# Rift / The Brink v3b — Call & Fall across the chasm

`rift-brink-v3b` — levels: `calm.mp3` · `activity1.mp3` · `activity2.mp3` · `danger1.mp3` · `danger2.mp3`

Take B is the BOLDER second reading of the brink, same ultra-sparse piano-ambiance style and the same every-two-bars pad + late-sub bed as the faithful take, but a DISTINCT structural angle: vertigo as a CALL-AND-FALL across a wide stereo chasm. C minor pentatonic, 52 BPM (the catalog's slowest), sparse:true. The bed is a single open DYAD — root + fifth only, no 3rd, no 6, the octave reach withheld (this is the rift-brink VAULT fragment: fragment(0,6), the pent snap removing the 6) — changing once every two bars, with the sub arriving LATE off the downbeat like a held breath released. Activity L1 (ch4-5) is THE CALL: the struckPiano on tone WARMEST (the deepest conscious extreme — the weight of the drop, chosen over warm for that low, heavy ring), panned hard LEFT, one low tone per two-bar block struck and left to ring its full ~1.9s decay into silence, plus a soft far lower piano-tail echo. Activity L2 (ch6-7) ADDS new material, not volume: THE ANSWER — a caveCelesta reply from across the gap (panned right) a fifth/octave above the call, but whose contour FALLS (each reply settles lower than the reach the call asked for: VAULT's long look INVERTED, the eye travelling DOWN, awe at what drops), plus its own hard-right far-side echo — the chasm gains its opposite wall. Danger L1 (ch8-9) is the approach: the stillness gone apprehensive — the late sub becomes a slow low heartbeat and very sparse deepBooms cross the void with WIDE stereo movement (left, then far right), distant gliding things below; real material, dread by proximity, NOT near-silence. Danger L2 (ch10-11) is the rim crumbling — a GENUINE intensity jump: the booms compress into a driving low pulse striding across the full stereo field, and a dense closing-in pentatonic ostinato (struckPiano BRIGHTER, articulate + urgent) TUMBLES downward in tight repeating cells (G-F-Eb-C, the gravity finally taking you) — new driving material + far higher density, never danger1 with the fader up. Dread is abstract throughout (register, density, wide stereo motion, the accelerating fall) — no chromatic darkening, no literal foley of the rim collapsing or wind in the gap; the retired §4 wind/exhalation noise beds are dropped, their intent folded into the pitched late sub and the wide-panned pentatonic material. Fully diatonic C minor pentatonic.
