimulations. It is a city where identity no longer exists, where past and present are blurred, where time is forgotten. It is a city where residents are only known by the occupation that they exist in from one moment to another, and who cannot conceive of a past beyond their own concerns. Each individual walks the streets of the falling city streaming soothing sensory stimulations through the cancans strapped over their heads in an endless cycle of daily tasks. Knowledge of the past is lost, and there is only myth now – myth that increasingly sounds more like unbelievable fictions. But when one resident pedestrian's cancans break down and they are forced to deal with the noise battering their exposed ears, a search for answers leads to revelations and truths about the city they live in. Hailing from Gisborne, New Zealand, Warwick Stubbs has spent most of his adult life experiencing an array of different jobs starting in Auckland, and ending up in Invercargill. Time down south allowed him to pursue a Bachelor Degree in Contemporary Music (Composition Major) while leading a heavy progressive rock band in between. After leaving study he continued his sampling of part-time jobs which would come to inspire a number of scenes for his first novel 'I am the Local Atheist'.Stubbs has written stories since a young age, poetry on occasion, but says the majority of his literary efforts during his late teens and 20s was invested in writing song lyrics, of which he has produced over 250. "Song lyrics, like poetry, provide a platform to create pictures in short form, but there needs to be a great deal more focus on what is being conveyed and how that fits into the canvas of music that sits behind it." A collection of some of these lyrics has been projected for the near future.
