underneath the faucet of the digital heat, garbling words, tryna speak simple thru machines:
there’s a feeling (a feeling!) for hurt and another for yearning and all these hundred marbles are
chasing gravity down into the murk below these backlit channels where feelings might go to
dissolve into a billion bits and pieces and ones and zeroes and pitches and tones and codes and
blow to be reassembled in someone else’s phone.
a song has no body but it does have a soul. and while every song is its own ship of theseus—
broken down, transmitted, reanimated—no song will ever allow itself to be held in our hands.
music is not water. it is more ethereal than the rain; exists in vibration, in movements;
companions to the rhythms of the soul. this ethereality is also, counterintuitively, what makes
music real, makes songs perfect vessels for digital release.
but the heart is a slow-moving creature. moves slower than these digital fortresses in the sky
where an .mp3 might remain perched in all its ethereality, ready to be plucked from the digital
tree, but the gap between what is immediately accessible and what is found over the course of
days, months, and years in our hearts creates a strange sort of friction. like we swallowed
sandpaper, it hurts some inner part of us. but art opens a door to suss out a vibe, helps us sort out
our losses.
here a preset drum track begins and live instrumentation rides the rails of tempo to find itself in
suspended animation between the laptop’s automated drum track, the autotuned vocals, and the
mere fact of recorded audio. the human performers remain at its center, of course, but floating in
the chest cavity of noise they hand over the ghost of the song to then float forever in the digital.
but this is how all recorded music works in the 2020s. and ofc baby is aware of this.
what emerges is… what? the post-punk to hyperpop’s moment? cyberpop? idk but this kind of
song feels of its time. there’s something new in its folded up sounds nudging the question: are
you are hearing the voice or the autotune? a song or a recording? the questions continue but
answers find a balance somewhere in the haze.