A bag head come to claim his throne

In 2013, Dan Barrett of the band Have A Nice Life released an EP called Hinterkaifeck under his solo project Giles Corey.¹ The cover art for the LP is a picture of the titular German farm located 40 miles north of Munich which was the scene of six murders in 1922, at the hands of a still-identity-unknown pickaxe-wielding culprit.

Superimposed on the wintery image are fifteen lines Zodiac cipher text which allegedly² decrypts to the following poem:

This decryption is tacitly confirmed by Barrett since:

1. Have A Nice Life / their label (The Flenser) sells merch featuring that final phrase: "Go, and ask the cattle to inform you" - a reference to Job 12.⁹

2. Have A Nice Life's 2019 album Sea of Worry includes one line of the poem per song,¹⁰ which –though they go unperformed– are "official listed."

Now, I'm convinced that I'm being gangstalked for three reasons.

1. No one online is able to explain how to decrypt the cipher text on the cover of Hinterkaifeck other than that it's "coded in the same method that the Zodiac killer used to encrpyt [sic] his messages,"¹¹ a comment made by a now-deleted user...
2. The album cover uses symbols from the at-the-time-unsolved code,
3. And, when the album cover is actually decrypted, it contains ADDITIONAL plaintext not referenced anywhere that I can find on the internet....

1. "It's encrpyted with the zodiac method"

This is not only un-helpful, but it's so vague that I suspect that the OP did not decrpyt¹² the cipher text himself. It's vague in two important ways.

First, there's are multiple zodiac codes to choose from. Of particular note are the Z408 and Z340 codes, named for number of tokens that appears in each

Z408

The Z408 which appeared across three letters which the Zodiac mailed to the Vallejo Times, the San Francisco Examiner and the SF Chronicle which all appeared in print on July 31, 1969. This code was solved after 4 days by Donald Harden :goat:¹³ His annotated solution can be read in full over here.

Z340

Second, there's the much, much, much, harder Z340 code which was not cracked until December 5, 2020, almost fifty-two years after Z408. Sam Blake, one of the mathematicians along with David Oranchak, published a great celeb-shot article on Wolfram about how they solved Z340.

Now, without specifying which of the two codes was used, this tongue in cheek "It's encrpyted with the zodiac method" from u/[deleted]¹⁴ is a meaninglessly imprecise statement.

You might think that we can safely assume that, given the fact that the 2013 release of Hinterkaifeck predates the Z340 solution by seven years, they must have meant: "It's encrypted using Donald Harden's 1969 key to the Z408 cipher" (as opposed to the Concerned Citizen key¹⁵).

Exceeeeeeept that Hinterkaifeck features symbols which are only present in Z340.

2. Dan Barrett is the Zodiac Killer Confirmed

Now, how in the HELL was Dan Barrett able to encode a message in 2013 for his DIRGE ROCK SIDE PROJECT using a mechanism which was unknown to the GODDAMN NSA, FBI, and every other three-letter organization + every slightly cryptographically-minded kid born in the past 70 years until less than 5 years ago. And furthermore, WHY does everyone who seems to have contributed to the very meager discussion about ~how to even decrypt the poem which the record label of the band SELLS MERCH REFERENCING, go by u/[deleted].

3. Did No One Ever Fact Check this?

Using the Harden key and working backwards from the known solution, we can relatively-easily recover the poem from the cover of the EP. Here's said key, with some added annotations indicating which symbols (V2 & SQ4) do not exist in the original 1969 key, but are present in Z340 and the superset of Z408 which appears in Hinterkaifeck which I denote Z408h.

which yields:

All together, this was all I was asking for.

As mentioned in the previous section, we have to make some modifications in order for this to "work". First, we treat the V2 (exclusive to Z340) symbol as a ⅃, which does appear in Z408, we can decode it as A per Harden's key and go on our merry way.

Similarly, we can just rotate the half-shaded square by 180º to yield an 'L' rather than pull our hairs out wondering how to handle yet-another Z340 symbol. Occam's razor saves us.

Ignoring the curiously incorrect enciphering of I as it appears in the word "knife" with an A, instead of either a K3, P, U, TGL2, OR a TGL3and wondering how Dan managed to fuck that up?¹⁶ I'm glad I didn't just stop and scrap this blogpost after realizing that V2, likely mapped to ⅃ under the Harden Cipher, and decided to actually go and check this thing out myself because I've realized that the poem –as cited on Lyric Genius– is incomplete and outright incorrect in some places! Namely, though the fifth track "Everything we Forget" is an instrumental, it still corresponds to the line

A bag head come to claim his throne

which is not mentioned in any of the likely places: vinyl insert, genius, or reddit!

This also fixes the rhyme scheme, forming a couplet with the line hidden within "Science Beat."

Lastly, we also see that the fuckin shirt graphic + genius translation is wrong. Whereas genius says:

Go, and ask the cattle to inform you

we can see that the actual deciphered text does not include the instructive verb pairing 'Go, and'. Much to think about.

Footnotes