Tag: rave

Playlist: July 2021

Have you followed me closely through the long four years of being caught into list like thistles do make this white stuff, fluffy July of it, caught pale against purple and green indelible sunsets. I appreciate all kinds of writing and sometimes a product has a good line like, rain and dark gold the podium and ringtone, we’ve got to get ready, there are some stones that remain. For memory and in VHS.

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Something happened which I could not write about, and it was scary. Summer is smoky, you see it all around and when you don’t you know it’s still there, if you know what I mean, everywhere you look and don’t see it you know. The smoke grows lilac from the country song and it’s a new one, drawn from the old one, Waxahatchee is also known as Katie and I like how sobriety opens a songwriting and settles. Not that a loss does settle. This is a week and more soberly in the poem, reflecting the dust bits, it’s not clarity it’s cornflake crushed beneath foot. Tonight is my exhibition and a stupid person cutting the lawn, I try to look outside. The curtains are just gauze and Mau texts to say there’s something funny about ‘gossamer sounds / on the porch’ as a line and we agree all spiderwebs are kinky because ‘entrapment / constraint or binding’, and spiders eating their mates and like, how this conversation occurs mint green on lilac as in nature, bad NYC illustration, having whatsapped the last chalice or lapped from, critical, I owe you a whole month of blog there’s a backlog, the real foxes coming around the lot. Joey says a blog is useful if it has a playlist, music is useful. I’ve been reading his pamphlet again, let’s do it, which he wrote for / dedicated to our reading group, and thinking about poetry and collectivity and action. And what you can do on the face of loss. An old woman chides the speaker to not plant vegetables on private land and the speaker replies by ruminating on the conditions necessary for flourishing, I love this line ‘some people think its cool to have / shit / like a forest what the fuck but it doesn’t stop’. I am reading this poem for its labour and dreaming in a flat it’s not mine, for its fight and for what it makes me want to do, this it which is like the it of a pop song, more of a doing and pronoun, Ily, who do you think we are? What do foxes think about music? I hear a gate creak outside as I write this and imagine on the bare patch of grass where the bins are the block became meadowed and fred gets targeted ads for hydrangeas, having told the story of the hydrangea wars one time too many and I also want my targeted ads, if I must have them, to sell me wildflower seeds and the bulbs of potential vegetables. I bought an album and it had two flower bulbs and a cassette tape included, everything wrapped in beautiful tissue paper. Hungover I am thinking about that and about Joey’s writing on the pale yellow paper you sensed was artfully stolen. There are lots of important thoughts in this pamphlet like ‘it’s dreamy to dream when the real & necessary work / is ugly like steps clogged & knotty with nauseous / exhaustion’ and what does it mean to say something is dreamy, I wish I could ask Bernadette and get her poem for an answer like an answer machine where the words are crackled but everything you need to know is in the tone of the voice and the space between sound and how there is a breeze through the line, a wise one. Or just like, the 3 second double space between songs on a playlist where you turn to the other and know. Time pass. Calcined eclipsed as if I scrolled mortality site with its many many awful ads about products for tooth decay and viagra and thinking is this the absolute dramatisation of death on the internet, can we not have something clean, a kind of writing. After our phone call all my targeted ads are for lingerie no person would wear, it makes me alien to say so? Someone tells me that the databases are inordinately complex and there’s nothing a layperson could do to pull out that code and so you have to trust the abyssopelagic practice of software developers. The speaker wants to find things in the gaps and ‘that’s something’ like when knowing your neighbours, I smile at my neighbours say hi, my old neighbours were good we swapped books and furniture and talked about work and what we were reading, one of them was always reading long, historical muscular novels but he also loved Lispector like me. One of them a ceramicist’s apprentice. What of a poem encased in clay, all the animals of this room are poems, more than we could know, as I swallowed the memory of their crumble and form. This pamphlet of Joey’s is always worrying about what poems are and can do even as it stays true to the ethic of let’s do it, we keep pushing even as we question what it is we are doing; I like this, it’s what I want to call ongoingness. It’s poetry that makes me hungry a kind of lush hunger like the dew upon new gardens and sparkling water that is also natural, holding glass to the light and clink and chime, we share a bottle, we share blossom, ‘i only want to read with friends / in the actual field of experience / in the garden of ourselves / exactly not edenic since we built it / in the future’ I want to epigraph, keep this close, eternal bindweed in the garden of ourselves and something to build in the future, let’s do it, like kick off your trainers into the sun, it’s so funny but I’m crying and sneezing. Ever since I moved I keep Gloria’s poem, ‘dig it some no place’, ‘a real-time no-time edited response to Bernadette Mayer(BM)’s “Utopia”’, as a printout by my bedside. I got this from a Zarf launch G. read at back in 2019 at the Glasgow Women’s Library, and I remember wanting to live in this poem in a way that rarely happens, I wanted to understand its address and who was living in it, what was happening. It was a year of climate strikes and the fucked election. I didn’t see any butterflies for a whole year. Joey’s poems make me long for the good things we learned in lockdown and also to be with friends and doing ‘preparatory work’ which might mean learning to cook for ten people or just learning to hold space, be present, show face ‘& we hold it far away’, this garden we built and are building. What can this plant do. How do you like your tea. For a while it is a Zoom garden. The roadside wildflowers are great this year, tall and showy purples and yellows. I ride the wave of heat and instantly miss it to wake up shivering at unsent texts in my dreams; in the middle of being held or not held by you. I learn this Irish phrase about it being so hot the ground’s cracking open or it’s hot enough to split rocks, I don’t remember, and once or twice this has actually happened in the saying of the phrase. Kirsty works in a glasshouse library by a motorway. ‘back in june / when it felt like everything / was cracking open’ and the ‘visceral’ like how I read this poem in February along the canal, like how I walked with it and wanted to do something like punch thru glass or send an email, but mostly I wrote instead and to hover where that scream was, placeholder, what was inside the rock of the day, how I gave it to the air of the field in Lambhill, how I miss those walks. ‘Theories are ok, but what patterns of movements will we trace through the streets as we go about our lives, who will we pass there, and how will we pass them?’ Joey asks in let’s do it. Someone asks me the time and someone asks for directions and someone is asking can I stash my booze in your pannier bags to my friend. I watch the police call children away from the fountain and I sip water and cycle home. Sometimes like the speaker, Joey’s speaker, ‘I’m dissociating from the city’ and I don’t know anything about it, who built this, how am I gonna do a wash or refresh these conditions, how am I gonna drink coffee on a Friday morning and wake up to the songs that I want, how am I gonna tell or not tell you. Nothing anyone can say and being scattered, needing encouragement, our friends are elsewhere, we hold each other through words because it is the flowers we have, gifted or put there, not to wilt, speculative to put anything in the soil and see if it grows the way I write a paragraph on discord, that’s something. Heart fires tripled and inboxed. Joey’s poetry teaches me to go beyond realism but not be complacent about something in the present as if that was enough, the eruption itself as utopic. I’m excited about what happens next once we begin changing, as if by the inward and outward transformation we would get to the place, hug emoji, to speak on the radio against enclosure and the ‘no place’ of Gloria’s poem maybe where you ‘Leave page […] to begin this’, and what Joey says: ‘If this place is so radically unrecognisable that to get there we would lose ourselves, then perhaps this imaginative effort is the beginning of a willing self-transformation, which we might hold onto in the midst of all we do in the hope of its eventual collective completion’. I imagine my face in the mirrors of dust shop windows, becoming something else when you say in the dream We shouldn’t… There is nothing left to buy but time. I am still trying to write about that thing whose impossibility is the basic problem of how I can feel and look around and know you, know me, how we are here and still have breath and like food, and like mornings ahead of us still possible to hold and break fruit and run for trains, share music. I appreciate the way this work is a writing back to itself, as if to reclaim the errata and do more with the adjacent claims and forms and changes — to acknowledge that anything we write academically exists within a context, it has this limit, something weathers through it and what is afterwards done is gonna crash through the words. I wish I was cycling long and hard along the canal today, I wish I was breathless and flush. I like what Joey says of poetry’s ‘glittering / incomprehensibility’ and how it disrupts ‘capitalist (etc) subjectivity’ and how at the exhibition everybody wanted to eat the sparklehorse, Jack’s sparklehorse, like it was this giant animal-shaped sugar plum cake with hallucinatory and erotic properties if you just had a slice, a small bite, a scoop of the horse. People want to imbibe the air magic they want to transform and be more than flesh, I think that’s poetry also the wanting to tip all the glitter right down your throat and come up rosy, aura, in excess of yourself, beyond consumer. Morvern’s dream of white horses on the beach. To read this, you had to be born and you had to feel something opening, hydrated, sapped of sense. In the pamphlet one of my favourite things is the scribbles, curlicues, tumbleweed gestures drawn on some of the pages, the sight of photocopied handwriting turned asemic scrawl — this gesture of something in excess of the language, a tending of the page, a tender unknowing. That I made a mark and remarked it. It is something to long for. Whose hand do you hold when you say let’s do it, not to ask what follows but move into that shimmering space of the it, which is always in motion. I want to work harder, have stronger hands and language. 

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One day I will be champion at hula hoop or retire from the athleticism of the long poem, the turbulent manner of a short moan, long-term loan, poems to unravel barbed wire fences, and how I had the library book but they lost the library book, found it. Everything turns up sometime. The turnips are good this year is a financial statement for racoons all around us. I want to go slow but I keep speeding up. Riverside champagne and bicycle, some of your Guinness, Pinot Grigio, Cava and fern, curl inside me a thought of the night and night club, lilac book, not yet. Ice rub, hot flush. Everything good in my room is mint green and white and nightly 

I want music to be everywhere, remembering

slenderly the first month in your new place

and all these milestones of 

the lake at twilight, Elliott Smith

you say

“can you play it for me”

I’ve been here a month, I am getting to know the roads

I’m supposed to buy furniture

I get home 

Kind of still drunk at 2am I watch that film about London, 2007, Giddy Stratospheres and it felt really lonely. I longed for more party scenes and more of the beginning running to ‘The Rat’ and you’ve got a nerve, more of a carelessness of the edge of history where you still have money or you don’t, sinking a wine and running for trains in the capital city and not falling asleep and the timeline’s messed up, how did we get there, landfill I die, the country is lonely. I love the whole boy/girl friendship and especially what it means to wait or go meet someone and the thrill of being out with them, swap hats, wrapped around each other, unconditional, laughing and wholesome and immune to other ppl. Platonic hold hands. I’m lucky to have had that. In 2007 I read NME every week and collected a sense of what was happening in London. Squat raves and indie discos and gigs that ended in broken glass and fights and the end of any sort of neoliberal consensus about to be voiced and soon. I was just walking the empty crossroads, smoking menthols. The girl Laura with the peach-orange hair is an artist and wants to claim club promotion as a kind of art, I get her, I get that she should be able to do that and contribute to the living as art, and nobody dies. Anagram of my name is ‘lame red armies’. Clubs always felt total elsewhere it seemed impossible that they really existed and now even more so, what is the fee, but I want to be in them. Who cares about satire it doesn’t care about anyone. You never see her without a hat and this is protection, wearing a beret against the world at the fierce mercy of cab drivers, “look after her yea?”. Everyone is wearing leopard print and looks good. We should be able to do this and nobody dies. Ventilation. The coloured tights and short skirts. Art school. When I cried at this film I cried for the twist, was I prepared for it, the way it screams something

against that hedonism, delusion, but they keep going on. The film isn’t sexy at all and the only sex hinted at is kind of gross, creepy or regrettable. I knew even drugged it had to be better but bad sex in films is so British. I felt the moral message was too strong. The boys in bands are more or less all annoying and druggy, sometimes endearing but mostly dumb, the long familiar ket nights of blurry talk. But the music is good and the guys are fun, it’s just acting. Besides, I miss that. To be a dumb boy in a band with the boys I alight from my slip and reach for the door, it’s always open, do you have a light. Now I go out alone if I go out at all. It’s a lonely film because something of the isolation of the pandemic overshadows it. What does it mean to care for someone? That I watched this on a sofa alone, that it was filmed in 2020 and they had to do artful camera things to simulate a bigger crowd, that we could only get one limited slice of the action. How to ask for help. I wanted bigger party scenes, more of the hedonism, rat sightings, I loved seeing people take drugs more or less constantly. I felt completely neutral, then indulgent, until I didn’t. The film confirmed my fear of bathtubs. That somehow you will never get out again. Some people feel like it’s a womb. And afterwards I was crying for the friend I lost. Everyone is wearing hats and I remember when Camden was full of hats you would go to just buy hats, and everyone looked cute and cared about clothes and music in this way that doesn’t seem possible now, wearing a bowler, there are so many ways to be serious now. What do you take from the film with you, having seen two decades compressed and the living room where you can always bounce.  

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The Long Blondes — Giddy Stratospheres

The Walkman — The Rat

Arcade Fire — Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)

Bleachers feat. Lana Del Rey — Secret Life

Angel Olsen — Gloria

Oneohtrix Point Never, ROSALÍA — Nothing’s Special

Caroline Polachek — Bunny Is A Rider

Porches — Okay 

Sharon Van Etten, Fiona Apple — Love More (By Fiona Apple)

Faye Webster — I Know I’m Funny haha

Le Tigre — Hot Topic

Hole — Softer, Softest

The Sugarcubes — Birthday

Moon Duo — Sevens

St. Vincent — Sugarboy

Billie Eilish — Oxytocin

U.S. Girls — New Age Thriller

Dry Cleaning — Leafy 

Prefab Sprout — I Trawl the Megahertz 

Dancefloor Utopia: Free Love’s ‘Pushing Too Hard’ & ‘July’

I love alcohol, the gloaming
of the blood that makes time an arcade.

Somehow, lately, I have been unable to drink myself into drunkenness. Everything is a spritzer whose taste effervesces like the further most points of the sea at sunset, those glisters of peachy waters which seem almost to fizz beneath the pleasure of light. To think of that expanse as the body’s active limit, like the horizons of video games, whose traversal would teleport you back to some familiar, originary location. Flip away. Endpoints as triggers for reversal. To travel outwards, to raise yourself clean into movement. To make of the body its own hypothetical. It’s like I want only the blueprint potential, the colours and geometries. 

The waves move against me. I do not drink. 

Queue, Free Love (FKA Happy Meals) ‘Pushing Too Hard’. This ultra-dappled, smiley-faced italo-disco is a sort of vertigo. I mean I am spinning silver in its listening. Emptiness requires its own containment. To dance in parallels then pirouettes, to queue time upon time’s arabesque. To oooooze. The little eddies of the ocean still swallowing, the sun ravelling down like residue soda. Whatever direction you make into ceremony, pleasure. 

The bunching of muscle, where sun hits the boulevard. Where the boulevard bursts into its many discographies of water, inclined to times beyond and before, a gradient popularity of passengers and travellers, nomadic ravers. Where the boulevard is not a waypoint but the lengthy stretch of hypnosis itself, an astral plane into sunlit ethers.

The very word boulevard, a sort of ferric opulence unfolding a hazy, urban sprawl.

All of this wayward July, and the synths so warm on my skin, and every conversation a twirl of hyperbole. I wanted nothing of night again, as night was just the day’s refresh and erasure. All through the summer, the air so syrup and seething.

I book the overnight ferry, I dream of a world without timetables. The tide sloshes over me and it is sleepless, and it is heat.

This is rich-text. All of oddness. I’m just so much happier at four in the morning, in the priory of sunrise. Missing you.

Cherish the currency of friendship, however the slightest touch is a glorious misreading. Miss reading, I’m missing. Mist between the one and the two and same, faintness of incense that is. The body unshowered, the mist of heat. The endless messaging dew drops of moisture; your pearly brow is beautiful. It isn’t as though you could shift sentences for me. I’m just as weak.

Suzanne Roden of Free Love sings sometimes in French and slips between two languages, the language of the one and the other, the foreign tongue as love in transition. The lively nuance of melodic translation. To stretch meaning, to make of its pulse the possibly unmappable. We listen and maybe we don’t quite need to understand, we just need the potential of passage, its affective route per semantic reach. Glossing Derrida on love, Maria-Daniella Dick and Julian Wolfreys write thus:

Love calls on us to be responsible in coming to map the unmappable, to be open to the possibility of the impossible, and the possibility of this impossible experience is that, in short, which is between us, and which remains: to come. Love is always just this exemplary passage between tongues, in what is foreign, other in the language one calls one’s own.

There is a healthy cascade of reverie. There is browse and incline, click and encryption. The love that you seek. Every pop song is of course love’s expression, the fluid joy of a ~solid~ ego; and yet to map that point of dissolve in which this ego is the melt-point of ipseity’s porous limit, is that not the deferring impulse of disco? Strike through to jouissance. The repetitive beat, the multiple oscillating climaxing motion; the avoidance of pop’s inevitable, normative denouement; the queerish musing deliciously around fulfilment; the rhizomatic overflow of the senses!

Stay mercurial, baby. In cool arousal, in sluicing.

‘But I love you despite the boring terrorism / of particularity / fading like parity’ (Keston Sutherland).

Your forehead is hot. It is glass for the shattering. We are fashionable and hackneyed, practicing lunacy where the beats scream and are again crass in their lust and elation, their confinement to time and place and the pulse of this darkness.

When my irises bleed, is this a form of eschewing the present? As in, swallowing an elsewhere unseen to the other? We see our eyes outside, in the comedown glow of street lamp smoulders. We the parts of our bodies as an archipelago, every isle slowly swallowed by rising water. 

This tectonic pulse, this encompassing warmth.

You’re pushing too hard. And so language is physical, and so is literally thrust in, into, the armoury of love. I will not say weapon, I will not reduce a necessary plural to the singular tool, the implied signified of the phallus. The piercing. My eyes become pliant.

Make of the air her dulcet voice, over and over like rain’s refusal. Make of this moment a lightness, a smoothing. Trace little bumps and ripples and glitches; the motion is softcore, resplendent’s true sense.

Love is also the coveting of blindspots, those absent locations of self’s abyss which lie adjacent to the lieux de memoire recognised as the sites of love’s memory, of memory’s happening in love. Love as process of betweening, as immersion. A feel-good, a good feeling. The prolonging of ephemeral sensation in an act of imaginary narrative, its plights and highs and necessary zigzags. Act within capitalism, act without; act as pop’s dazzling detournement. So here by the convenience store we kissed, so here by the river; so at the window we shared cigarettes in a friend’s apartment, by the ersatz palms, so these screens between us, so the niche forums that served as our weird, oblique interface; so here where the road slumps into a junction, so here at the station where you had to go. A whole topography of abstract thought, remix it. Drink it. So memories of mountains, so sharing the lakes we made up in memory; that you swam in, the lakes I walked round as a child, the heather on hills where ashes were scattered. This interface, these blue messages. Blue irises. The shape of a letter impressed on a map. The silent valley, its conclusive basin of time; where life is swallowed. I memorialise a thought, the quality of light in August, its paler gold among green; whose green is mortal again, whose green is set to fade. Your pupils resolve all green of the iris to blindspots, they mop up the blue with the black of sleep. And to sleep as equals is to forget the self, to wake in a room between rooms, to find yourself caught as other again, your room unfamiliar, the room never yours even less so now. The very first utterance of morning might break the spell. How the sky looks different through your open, solar window!

And I’m not the one to help you / Although I’d like to tryyyyy.

Clatter and wave, video game imperative to action and motion. Soundtrack the heat. Make reverie of weather. The production is so acid house. The production inclines toward dance. Externalise the internal. Naturalise the natural. A certain elasticity of underlying beat, as if bass were the hum of the blood that produces affect. As if it were all that reducible. As if in that energy. Make our mammalian restraint ethereal. 

The Quietus says of Free Love’s music, ‘Their vision is a utopian one, influenced by rave culture, Eastern religions, politics and magic’. To unhinge love from its possessive sense, love becomes an ambient tone in the spread of the days between days which we count in love, if love is a sense as any other, an orientation between things, between selves, the one and the same. If love is something… that something within us must export to numbers. How many days has it been, I’ve been thinking all week… Here are our figures. Crunch on a sort of krautrock lingering, the impersonality at the heart of euphoria’s insistent heat. Free Love have used drones before, meditative, balearic beats. It’s a process of seeking the nuanced frequency, the cleaner hum of Being, what might spread into an open future, something bright to seize. Design your consciousness for different realms, just feel the synaesthesia of speculative situation. The future’s flirtatious, maybe it speaks French. It’s a bright pink, cherry-red electric French.

In his spectacular tome, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998), Kodwo Eshun talks of how the subaquatic techno-duo Drexciya ‘fictionalise frequencies into sound pictures of unreal environments […]. They fictionalise the psychoacoustic volume of a giant submersible’. ‘Pushing Too Hard’ implies a current out of sync with its destination, an unbalancing in the passage between entities. A kinetic effort. Disco’s warm flicker invites that spiralling back to aporia; not a giving up in the sense of seduction’s failure, so much as surrender to the unknown and its cheeky, distinctive flourishes of acid, italo, proto-house all drenched in funk. I don’t pretend to understand French; my language is literally standard grade, processed only to that limit.

But I pick up some terms Suzanne sings:

L’avenir: future, future, future, promise. To come up. Insistent, proximity, imminent. A cool bitten ecstasy, a love to-come. Love in the conditional, although I’d like to tryyyyy. Those airy harmonies cascade around chiasmic, sunshine flourishes. Love’s duration at 4:18.

Plastique: plastic. What seems elastic, mutable, but is in some sense unerasable—a material that ultimately remains. Residuals. Shards, bits. When ‘Pushing Too Hard’ collapses into its A-side twin, ‘July’, the beats are fatter, darker, hotter—brooding with a sense of summer’s latency as always already. The plastic feeling is inside me, it’s a melting, it’s a coming-into-skin. Sonic duplicity. It’s the Anthropocenic hauntology of organs, it’s a PVC drag of natural sensation. It necessitates dancing, but the percussive chimes in the track’s white-heat centre drag my mind from the present’s solidity. Those chimes are airy, they are elsewhere, enchanted; they are so far removed from the close close city. To be fast and slow, hard and soft, selfish and strong, reflected and present, past and future…Being as syncopation, being as plastic, rent to split. Our lapidary imaginaries, our synthesised clicks of pleasure; a pool of sound, an immersion…I’ve come to relax, to realise.

Visage: face. A word whose very sound is that of sunlight hitting clean the bounce of a mirror, a slide into silver. The waspish vibration of the lips, inclined to glass on the brink of shatter. I think of all those mirror tricks in every ABBA video. The face, the face, the face again. The face we effect. Maria Dick and Julian Wolfreys again: ‘Seeing the face in its absolute and irrecusable singularity, I am given to apprehend a doubleness from the first gaze’. Disco is doubleness inherently split to multiplicity, it is the vying for one attention amidst the millioning of other skins (skins becoming a metonymy of figures, faces), it is the shakeaway of self into other, the imitation, the performance of gesture’s contextual plurality. The face, in Emmanuel Lévinas’ sense, is the announcement of subjectivity: the instating of the subject as a sort of ‘hostage’, as Dick and Wolfreys gloss. It demands a response, stealing the attentions of the self, instating by necessity a certain ethics of wholly Otherness: the human face, as Lévinas puts it, ‘orders and ordains us’. I catch your face on the dancefloor, there is a temporary pact between us. What implicitly slides in the raising of one arm, the twist of hips, copying this dance, a Xeroxing event whose zero-sum origin remains irreducible, whose condition is always undecidable, plural. So far so obvious the ontology of rave culture. Every action now as response. A semi-autonomous severing. Technology can be, as Eshun puts it, a ‘bifurcation in time’. The techno throbbing through the pale membranes of my human sense is a channel for split subjectivity, an experience of falling between worlds.

On the dancefloor, when he asks me what to do, I whisper in his ear, in some half-remembered echo from The Bell Jar: ‘pretend that you are drowning’. And that paranoid panic, that scramble for air in the thrust of the limbs, it seems to work. I see the moisture mist up his glasses. Face after face, we glimpse the phenomenology of substitution, we trade our own affect for the possible electricity of the next. His smile, her hair, our collective sweat. The absurdity of all these moves; the warping of all muscle memory inclined to a known rhythm, then ever the melodic trajectory of an unknown palette. We expose our infinite vulnerability, we abstract ourselves to the dancefloor’s disorderly hospitality, where the reciprocal push-pull of crowd and DJ is a mutual reading and so mutual dissolve, a ‘free love’ whose freedom is conditional on the exchange of gesture, face and motion, of bass, beat and melody. Of sonic and visionary qualities. Of closeness, a close reading. 

I imagine my skin looks metallic, right now, as you see it.

Eshun again:

Groove is when overlapping patterns of rhythm interlock, when beats syncromesh until they generate an automotion effect, an inexorable, effortless sensation which pushes you from behind until you’re funky like a train. To get into the Groove is to lock into the polyrhythmotor, to be adapted by a fictionalised rhythm engine which draws you on its own momentum.

Is fiction here the condition for identity’s erasure? We hustle ourselves out of ordinary language, slip into the chug and pulse of the train. Okay so all these bodies in motion. To export yourself to the techne of musical condition. Fold in the overlap, a baroque philosophy of subjectivity’s production. Enter heterotopia with both hope and scepticism. Put away your wallet. Fold yourself. There’s Deleuze’s notion of the fold as a doubling: one thought rolled and pressed into another, the scratch of tobacco in cigarette papers, the promise of chemical stimulation imbibed in the skin, the curlicues of words upon screen and page, the unlocking potential of semiotics in motion. A rolling into, an overlay’s careful pleat of impression and meaning. The duplicity of temporalities in photographic exposure. This tongue curled on a foreign one, the blendable play between French and English, a play between verse and chorus. A recursively mutual translation of inside/outside, the self and other, here and there, near and distant; a translation whose very process belies the instability and futility of such ontological divisions. We relate to ourselves as production, we produce ourselves. But don’t look at me / I’m just as weak. The face that desires, amid over-stimulation, the reserve of hiddenness, the retreat. Subjectivity as a question of mastery, self-relation, processing affect, thought and memory in the world’s abundance, intensified in the sonic duration of a pop song, or in the ever-churning lieux de memoire of a dancefloor, where memory is always in oscillation, caught between bodies and beats. And the magic in that, and the heat. 

‘It’s like creating temporal communities’ — Lewis Cook.

Every melody’s upswing, a new euphoria: ‘Synchronicity’. Left my ego on the ground. Make of identity its fractal components in disco extension, plugin auroras of thought, the perspectives shifting. Suzanne’s voice spliced between echo and harmony, echoed by Free Love’s other half, Lewis, echoed by her own, echoed by the satisfactions of division’s fall back into rhythm, the tightness of synchronicity. Turn me upside down / I don’t know what’s left in front of me. Resonate, resonate. Duplicity kaleidoscopes originary identity as an always receding, elusive location, infinite addiction. Broken glass, symmetry, the one and the same split shard-ways, a cool euphony of a synthetic present cast ever between past and future; the neuromuscular necessity of this beat, this bodily response; hyperstition; this brainwave as process corrosion, as shimmer and sweet, as almost coincidence.

 

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(Video shared via YouTube/Gorilla vs Bear)