Human Impact - 2024 - Gone Dark

 

Ipecac Recordings – IPC279LP

The cover is a blackout in which everything remains visible. A row of riot police advances across a city reduced to stacked gray compartments, digital scars, broken windows, and small flashes of emergency red and blue. Their bodies are surrounded by thick white outlines, making them look like figures cut from another photograph and pasted onto the urban grid. Some carry batons. One raises a megaphone. They are simultaneously human beings, state machinery, computer-game units, and symbols deployed by whoever controls the image. Nothing has disappeared into literal darkness. Instead, darkness has become the condition under which power can be seen most clearly.
“Gone dark” can mean a loss of electricity, communication, visibility, or surveillance contact. A person goes dark by ceasing to answer. A military operation goes dark when information is restricted. A city goes dark when the grid fails. A website, phone, bank account, or identity can be erased from public reach. The phrase may describe defeat, concealment, privacy, death, or refusal. Human Impact places all of these possibilities inside one title without giving the album a title song. Gone Dark is not one event within the record. It is the atmosphere connecting every event.
The nine song titles can be read as a damaged emergency procedure: Collapse. Hold On. Destroy to Rebuild. Reform. Imperative. Disconnect. Corrupted. Repeat. Lost All Trust. The sequence begins with a system failing and ends after confidence in the system has disappeared. Between those points, commands arrive from uncertain authorities. Hold on, but to what? Destroy, but who decides what should replace the ruins? Reform, but can a structure repair itself while continuing to benefit from the damage? Disconnect, but from the machine or from one another? Repeat, because repetition may be practice, propaganda, addiction, historical recurrence, or the mechanical inability to do anything else.
Human Impact is an equally reversible name. It can describe what human activity does to the planet, the effect institutions have upon human bodies, or the physical collision produced when one person is struck by another. “Impact” sounds momentary, but consequences spread outward. A baton lands once and leaves injury, fear, memory, legal language, medical expense, political imagery, and altered behavior behind it. An industrial decision may be made in an office and continue affecting air, soil, labor, families, and health for generations. The impact occurs at one point while its meaning keeps traveling.
The band contains several histories of impact. Chris Spencer brought decades of Unsane’s damaged urban guitar language, in which riffs often appear to be pulled across concrete until their surfaces tear. Jim Coleman brought the sampling, electronics, and architectural abrasion of Cop Shoot Cop. Eric Cooper’s bass supplies mass without merely following the guitar, while Jon Syverson’s drumming gives the music a disciplined violence that can suddenly fracture, suspend, or accelerate. These are not four impressive résumés politely occupying the same project. Gone Dark sounds like the moment their separate methods have developed a common reflex.
That reflex was strengthened by performance. The songs had lived in rehearsal rooms and on stages before being recorded, so they arrive less as studio constructions than as coordinated movements among bodies. The debut often revealed the fascination of musicians discovering how their elements might coexist. Gone Dark begins after discovery. Coleman’s electronics no longer feel placed behind the band as atmosphere or interruption. They enter the rhythm, distort the apparent dimensions of the room, and occasionally make the music seem to continue beyond the four players, as though a larger automated system has begun accompanying them without permission.
The attempted use of 24-track tape provides a perfect miniature of the album’s worldview. The musicians deliberately sought older machinery in pursuit of weight, physicality, and a particular relationship between performance and recording. The machine then consumed days without cooperating fully. Rather than allowing the failed apparatus to become a sacred obstacle, they recorded by whatever method would preserve the songs. Technology was used, resisted, partly abandoned, and used again. The record does not worship analog authenticity or digital convenience. It asks whether the tool serves the human act or gradually forces the human act to reorganize itself around the tool.
“Collapse” begins not as a distant forecast but as structural failure already underway. The rhythm section creates enough forward movement to suggest escape, yet Spencer’s guitar keeps placing damaged material in the route ahead. Coleman’s sounds widen the disaster beyond the instruments, implying alarms, transmissions, friction, and systems operating at the edge of intelligibility. The track does not depict a building falling in one spectacular moment. It resembles the period when everyone knows the supports are compromised but ordinary activity continues because stopping would require admitting how much has already failed.
Collapse is often imagined as the opposite of order, but collapse can be highly organized. Institutions prepare statements, markets adjust, authorities establish perimeters, companies protect assets, and media convert suffering into continuous programming. The system may manage its own failure efficiently while remaining incapable of preventing that failure. Human Impact’s precision captures this contradiction. The band is extremely controlled while producing the sensation of control being lost.
“Hold On” turns endurance into a contested instruction. It is an expression of resistance against systems that use convenience to establish control. That description reaches far beyond one technology. Convenience rarely presents itself as domination. It offers to remember passwords, recommend purchases, choose routes, store money, monitor health, deliver food, predict desire, and remove inconvenient human delays. Each service appears small and voluntary. Together they create an environment in which participation requires surrendering information, autonomy, alternatives, or the practical ability to leave.
Holding on can therefore mean refusing to release the remaining piece of an older world, but it may also mean clinging to the very apparatus causing the fall. A hand gripping a ledge and a hand gripping a weapon can make the same muscular shape. The song’s long duration keeps that ambiguity active. Resistance is not presented as one heroic shout. It is the exhausting continuation of pressure after adrenaline should have faded.
“Destroy to Rebuild” makes the fantasy of cleansing destruction explicit. When a system appears irreparable, demolition can seem more honest than incremental reform. Tear it down, remove the compromised structure, clear the site, and construct something new from uncontaminated foundations. The idea carries enormous emotional force because it transforms helpless observation into decisive action.
Yet destruction never produces a blank site. Rubble remains. Survivors remain. Skills, prejudices, property, trauma, habits, and unequal access to resources pass through the supposed reset. Those with the greatest power before collapse are often best positioned to own the rebuilding. Human Impact’s song does not resolve this problem, but its muscular momentum explains why destruction can feel like relief. The wrecking action is immediate. Building requires patience, cooperation, revision, and responsibility for what appears afterward.
The transition into “Reform” makes the two titles argue with each other. Destroy to rebuild, or reform what exists? Reform can mean improvement, but it can also mean forcing unruly material back into an approved shape. A reformed institution may have changed its public language while preserving the mechanisms that produced the original harm. A reformed person may genuinely redirect a life or merely become easier for society to manage.
The song places environmental disaster within this uncertainty. Fires visible from space and surroundings beyond control destroy the comforting distinction between local problem and planetary condition. The phrase “from space” changes scale without creating distance. Satellites can photograph the damage with extraordinary accuracy while remaining unable to extinguish it. Humanity achieves the technological perspective once reserved for gods and uses it to watch the world burn in high resolution.
“Imperative” is both noun and adjective: an urgent command and something that cannot be postponed. The song emerged before the album, but here it becomes the central hinge. Its industrial language joins broken labor, damaged production, collective loss, and the bodily memory of work. Machinery and workers appear caught in the same decline, although only the workers can suffer from it.
Industry often hides agency behind necessity. Closures, layoffs, automation, reduced safety, weakened unions, disappearing benefits, and exhausted communities are described as market imperatives, as though no person made the decisions. The imperative speaks without identifying its speaker. People are told that adaptation is unavoidable while profits, ownership, and responsibility remain negotiable for those above them.
Coleman and Spencer have tried to write from “we” rather than reducing the world to private complaint. That collective voice matters here. Heavy music frequently turns social damage into a stage for individual rage, allowing the singer to become the most important wounded person in the room. Human Impact’s anger keeps pointing outward toward shared conditions. The voice remains personal because a body must produce it, but the subject is larger than autobiography.
“Disconnect” is the shortest track and the album’s clearest withdrawal. Disconnecting can protect attention from a network designed to keep every person activated, outraged, available, measurable, and afraid of missing the next signal. Turning off the flow can restore silence enough for independent thought. Coleman’s interpretation of “gone dark” includes precisely this possibility: escape the addictive cycle of information and make a reality through creative work.
But disconnection also carries danger. The isolated person may become freer from manipulation or easier to abandon. Social systems frequently solve discomfort by disconnecting the difficult person, neighborhood, worker, patient, or fact from public attention. A corporation can disconnect responsibility from consequence. A consumer can disconnect a delivered object from the labor that produced it. A government can disconnect policy from the bodies absorbing its cost.
The track’s compression feels appropriate. Disconnection happens suddenly. One click, dead line, lost signal, severed cable, terminated account, unanswered message. The silence afterward may be freedom or evidence that nobody is coming.
“Corrupted” gives the album its most concrete social target. The song addresses pharmaceutical greed and the corporate engineering of addiction, homelessness, mental illness, and desperation, with its video focusing upon the opioid epidemic and the later prevalence of fentanyl and methamphetamine. The corruption is not portrayed as contamination accidentally entering an otherwise healthy system. The incentives themselves are corrupting. Suffering becomes profitable when treatment, dependency, enforcement, incarceration, insurance, and crisis management can each generate revenue.
The accompanying use of old anti-drug public-service footage adds another layer. The “just say no” era transformed addiction into an individual character flaw while institutions escaped examination. A frightened child, reckless teenager, weak adult, or criminal user became the visible problem. Corporate marketing, medical incentives, economic despair, trauma, inadequate care, and profitable punishment remained beyond the frame.
Corruption in digital systems usually means that information can no longer be read correctly. The file exists, but its internal order has been damaged. Social corruption can work the opposite way: the system remains completely readable, but people have become accustomed to its logic. The scandal is not hidden malfunction. It is successful operation according to values nobody wishes to state aloud.
“Repeat” arrives as both musical principle and political diagnosis. Repetition makes rhythm possible. It allows four musicians to coordinate, audiences to recognize form, and memory to convert sound into a song. Repetition can also turn an unsupported claim into common sense. Advertising repeats. Propaganda repeats. Trauma repeats. Addiction repeats. Institutions repeat failed solutions because those solutions preserve the institution.
The album’s interconnected construction gives repetition an almost architectural role. Motions, textures, and tensions pass between songs, creating the sense that the record has not reset at each track marker. This resembles the experience of historical crisis. One disaster is announced as unprecedented, yet its causes and responses carry familiar shapes. The names change, technology changes, and the same priorities reappear wearing updated interfaces.
Repetition does not prove that change is impossible. A musician repeats a phrase in order to alter its meaning through context, intensity, duration, or small deviations. Resistance also requires repetition. The warning must be stated again because the machinery benefits from public exhaustion. Hold on must be said again. Why must be asked again. Trust must be reconsidered again.
“Lost All Trust” ends the album after the language of systems has reached the most intimate social resource. Trust permits cooperation without constant verification. It allows a person to sleep near another person, accept food, enter a building, use money, receive medicine, follow directions, and believe that infrastructure will continue functioning beyond direct sight. Modern life requires enormous quantities of trust because no individual can inspect every bridge, prescription, wire, institution, contract, and data process personally.
When trust disappears, vigilance expands to occupy the vacant space. Every message may be manipulation. Every convenience may conceal extraction. Every official statement may protect another interest. This suspicion may be justified and still become psychologically ruinous. A person cannot live indefinitely in complete verification mode. The nervous system becomes a private surveillance state.
The title “Lost All Trust” sounds absolute, but placing it inside a band performance quietly contradicts the statement. Four musicians must trust one another’s timing, judgment, preparation, and response. They must trust engineers, studios, instruments, labels, manufacturers, drivers, venues, and listeners enough to bring a record into existence. The album reports social distrust through an act requiring collective trust.
This contradiction is the hidden hope within Gone Dark. The record does not promise that institutions will reform themselves, that technology will remain obedient, or that public life will soon become humane. Its hope exists at a smaller operational scale. People can still gather, make decisions together, create structures that serve an actual purpose, and recognize when a tool has begun controlling the work.
The riot police on the cover remain ambiguous in number and identity. Their white outlines detach them from the city behind them, yet they are agents sent to regulate whatever happens within it. The megaphone represents amplified authority: one voice made larger than the crowd. Batons convert that voice into physical instruction when amplification fails.
Behind them, the building resembles both apartment architecture and corrupted data. Homes become pixels. Windows become files. Residents become information hidden inside compartments. The cover suggests that urban life is being reformatted into a system whose human contents are visible only as scale.
The red lettering refuses to go fully dark. It glows like emergency signage, a recording indicator, or the last illuminated text after the grid has failed. HUMAN IMPACT appears above the police while GONE DARK sits below them, making the figures stand between cause and condition. They may represent human impact producing darkness, or human bodies trying to enforce order after darkness has arrived.
Gone Dark is fiercer than the debut, but its achievement is not simply greater aggression. The band has learned how to make force directional. Cooper and Syverson provide a rhythm section capable of driving straight through the center while Spencer and Coleman deform the route around them. The electronics do not add futuristic decoration. They make familiar rock instrumentation sound trapped inside systems that can record, analyze, duplicate, and eventually replace it.
The record belongs to the lineage of New York noise rock without pretending that late-1980s New York can be restored. Spencer and Coleman carry that history into a world where urban danger is increasingly administered through invisible networks, financial systems, environmental decisions, pharmaceutical markets, and interfaces marketed as frictionless. The street has not disappeared. It has been connected to servers.
Going dark may be the final refusal available to a person whose every action has been turned into information. Yet the album does not vanish. It broadcasts the refusal, presses it onto vinyl, uploads it, tours it, and invites strangers to enter. Human Impact understands that total escape from the system is fantasy. The more practical task is to build temporary zones where the system’s purpose can be challenged and another form of coordination practiced.
The lights go out. The amplifiers remain on.

Organ Of Corti - 2024 - Colluvio ​​/ Mutatio 7''

iDEAL Recordings – IDEAL 255

The cover could be mistaken for a label peeled from an old medical cabinet, a public-institution notice, or the title card from an instructional film whose projector has been stored in a damp basement. ORGAN OF CORTI occupies nearly the entire surface in heavy black letters, but the ink is uneven, scarred, and granular. The words are physically present without looking digitally perfect. Beneath them, COLLUVIO / MUTATIO appears in smaller type, divided by a slash that turns the two pieces into diagnosis and response, contamination and alteration, material gathered together and material changed by the gathering.
Letterpress is particularly appropriate for music made from tape loops. Both processes depend upon repeated physical contact. A raised surface meets paper and leaves an impression; recorded tape passes across a playback head and releases a signal. Neither repetition is entirely abstract. Pressure, alignment, surface condition, mechanical wear, and the peculiarities of each pass matter. The one-hundred numbered covers may share the same design, yet each physical impression contains tiny differences. The loop also returns as apparently the same sound while time, processing, layering, and listening continually change what that return means.
The title “Colluvio” names a mixture whose contents have not been purified into socially approved categories. It can suggest runoff collecting soil, refuse, leaves, oil, chemicals, and whatever else gravity carries into the same low place. It can also name a mob, jumble, contamination, or miscellaneous mass. Organ of Corti makes this impurity productive. The music does not separate tape hiss from signal, rhythm from malfunction, atmosphere from interruption, or musical tone from material friction. Everything entering the loop becomes part of its weather.
The first side begins around a low, stuttering figure that could be mistaken for a damaged bass line, a machine attempting to restart, or a short length of sound repeatedly catching on the same tooth. Its attraction is partly rhythmic, but the rhythm never develops the clean authority of a drum pattern. It hesitates. Each return seems to inspect the previous return and discover that something has shifted.
A loop is often imagined as closed repetition, sound condemned to circle forever without development. Actual tape resists that fantasy. It stretches, sheds particles, accumulates dirt, slips against mechanisms, and responds to the equipment through which it travels. Even a perfectly preserved loop changes because new sounds can surround it and because the listener remembers what occurred during the previous rotation. Repetition produces difference by providing something against which difference can be recognized.
“Colluvio” grows through this contaminated recurrence. Small electronic events enter around the central pulse without identifying themselves. A sound may resemble scraped metal during one pass and an animal call during the next. Another seems almost vocal until its timing becomes too mechanical. The trio leaves enough room around these fragments for the mind to manufacture causes. Instead of presenting a dense wall that overwhelms interpretation, they use scarcity to make interpretation unstable.
That restraint is striking given the histories involved. Dan Johansson’s work as Sewer Election can occupy severe territories of harsh noise and decayed tape composition. Mattias Gustafsson’s Altar of Flies has repeatedly turned field-like residues, fragile loops, domestic unease, and obscure sonic matter into environments that feel both intimate and contaminated. Joachim Nordwall has spent decades moving through industrial music, minimal electronics, psychedelic repetition, noise, and the organizational world of iDEAL. Combining three such musicians could easily produce maximal accumulation. Organ of Corti instead behaves like a committee convened to determine how little evidence is required before a room begins feeling haunted.
The individual sources remain difficult to assign. This is important because credits can encourage an overly tidy form of listening: here is Johansson’s loop, there is Gustafsson’s loop, and over both sits Nordwall’s synthesizer. The record frustrates that division. Tape and synthesis imitate one another. A synthesizer can sound old, damaged, or mechanically constrained. A tape fragment can acquire the impossible stability or alien pitch associated with an electronic oscillator. Mixing becomes composition because it decides not only what is audible but what kind of object each sound appears to be.
The name Organ of Corti makes this uncertainty almost anatomical. Before a sound becomes an idea, memory, threat, rhythm, or imagined machine, it must be translated from pressure into nervous activity. The listener never receives the original vibration as an untouched object. The ear changes it into a signal; the brain groups that signal according to experience. Hearing is already mutatio.
This makes “Colluvio” a description of ordinary listening at its most exposed. The environment sends an impure mass toward us: traffic, speech, ventilation, appliances, birds, footsteps, electrical hum, distance, and internal bodily noise. Attention selects some elements as meaningful while relegating others to background. Organ of Corti weakens that hierarchy. The background begins making claims. A hum develops intention. A stutter becomes the possible center. Tiny abrasions feel consequential because no larger musical authority arrives to explain their place.
The seven-inch format intensifies the concentration. Each side lasts slightly more than five minutes, imposing a physical border that a long digital file would not possess. The groove spirals inward, carrying the listener from the outer edge toward the label. Just as the cochlea translates vibration through a spiral structure, the record stores vibration in a spiral path. The object and the body briefly resemble one another: one groove enters another spiral and becomes hearing.
Flipping the record is part of the composition. “Colluvio” does not flow automatically into “Mutatio.” The listener must stand, lift the needle, turn the object over, locate the second groove, and begin again. Change requires handling. The slash on the cover becomes the physical interval between sides.
“Mutatio” does not behave like a cleaned-up sequel in which the impure mass has been successfully organized. Change here is not improvement, evolution toward clarity, or repair of the first piece. It is alteration without moral promise. The source matter has been placed under different pressure, and the resulting organism moves according to another internal law.
The second side feels more slippery and chemically active. Shapes stretch, recede, and appear to exchange functions. A texture that initially behaves like atmosphere begins asserting rhythmic weight; a pulse loses solidity and becomes surface noise. The piece does not announce each transformation through dramatic edits. Its mutations occur inside continuity, the way a face changes during years of daily viewing without providing one exact instant at which it became older.
This gradual instability distinguishes mutation from simple replacement. Replacement removes one object and installs another. Mutation allows the original structure to continue while becoming strange to itself. Tape manipulation is ideal for this because the identity of a recorded event can survive enormous distortion. A voice may lose language but retain breath and contour. A mechanical impact may lose its visible cause but preserve attack and resonance. The source remains present as a ghostly genetic inheritance.
There is no innocent original available to which the listener can return. Even before Johansson and Gustafsson made loops, microphones or recording devices had already selected and translated their sources. The tape medium altered them again. Cutting imposed duration. Repetition created emphasis. Nordwall’s synthesizers and mix changed their scale and relation. Vinyl cutting converted the finished work into another mechanical inscription. Playback equipment colors it once more. Finally, the ear transforms vibration into neural information and the listener’s mind produces an imagined world from that information.
Every stage is a mutation, yet none necessarily destroys authenticity. Authenticity may lie not in preserving an untouched origin but in allowing each transformation to remain audible. The slight dirt around a loop, the abruptness of its seam, the pressure of the mix, the printed wear of the cover, and the finite crackle of vinyl all reveal process instead of hiding it behind seamless digital transparency.
This is why the record’s minimalism feels crowded. Very few sounds may be active at one moment, but each contains a chain of previous states. A short fragment carries the event originally recorded, the recording apparatus, the cut, the loop mechanism, the processing, the mix, the groove, the playback system, the room, and the listener’s nervous system. The apparent emptiness is densely inhabited by transformations.
The two Latin titles also make the release resemble a pair of pathological specimens. One slide contains the contaminated accumulation; the second shows the alteration it produces. Yet Organ of Corti refuses the clean distance of laboratory observation. We do not stand outside the specimens. The sound enters the body, and the body becomes the final apparatus in the experiment.
Noise music frequently emphasizes assault, but this trio often works through suggestion. The danger is not that something attacks from the speakers. It is that the listener begins supplying missing information. Sparse and unidentifiable sounds create a cognitive vacuum, and imagination rushes in with machinery, insects, distant voices, industrial rooms, damaged transmissions, bodily functions, and unnamed movements beyond sight. The record becomes collaborative at the point where certainty fails.
This can be more unsettling than explicit harshness. A loud wall tells us exactly where the pressure is located. These pieces leave gaps through which the pressure can migrate. The room around the speakers becomes implicated. Heating pipes, refrigerators, street sounds, and the internal grain of silence begin joining the composition. When the record stops, its listening method remains active.
Colluvio / Mutatio is tiny compared with the larger works surrounding it in Organ of Corti’s expanding catalogue, but smallness is part of its precision. It does not attempt to summarize the trio or demonstrate every available technique. It isolates two conditions and places one on each side of a tactile object: matter gathering and matter changing.
The distinction eventually collapses. Gathering already causes change. When separate substances enter the same pool, each alters the environment of the others. When three musicians place their sounds together, no contribution retains its original meaning. When repeated signals enter memory, the later repetition meets a listener changed by the earlier one. Colluvio becomes mutatio while mutatio produces another colluvio.
The sleeve states the names in enormous worn letters as though identifying an anatomical diagram. Somewhere inside the body, a structure bearing the same name bends beneath the arriving waves. The record spins, the cochlear fluid moves, hair cells respond, and electrical signals travel toward a mind that will never know exactly what created every sound.
A physical mixture becomes vibration. Vibration becomes electricity. Electricity becomes imagined matter. Ten minutes later, the room sounds different even after the needle has lifted.

Breech Boys - 2024 - Greetings From Paradise

Slow Death Records – SDR-054

 The front cover looks like a postcard printed during an equipment malfunction. BREECH BOYS rises in enormous red letters with a blue shadow slipping behind them, while rows of small waves promise water, sunshine, and recreational escape. Beneath the title, two scenic images have been torn together: a violent natural formation on one side and people enjoying a lakeside landscape on the other. “Greetings From Paradise” appears in quotation marks, already making the greeting suspicious. Paradise is not being presented as an unquestioned location. Someone is repeating what the brochure told them to call it.

The back completes the joke with “Aloha From Kelowna,” converting a British Columbia city into a budget Pacific island and turning the 7-inch into tourist mail. A postcard traditionally selects the most flattering rectangle of a place and sends it somewhere else. Mountains, lakes, sunlight, and vacation bodies are allowed onto the front. Anxiety, family history, damaged plumbing, mental collapse, failed relationships, bad nights, and the person working behind the souvenir counter remain outside the crop. Breech Boys sends both sides.
The band name performs its own small bodily disaster. BEACH BOYS would complete the vacation fantasy. BREECH BOYS replaces the beach with the rear portion of the body, the back end of a firearm, and a difficult position of birth. Paradise develops an anatomical complication. The boys are not emerging into California sunshine according to the approved orientation. They are arriving backward, feet first, armed at the wrong end, and already making the postcard difficult to read.
That mutation tells us nearly everything about the record’s method. Familiar punk materials are not rejected so much as delivered incorrectly. The EP uses blunt hardcore rhythms, thick guitars, shouted vocals, brief durations, and simple physical impact, but small distortions keep the music from settling into historical reenactment. A woozy riff appears above a pounding beat. A rock-and-roll lead pokes through the abrasion. Chad Jones’s voice does not maintain one dependable posture of righteous anger. It yelps, strains, mutters, barks, and seems occasionally surprised by whatever has just escaped from it.
The recording credits reduce the entire performance to two people: Jones supplies the voice, while Danny Marshall supplies every instrument, tracks the music, and mixes it in a basement. This is compact even by hardcore standards. A whole band’s physical disagreement has been constructed from one instrumental body and one vocal body, then packed into a record whose five songs together are shorter than many album openers. Its smallness does not feel miniature. It feels compressed, the way a clenched fist is smaller than an open hand but carries more immediate consequence.
“Anxiety Combat Rock” announces the central conflict in its first title. Combat rock ordinarily directs punk outward toward war, state power, streets, authority, or social confrontation. Here the combatant is anxiety itself, and the battlefield includes the narrator’s body, family inheritance, generation, housing, pipes, mood, and dream of escape. The song wants to leave for a vacation island while repeatedly discovering that the luggage has already been packed with whatever made departure necessary.
The fantasy of paradise quickly becomes suicidal and absurd. A backpack filled with rocks turns the lake from recreational scenery into a possible endpoint. Religious voices condemn the narrator’s generation as defeated. Rats have returned to the pipes. Sanity leaks slowly. The body suffers a minor injury while the mind responds as though reality itself has cracked. Vacation Island then appears not as a destination on a map but as an emergency dream produced by someone who cannot leave consciousness behind.
This is the hidden cruelty inside fantasies of total escape. They promise that distress belongs to a location and will therefore disappear when the location changes. The person imagines another city, island, relationship, job, house, era, or version of the self where the old pressure cannot follow. Yet the nervous system crosses every border with its owner. Paradise may change what surrounds the mind without automatically changing the pathways through which the mind interprets its surroundings.
The music has no time to explain this carefully. It pounds through the contradiction in seventy-seven seconds. That speed is not an avoidance of seriousness. It reproduces the way anxiety compresses several incompatible thoughts into one bodily alarm. Spiritual judgment, generational defeat, plumbing, physical pain, depression, and tropical escape arrive almost simultaneously because panic does not organize its evidence into elegant paragraphs.
“Pretend Honey” brings sweetness into the modern world and immediately discovers that it may be artificial. Honey suggests affection, preserved sunlight, animal labor, nourishment, and something naturally resistant to decay. Pretend honey supplies the taste without the origin. It is emotional sweetener, a substance added to make an intolerable arrangement easier to swallow.
The lyrics surround this false sweetness with screens, hype, validation, and mental clutter. The modern world does not merely deliver information. It enters the head, asks to be believed, bathes even the cemetery in electronic glow, and constructs pulpits from images bright enough to replace older forms of authority. The person no longer needs a priest to identify salvation or failure. A feed, video, advertisement, audience count, or invisible social ranking can perform the ceremony continuously.
The command to let go of pretend honey and pretend money joins emotional and economic counterfeit. Both promise security through symbols. Money is real in its consequences yet exists through collective agreement; affection may feel real while being performed for convenience, status, fear, or habit. The song asks what remains when the person stops accepting every available substitute simply because the real need has become difficult to name.
Hardcore has always been suited to this kind of refusal. Its compression makes ornament suspicious. A song has one minute to identify the false thing, strike it, and leave before the false thing develops a marketing strategy around the attack. Breech Boys does not pretend to stand completely outside the modern system it condemns. The music is recorded, uploaded, streamed, photographed, tagged, and sold through the same illuminated machinery. The refusal occurs from inside dependence.
“Peace Lily” gives the record its strangest and most emotionally complicated symbol. A peace lily is a domestic plant frequently associated with sympathy, funerals, air purification, and the quiet visual promise that a home can remain calm if something green is placed in the correct corner. The song’s family environment refuses that decorative peace. Love becomes repulsive and dangerous, suffering is hidden behind a straight face, sobriety appears only briefly, and family nourishment begins resembling poison or preparation for execution.
The plant’s name therefore sounds less comforting than accusatory. Peace has been assigned to an object because the people in the room cannot produce it themselves. The lily is expected to absorb bad air while the family continues generating it. Houseplants often become witnesses to private history. They receive the same arguments, silences, television light, intoxication, recovery attempts, disappearances, and changing occupants without being able to describe any of it.
One memory stands out because of its painful modesty: a father remains sober long enough to coach a baseball team. The event is not presented as a complete redemption. Its value comes precisely from its limited duration. A child receives one period in which the parent becomes available enough to perform an ordinary act, and that ordinary act later carries the emotional weight of a miracle.
Addiction frequently reorganizes memory around such temporary openings. The person is remembered not only through what repeatedly failed, but through the afternoons when failure briefly loosened its grip. Gratitude and resentment become impossible to separate. The child may treasure the game while knowing that the game became precious because stability was unusual.
“Peace Lily” also keeps returning to the question of who concealed suffering most successfully. This is a fierce description of family performance. In troubled households, emotional control can become a competition nobody consciously agreed to enter. The person who appears least affected may be praised as strong while carrying the greatest unspoken pressure. Another person becomes visibly chaotic and is treated as the problem because the family’s hidden disorder has found one public body.
The song refuses a neat moral assignment. Love may be sincere and still injure. Sobriety may matter even when it does not last. Family resemblance may feel like connection or doom. The peace lily remains in the room, cooling nothing enough.
“Hands Tied” moves from family memory into bodily enclosure. Stomach, liver, concrete, walls, heat, isolation, and blue feeling form a structure whose interior has begun attacking its inhabitant. The title gives us helplessness, but the song is not passive. The narrator claws, burns, vomits, lashes out, and tries to move while repeatedly discovering that effort itself has become another source of pain.
Hands tied is a useful phrase because hands are the ordinary instruments of agency. They build, carry, defend, write, work, touch, play music, open doors, and ask for help. Binding them does not remove desire. It creates a gap between intention and action. Anxiety and depression often operate through that gap. The person may know what should be done, may even want intensely to do it, while experiencing the required movement as inaccessible.
The song also describes the claustrophobia of being considered superficial or pathetic while the body is already close to the ground. Outside judgment arrives at the exact moment internal strength has become least available. Advice can become another wall when it assumes that inability is laziness or that despair persists because nobody has yet suggested looking on the bright side.
The aggressive performance returns agency at the level of sound. A person whose hands are tied can still make noise. The shout may not solve the condition, but it prevents silence from being mistaken for consent. Punk has always understood this narrow but essential freedom: when control over circumstances is weak, control over the form of refusal may remain.
“Too Sealed Shut” is the longest song at just over two minutes, giving its enclosure time to become nearly spacious. The narrator admits being a poor participant in relationships, a bundle of damaged wiring who disappears, wallows in sad music, occupies space, and remains unable to open. Paradise returns throughout, but each repetition changes it from destination into diagnosis.
To be sealed shut is more than being closed. A closed door can be opened by the person inside. A seal suggests that the closure has been reinforced, perhaps for protection, freshness, secrecy, contamination control, or evidence preservation. The person has not merely withdrawn. The edges have been bonded until opening threatens to damage the container.
Emotional sealing usually begins as intelligence. Something enters and causes enough harm that preventing entry becomes necessary. The boundary works. Pain is reduced, danger is kept outside, and the person survives. Problems begin when the emergency architecture remains after the emergency, preventing affection, assistance, and new experience from entering through the same route once used by harm.
The song knows this and still cannot simply remove the seal. Insight does not automatically produce access. The narrator recognizes the pattern, criticizes it, and continues living inside it. This is more honest than the usual promise that naming a problem constitutes recovery. Sometimes naming only improves the acoustics of the room in which the problem remains.
Paradise becomes the name for that sealed interior. It is empty, socially erased, emotionally graceless, and strangely permanent. The person is trapped inside while also fearing what would happen if the enclosure opened. This turns the title of the EP completely inside out. Greetings are being sent from paradise because the sender cannot leave it.
The postcard format now becomes tragic rather than merely sarcastic. A postcard communicates from afar in a space too small for full disclosure. The sender writes a few cheerful sentences beside a beautiful image, while the recipient cannot see the room, weather, relationship, illness, loneliness, or financial condition surrounding the act of writing. “Greetings From Paradise” may be less a lie than the only message that fits.
Breech Boys squeezes this conflict into the 7-inch format, an object historically built for immediacy. The record does not ask for an hour of attention or claim to provide a complete philosophy. It enters, delivers five damaged greetings, and exits before the nervous system can establish a comfortable distance. The brevity makes replay feel almost compulsory. Seven minutes later, the postcard has returned to the mailbox.
Slow Death Records describes itself as devoted specifically to British Columbia punk, and the regional focus matters. Underground music becomes more vivid when it is allowed to emerge from an actual place rather than from an undifferentiated global genre feed. Kelowna is not being marketed here as a prestigious cultural capital. It is transformed into “Kelownafornia,” a private coastal fantasy beside an inland lake, complete with aloha language and a paradise whose internal population is anxious, poisoned, half-sober, sealed shut, and ready to pogo.
The cover’s red and blue misregistration captures the entire record. Each element appears twice, almost occupying the same position but never fully aligning. Tourist paradise and private distress overlap this way. Family love and family injury overlap. Honey and counterfeit sweetness overlap. Peace and the houseplant named for it overlap. The person presented publicly and the person suffering privately remain slightly displaced versions of the same figure.
That displacement produces the EP’s strange humor. None of the lyrics are funny because the underlying conditions are trivial. They become funny because language keeps finding crooked handles on unbearable material. Vacation islands, peace lilies, baseball practice, cemetery video glow, pretend honey, and postcards from paradise give distress forms that can be carried without reducing it to clinical terminology.
Punk performs a similar conversion. Fear becomes rhythm. helplessness becomes impact. Family history becomes a chorus. A basement becomes a studio. Two people become a band. Seven minutes becomes an inhabitable country.
The record ends without opening the sealed container. That is not failure. The greeting made it out.

Zorn - 2024 - Endless Funeral

 

Black Konflik Records – BKR242

A procession of skeletons, hooded mourners, demons, torches, bats, blades, and impossible bodies gathers beneath a monumental archway on the cover. Everything is drawn in burnt orange against black, turning the scene into an illuminated manuscript recovered from a cathedral whose congregation had been replaced by monsters. The figures do not appear to be mourning quietly. They are attending death as spectacle, civic ceremony, military parade, and neighborhood celebration. Along the left edge, the Black Konflik CD layout adds Japanese lettering and the wonderfully direct description “Satanic Hardcore Metal Punk,” presenting the object like an imported supernatural commodity whose contents require both warning label and advertisement.
A funeral is supposed to establish an ending. Someone has died; the living gather; the body is carried, buried, burned, remembered, and released into whatever each participant believes comes next. “Endless Funeral” destroys that function. The procession never reaches the grave. Mourning becomes permanent employment. Coffin bearers continue carrying their burden after the cemetery has run out of ground, musicians repeat the march until celebration and grief become indistinguishable, and the dead person remains socially powerful because nobody is permitted to finish saying goodbye.
Zorn turns this impossible duration into approximately a quarter hour of concentrated metal-punk theater. Hardcore supplies forward impact, thrash supplies intricate motion, black metal supplies frost and theatrical evil, death metal supplies blunt weight, and glam metal occasionally flashes through the lead guitar with no concern for whether genre police approve the costume. The songs are short, but they are crowded with riffs. Each one behaves like a miniature castle constructed immediately before somebody sets it on fire.
The name Zorn happens to mean anger or wrath in German, and whether or not that translation governs the band’s intent, it describes the physical speed with which the music moves. Yet this is not ordinary social rage presented through direct slogans. Zorn’s anger wears a cloak, climbs battlements, releases bats, summons mercenaries, and demands that demons carry the coffin. Emotion is translated into fantasy because fantasy permits it to become larger, funnier, and more physically playable.
“Warpath” begins from the viewpoint of a mercenary whose moral vocabulary has been reduced to forward motion. He kills for payment, commands an evil army, and treats hesitation as a failure of discipline. The repeated demand to get out of his way turns the song into both military chant and pit instruction. In less than three minutes, Zorn joins the fantasy battlefield to the social mechanics of live hardcore: advance, collide, clear space, re-form, and charge again.
The track’s brutality is strengthened by how sharply the musicians coordinate. The rhythm does not simply accelerate into blur. Drums and guitars lock together tightly enough that every sudden turn feels like a formation changing direction. A heavier death-metal passage lands with unusual force because it has been approached through speed. Zorn understands that heaviness is not measured only by slowness or distortion. It is created by contrast, placement, and the listener’s inability to prepare before the floor changes height.
The mercenary’s certainty also reveals why fantasy violence can be liberating without being morally educational. Ordinary life is filled with conflicting obligations, incomplete information, delayed consequences, paperwork, compromise, and actions whose value remains uncertain. The fantasy warrior knows exactly what must happen. An enemy stands ahead; movement is required; doubt is weakness. For two minutes, the song rents that certainty to the listener, then returns everyone to a world where consequences cannot be solved with one excellent riff.
“G.O.R.N.” enters a darker internal cycle. The lyrics invoke a Black Dog that must be fed repeatedly, another mission undertaken, another killing completed, and an evil rule that never ends. The Black Dog has long served as an image for depression, but Zorn does not reduce it to one psychological meaning. Here it is appetite, commander, curse, mascot, and internal machine. Feeding it provides temporary purpose while ensuring that hunger returns.
This repetition gives the song an interesting relationship with performance. A band creates excitement by repeatedly summoning the same constructed world. The coffin appears again. The ghoul escapes again. The audience demands another song, another tour, another escalation of the spectacle. The theatrical creature is fed through attention, and in exchange it gives the human performers a temporary identity larger than ordinary life. The danger and delight are the same: eventually the creation develops expectations of its own.
Zorn’s relationship with theatricality is unusually healthy because the absurdity remains visible. They do not demand that listeners believe demons have literally authorized the performance. The costumes, coffins, chains, and exaggerated evil create a shared game whose emotional effect can be real without its fictional machinery becoming doctrine. This separates camp from insincerity. Camp is often extremely sincere about pleasure, craft, transformation, and the freedom produced when embarrassment is denied authority.
“The Drunken Demon’s Iron Keep” builds the EP’s clearest fantasy landscape. A traveler must cross the mountains and Great Divide toward a fortress where a demon sleeps bound by seven chains. Prayer may be required to return home, but prayer alone will not complete the work. The demon must be beheaded or evil will remain. The song borrows the compressed logic of folk tale, role-playing quest, pulp fantasy, heavy-metal paperback, and story exchanged by children who have remembered the exciting parts more clearly than the connecting details.
Its melody gives the journey scale far beyond the song’s short duration. Tremolo-like figures flicker above the charging rhythm, while lead guitar lines make the keep appear higher and farther away. Zorn’s great trick is making this adventure feel simultaneously enormous and homemade. The Iron Keep may tower through storm clouds, but it has been constructed in a rehearsal room by friends who understand that cardboard battlements can become convincing once the drums begin.
The drunken demon is especially appealing because intoxication compromises supernatural majesty. A demon should represent immortal cunning, absolute corruption, or terrifying command over hidden forces. This one is asleep, drunk, chained, and vulnerable to practical decapitation. Evil remains dangerous but has become manageable enough to stage. The heroic journey therefore contains comedy without losing momentum.
That mixture reaches its purest form in “Endless Funeral.” The dying speaker gives precise instructions: scatter the ashes across castle walls, dig deeply, do not cry, assign six demons to carry the coffin and six more to clear the path. Death becomes event planning. Even at the edge of extinction, the individual wants authority over procession, emotional tone, personnel, and spectacle.
Funeral instructions reveal the strange human desire to direct a gathering one will not consciously attend. We select songs, clothing, burial methods, readings, guests, and disposal of remains partly to ease the burden on others, but also because imagination resists surrendering authorship. The body will be absent or inert, yet the person still wants the final scene to carry the correct meaning.
Zorn exaggerates this desire until it becomes a royal occult production. Twelve demons are apparently required for logistics, suggesting either great status or terrible inefficiency. The command not to cry rejects ordinary mourning in favor of dancing around the grave. The funeral becomes a concert, and the dead person becomes headliner.
Yet the title introduces a darker possibility. An endless funeral is what occurs when death cannot be integrated into life. Grief no longer honors attachment and gradually releases the mourner; it becomes the structure through which every later experience is interpreted. The coffin may have reached the ground, but internally it is still being carried. The procession moves through work, relationships, sleep, anniversaries, and ordinary mornings.
Zorn’s stage coffin turns that burden into play. The frontman enters the box alive and emerges as a ghoul. The funeral is reversed into birth, but the birth produces a character associated with death. This theatrical resurrection allows the audience to rehearse mortality without requiring reverence. Death becomes something that can be opened from inside, leapt out of, screamed about, laughed at, and returned to storage after the show.
“Dance of Madness” brings the procession into psychological territory. Reality becomes unreliable, the listener is trapped inside another being’s dream, and fear is given choreography. The dance is simultaneously death sentence and invitation. A helpless victim is told to close their eyes, while the music makes bodily stillness nearly impossible.
Dance has always contained this double character. It can express freedom through movement, but it also organizes bodies according to rhythm. The dancer chooses to participate while surrendering some control to tempo, repetition, crowd, and expectation. In a mosh pit, individual agency and collective force continually exchange places. A person moves the crowd and is moved by it, creating temporary madness with practical rules that may never be spoken.
The track stretches to the same length as the title piece, giving Zorn enough space to turn their short-form attack into something approaching miniature epic metal. Guitar lines become more elaborate without losing the primitive physical engine beneath them. This is where the band’s increased musicality becomes clearest. The theatrical surface may look gloriously crude, but the players are capable of precise internal construction.
The CD-exclusive “Power” extends the object beyond the official vinyl funeral. Bonus tracks have always occupied a strange afterlife. The primary work announces its ending, then another piece emerges because a particular format, territory, label, or edition has opened an additional chamber. Here the Malaysian Black Konflik edition refuses to let the procession conclude after “Dance of Madness.” The word “Power” arrives after death and madness like the energy still remaining in the corpse.
That edition history suits Zorn perfectly. The American vinyl is one body; the compact disc becomes another. Japanese lettering appears on a Malaysian label’s packaging for a Philadelphia band drawing upon European metal, American hardcore, Gothic horror, fantasy art, and occult theater. Underground music has never obeyed the national boundaries imagined by cultural gatekeepers. A coffin built in Philadelphia can be shipped across the planet and opened by strangers who already understand the ritual.
Endless Funeral is most successful because the music does not depend upon forgiving weak songwriting in exchange for a great show. The visual world attracts attention, but the songs remain after the coffin has been carried away. Riffs recur in memory, changes arrive with purpose, and the vocals possess their own jagged timing rather than merely screaming over the instruments. The band is funny, but the playing is not a joke.
Extreme music sometimes treats humor as contamination. Artists fear that one visible smile will weaken the authority of darkness, as though evil requires constant administrative seriousness. Zorn recognizes the opposite. Horror and heavy metal have always contained extravagance, costume, theatrical death, rubber monsters, elaborate typography, impossible anatomy, and pleasure taken in being frightened safely. Pretending this playfulness does not exist makes the genre less honest, not more frightening.
The group’s Satanism functions partly as a carnival language through which embarrassment, anxiety, mortality, and social restraint can be rearranged. A corset, coffin, chain, sword, or demon mask permits the performer to become temporarily ungovernable. The everyday self has obligations and inhibitions. The ghoul has an entrance cue.
That transformation does not eliminate anxiety. It gives anxiety a body capable of moving through a room. The demon, mercenary, funeral master, and mad dancer are all exaggerated forms of determination. They know what they want even when what they want is absurd, destructive, or impossible. The anxious person wants that certainty and may experience it briefly through performance.
The cover procession therefore need not be interpreted as movement toward death. It may be movement away from private paralysis. Every monster has arrived dressed for the occasion. The castle doors stand open. The dead are more socially active than many living people, and the funeral refuses to end because nobody wants to return yet to ordinary clothes.
Eventually the needle lifts or the CD reaches silence. Coffins become props, demons become friends carrying equipment, and the endless funeral ends for the evening. Its endlessness survives only as repeatability. The ritual can begin again whenever the record is played.
That is a kinder kind of eternity than permanent mourning. It allows death to be approached, staged, shouted at, danced around, and then temporarily dismissed. Zorn does not conquer mortality. They give it a great party and make it wait outside while the amplifiers are packed.

Wand - 2024 - Help Desk / Goldfish

Drag City – DC925

The object shown on the cover looks like customer service after its final emotional breakdown. WAND appears in enormous white letters above a yellow smiley face raising both middle fingers. The face remains perfectly cheerful because it has only one expression available. The hands communicate everything the smile has been forbidden to say. Behind them sits an urgent red field, the color of warnings, error messages, emergency buttons, clearance stickers, and the little badge informing an overworked employee that another problem has entered the queue.
A help desk is where confusion must become legible before assistance can begin. The person seeking help describes what has failed, selects a category, repeats what has already been attempted, and waits while the problem is translated into the language of a system. The system may be genuinely useful, but it can only address what its forms are designed to recognize. “My password has stopped working” fits inside a ticket. “I no longer recognize the life connected to this password” does not.
The smiley with its raised fingers perfectly captures this contradiction. Its face says that the institution is happy to assist. Its body says that the institution has exceeded its capacity for patience. It is hospitality and refusal condensed into one mascot, emotional labor revolting while the uniform remains on.
“Help Desk” does not sound like a band confidently supplying answers. It sounds like several people circling a distress signal whose meaning keeps changing as they approach it. The arrangement is spacious, murky, and quietly enormous. Guitars quiver rather than strike, bass gives the music a hidden floor, and the drums move with the care of someone walking through a dark room where another person may be sleeping or injured. Cory Hanson’s voice appears close enough to confide but distant enough to remain uncertain whether the message has reached its intended recipient.
The opening promise that someone will try to help arrives with an immediate qualification: perhaps the person in trouble could simply work it out. That sentence can be encouragement or abandonment depending upon how it is spoken. “You can do this” and “deal with it yourself” often wear the same words. The song lives inside that unstable tone, where care is present but cannot prove that it will be sufficient.
Its images move through graves, sheds, nests, caves, roads, animals, faith, hiding, running, and the difficulty of admitting that someone else may be right. These are not ordinary help-desk categories. They belong to older systems of shelter and danger. The shed is a rough human structure; the nest is a structure built by instinct; the cave is protection, burial chamber, origin point, and place into which frightened creatures retreat. The song gradually moves assistance away from offices and toward the basic question of whether one being can build a safe enough place for another.
To help someone out of a grave sounds heroic until the lyric makes the timing uncertain. Is the person already dead, merely mistaken for dead, hiding among the dead, or waiting for someone else to notice before completing the disappearance? Rescue becomes morally urgent while remaining practically unclear. One person may desperately need intervention and still resist the hand reaching toward them. Another may offer help partly from love and partly from the need to become indispensable.
This is where “Help Desk” becomes more than a song about alienation. It examines the intimate power contained inside assistance. The helper gains access to weakness, information, and decisions that the distressed person cannot currently manage. Care can restore agency, but it can also quietly replace it. The difference may depend upon whether the helper wants the other person to become free or permanently grateful.
The song never establishes one clean position. Desire, frustration, protection, shame, and hostility pass through the same voice. The listener cannot separate “I want to save you” from “I want you to behave in a way that allows me to feel like your savior.” Wand lets these emotional frequencies interfere with one another instead of cleaning the signal.
That interference reflects the method from which the music arose. The band entered the studio without finished compositions, generated hours of improvisation, and later listened for passages that seemed to contain their own internal demands. In that sense, Wand became a help desk for the music. The raw recordings arrived as unsolved cases. Instead of asking how to impose a familiar Wand song upon them, the musicians asked what each fragment appeared to need.
This is a profound change from the model of a songwriter issuing complete instructions to supporting players. Improvisation distributes uncertainty. Nobody can know exactly what another musician will do next, and every contribution changes the meaning of what has already happened. The composition becomes an act of mutual assistance: one player creates a problem, another offers a route through it, and a third reveals that the apparent solution was actually another opening.
“Goldfish” is the creature left swimming after the administrative system closes for the evening. Its title introduces a living body small enough to be contained inside a bowl and visually available from every side. A goldfish has almost no privacy. It eats, sleeps, moves, and excretes inside the same transparent enclosure while a larger species looks in whenever it chooses.
The fish may not understand that its world is decorative. The castle, gravel, plastic plant, filtered current, and boundaries of the bowl appear simply to be reality. This makes the aquarium an unusually exact image for consciousness. Every person experiences existence from inside a container that cannot be viewed completely from within. Language, family, body, history, culture, and sensory limits form the glass. We may recognize some of the enclosure while remaining unable to imagine the room outside it.
The popular claim that goldfish possess only a few seconds of memory has long made them symbols of perpetual rediscovery. Whether or not the biology supports that myth matters less to the song than the cultural image it created. The goldfish circles its bowl and meets the same castle as though for the first time. Repetition becomes innocence rather than imprisonment.
Wand’s music complicates that innocence. “Goldfish” glows, but its light carries melancholy. Feedback seeps around the guitars, piano notes appear like objects seen through moving water, horns spread color without becoming triumphant, and the drumming places small precise disturbances across the surface. The composition seems to rise and sink simultaneously. It is sunrise viewed from underwater, where illumination reaches the body only after being bent by another medium.
The song’s six minutes do not build toward the explosive release one might expect from Wand’s earlier psychedelic rock. Energy is dispersed through texture. Instead of a door being kicked open, the dimensions of the room slowly become questionable. The walls may be moving outward, or the listener may simply be losing the ability to locate them.
This makes “Goldfish” a natural survivor from the Vertigo sessions. Vertigo is not merely dizziness. It is a disagreement between sensory systems about one’s position in space. The eyes report stability while the inner ear reports movement, or the body feels stationary while the world appears to rotate. “Goldfish” produces a gentler version of that disagreement. The rhythm establishes an environment, but the surrounding tones make the environment appear to float.
Bruce Bickford’s drawings deepen the effect. His animation was famous for worlds that could not remain in one shape, where bodies, landscapes, machines, monsters, and architecture continually transformed into one another. For the “Goldfish” video, scanned drawings made before his death are placed into new motion. The artist is absent, yet marks once produced by his hand continue changing position.
This is not resurrection. The drawings cannot restore the consciousness that made them. They do, however, demonstrate that an image may contain unrealized movement long after the moment of drawing has ended. Someone else scans, sequences, edits, and displays the material, discovering paths through it that the original artist may never have specified. The dead hand stops moving; the line keeps traveling.
The goldfish and the posthumous animation therefore share a strange life. Both exist inside visible enclosures constructed by others. The fish moves through a tank; the drawing moves through a screen. Each can be watched repeatedly, and neither can explain its experience of being watched. The viewer supplies interiority.
After the two Wand pieces, the record returns to “Help Desk” three times. This sequencing turns the second side into a support ticket routed through separate departments. The original problem has already been described, but Beat Detectives, Dead Rider, and Dean Spunt each receive different permissions, tools, assumptions, and listening habits. No remix closes the ticket. Each demonstrates that the ticket contained several problems hiding beneath one number.
Beat Detectives rebuild the song around rhythm and nocturnal electronic space. The original’s organic uncertainty becomes a city of delayed signals, beats, reflections, and half-lit movement. Their version treats the voice less as a narrator standing inside a band and more as information circulating through an environment. Fragments become signs glimpsed from a moving vehicle. Help has entered the network and acquired a pulse.
This remix makes the phrase “help desk” sound institutional again, but the institution is now open after midnight. Fluorescent offices, empty transit platforms, server rooms, surveillance monitors, call queues, and distant apartment windows begin assembling themselves around the beat. Human need travels through machines that remain active while most human bodies are asleep.
Dead Rider approaches the song from a different angle. Their music has long understood negative space as an active ingredient, and the remix makes Wand’s structure bend, shimmer, and squirm without simply destroying it. Sounds appear to negotiate their own right to occupy the foreground. The song becomes less a building than a body trying to reposition itself inside uncomfortable clothing.
The Dead Rider version recognizes that assistance can be disruptive. A real solution may require dismantling the arrangement that allowed the original problem to remain stable. The remix does not decorate “Help Desk.” It changes where the song appears to possess joints.
Dean Spunt’s treatment moves furthest toward blur. As a member of No Age and an artist interested in repetition, noise, objects, and recording as material, Spunt allows the song’s recognizable identity to dissolve into smears, tremors, and hypnotic recurrence. The help desk has stopped interpreting the caller’s language and begun listening to the electrical texture of the connection itself.
A conventional remix often locates the most reusable component, places it over a new beat, and produces a parallel version suited to another social setting. Spunt makes the notion of usefulness stranger. Voice, rhythm, and atmosphere become substances rather than messages. The song is not answered. It is rubbed until the printed instructions disappear.
By the end of the record, “Help Desk” has existed four times. The repeated title begins behaving like a phrase spoken into an automated telephone system that fails to recognize pronunciation. Each repetition changes emphasis. HELP desk. Help DESK. Help? Desk. Eventually the words lose their ordinary service meaning and become two objects placed beside one another: assistance and furniture.
A desk is a surface where problems are processed while the body remains seated. It divides worker from customer, clerk from applicant, expert from person seeking access. Help becomes something administered across the barrier. Yet a desk is also where people write, draw, assemble, repair, and imagine. The same object that bureaucratizes assistance can support the creation of another world.
The EP’s artwork compresses that contradiction into its smiling insult. The mascot belongs on a sticker, skateboard, tool case, school notebook, service counter, or piece of industrial equipment. It is instantly readable and emotionally impossible. The face cannot stop smiling; the fingers cannot stop objecting. Cheerfulness and rage have been assigned separate parts of the same body.
That division resembles life inside a band, job, relationship, or digital platform. People learn to maintain acceptable surfaces while other gestures leak from beneath them. A voice says everything is fine. A foot shakes under the table. A hand tightens. A joke arrives carrying the information that direct language could not deliver.
Wand’s 2024 music frequently inhabits this leakage. The band’s earlier records could erupt with enormous fuzz and clear physical attack, but these pieces allow pressure to remain internal for longer periods. Density has not disappeared. It has moved beneath the surface, where feedback, arrangement, hesitation, and nearly buried instrumental events create the sense that the song knows more than it is willing to state.
The two originals and three remixes form a small study of how meaning survives alteration. “Goldfish” remains alone, protected inside its bowl, while “Help Desk” is repeatedly opened, copied, reassigned, and modified. One track represents containment; the other becomes circulation.
Yet the contained fish moves constantly, while the circulating help request may never reach resolution. Motion does not guarantee escape. Distribution does not guarantee understanding. Sometimes the most widely shared distress becomes the easiest to process without truly encountering.
The EP does not solve this. It offers several forms of listening. Wand listens to improvisation until a song appears. The remixers listen to the song until alternate structures appear. The listener hears the versions sequentially and begins noticing details in the original that may have remained invisible before transformation.
That is the real service provided by the record. It does not answer the problem. It changes the ear receiving it.
Anyone with the physical 12-inch, knowledge of the design credits, or insight into how the remixes were exchanged and assembled is invited to add another department to the case file. The help desk remains open, although the mascot may have complicated feelings about your call.

Jim Nothing - 2024 - Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn

 

Melted Ice Cream – MICV015

The cover looks like a neighborhood remembering itself through several incompatible systems. A blurred hillside occupies the upper photograph, while the lower image shows some kind of skeletal shelter, frame, garage structure, or unfinished room. Architectural diagrams run along the top and bottom edges, their little boxed forms and cross-braces suggesting routes, rooms, windows, or instructions for assembling a place. A broad salmon-colored stripe divides the images, smaller marks repeat across the bottom like missing letters, and an upside-down number 23 sits near the corner as though the sleeve has been rotated, misfiled, or recovered from a planning office after its original purpose was forgotten. Nothing is centered in the conventional sense. The record appears less illustrated than mapped.
Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn performs a similar operation upon inner-city Auckland. It maps a place through bicycles, pubs, roads, trees, shorelines, long afternoons, feedback, old drinking habits, cats, flowers, gambling screens, fading light, and people whose identities are revealed only through the way the singer notices them. The neighborhood is never introduced through famous landmarks or a tourist’s elevated view. It appears from inside daily movement, one avenue, garage, window, bar, road surface, and patch of changing light at a time.
The title joins a person to a suburb so closely that the boundary between them disappears. Grey eyes look at Grey Lynn, but Grey Lynn may also be looking back through those eyes. A person becomes a local weather system, while the neighborhood acquires a face. Grey is not treated as the absence of color. It contains overcast light, asphalt, old timber, evening, memory, melancholy, silver guitar tone, and the soft visual grain of the cover photographs. Lynn supplies the human sound at the end, almost a name spoken after the color has settled.
Jim Nothing is another wonderfully misleading construction. It sounds self-erasing, as though James Sullivan has stepped aside before anyone can accuse him of importance. Yet the songs are filled with evidence that nothing is never actually nothing. A cat playing in a doorway matters. A bicycle matters. The last leaves on a tree matter. A quiet afternoon matters. An old-timer placing a bet matters. The joke inside the name is that someone calling himself Nothing has become unusually attentive to all the small somethings other people discard as background.
“Hourglass” begins with time converted into landscape. Sand belongs both to the instrument measuring time and to the beach where time is often temporarily forgotten. The song keeps returning to the fact that time will not come back, but the music refuses to sound defeated. Guitars sparkle, drums move forward, and the backing vocals add warmth around the central warning. The hourglass keeps track even when the person does not, yet the song itself creates another relationship with time. Two and a half minutes can be replayed, allowing the same passing moment to return without pretending that the listener remains unchanged.
The production history gives that opening track another meaning. Its first recording was clean enough to make Sullivan uncomfortable. The professional microphones and studio clarity produced something recognizably good, but not yet recognizably Jim Nothing. He returned to the garage, added overdubs and layers of feedback, and allowed the song to acquire the abrasions through which his own identity became audible. This is not a simple preference for bad sound over good sound. It is the recognition that technical improvement can sometimes remove the conditions under which personality becomes visible.
A perfect recording may reveal every instrument while hiding why the musicians needed to make it. Garage noise restores scale. The listener can sense the walls, limitations, cold air, improvised setup, and decisions made without an institution waiting to approve them. Feedback is not damage placed over the song. It is the garage asserting that the song passed through an actual room.
“First Bite” introduces one of Sullivan’s marvelous miniature people: a pill vampire wearing dad shoes on a Sunday, watching a cat play in the doorway while competence gradually subsides. The description is funny because its details refuse the grand authority usually granted to a vampire. Immortal darkness has reached middle age, pharmaceutical dependence, practical footwear, and quiet domestic observation. Yet the figure is not merely mocked. There is tenderness in the act of seeing someone so exactly.
The phrase “enough is never enough” opens the song outward. Appetite survives every attempt to domesticate it. Medication, consumption, attention, affection, entertainment, work, intoxication, and self-improvement all promise a point of sufficiency that continually moves. The pill vampire does not need a Gothic castle. Contemporary life provides subscriptions, prescriptions, screens, and Sunday afternoons in which hunger can continue without ever clearly identifying what it wants.
“Wildflowers” moves into the inverted seasonal world of a Southern Hemisphere December, where Christmas belongs to heat, melting roads, swimming, and plants releasing themselves into summer air. Sullivan even hesitates between “tarmac” and “bitumen,” allowing the material beneath his feet to become linguistically unstable. This tiny uncertainty is part of the album’s charm. The singer does not need to know the approved word before the road can carry him.
The flowers, seeds, heat, roadside quicksand, and psychedelic memory turn the song into a local summer mythology. Falling becomes successful because the people once “tripped” and “fell so well.” The line transforms failure into an art of landing. Youth is remembered not as a period when nothing went wrong, but as a time when falling could still feel collaborative, funny, and temporarily free of permanent consequence.
“Easter at the RSC” constructs a secular religious service inside a sports and social club. Old-timers try their luck at the TAB, spectators send hand signals toward the referee, beloved songs play, doors stay open, and the repeated instruction to “sell your car” arrives like advertising, prophecy, and financial emergency fused into one phrase. Easter traditionally concerns death, return, and transformed life. Here resurrection may mean winning a bet, finding a gap in the replay, surviving the long weekend, or exchanging an automobile for whatever dream feedback promises.
The RSC becomes a neighborhood church whose rituals are gambling, sport, alcohol, screens, memory, and familiar company. The song does not treat these practices as degraded substitutes for something sacred. Repetition, hope, disappointment, communal watching, and belief in unlikely reversals already make them religious in structure. One in a million remains almost certainly impossible, but people gather because impossibility becomes easier to hold in company.
The title song is the album’s emotional center because it joins escape fantasy to the discovery that remaining can also become meaningful. The singer remembers drinking himself beneath the table and mentally driving state highways, wishing to leave while physically staying in the same place. Travel happens first as imagination, the road becoming available inside the mind before the body follows it.
Then the song slows into a tree-lined avenue, fading light, books, grey eyes, Grey Lynn, and “Marquee Moon.” Television’s great song of nocturnal urban revelation becomes part of an Auckland afternoon without swallowing the local scene. The reference is not a badge displayed to prove taste. It names the way music from another city can enter a neighborhood and change its light. New York guitar lines pass through decades and hemispheres until they become part of two people reading quietly in Grey Lynn.
The song’s deepest movement is from wanting to get out toward learning how to see where one already is. This does not mean every urge to leave was immature or mistaken. A place can feel imprisoning during one period and beloved during another because the observer, relationships, habits, and available futures have changed. Home is not a fixed property of geography. It is a changing agreement between location and attention.
“Can’t Find It Now” lasts barely more than a minute and turns absence into a problem of insufficient brightness. Whatever has been lost may still exist, but there is not enough light to distinguish it. This could describe memory, purpose, an object misplaced in a room, a former self, or the first reason a song was begun. The piece leaves before the search can become dramatic, respecting the ordinary way lost things remain lost. Most disappearances do not receive conclusions. People simply stop looking for the day.
“Raleigh Arena” is a love song to a road bicycle and one of the purest expressions of physical freedom on the record. The title names Sullivan’s beloved bike, but it also transforms the city into an arena entered through pedaling. Movement requires no fuel purchase, timetable, permission, or sealed compartment. The rider is exposed to weather, traffic, gradients, smells, sounds, and sudden changes in the neighborhood, but this exposure is part of the freedom rather than a flaw in it.
Its motorik pulse creates a road beneath the words. Repetition becomes rotation, each musical circuit resembling another turn of the wheels. The lyric is almost childishly direct: riding feels good and free, and everyone should have access to such a machine. That simplicity becomes political without acquiring a slogan. The bicycle is inexpensive relative to a car, physically empowering, spatially modest, and capable of converting a city from something passed through behind glass into something continuously encountered.
The song also explains the album’s method of observation. Walking and cycling operate at the speed at which small features become visible. A person in a car moves between destinations. A person on a bicycle experiences the material connecting them. Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn is written from that connecting material.
“Lucky Charm” asks to become a protective object for another person while admitting that years, seasons, and unrealized possibilities continue moving. A charm is carried because someone believes proximity to it may influence chance. The singer does not promise complete protection or control. He wants to be the small object accompanying another person through uncertainty.
This modest scale saves the song from romantic conquest. The desire is not to own the beloved’s future but to become something fortunate within it. Even the movement from “lucky charm” to “lucky one” and finally “only one” feels less like increasing possession than language gradually admitting the full size of its hope.
“The Shimmering” returns to the shore at night, where streetlights, stars, waves, reflections, and human figures begin sharing one unstable surface. Shimmering occurs when light cannot remain fixed. It trembles upon water, glass, leaves, metal, and the eye itself. The object appears to move because illumination keeps changing its angle.
This is also how memory works across the album. Events do not return as solid reproductions. They shimmer according to the present from which they are recalled. A drunken period, bicycle journey, pub afternoon, psychedelic summer, or person’s eyes may look different each time memory’s light reaches them. The song accepts that instability as beauty rather than evidence that the memory has failed.
“The Present” performs the album’s most graceful word-turn. “You are the present” identifies another person as both the current moment and a gift, while “I’m the afternoon” makes the singer a temporary portion of the day. One person is time itself; the other is weather passing through it. The lyric keeps nodding toward the past while remaining bittersweetly aware that staying is an active decision.
This may be the record’s quiet philosophy. The past deserves recognition without being allowed to govern every room. Escape remains imaginable without being automatically necessary. The present is not an empty interval between what has been lost and what may arrive later. It is another person sitting within the afternoon.
“Sundown Clown” turns evening into permission. Once the sun disappears, clowning begins, drinks are poured, and everyone does whatever is necessary to continue. The clown can be comic freedom, intoxicated foolishness, emotional disguise, or the self who emerges when daylight’s duties release their grip. The world keeps spinning around the singer, the listener, and the neighborhood whether the night becomes celebration or avoidance.
The song does not condemn drinking despite the title track’s memory of drinking beneath the table. It recognizes that the same act can belong to different chapters. A drink can accompany friendship, ritual, escape, dependence, or ordinary pleasure. Songs do not need to issue one permanent verdict upon every behavior they contain.
“Out of Reach” is full of nearly graspable purity: a tree clinging to its final leaves, moonlight tea, flowers, Antipodean stillness, and medicine dreamed into existence. The repeated insistence that something is pure begins sounding less certain with every return. Purity may be precisely what remains unreachable.
This is fortunate. Pure scenes, pure genres, pure memories, pure motives, and pure identities usually exist only after inconvenient material has been removed. Jim Nothing’s music is valuable because it refuses that cleaning. Jangle carries feedback. sweetness carries sadness. A garage shares authority with a proper studio. New Zealand guitar history coexists with local details too peculiar to become generic heritage.
“The Pass” closes in a town where gold once drew people toward the river and then disappeared. Bells continue ringing although almost nobody remains to hear them. Words have been written into rock, ribbons are cut, and commemoration survives the community whose life supposedly gave the ceremony meaning. The song turns a former mining settlement into a meditation upon how places continue after their economic purpose has been extracted.
It is a darker companion to Grey Lynn. One place remains inhabited through attention; another has become monument, inscription, and echo. The bells ring for everyone, but nobody is left. The record ends by asking whether a place lives through buildings, population, memory, repeated sound, or the person who carries its story elsewhere.
Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn gathers these questions without becoming burdened by them. Its melodies remain immediate, guitars shine and fray, drums keep the songs lightly airborne, and backing voices create small openings around Sullivan’s understated delivery. The album’s intelligence never needs to announce itself because it is embedded in what gets noticed.
The cover’s floor plans, photographs, colored blocks, and unexplained number finally resemble a personal archive being converted into shelter. One image shows landscape; another shows construction; the diagrams offer possible arrangements without telling us which one was completed. Perhaps the album itself is the completed room.
It has been built from a garage, a studio, a bicycle, a neighborhood, friends, flowers, wagers, forgotten towns, and time passing through grey light. Jim Nothing stands at the center by refusing to behave like a center. The songs keep looking outward, where nothing important is happening and everything is.

David Grubbs & Loren Connors - 2024 - Evening Air

 

Room40 – RM4226

The cover contains a horizon but refuses to declare where the horizon is. Loren Connors’s monochrome painting appears to divide into air, water, shore, fog, and dark land, yet each region quietly leaks into the others. A pale band seems to hover above a heavier black field. Tiny marks near the lower edge might be reflected light, distant structures, waves, scratches, or places where the painted surface has remembered the hand that crossed it. The image is called A Coming to Shore No. 21, but it does not show arrival as a clean event. Shore remains something emerging gradually from atmosphere.
Evening air behaves similarly. It cannot be pointed to as an object, yet it changes every visible object. Heat leaves the ground, distances soften, sounds travel differently, and forms that were obvious in afternoon light begin surrendering their borders. Evening is not night, but the certainty of day has already begun withdrawing. Connors and David Grubbs make music inside that transition. Guitar and piano remain recognizable, but neither instrument consistently occupies the expected ground. Notes arrive, fade, reflect, and occasionally become indistinguishable from the space around them.
The label name adds another quiet chamber. Room40 originally points elsewhere, toward codebreaking and hidden transmissions, but here the words become literal again: a room containing forty possible meanings, or the fortieth room reached after all familiar rooms have been exhausted. This music does not feel designed for a large public square. It creates a room whose dimensions are determined by attention. Listen casually and it may seem almost empty. Listen closely and the apparent emptiness develops doors, drafts, distant motion, and the acoustic evidence of things waiting outside sight.
The two musicians first met as a duo more than twenty years earlier in the chapel at Green-Wood Cemetery. That origin remains audible even though Evening Air was recorded in a studio. A chapel teaches sound to behave differently. Silence is no longer the absence between events but part of the architecture holding them apart. A single note can establish height, stone, distance, and the presence of bodies attempting not to disturb one another. Connors and Grubbs do not reproduce church acoustics here. They preserve the courtesy such acoustics demand.
“Evening Air” begins with Grubbs at the piano and Connors on electric guitar. The pairing might suggest a clear division between struck notes and sustained ones, piano providing points while guitar provides atmosphere. The performance immediately complicates that expectation. Grubbs allows chords and isolated tones to hang long enough that the piano begins behaving like weather. Connors’s guitar enters with gestures so thin and carefully placed that they can resemble marks made upon paper rather than amplified strings.
Neither musician appears interested in filling what the other leaves open. This is more unusual than it sounds. Much improvisation is governed by response: one player makes a statement, another replies, and musical intelligence becomes visible through speed of recognition. Connors and Grubbs practice a slower form of recognition. A sound may be answered by allowing it to remain unanswered. Respect becomes audible as restraint.
The title piece does not develop toward conquest. It develops toward acquaintance. Piano and guitar gradually learn the pressure each can exert without forcing the shared air to become private territory. A low piano tone may alter the emotional color of a guitar line without touching it directly. A guitar sound may make the decay of the previous chord suddenly noticeable. The musicians communicate not only through what they play but through what each performance causes us to hear in the other.
“Choir Waits in the Wings” introduces a group of singers who never enter. The title locates them beside the stage, prepared but withheld. Their waiting becomes more powerful than an actual choral entrance because imagination can supply a choir larger than any recording budget. Every sustained guitar tone or gathering piano resonance begins to suggest voices assembling behind a curtain.
A choir traditionally converts separate breathing bodies into collective speech. The individual singer becomes part of a larger mouth. Connors and Grubbs accomplish something almost opposite. Two instrumental voices remain clearly separate while occasionally producing the sensation that a third body has formed between them. The imaginary choir is not added to the music. It appears within the overlap.
The wings are also where performers remain visible to one another while hidden from the audience. They contain preparation, nerves, whispered instructions, props, dust, practical labor, and the ordinary bodies that will soon enter a stage and become symbolic. This album often feels as though it remains in that side space, listening to art before art has completed its public transformation.
The long first side belongs to Grubbs’s piano and Connors’s guitar. The second side changes the furniture. Connors moves to piano for “The Pacific School,” “Enjoyment of Ruins,” and “Child,” while Grubbs takes the electric guitar. The reversal is not presented as a stunt. No announcement tells the listener to admire their versatility. The instruments simply begin revealing different temperaments under different hands.
Connors’s piano playing has a beautiful untrained exactness, not because it lacks knowledge but because it refuses the instrument’s social pressure to demonstrate pianism. The piano carries an enormous historical institution inside it: conservatories, recitals, domestic respectability, composition, virtuosity, and the authority of Western notation. Connors approaches it as a field of available sounds. A key is permitted to be one event rather than evidence of mastery.
“The Pacific School” lasts barely two and a half minutes, yet its title opens toward an ocean and an institution at once. A school can teach doctrine, but it can also be a moving community of fish whose coordination has no visible conductor. Pacific can name an ocean or a condition of peace. The piece hovers among these meanings. Connors’s piano tones appear as dark bodies briefly surfacing while Grubbs’s guitar supplies water, current, or the reflected sky.
The Pacific is too large to be seen as a whole from any shore. It must be understood through local encounters: one wave, harbor, crossing, map, storm, memory, or horizon. The same is true of musical traditions. Nobody hears an entire lineage. A listener receives one record, one performance, one borrowed influence, and gradually imagines the larger sea from those partial contacts.
“Enjoyment of Ruins” is a dangerous title because ruins are beautiful partly through damage someone else may have suffered. A collapsed factory, burned home, deserted institution, or abandoned town can become visual pleasure once the people harmed by its failure have left the frame. Ruin photography often turns consequence into texture.
The piece does not sound triumphant enough to celebrate destruction. Its enjoyment is quieter and more ethically uncertain: the pleasure of hearing forms after their intended function has ended. A broken wall reveals layers hidden during the building’s useful life. A failed machine becomes sculpture. A musical phrase interrupted before resolution exposes the assumptions through which listeners expected it to continue.
Connors and Grubbs do not construct complete melodic buildings and then theatrically destroy them. They begin with fragments already carrying the dignity of remains. The listener is not invited to mourn the missing whole because there may never have been one. Ruin becomes a method of composition in which gaps are original features rather than later damage.
“It’s Snowing Onstage” is the album’s magnificent disturbance. Both musicians take up electric guitars, creating a denser, more confrontational field, and Connors unexpectedly moves to drums. The surprise is not that percussion appears but that it behaves according to no familiar contract. The drums do not stabilize the guitars by supplying a dependable rhythmic floor. They enter like objects dropped into weather.
Snow onstage makes the boundary between representation and environment collapse. Stage snow is artificial weather, flakes manufactured to create an image for an audience. Actual snow would disrupt equipment, alter surfaces, endanger movement, and potentially force the performance to stop. The title leaves us between those conditions. Is the stage convincingly pretending to be outside, or has the outside entered and begun damaging the illusion?
The guitars gather in rougher formations than elsewhere on the record. Their lines push, hover, and occasionally lock together before separating again. Connors’s drumming introduces impacts that seem less interested in measuring time than in proving that time has a body. A drum is struck, air moves, the room answers, and the guitars must continue in a world changed by that impact.
The piece is the longest act of weather on the second side, yet it never becomes a storm in the conventional free-improvisation sense. Its tension comes from unpredictability without aggression. Snow is quiet while transforming every surface it reaches. The track covers the stage this way, changing the visibility and footing of everything already present.
“Child” closes the album in a little over two minutes. Knowing the composition’s history gives the miniature tremendous gravity: a mother’s child killed by the freight trains that once ran through Manhattan’s West Side streets. Yet no voice explains the story here. Connors plays piano while Grubbs’s guitar remains near him, and grief is returned to the condition before narrative organizes it.
A child is a person, a relationship, a future, and a word adults continue using after the person it names has grown or died. To a parent, the child may remain “my child” beyond every alteration of age and even beyond death. Language preserves the relationship while reality removes the body.
The brevity refuses monumental mourning. Public memorials often enlarge grief into architecture because ordinary scale seems incapable of carrying it. “Child” remains small. This makes its absence feel closer. The piece resembles an object kept in a drawer, touched rarely because it contains more feeling than its physical dimensions should permit.
Grubbs does not attempt to replace Suzanne Langille’s absent voice or imitate the emotional information words once carried. His guitar remains a companion to Connors’s piano, perhaps carrying what another person can carry when grief itself cannot be shared equally. One person experiences the central loss; another remains nearby without pretending proximity creates complete understanding.
This has been the ethic of the whole album. Collaboration does not require merging identities. Connors and Grubbs preserve difference so carefully that their moments of convergence become extraordinary. They do not constantly prove that they are listening. They create conditions in which listening can be inferred from the survival of each other’s space.
After two decades, their return is not framed as unfinished business finally completed. Evening Air does not attempt to update Arborvitae, exceed it, or demonstrate everything learned during the interval. Time is allowed to exist between the records without becoming a burden the new music must explain.
This may be why the album feels simultaneously old and newly made. Piano and electric guitar carry no obvious timestamp here. There are no fashionable production gestures announcing 2024. Yet the music could only have been played by these people at this stage of their lives and history together. Timelessness is not the absence of time. It is time felt without being advertised.
Room40 is an ideal home because the label repeatedly treats listening as an active physical and philosophical practice rather than passive receipt. Its releases often enlarge the space between almost nothing and almost too much. Evening Air remains near the first boundary, but close listening reveals that almost nothing may contain an impossible amount.
The cover painting finally stops resembling a landscape and becomes a score. Dark horizontal fields indicate duration. Pale bands indicate air. Tiny marks become notes, boats, distant lamps, or incidents in the painted surface. The coming to shore may be the music approaching audibility, the musicians approaching one another, or the listener gradually recognizing a form that was present before recognition.
Arrival never becomes complete. The shore continues emerging. The choir continues waiting. Snow continues falling upon an indoor stage. The child remains held inside two minutes of sound. Evening enters the room without opening a door.