This one goes out to all the ghosts
I love you
Towers of glass loom over you. It just rained, and the pavement is still damp. There are droplets on the windows and puddles on the street. It's late afternoon, but it's overcast, the light diffuse. Everything is flat. Traffic is a blur, but you don't notice it. You're in your own world, thinking. About your choices. About the blind luck and the dumb fate that pushed you, inch by inch, to this street, right here, right now. About the people you knew, about the people you never met. About the dreams you had as a kid, and how they were swallowed whole by circumstance. About how things could've gone differently. But also how things worked out in the end. Kind of.
Maybe it's the trip-hop-esque drums, evoking childhood memories of Moby and Portishead and Groove Armada. Or perhaps instead it's the reversed piano swells, subliminally reversing my own temporality.
There's something about this album that just evokes such a deep feeling of nostalgia. With a tinge of sadness, or regret, I don't know which. It doesn't matter. The poems have the profundity of a dream, swinging between introspective to absurd in an instant. It feels like the first truly Metamodern album (sorry, Sturgill), the way it oscillates between ironic absurdity and heart-wrenching sincerity. I'm on a gritty London street, cold and real. But I'm also in purgatory. A pure white room. A disembodied voice reminds me, through a disordered stream of consciousness, what it means to be human. Loss. Grief. Love. Embarrassment. Joy. Curiosity. Stupidity.
The voice is synthetic. This was a surprise, but you can hear it if you listen closely. The phrasing is sometimes unnatural. The audio just slightly uncanny. It augments the bizarre poetry, which bounces around from topic to topic, past to present to future. The physical world turns metaphysical. It's another layer of irony; musings on the human condition, relayed via a machine.
We live in strange times. The world is in fragments. We're rushing towards a future that no one wants, while we erase our own past. We've decontextualised the present. There is only the now. There is no wider context. We've decided to take the world at face value, and it's ruining us. In many ways, our inventions mirror our reality—artificial intelligence is apt. It too has no memory, no creativity, and no context. It works by collapsing meaning and syntax into numbers and vectors. Our infinitely detailed reality crunches down to an imprecise rendering. It looks real until you zoom in. Really, it's a poorly approximated snapshot. It is a spectacle. So a synthetic voice, talking in a way only a human could, over electronic music warmed with a human touch, well, it all feels incredibly apt.