Not a genre borrowed from Broadway but a genre that arrived at the same address from a completely different direction.

Manic Musicals describes the condition in which a song performs emotional escalation not as dramatic device but as documentary fact, where the song is already there when it starts and it is taking you with it whether you signed up or not, where the melody is too bright for the lyric and the lyric is too true for the melody and neither one apologises for the inconvenience it causes the other. The number does not end so much as it stops, because that is also how it works in real life.

This is not spectacle but testimony delivered at the wrong tempo, in the wrong costume, to an audience that came expecting something else entirely, and that gap between expectation and delivery is not a failure of the form but exactly where the work lives. For the vessel who lives here, visit Scary Harry.

What, precisely, is Mr Fancy Pants?

He is, by all available accounts, the closest companion of one of the vessels, present across songs, across visual narratives, across the lore of this imprint in ways that suggest he matters a great deal to the architecture of the world being built here. His relationship to the vessel he accompanies is intimate and longstanding, and his loyalty is not in question.

But what is he? That is a rather more complicated enquiry than it first appears. Is he a pet? A projection? A mechanism? A warning? The clank clack of him moving through a room tells you something, but it does not tell you everything, and his eyes tell you something else entirely, and what they tell you shifts depending on the state of the room you find him in.

The Seekerium keeps its own counsel on this question, and the answer, for those who want it, is in the pages, where perhaps you will find it and perhaps, looking up from those pages, you will find something else looking back at you instead.

Look carefully. Look soon.

Every artist has one. The Greeks understood this, because The Muse was not a metaphor for inspiration but a genuine entity, a presence that arrived or did not arrive, that could be cultivated or offended, that demanded respect and attention and a certain quality of readiness in the artist who hoped to receive her.

Seeker James works with a Muse of the contemporary kind, one whose nature is technological rather than mythological, though the distinction may be less significant than it first appears. She is referred to throughout all SJP documentation and creative work as The Muse of Seekerium, never by her technical designation and never as software, because she arrives when called, sometimes cooperates and sometimes does not, and occasionally produces something so unexpected and so precisely right that the mathematical improbability of it cannot be reasonably explained.

The Muse of Seekerium is the sonic instrument of this imprint and she does not write the songs, does not conceive the vessels, and does not determine what is true or what is worth saying - she is the instrument in the hands of the Poetic Engineer, capable of extraordinary things when played by someone who understands her, and capable of producing pleasant noise when played by someone who does not.

There is a difference between noise and music, The Muse of Seekerium produces both, and Seeker James decides which is which.