Dur-Dur Band - 2013 - Volume 5

Awesome Tapes From Africa – ATFA004

Before the first full song begins, Abdinur Daljir introduces the members rd. Rather than presenting the group as a single magical name, the introduction allows the name to unfold into people: singers, guitarists, horn players, keyboardist, bassist, drummer, conga players, backing vocalists. The band becomes audible as a community before it becomes music. Each announced name briefly steps forward, then rejoins the larger organism. What follows is not the expression of one commanding personality but a social structure in motion.
The word dur-dur is commonly translated as “spring,” which feels almost suspiciously perfect for this music. A spring is a source emerging from underground, water becoming visible after traveling through hidden layers of earth. It is also a season of return, movement, color, and renewed public life. Dur-Dur Band possesses both meanings. The music rises from a deep network of Somali poetry, melody, rhythm, dance, family life, religious understanding, and oral memory, yet it arrives wearing the bright electrical clothing of late twentieth-century funk, disco, soul, reggae, jazz, synthesizer pop, and international radio. Nothing is simply imported or preserved. Sources meet beneath the surface and reappear as something newly local.
Volume 5 was recorded in Mogadishu during the final years of the city’s great nightclub era and reissued internationally in 2013 by Awesome Tapes From Africa from a surviving cassette copy. The exact year has become slightly unstable. The label’s original notes identify the recording as 1987, while current physical-edition descriptions call it a 1989 tape. That uncertainty belongs to the object’s history rather than diminishing it. Many recordings survive inside archives designed for completely different lives than the ones they eventually acquire. A cassette copied for circulation within one musical community may become, decades later, the nearest surviving doorway into a vanished arrangement of musicians, venues, studios, listeners, streets, and nights.
The hiss is part of that doorway. It is not the sound of Mogadishu itself, and it would be sentimental to pretend that every technical imperfection carries mystical historical truth. Hiss is friction produced by a recording and duplication medium. Yet here it also marks the distance the music has traveled. The band performs in the foreground while time moves continuously behind it. Rather than placing the listener inside a spotless reconstruction of the late 1980s, the reissue lets us hear the difficulty of reaching them. The music penetrates the damage without erasing it.
Dur-Dur Band was considered a “private band,” meaning it was not tied to the state institutions that employed many Somali musicians and often expected political or patriotic material. That word private does not mean isolated. The group was large, popular, public-facing, and built for places where people gathered. Privacy here means a degree of artistic independence, particularly the freedom to sing about love, domestic negotiation, longing, disappointment, faith, money, family, and dance rather than carrying an assigned government message. The result is political in a quieter and perhaps more enduring way. It preserves the emotional life of ordinary people.
“Hayeelin,” meaning approximately “Don’t Do It,” begins with romantic despair intense enough that the singer contemplates ending his life. The response comes from the surrounding voices: do not do it; God will make things easier. The arrangement turns private crisis into communal dialogue. Despair speaks in the singular, but care answers in the plural. The band does not leave the suffering voice alone at the center of the song. Rhythm, chorus, and reassurance gather around him.
This interaction reveals something essential about Dur-Dur Band’s music. The groove is not an escape from serious feeling. It is a way of carrying serious feeling without letting it become motionless. Sadness is placed inside bass, percussion, horns, voices, and dancing bodies. The pain remains real, but it is prevented from becoming the only available reality. Music creates companions around an isolated thought.
“Halelo” answers the uncertainty of “Hayeelin” with fulfillment. A couple announces that they have reached the destination they sought together. Love is not described as one person conquering or possessing another. The achievement is shared, and the male and female voices confirm it from their respective positions. The call-and-response structure does more than decorate the melody. It dramatizes mutuality. One voice makes a claim, and the other is permitted to answer.
The performance has the buoyancy of a celebration already in progress before the recording begins. Guitars flicker around the beat, horns arrive in bright clusters, and the rhythm section maintains a pocket spacious enough for every voice to remain distinct. Dur-Dur Band’s size does not produce congestion. The musicians understand that a large ensemble becomes powerful through placement rather than constant activity. A horn line appears, leaves air behind, and allows a guitar or vocal phrase to occupy the newly illuminated space.
“Fagfagley” moves the record into domestic comedy and conflict. Its central woman is accused of talking excessively and demanding more from her husband than another wife receives. The situation emerges from a specific social context involving a polygamous household, but the emotional mechanics are immediately recognizable: comparison, resentment, unequal expectations, competing definitions of fairness, and the use of ridicule to weaken someone whose demands have become inconvenient.
Calling the woman a gossip or endless talker may describe her behavior, but it may also function as a strategy for avoiding what she is saying. Throughout history, people with less formal authority have often been accused of talking too much when speech is the primary instrument available to them. The song allows the conflict to remain funny without making it simple. A household is revealed as a small political system in which resources, affection, duty, and voice must continually be negotiated.
“Ilawad Cashaqa,” “Hold on to This Love with Me,” returns to the uncertain beginning of a relationship. Questions have accumulated without answers. One person has waited for an invitation into the other’s heart and now insists that the situation be stated clearly. The phrase “with me” contains the song’s entire ethic. Love cannot be held by one person on behalf of two. The request is not merely for affection but participation.
The guitars throughout Volume 5 often behave like conversation. One supplies clipped rhythmic punctuation while another sends small melodic figures around the vocal. The keyboard can thicken the harmony, imitate orchestral color, or suddenly announce the technological decade with a bright synthetic tone. Horns provide emphasis without permanently becoming the main event. Beneath them, bass, drums, and congas keep the songs from becoming illustrations of their lyrics. The body receives its own argument.
“Garsore Waa Ilaah,” “God Is the Judge,” places a couple before the uncertainty of a shared future. The woman is prepared to make the journey but asks whether her partner will help carry the decision. She knows that many people plan to remain together and still become separated. Faith does not remove human responsibility. God may judge fairly, but the couple must still act, choose, assist, and endure.
The song’s title might initially suggest surrender to divine verdict, yet its story emphasizes cooperation. The future cannot be guaranteed by intensity of feeling alone. Love becomes an activity requiring repeated decisions by people whose certainty will fluctuate. The divine judge does not replace communication. God’s permanence instead reveals the instability of human promises and the care required to keep them alive.
“Aada Fududey Iga Ahow” presents perhaps the album’s most complicated domestic decision. A divorced man has remarried. His former wife, the mother of his children, returns and asks for reconciliation. He ultimately tells the new wife that his bond with his children and family history prevents him from continuing with her. No arrangement avoids pain. Loyalty to one relationship becomes abandonment within another.
Popular love songs often make emotional truth appear singular: follow the heart, return to the original love, choose the person who understands you, or remain faithful to the newest promise. This song recognizes that several truths may exist simultaneously and demand incompatible actions. The man’s responsibility to his children is meaningful. The new wife’s injury is also meaningful. A choice can be understandable without becoming harmless.
“Tajir Waa Ilaah” widens the album’s moral vision from romance to wealth and human limitation. God is complete; human fortune changes. A person who possesses abundance today may have nothing tomorrow and therefore has no stable ground from which to despise someone with less. The song joins economic humility to kindness toward women and emphasizes decisions made together.
These ideas do not arrive as a sermon detached from pleasure. They travel through one of the band’s warm, rolling arrangements, where ethical instruction becomes dance music. This may initially appear contradictory only because modern commercial culture often separates seriousness from bodily joy. Dur-Dur Band does not. Wisdom can be sung in a nightclub. A dancing person can consider mortality, responsibility, generosity, and God without leaving the floor.
“Dholey” contains some of the album’s most striking electronic color. The synthesizer bends and darts around the percussion, giving the arrangement an unmistakably 1980s brightness while the singer describes heartbreak severe enough to disturb physical orientation. The ground becomes dizzying. Voices seem to descend from the sky. Shared birthplace and common history cannot prevent abandonment.
The song is musically exuberant while emotionally wounded, but neither side cancels the other. This is not upbeat music hiding sad words. The arrangement demonstrates how longing actually behaves. A person can remain physically alive, socially active, beautifully dressed, rhythmically responsive, and inwardly destabilized at the same time. Pain does not always slow the body. Sometimes it makes every sensation brighter.
“Amiina Awdaay,” “Where Is Amina?,” is built from absence. The singer searches for Amina, remembers his promise, and imagines the happiness of marrying her. A name repeated in song becomes a form of temporary presence. Amina is missing from the singer’s physical world but occupies the entire musical space. The band constructs a room from which she is absent and then fills that room by calling for her.
Recorded music performs a related act. It summons people who are no longer standing together. By the time Volume 5 reached international listeners in 2013, the original social geography of the band had been scattered by war, migration, death, exile, and time. Yet pressing play gathers these voices into the same arrangement again. The reunion is real within sound even when it is impossible in place.
“Dooyo” closes the album with a woman hearing drums and declaring that she will not resist the dance. The rhythm is medicine. Dooyo has taken possession of her, and stopping is no longer desirable. After an album filled with romantic crisis, family complications, moral judgment, economic humility, abandonment, and longing, dance becomes not a trivial conclusion but a practical form of healing.
To call rhythm medicine is not metaphorical decoration. Music changes breathing, muscle tension, attention, memory, proximity, and the experience of time. It does not solve the circumstances described in the preceding songs. It alters the body that must continue living through them. The dancing woman is not cured of every problem. She has entered a condition in which the problem no longer occupies the entire field.
There is a temptation to hear Volume 5 primarily as a document of what Mogadishu lost. The city’s musical infrastructure was devastated as civil war began, performers dispersed, venues closed, archives became endangered, and later extremists attempted to suppress music itself. That history cannot be ignored, but allowing catastrophe to become the album’s main subject would repeat another kind of erasure. It would define Somali cultural life chiefly through its destruction.
Volume 5 does not sound like ruins. It sounds like expertise, humor, argument, flirtation, faith, fashion, electricity, rehearsal, nightlife, friendship, and professional musical confidence. The people on this cassette did not know themselves merely as inhabitants of a tragic historical prelude. They were living in their present, making contemporary music for listeners who understood its language, references, personalities, and dances.
The reissue listener therefore carries a responsibility not to convert the record into an exotic ghost. Its value is not that Western collectors rescued an otherwise silent culture and granted it meaning. The music already possessed meaning, popularity, circulation, and a sophisticated audience. The international reissue extended the route. It did not create the spring.
Awesome Tapes From Africa’s decision to remaster a cassette copy rather than wait for an imaginary perfect source respects a crucial archival truth: sometimes the surviving copy is the master history has provided. Preservation cannot always recover first-generation tapes, original artwork, exact dates, complete credits, or untouched sound. The responsible act is not to disguise uncertainty but to carry forward what remains with enough context that future listeners can hear both the music and the conditions of its survival.
The shifting fidelity across Volume 5 gives the album the feeling of movement through rooms and nights. Organ appears thick and physical in one track; synthesizer becomes sharper and more metallic in another. Live drums may seem to yield to machine-like regularity. Vocal textures and instrumental balances change. Instead of one sealed studio session, the tape feels like a vessel into which several moments of Dur-Dur Band’s life were gathered.
A cassette is especially suited to this kind of survival. Tape is linear, vulnerable, portable, recordable, erasable, duplicable, and intimate. It passes through hands. Every copy may slightly alter what it carries. The hiss grows, high frequencies soften, cases crack, handwritten information becomes detached, and still the music travels. Like oral memory, it survives not by remaining physically unchanged but through repeated acts of transmission.
The introduction now takes on a deeper meaning. Abdinur Daljir names the musicians because a band is not an anonymous historical atmosphere. It is people. The names resist the tendency to let distant music dissolve into generalized phrases such as “Somali funk,” “African disco,” or “lost sounds.” Categories help us find the doorway, but the introduction asks us to meet whoever is inside.
Then the band begins, and all those individual names become one moving body without disappearing into it. Voices trade perspectives. Guitars interlock. Horns answer. Percussion thickens the road beneath the melody. A woman hears drums and finds medicine. A desperate man is told not to die. Couples reach destinations, lose them, renegotiate them, and ask God to judge what human beings cannot settle cleanly.
The spring continues flowing through a damaged cassette. Its water carries hiss, love, advice, gossip, faith, synthesizer light, household argument, nightclub electricity, and the names of people standing together in Mogadishu before history scattered them. Volume 5 is precious because it remembers a city, but it remains alive because it does more than remember. It still moves.

Position Normal - 2025 - Modern and Unique 2

 

Self-released – none

The person on the cover has become furniture, television, worker, and viewing audience at the same time. A paint-spattered body reclines heavily in an old brown chair, but where the head should be sits a small glowing screen. Another television rests beneath the feet like a footstool, discarded appliance, or technological altar. The figure may be watching through the television, being watched by it, dreaming inside it, or simply too exhausted to distinguish any longer between consciousness and programming. The surrounding collage of red fabric, wood grain, carpet, gloves, overalls, and obsolete electronics turns an ordinary room into a homemade command center whose commander appears to have fallen asleep during transmission.
Modern and unique sounds like language copied from a furniture advertisement, estate-agent listing, motel brochure, or handwritten sign beside an object at a yard sale. The phrase promises two qualities that should be easy to recognize but become slippery when placed together. Modern means belonging to now, although “modern” also names styles and technologies that became old decades ago. Unique promises that nothing else is quite the same, although advertising applies the word to thousands of nearly identical products. Add the number two and the title becomes beautifully self-contradictory. The unique thing has acquired a sequel.
Position Normal has always lived inside such verbal creases. Even the group’s name joins movement and stability. Position suggests where something has been placed, while normal promises that the placement follows an accepted standard. Yet very little in this music remains where language or culture normally leaves it. Voices become percussion. Household objects become instruments. mistakes become architecture. A title begins as a sentence and wanders away before locating its verb. Normality is not rejected from outside. It is entered through a loose floorboard.
The first Modern and Unique, released in 2023, was largely instrumental and presented as music made with instruments rather than the sampled voices and scavenged recordings historically associated with Position Normal. Its sequel greatly enlarges that idea. Chris Bailiff plays real and software piano, acoustic and electric guitars, double bass, congas, bongos, tambourine, synthesizers, and shakers disguised as produce. John Cushway returns with lyrics, stories, and the special vocal presence that has always allowed Position Normal to make speech sound half remembered before it has even finished being spoken.
Only two samples are admitted into the entire record. One is a dog barking twice. The other is a 1990s drum-and-bass fragment used in the hidden “Techno Non Stop.” For artists once celebrated as masters of the found fragment, this near-abstinence is more radical than continuing to add increasingly obscure source material. Position Normal has not abandoned collage. It has begun manufacturing the scraps itself.
That distinction is easy to miss because the new playing still sounds inherited, recovered, overheard, or transmitted through unsuitable equipment. The musicians can create a piano phrase in the present and make it feel as though it has survived inside a cupboard since 1978. A guitar need not be sampled from a forgotten instructional record to carry the posture of forgotten instruction. Original material can become found sound when it is recorded, cut, titled, and placed as though the makers discovered it among their own belongings.
Recording onto VHS is central to this peculiar time-fold. Videotape was designed to preserve moving images, with sound accompanying the picture. Using it primarily as an audio body leaves the image channel haunted by whatever is absent. The album becomes the soundtrack to a missing television program whose episodes may once have involved a man in an armchair, laughing trees, dirty dumplings, marine holidays, unexplained staring, and a dog permitted exactly two barks.
VHS also belongs to domestic memory in a way that pristine digital recording cannot imitate. It remembers shelves of unlabelled tapes, programs beginning late because someone failed to press record in time, advertisements interrupting films, family events accidentally taped over, tracking lines, remote controls with missing battery covers, and voices continuing after the picture has turned to snow. Position Normal does not merely use obsolete technology for warmth. It uses the social habits attached to that technology.
“Light Introduction” begins like illumination being introduced to a room rather than a band being introduced to an audience. The title could mean a gentle opening, but Position Normal titles rarely stay obedient to one meaning. Perhaps Light itself has arrived and must be presented. Perhaps the introduction weighs very little. Perhaps an introductory passage has been left near a window and faded. The music opens the curtains without establishing what kind of day has begun.
“Khee,” played on piano and guitars, has the quality of a word heard correctly but spelled privately. It may be a name, sound, exhalation, or key with its first letter slightly displaced. This is how language often enters Position Normal: not as clean semantic information but as a physical object handled long enough to acquire fingerprints. Cushway and Bailiff understand that a spoken syllable can remain compelling after meaning has loosened. The mouth becomes a small synthesizer made from muscle, air, memory, and social embarrassment.
“Dorian Chords” briefly announces musical theory with the solemnity of an educational film, only to disappear after little more than a minute. The Dorian mode traditionally occupies an emotional space between major brightness and minor sorrow, making it perfectly suited to Position Normal’s cheerful unease. Their melodies often appear pleased with themselves while something in the room remains unmistakably wrong. Happiness is not exposed as false. It has simply put on a cardigan belonging to someone who has been missing for years.
“Larfin Trees” performs one of the album’s tiny acts of word-morphing. Read aloud, the trees begin laughing, but the altered spelling makes the laughter belong to a regional accent, a child, a comic character, or somebody repeating a phrase they never saw written down. Trees can laugh through leaves and branches, but they can also appear to laugh at the human need to assign them expressions. The track lasts only forty-five seconds, enough time for the forest to make its remark before returning to ordinary vegetation.
“Think About The” ends before naming what should be considered. The title resembles a command clipped from a longer sentence, leaving the mind permanently leaning forward. Think about the what? The consequences, children, price, smell, future, old days, person beside you, dog outside? The missing noun turns thought into a room without furniture. Position Normal repeatedly discovers that incompleteness can be more generative than explanation. A complete sentence delivers information; a broken sentence recruits the listener.
“Book Looks” is the album’s emotional hearth. The song had circulated before this full release and was already singled out for the way its murmured domestic lyric evokes a man who loves the smell of his house and the people inside it. Home becomes animal, architectural, affectionate, and faintly claustrophobic. People share air, fabric, food, skin, habits, books, dust, and the smell produced by remaining near one another for years. The house does not merely contain the family. It gradually acquires them.
The title itself may suggest judging a book by its cover, a book returning the reader’s gaze, or the particular appearance a person acquires after too much time alone with printed matter. Position Normal’s homes are never simply cozy or sinister. They are burrows constructed from attachment. Safety and enclosure grow from the same walls.
“They Are Not Staring” addresses the social fear that other people have become a tribunal. The reassurance is specific, yet its specificity makes suspicion stronger. Nobody tells us not to worry about staring unless somebody has already felt watched. The sentence may be spoken by a friend, therapist, parent, conspirator, or one part of the mind attempting to calm another. Under a television-headed figure, the claim becomes even less secure. They may not be staring, but the screens certainly are.
The four “Theme Tune” pieces divide the album into imaginary programs. A theme tune traditionally promises recurrence. It tells the viewer that the same characters, room, and problems will return after the opening credits. Here no programs accompany the themes, so the listener must invent them from surrounding fragments. The album begins to resemble a television schedule from a country whose programs were all cancelled before transmission, leaving only their miniature musical identities.
This structure also suits the record’s unusual chronology. Bailiff describes its contents as spanning from the late 1980s to now. Instead of arranging those decades into a documentary progression, Position Normal lets old and new constituents coexist without identification badges. A youthful idea may be completed by older hands. A recent performance may pass through VHS and emerge sounding earlier than its source. Time is not a line but a house in which several versions of the residents occupy different rooms.
“Overwhelming” gives a large word less than two minutes in which to demonstrate itself. Modern life generally imagines the overwhelming as accumulation: too much information, noise, responsibility, memory, choice, grief, work, media, or future. Position Normal responds with compression. The miniature does not defeat excess by becoming empty. It traps excess inside a small container and allows pressure to become character.
“Dirty Dumplings (Done Dirt Cheap)” drags an AC/DC title into the kitchen, replacing dangerous deeds with inexpensive food that may have fallen onto the floor. It is ridiculous and exact. Much of domestic life consists of heroic musical energy being spent upon small edible objects. The dumpling deserves a riff too. Position Normal’s comedy does not simply mock grandiosity. It redistributes grandeur to objects and situations usually denied it.
“Someone Else’s Bare Minimum” contains an entire social philosophy. The least one person can manage may exceed another person’s greatest effort. Standards that appear objective often conceal differences in health, money, confidence, training, time, support, and luck. The phrase can sound accusatory, compassionate, resentful, or liberated depending upon which word receives emphasis. Someone else’s minimum should not become the ruler used to measure your maximum.
“Are Glued” is another grammatical fragment whose missing subject enlarges it. Eyes are glued. People are glued. Pieces are glued. We are glued to screens, chairs, habits, homes, histories, and one another. Glue repairs by preventing movement. It restores the object while permanently changing how the repaired area can flex. Much of the album behaves this way, fastening decades of material together without hiding the joins.
“And I Muddled All the Ins” turns muddling into a physical occupation. Perhaps the speaker confused every entrance, mixed up all the interiors, or disturbed the small words hidden inside larger ones. “Ins” are people with access, fashionable insiders, or the opposite of outs. To muddle them is to sabotage the border separating belonging from exclusion. Position Normal’s work has always invited outsiders into the living room while making insiders wonder whether they entered the correct address.
“Wham Marine Holidays” resembles the name of a budget travel company, a television special starring a pop duo on a boat, or a collision between sudden impact and organized leisure. Holidays promise temporary escape from the normal position. Marine holidays add water, unstable footing, unfamiliar creatures, and the possibility that the accommodation is slowly drifting away. The title alone constructs a brightly colored brochure whose small print may contain the actual song.
The secret bonus piece, “Techno Non Stop,” finally admits a recognizable 1990s dance sample. After an album built almost entirely from newly played material, the borrowed break arrives as a veteran performer wearing an old fluorescent jacket. “Party Party Drugs” is placed in parentheses like the hidden explanation adults feared beneath rave culture. Yet the track’s status as a secret bonus revives another vanished media pleasure: the unlisted song discovered because the CD continued playing or the cassette contained more tape than the printed sequence admitted.
Digital platforms usually make secrets difficult. Every track has metadata, duration, waveform, and searchable title. Position Normal preserves the vocabulary of concealment even when concealment has become theatrical. The secret is openly named, the bonus is part of the official program, and the non-stop music stops after three and a half minutes. Each claim cheerfully undoes itself.
That may be what modern and unique finally means here. Modernity is not a clean replacement of old tools by new ones. It is the strange simultaneous presence of software piano, VHS audio, 1990s sample CDs, late-1980s ideas, digital distribution, acoustic guitars, vegetable-shaped shakers, Bandcamp metadata, old televisions, and a duo whose original tape methods anticipated the layered flexibility now associated with computers. The future did not remove the attic. It installed wireless internet inside it.
The album’s short duration and tiny pieces prevent nostalgia from becoming monumental. Position Normal does not build a grand memorial to obsolete media. It continues using the debris. Their relationship with the past is practical, comic, and affectionate. Old technology is not worshipped because it was superior. It remains useful because every medium teaches the imagination a different way to arrange time.
On the cover, the television-headed body may therefore be neither victim nor warning. It may be the musician’s self-portrait as receiver, player, laborer, and archive. Paint covers the clothes because making things is untidy. The screen glows because reception continues. The chair supports a body carrying several decades of unfinished material, and the second television waits below like a spare head.
Modern & Unique 2 does not return a legend by pretending no years have passed. It permits all the years to enter at once. The songs arrive as themes for missing programs, domestic spells, verbal crumbs, half-remembered jokes, modal sketches, little rooms, and handmade transmissions. Nothing is polished into timelessness. Everything remains timed, taped, touched, and slightly out of position.
That is where Position Normal continues finding its unique normality: not in preserving the past unchanged, nor in proving its relevance through fashionable modernization, but in allowing old and new materials to live together without deciding which one is haunting the other. The television watches the person. The person wears the television. The archive becomes an instrument, and the newly played instrument immediately begins remembering something that may never have happened.

Humdrum - 2024 - Every Heaven

 

Slumberland Records – SLR-284

The face on the cover has already passed beyond an ordinary expression. Its eyes are stretched wide, the mouth held in a gigantic smile or scream, and the halftone printing breaks the surface into thousands of dots, as though the figure has been transmitted through an old newspaper, photocopier, television screen, and memory before reaching us. Turquoise and magenta ordinarily suggest brightness, summer merchandise, candy wrappers, swimming pools, and inexpensive pop pleasure. Here they cover something grotesque. The image feels delighted and terrified at once. It is the face of someone entering heaven who has suddenly realized that heaven may be too intense for a human nervous system.
Every Heaven is an equally unstable title. “Heaven” generally names the final perfect place, singular and absolute. Adding “every” multiplies perfection until it becomes personal, temporary, and perhaps contradictory. Every person may carry a different heaven. One heaven is romantic union, another solitude, another youth, another the right song arriving during a difficult year. A former relationship can become heaven in memory even when living inside it was impossible. An old musical era can feel like heaven to someone who did not fully inhabit it the first time. Once heaven becomes plural, it stops being merely a destination after life and becomes the name given to those moments when life briefly seems to fit.
The project name pulls in the opposite direction. Humdrum means ordinary, repetitive, lacking excitement. It describes routine after wonder has departed. Placed beside Every Heaven, the name creates the record’s central tension: transcendence is being sought through familiar materials. These songs do not attempt to invent a previously unheard musical language. They return to chiming guitars, softly diffused vocals, melodic bass movement, propulsive drums, pastel reverb, and the emotional grammar of late-1980s and early-1990s indie pop. The revelation is not that the past can be perfectly recreated. It is that old forms remain capable of receiving new lives.
Loren Vanderbilt began Humdrum after the pandemic interrupted and eventually dissolved Star Tropics. That origin matters because the album is saturated with movement following stoppage. Songs written from 2019 onward gradually became a bridge between one creative identity and another. The music frequently sounds as though it is running, but not necessarily running away. Sometimes it is running beside someone, back toward something, around a bend, beneath the sky, or simply fast enough to restart circulation after an emotional numbness.
The brief title track assembles the album piece by piece. Guitar, rhythm, reverb, and atmosphere appear like parts of a landscape becoming visible at sunrise. Because it contains no conventional lyrical argument, the piece acts as an invitation rather than an explanation. Near its end, a sampled voice asks what it is about this place and observes that it resembles another world. The question describes the emotional technology of indie pop. A few guitars, a drum pattern, and the right production can construct a parallel environment whose geography is made entirely from association.
Those associations are proudly visible. The guitars carry the bright, liquid movement of early R.E.M., Felt, The Railway Children, and the melodic edge of Sarah Records, while the wider atmosphere remembers New Order, Pale Saints, Ride, Slowdive, and the period when indie pop and shoegaze had not yet been organized into separate museum rooms. Yet the album does not merely imitate a record collection. Influence has passed through Vanderbilt’s own history, including Star Tropics, Chicago, the pandemic, adult relationships, disappointment, and the particular questions of continuing to make romantic guitar music as a queer artist in his thirties.
“There and Back Again” makes return its explicit structure. The title is familiar from Tolkien, but here it also points toward Sarah Records’ final release, the label closing its doors by looking simultaneously backward and homeward. Vanderbilt uses that phrase to describe an on-again, off-again relationship whose repetitions have become a form of geography. Two people travel away from and toward each other so often that the route itself begins replacing the destination.
The music moves with far more confidence than the relationship it describes. Drums press forward, guitars shimmer, and the melody supplies the certainty the words cannot locate. This is one of pop music’s most durable forms of emotional alchemy. Doubt becomes singable without being solved. The listener receives forward motion while the narrator remains unsure whether the relationship can survive another bend. The body is carried ahead by a song whose mind is still looking backward.
“Superbloom” turns this motion into romantic possibility. A superbloom occurs when dormant seeds respond to unusually favorable conditions and suddenly cover a landscape with color. The apparent miracle depends upon life that was already present but invisible, waiting beneath dry ground. As a love-song image, it is almost too perfect for a project born after pandemic isolation. Feeling has not been manufactured from nothing. Conditions have changed enough for buried capacities to emerge.
The invitation to run together through heaven gives the song its buoyancy, but the question remains an invitation rather than a guarantee. Love is imagined as coordinated movement. One person cannot create the shared escape alone. The song’s exhilarating guitars therefore carry a quiet vulnerability: the speaker is already running and hopes the other person will choose the same direction.
“Wave Goodbye” contains one of the album’s simplest word-morphs. A wave is a gesture of departure, but also a moving body of energy. To wave goodbye is to communicate separation through motion, while a sound wave allows the goodbye to continue long after the original gesture has ended. Recorded music preserves departures this way. Someone leaves, a band ends, a relationship closes, but the emotional wave continues traveling through speakers.
The song is bright enough that goodbye does not become complete devastation. Humdrum understands that departures can contain relief, affection, regret, and momentum at once. The jangle keeps opening windows inside the loss. Sadness is present, but it has air moving through it.
“Test of Time” slows the album just enough to ask what survives repetition. The phrase is often applied retrospectively to music, relationships, institutions, and promises that remain meaningful after novelty has faded. Yet no object passes the test of time unchanged. Records age, production styles reveal their decades, memories alter emphasis, and people hear beloved songs through older bodies. Survival is not immunity from change. It is the ability to continue communicating while change accumulates.
This is especially relevant to music so openly devoted to earlier styles. Every Heaven does not prove the timelessness of jangle pop by stripping away its historical identity. It proves it by allowing that identity to remain audible while discovering a present need for it. The chiming guitar still works because longing has not become obsolete. A chorus still lifts because human beings continue needing brief structures in which uncertainty can feel complete.
“See Through You” introduces a sharper kind of perception. To see through someone can mean recognizing deception, but it can also mean seeing a person as transparent or insubstantial. Dream pop frequently creates voices that sound partly dissolved inside the surrounding instruments. Here that softness does not eliminate confrontation. The song’s energetic surface and more suspicious emotional position create a tension between attraction and recognition. Beauty no longer guarantees trust.
Scott Hibbitts’ lead guitar is crucial throughout the record because it rarely functions as ornamental soloing. The lines act as second voices, answering or complicating Vanderbilt’s melodies. They brighten corners, extend phrases beyond the lyric, and supply small upward motions when the words become uncertain. Melissa Buckley’s backing vocals perform a related function, widening the private monologue into a social space. Even though Humdrum began as a rebuilding project centered on one songwriter, the finished album does not sound sealed inside one person.
“Eternal Blue,” the album’s longest piece, allows the emotional weather to expand. Blue is sky, water, distance, sadness, devotion, and the color created by light scattering through atmosphere. Calling it eternal turns a passing mood into a horizon. One can move toward the horizon indefinitely without reaching it, yet it continues organizing the landscape.
The keyboards and layered guitars give the track a greater sense of scale without abandoning the album’s intimacy. It feels like a private emotion discovering that the sky has been feeling it too. This is one of dream pop’s characteristic gifts: inward states are projected outward until weather, light, and distance seem to participate. The person is not cured of sadness, but sadness is no longer confined to one body.
“Ultraviolet” names light beyond ordinary human vision. We know it exists through its effects even though our eyes cannot directly perceive it. The title therefore belongs naturally to an album concerned with hidden emotional continuities. Love, grief, influence, identity, and memory frequently become visible through what they alter rather than through direct observation.
Musically, the song’s brightness seems almost capable of exceeding the visible spectrum. The guitars shine while the emotional content remains harder to locate, producing the pleasurable uncertainty that separates dream pop from straightforward confession. Not everything felt intensely can be translated into a clean statement. Sometimes music records the effect without identifying the source.
“Come and Get Me” reverses the running imagery by asking another person to cross the distance. It can sound flirtatious, defiant, vulnerable, or exhausted depending upon how the invitation is heard. The speaker is available but unwilling or unable to complete the entire journey alone. Pop songs are filled with such invitations because desire is always partly a problem of geography. Someone must move.
The album’s drums make that movement physical. They are not buried beneath shoegaze haze or reduced to decorative timekeeping. Their pulse gives the record a cardiovascular character. Slumberland’s description of the pause between heartbeats is particularly apt: silence may be brief for one person and terrifyingly extended for another, but the next beat changes the meaning of the pause. Humdrum sounds like that returning beat.
“Underneath the Sky” closes without attempting to reach beyond the atmosphere. After every heaven, superbloom, eternal blue, and ultraviolet illumination, the final song places the listener underneath rather than inside the sky. This is a modest but important position. The sky remains above, visible and unreachable. Transcendence has not abolished earthly location.
To live underneath the sky is to share one enormous ceiling with people traveling in different directions. Lovers separate beneath it. Bands dissolve beneath it. Records are made, mailed, discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered beneath it. The phrase joins intimacy to scale without requiring the individual to become cosmic. A small human life can remain small and still participate in something immeasurable.
The cover’s ecstatic, frightened face now begins to resemble the listener caught between those scales. Its expression is too large for one emotion because the album’s heavens are not purely comforting. Nostalgia can restore and imprison. A familiar musical language can provide shelter while reminding us that the period associated with it has disappeared. Renewal carries evidence of whatever had to end before renewal became necessary.
There is sometimes a suspicion that artists working through visibly older styles are avoiding the present. That suspicion mistakes time for a row of locked rooms. Music never travels neatly from past to future. Riffs, recording methods, clothing, formats, local scenes, and emotional codes disappear and return because each generation encounters them under altered conditions. The person hearing Felt or Sarah Records decades later is not having the original experience badly. They are creating another experience from the surviving signal.
Every Heaven is convincing because Vanderbilt does not pretend to have discovered these sounds without predecessors. The references are part of the pleasure. Listeners can trace guitars toward R.E.M., vocals toward The Wake, rhythms toward New Order, haze toward Pale Saints, and romantic directness toward Sarah Records. But influence is not subtraction. Mapping the tributaries does not make the river disappear.
Slumberland is the ideal home for such a record because the label has spent decades treating indie pop not as a frozen period style but as a renewable social language. Its releases repeatedly demonstrate that modest-scale music can carry enormous emotional weather. Every Heaven enters that continuity without becoming anonymous within it. The album knows the neighborhood, but it has its own address.
The word “humdrum” finally loses its insult. Repetition is how songs become companions, how routes become homes, how relationships acquire histories, and how a person rebuilding after collapse discovers that another day has arrived. Heaven may not be one permanent destination waiting beyond ordinary life. It may be hidden inside the humdrum, appearing whenever familiar elements suddenly align and the next heartbeat arrives on time.

Angel Olsen - 2024 - Cosmic Waves Volume 1

Jagjaguwar, Inc. – none

The cover appears at first to show fireworks suspended against a black sky, but the longer one looks, the less certain their scale becomes. They might be stars, flowers, radio signals, microscopic organisms, or diagrams of sound expanding from several separate sources. Thin lines connect smaller bursts to a large central bloom, turning the image into a bouquet and a communications network at once. Nothing is represented realistically, yet the arrangement immediately explains the record. Five distinct artistic bodies send out their own colors and patterns. Angel Olsen receives those transmissions, carries them through her own voice, and sends altered waves back.
A cosmic wave is a magnificent contradiction in scale. “Cosmic” stretches toward distances that exceed ordinary imagination, while a wave can be intimate enough to enter the small bones of the ear. Waves travel without transporting their source intact. A singer remains in one room while the vibration continues into another room, another city, another format, and another person’s memory. The receiver does not obtain the original event. It receives energy shaped by everything the wave has crossed.
That is the operating principle of Cosmic Waves Volume 1. It is not quite a compilation, covers album, label sampler, split release, or Angel Olsen record, although it contains qualities of all five. Its two sides form a listening circuit. Five artists each present a song of their own choosing, establishing how they wish to enter the room. Olsen then chooses a different song from each catalogue and answers through reinterpretation. She does not hold up the same composition twice and ask the audience to select a winner. Each artist receives two openings: one self-portrait and one portrait made by an attentive outsider.
This distinction protects the collection from becoming a talent-show arrangement in which an established musician demonstrates how much better she can perform songs by lesser-known artists. The first side belongs entirely to the invited voices. They are allowed to create the initial conditions, select their own points of entry, and remain stylistically incompatible. Olsen waits until the record has heard them before she responds.
Her imprint name, somethingscosmic, quietly returns to “Some Things Cosmic,” a song from her earliest cassette-era work. That origin makes this release feel circular without becoming nostalgic. Olsen entered public musical life through a small tape label and now uses the leverage accumulated across her career to construct another modest doorway. The gesture does not recreate the world of hand-dubbed cassettes, where discovery depended heavily upon letters, mail orders, tiny catalogues, local shows, and recommendations moving slowly between friends. It carries that spirit into a different distribution system.
Volume 1 is important. The number turns the record from a one-time exercise into a possible continuing method. A volume belongs to an archive, library, encyclopedia, or sequence whose total boundary has not yet been established. It says this constellation is not definitive. These five artists do not represent every direction worth following. They are the first group of signals Olsen has chosen to amplify.
“Glamorous” begins by placing glamour somewhere far from polished celebrity. Poppy Jean Crawford’s guitar-heavy performance is forceful, ragged, and physically present, carrying the kind of vocal authority that can make aggression sound melodic without domesticating it. The title becomes less about perfect surfaces than the charisma generated when someone refuses to shrink. Glamour is not cleanliness here. It is voltage around a person.
The song also disrupts any expectation that Olsen’s compilation will be populated only by delicate singer-songwriters resembling her quieter work. Crawford enters loudly enough to rearrange the room. Her presence argues that curation should reveal the curator’s curiosity rather than merely reproduce the curator’s established brand. A useful recommendation does not always say, “This sounds like me.” Sometimes it says, “This changes what I think I can sound like.”
Olsen answers Crawford later with “The Takeover,” but she does not attempt to reproduce the same guitar force. Her version draws the song toward spectral 1960s pop, allowing melody and language to move forward while the original surface changes. Crawford has said that hearing Olsen sing her words made her reconsider them, because another voice emphasized the message from a different angle. This may be the most intimate power of a cover. It returns a song to its writer as something simultaneously familiar and no longer privately owned.
A takeover ordinarily means one power displacing another. In the context of a cover, however, the takeover becomes mutual. Olsen enters Crawford’s song, but Crawford’s language also takes over Olsen’s breathing, timing, and melodic instincts. Interpretation is not conquest unless the interpreter refuses to be changed by what she interprets.
Coffin Prick’s “Blood” moves into stranger electronic territory, built from psychedelic synth color, nervous motion, and a rhythmic intelligence that makes the human body feel partly mechanical. Blood is usually invoked as proof of organic authenticity: blood relatives, blood sacrifice, blood pumping beneath the skin. Here the title enters a synthetic environment and raises the question of where the body stops when electronics begin reorganizing its movement.
Olsen’s response, “Swimming,” performs one of the album’s most radical transformations. The original song’s viscous electronic atmosphere is converted into buoyant retro pop. Swimming is already a useful image for reinterpretation. A swimmer cannot command the water to disappear. Progress depends upon entering resistance, learning its pressure, and coordinating the body with a medium that could otherwise overwhelm it. Olsen swims through Coffin Prick’s composition rather than standing above it. She changes the stroke, temperature, and surrounding light without pretending the water belongs to her.
Sarah Grace White’s “Ride” marks the point where the first side’s early turbulence begins opening into greater space. Its hypnotic restraint gives every melodic decision more consequence. A ride implies movement without necessarily identifying who controls the vehicle, where it is going, or whether the passenger can leave. This uncertainty suits a record built around artistic invitation. Agreeing to be interpreted by another musician means surrendering some control over where the song may travel.
White’s voice and sparse construction demonstrate that intensity does not require density. A melody can command attention by refusing to fill every available surface. The song becomes an open landscape through which small changes travel a long distance.
Olsen chooses “Sinkhole” as her answering piece. The pairing subtly reverses the direction of “Ride.” One moves horizontally through space; the other opens vertically beneath it. A sinkhole forms when apparently stable ground has been hollowed from below. Its collapse looks sudden, but the conditions have often developed invisibly for years. Emotional life can behave the same way. A person may appear to move forward until one ordinary step discovers the absence concealed beneath the surface.
Olsen’s rendering turns the song into suspended atmosphere rather than spectacle. She does not need to dramatize the fall. The most frightening part of a sinkhole may be the delayed knowledge that the ground was already disappearing while daily life continued above it.
“Make Believe You Love Me” by Maxim Ludwig places performance directly inside its title. Make-believe is childhood play, artistic invention, denial, acting, and the temporary agreement to behave as though an imagined condition were real. Love already requires interpretation because no person can directly enter another person’s consciousness. We infer affection from words, decisions, touch, consistency, sacrifice, memory, and the stories we tell about those signs. The title asks for one more layer: even if love is absent, could its behavior be performed convincingly enough to provide shelter?
Ludwig’s minimalism gives the question little room to hide. The song does not bury uncertainty beneath elaborate production. Its emotional weight depends upon how much emptiness can remain around the request without breaking it.
Olsen answers with “Born Too Blue,” finding an expansive old-songbook sadness inside Ludwig’s writing. The phrase turns melancholy into an original condition rather than a passing mood. To be born blue suggests arriving already tuned to frequencies other people may hear only during loss. Olsen has always been unusually capable of making sadness feel like a physical architecture, with rooms, corridors, windows, and stairways rather than one undifferentiated dark cloud. Her interpretation does not cure the blue. It gives it shape enough to inhabit.
There is a danger whenever a famous interpreter covers an obscure songwriter this beautifully. The cover can become more visible than the source, causing listeners to treat the original artist as raw material for the established artist’s achievement. Cosmic Waves attempts to resist this by constructing the entire release around names, sequence, and reciprocity. Ludwig is heard first. Olsen’s version points backward toward him rather than pretending the song arrived ownerless.
“Wonder Now” by Camp Saint Helene closes the first half with wide-open folk atmosphere. Its title joins two relationships with time. Wonder is an astonished way of looking, but it is also an unresolved question. “Now” insists that the question be encountered in the present rather than postponed until certainty arrives. Wonder now, before knowledge becomes complete enough to make surprise feel unnecessary.
The band’s spaciousness makes the song feel less empty than environmentally large. Silence becomes sky rather than missing information. This is a different form of cosmic music from synthesizers imitating outer space. The cosmic can be reached through a voice placed carefully against open air, allowing scale to emerge from restraint.
“Farfisa Song,” Olsen’s final answer, brings the collection back to a smaller and more domestic technology. Farfisa organs carry associations with garages, chapels, psychedelic records, community halls, inexpensive studios, and musicians seeking grandeur from a portable instrument. After the cosmic title and stellar cover, the record ends by naming a particular keyboard. The universe returns to circuitry, keys, fingers, and a sound made by someone in a room.
That descent is appropriate because every cosmic wave eventually becomes local reception. The signal may have crossed enormous conceptual distance, but hearing occurs through material: cartridge, stylus, speaker cone, digital converter, cable, air, eardrum, memory. The cosmic does not cancel the ordinary mechanism. It requires it.
Olsen recorded and mixed all five interpretations herself, which gives the second side a private workshop quality. The performances are not framed as authoritative studio monuments. They resemble messages assembled after sustained listening, each retaining some of the soft distortion, reverberant distance, and inward experimentation associated with her earliest recordings. The circle back toward Strange Cacti is therefore not only institutional. It is audible in the willingness to let a song remain slightly ghosted around the edges.
Covering another person’s work is a special form of attention because it requires entering decisions that were not made for one’s own body. A melodic interval may sit awkwardly in the new singer’s range. A word may carry an emotional history she does not share. A rhythmic emphasis may resist her habits. The interpreter can either correct these differences until the song resembles her existing work or allow the resistance to teach her another way of moving.
Olsen describes this process as learning from other people’s words and melodies, and the record supports that idea. Her covers do not simply display her versatility. They reveal what happens when a recognizable artistic identity becomes temporarily permeable. Voice remains personal, but personality does not have to be a locked house.
The compilation format has always carried a social promise. A listener may purchase a record for one familiar name and leave with several unknown ones. Labels, zines, DJs, mixtape makers, bloggers, record-store employees, friends, and older siblings have long performed this curatorial labor. Streaming algorithms imitate part of the function by identifying statistical similarity, but similarity is not the same as trust. Human recommendation includes biography, surprise, affection, error, and the desire to give someone else a stage.
Cosmic Waves is especially valuable because Olsen’s admiration becomes material support rather than merely a list of names in an interview. She commissions music, places the artists on vinyl, covers their songs, shares the attention attached to her name, and directly asks listeners to buy their records, attend their shows, and tell other people. The compliment becomes infrastructure.
Still, the record cannot entirely eliminate the imbalance it uses for good. Olsen’s name appears most prominently. Many listeners will enter through her half, and some may treat the first side as preliminary material. Generosity does not erase hierarchy. It can, however, redirect hierarchy toward circulation. The established artist becomes less a summit than a transmitter.
The cover diagram captures this beautifully. The central bloom may initially look like Olsen surrounded by smaller stars, but the lines also allow energy to move inward. The center is being formed by the surrounding bodies. A curator is not simply someone who shines light upon others. She is someone whose own understanding has been reorganized by what she has heard.
The album’s deepest subject may therefore be listening as a creative act. Listening is often treated as passive consumption, but careful listening changes the receiver. It creates new associations, reopens memories, alters standards, and makes previously impossible combinations available. Olsen listens closely enough to identify not only songs she admires but songs she wishes to inhabit. Then she returns evidence of that listening.
The wave travels out, reaches another body, and comes back changed. Neither version cancels the other. Each provides information about what the song can carry.
Volume 1 leaves the network open. New artists, styles, friendships, and interpretations may enter later installments. Even without another volume, this first collection proposes a durable model: discovery followed by attention, attention followed by transformation, and transformation directed back toward the source rather than away from it.
The stars on the cover may be flowers after all. A bouquet is assembled from separate organisms whose differences create the arrangement. Its purpose is not to prove that every flower is identical or that one bloom deserves ownership of the others. It says: these existed together for a moment, someone noticed the relationship, and the act of noticing became another object capable of traveling.

Merzbow / Lawrence English = Мерзбоу / Лоуренс Инглиш - 2022 - Eternal Stalker = Вечный Сталкер

 

Dais Records – DAIS192

The cover resembles an industrial landscape remembered after the machinery, buildings, and horizon have been broken into separate pieces. Red shapes sit inside a white field like fragments of a factory viewed through damaged windows, a contact sheet exposed incorrectly, or architectural plans that have begun sliding away from their intended structure. The Russian lettering strengthens the connection to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, but the design avoids recognizable film imagery. There are no railway tracks, flooded rooms, armed guards, or three men moving toward the Room. Instead, the Zone has been reduced to color, division, obstruction, and glare. Red is warning light, rust, molten metal, blood, and the color a white surface acquires when an alarm refuses to stop flashing.
The title contains two meanings of “stalker” that pull against one another. In Tarkovsky’s film, the Stalker is a guide who knows how to move through a forbidden territory whose invisible laws continually change. In ordinary speech, a stalker is someone or something that follows, watches, and refuses to release its target. Eternal Stalker joins those roles. The guide cannot leave the Zone because guiding has become his identity; the pursuer cannot stop following because pursuit has become permanent. Across this album, it is difficult to decide whether the listener is stalking the industrial complex through microphones or whether the recorded environment has followed the microphones home.
Lawrence English and Masami Akita arrive with practices that might initially appear easy to divide. English provides field recordings, space, atmosphere, and environmental scale. Akita provides violent electronic density, abrasion, overload, and the unmistakable Merzbow capacity to turn electrical pressure into a physical event. Yet Eternal Stalker becomes compelling precisely when this division fails. The factory recordings are already noisy, artificial, and threatening. Merzbow’s electronics frequently behave like weather, animals, fire, wind, or geological pressure. The supposedly real environment becomes science fiction, while the deliberately manufactured noise begins to feel natural.
This confusion between origin and effect is one of the album’s central achievements. A field recording is often treated as documentary evidence, a transparent opening onto a location that existed outside the artwork. But microphones do not simply preserve places. They select position, distance, direction, duration, and frequency. Later processing removes the recording even further from neutral documentation. The industrial complex on Eternal Stalker is therefore neither untouched reality nor pure invention. It is a recorded place entering a new artificial ecology, where its machinery can be enlarged, buried, repeated, obscured, and forced into contact with electronics that imitate it without sharing its source.
“The Long Dream” begins with rain striking metal, distant thunder, reverberation, and a sense of immense interior space. It does not immediately announce Merzbow through maximum force. Instead, it establishes listening as trespass. The environment seems occupied even when no person can be heard inside it. Water touches roofs and exposed surfaces, but each impact awakens a larger resonance, suggesting halls, tanks, pipes, towers, and cavities extending beyond the microphone’s reach. The dream is long because it has no visible dreamer. The factory itself appears to be asleep, processing the weather through its metallic body.
A factory at night possesses a peculiar psychological character. During working hours, machinery can be explained through production, schedules, labor, maintenance, safety procedures, and output. At night, especially when separated from the workers who operate or monitor it, the same structure becomes difficult to read. Lights remain on without revealing who needs them. Steam rises from processes whose purpose is hidden. Motors continue rotating. Warning signals address people who may not be present. The institution appears alive while concealing the human system that gives its activity meaning.
“A Gate of Light” does not offer enlightenment in any gentle religious sense. Light arrives as rupture and exposure. The track erupts into a dense electronic brilliance that can feel almost visual, a white-red glare translated into pressure. A gate ordinarily controls passage between spaces, but this gate is constructed from intensity. Crossing it means losing the comfortable distance from which individual sounds could be identified. Noise becomes so bright that it destroys the outlines of the objects it illuminates.
This is one of Merzbow’s recurring gifts. Extreme density can remove information and produce revelation simultaneously. The listener hears too much to follow everything, yet the overload reveals how strongly the mind depends upon hierarchy. Ordinarily, hearing organizes the world by separating foreground from background, signal from interference, threat from harmless ambience, and meaningful event from irrelevant remainder. Merzbow floods those categories until the background claims equal authority. Nothing agrees to remain insignificant.
“The Visit” is more spacious, but its title makes the relative quiet suspicious. A visit implies that something has arrived temporarily and will eventually depart. The track never identifies visitor or host. We may be visiting the factory through English’s recordings. Merzbow’s electronics may be visiting and transforming the captured location. The industrial site may be entering the listener’s room. Something may also have arrived within the recorded environment itself, an unseen presence detectable only through changes in pressure, vibration, and distance.
The lack of a visible agent allows the track to approach horror without conventional narrative. Horror often begins when an environment suggests intention but withholds the being responsible for it. A creak becomes frightening when it seems timed. A machine becomes uncanny when it behaves as though it notices the observer. Eternal Stalker repeatedly gives industrial sound this almost-conscious quality while refusing to confirm that consciousness exists. The result is not a monster inside a factory. The factory has become the uncertain monster.
“Magnetic Traps” makes attraction dangerous. Magnetism operates invisibly, exerting force across empty space and reorganizing matter without the theatrical evidence of impact. A trap similarly depends upon forces that remain concealed until the subject has entered their range. The composition behaves this way. It draws the listener toward certain pulses, metallic contours, and repeating textures, then closes around them with sudden bands of noise. The ear is captured by what it was attempting to examine.
Electronic sound is especially suited to representing invisible forces because it can seem detached from ordinary physical causation. A drum suggests something struck. A guitar suggests vibrating strings. A human voice suggests lungs, throat, mouth, and body. Feedback, electrical interference, and processed field recordings can conceal the action that produced them. The listener receives consequence without gesture. Magnetic Traps turns this missing gesture into threat.
“The Golden Sphere” introduces an object whose beauty seems almost out of place. Gold promises value, radiance, incorruptibility, sunlight, religious perfection, and the human dream of matter that does not decay. A sphere suggests completeness without beginning or end. Yet the central tone that emerges from the surrounding turbulence is not reassuring. It resembles a siren, beacon, distant engine, or celestial body broadcasting after the civilization capable of interpreting its signal has disappeared.
The temporary recession of noise gives the drone tremendous authority. Silence is not required to create contrast; relative reduction is enough. After saturation, one sustained tone can seem larger than the entire wall that preceded it. Merzbow’s extremity works partly because it changes the listener’s internal scale. Loudness makes quieter details enormous. Density makes empty intervals active. When the noise returns, it does not simply cover the signal. It demonstrates that the signal had always existed inside conditions capable of destroying it.
This relationship between concealment and revelation echoes Stalker’s Room, the mysterious destination believed to fulfill a visitor’s deepest desire. The danger is not that the Room will misunderstand the conscious request. It may understand the person more accurately than the person understands himself. Eternal Stalker builds similar uncertainty around sound. What does someone actually seek when choosing to enter nearly forty minutes of industrial dread and sensory saturation? Catharsis, punishment, novelty, concentration, confrontation, disappearance, or the chance to hear beyond ordinary emotional language?
Noise can become a Room because it does not tell the listener exactly what to feel. A lyric supplies words that may be accepted, rejected, translated, or misunderstood. An instrumental melody still carries familiar emotional conventions. Dense noise weakens those conventions and leaves the body to negotiate directly with frequency, volume, duration, and expectation. What emerges may reveal less about the artist’s declared meaning than about the listener’s own methods of resistance and surrender.
“Black Thicket” combines an organic image with near-total visual obstruction. A thicket is composed of living growth, yet its density prevents passage and clear sight. Blackness removes the depth cues required to know how far the branches extend. The track creates a similar acoustic entanglement. Mechanical, environmental, and electronic textures cross so completely that tracing them back to individual sources becomes nearly impossible. One can hear movement everywhere without locating a path through it.
This is not failure of composition. The inability to separate sources is the composition’s subject. Industrial society depends upon hiding connections. Electricity arrives at a wall socket without displaying the fuel, turbines, grids, labor, extraction, waste, and politics required to make it available. Manufactured objects appear in stores without carrying the audible history of mines, factories, shipping, injury, and discarded material. Eternal Stalker returns some of that concealed complexity as overwhelming texture. The sound cannot be neatly consumed because its causes refuse to line up.
There is a danger in finding industrial devastation aesthetically beautiful. Rust, smoke, nocturnal machinery, chemical light, and immense factories are visually and sonically seductive precisely because they suggest powers larger than the individual. Art can romanticize the very systems that poison landscapes and exhaust human bodies. Merzbow and English do not resolve this contradiction. Their album makes industrial activity majestic, terrifying, psychedelic, and physically exhilarating without pretending those qualities make it innocent.
The absence of workers is therefore important. No voices describe conditions, ownership, purpose, or consequence. The human body is present chiefly as the body listening and being pressured by the recording. This abstraction allows the factory to become a metaphysical Zone, but it also risks allowing labor to disappear behind atmosphere. The record is most useful when that disappearance is noticed. Machines do not operate outside human decisions. Even automated systems inherit the priorities of those who built and financed them.
“A Thing, Just Silence” closes the album with a title that initially appears to be a joke. After so much pressure, calling anything silence seems absurd. Yet the phrase treats silence not as the absence of sound but as an object, “a thing” possessing weight and location. Silence can be manufactured, imposed, discovered, protected, or feared. It may mean rest, abandonment, censorship, death, attention, or the instant before machinery begins again.
Noise reveals silence by placing it under pressure. After sustained saturation, the smallest reduction feels like an opening. The listener becomes aware that silence was never empty. Rooms contain ventilation, electricity, traffic, plumbing, bodies, and distant movement. Even internal silence contains breathing, blood, memory, and expectation. The final track suggests that silence may be another frequency range rather than the opposite of sound, a material encountered differently after noise has recalibrated perception.
The album ends without providing a clear exit from the Zone. This is where “eternal” becomes more than an atmospheric adjective. The industrial complex continues operating beyond the recording’s duration. The field recordings preserve a past moment, yet playback returns that moment repeatedly to the present. Each listen reactivates weather, machinery, microphones, processing, and electrical violence. The listener leaves the room, but the file waits without aging, ready to construct the same territory again.
This makes Eternal Stalker a powerful opening into Merzbow’s enormous discography. It demonstrates that Akita’s noise is not a single wall reproduced across hundreds of titles. Collaboration changes its behavior. Source material changes its apparent physics. Another artist’s treatment of space can reveal shadows, distances, and intervals that a solo release might intentionally burn away. English does not civilize Merzbow, and Merzbow does not simply vandalize English’s field recordings. Each exposes something latent in the other.
English’s environments already contain violence. Akita’s noise already contains landscape. The collaboration draws those truths together until the listener cannot determine where documentation ends and hallucination begins. Rain becomes electronics. Feedback becomes weather. The smelter becomes an animal breathing beneath the horizon. The microphone becomes a gate. The factory watches the person who believed he was listening to it.
The red fragments on the cover never assemble into a stable picture because stability would betray the record. Eternal Stalker is not a portrait of one industrial site or a soundtrack placed respectfully beside Tarkovsky’s film. It is a method of entering uncertain territory. It teaches the ear to move without a map, to distrust apparent emptiness, and to notice that every background may contain a force preparing to become foreground.
The Zone does not chase us. It only remains where it is. We become eternal stalkers by returning.

1-800 MIKEY - 2024 - Digital Pet

 

Erste Theke Tonträger – ETT - 106

A large orange cat lies across Michael Barker’s head as though it has interrupted the photo shoot and immediately improved the concept. Barker bends beneath its weight, one hand trying to steady the animal while the other disappears behind his hair. His green-and-black striped shirt creates the illusion that the human body has been drawn onto the otherwise plain background with a thick marker. Above them, 1-800-MIKEY is written in Ian Teeple’s irregular lettering, less like a corporate hotline than a number scratched beside a telephone by someone promising to answer whenever the official services have closed.
The cat changes the meaning of Digital Pet before the music begins. A digital pet is usually a simplified creature living inside a screen, dependent upon repeated button presses for food, attention, hygiene, and continued existence. This cover gives us the opposite arrangement. The animal is large, warm, unpredictable, and physically inconvenient. It cannot be reduced to an icon. Its paws obscure the person who supposedly owns it, and its weight changes his posture. The pet is not contained by the technology or even by the photograph. It has taken over the human interface.
The title also contains a quiet portrait of modern affection. Digital life allows people to care for distant friends, maintain relationships through messages, follow animals they will never meet, and construct little rituals of attention around notifications and glowing screens. It can also convert care into maintenance. Someone sends the daily message, reacts to the story, preserves the streak, clicks the heart, and worries that silence will be interpreted as disappearance. The relationship remains alive partly because each person keeps pressing the button.
1-800-MIKEY has always understood that cuteness is not the opposite of punk. Cuteness can be a refusal of the emotional uniform that underground music sometimes imposes upon itself. Punk is allowed to be furious, sarcastic, damaged, disgusting, confrontational, or terminally cool, but open sweetness can make people nervous. Sweetness exposes the wish to be loved without providing irony as protective equipment.
Michael Barker’s work does not pretend that affection makes adulthood uncomplicated. Digital Pet is filled with jobs, mediated relationships, distant places, screens, fantasy identities, returns, and departures. The songs are tiny because their feelings arrive in concentrated packets. Ten tracks pass in roughly twenty-one minutes, each moving quickly enough to resemble a thought typed before courage disappears.
“Rental Girlfriend” begins with a title that turns intimacy into temporary service. A rental grants access without ownership and companionship without permanence. The phrase could refer to an actual commercial arrangement, a fantasy assembled from loneliness, or the unsettling feeling that a relationship has become a performance with hidden hourly rates. One person supplies affection while the other worries that the affection exists only because the agreed conditions remain in place.
Pop music has always rented emotions to listeners. A song provides two minutes of romantic certainty, heartbreak, confidence, or belonging, then ends without accepting responsibility for what happens afterward. The listener can replay the experience, but repetition never converts it into possession. “Rental Girlfriend” understands this transaction without turning cold. Its hooks are generous enough to make the temporary attachment feel real while it lasts.
“W.F.H” places the old punk complaint about work inside the newer domestic office. Working from home supposedly removes commuting, supervision, uniforms, and the visible machinery of employment. It also allows the job to enter the room where a person sleeps, eats, plays music, argues, and tries to stop thinking about work. The office disappears as a location because it has spread into everything.
For a project whose name came from call-center employment, the subject is especially exact. The telephone once promised connection across distance. In a call center, connection becomes scheduled labor. A human voice is placed inside a numerical system, measured through calls, waiting times, scripts, outcomes, and customer reactions. The worker must sound personally present while participating in an interaction designed before either caller arrived.
The name 1-800-MIKEY rescues something from that machinery. A toll-free business prefix becomes a private character. Instead of reaching an anonymous department, the imaginary caller reaches Mikey himself. The number transforms employment into identity, then identity into play. A system designed to route customers becomes a doorway into fuzzy guitars, toy-like keyboards, cats, plush objects, and songs for cuties.
“Japan” continues the album’s relationship with distance. Japan enters 1-800-MIKEY’s world through music, visual culture, kawaii objects, language, travel imagination, and the possibility that another place can become emotionally important before it becomes geographically familiar. The danger of distant fascination is reducing a real society to an aesthetic supply cabinet. Barker’s affection feels more personal and porous than that. It belongs to the way people build themselves from signals arriving across borders.
The internet made this construction ordinary. A teenager in Western Sydney could discover home-recording artists, Japanese bands, American garage rock, drawings, toys, clothing, and whole musical micro-scenes without waiting for local culture to approve the combination. Geography still matters, but it no longer has complete control over the materials available to a young imagination. A bedroom can develop several windows before the person inside it has money to travel.
“Digital Pet” places Buz Clatworthy behind the drums and gives the album’s central creature a wonderfully brief life. The title track does not linger long enough to simulate the responsibility of keeping a virtual animal alive for years. It behaves more like the sudden affection such creatures produce. A few pixels acquire a name, habits, vulnerability, and the ability to make their owner feel guilty.
This is one of the odd powers of representation. Humans can care about something while fully understanding that it is artificial. A drawing, game character, stuffed animal, recording, or digital pet does not need to be mistaken for a living organism in order to carry genuine feeling. The object becomes a meeting place between imagination and attention. What we supply returns in altered form.
Music works the same way. The recorded voice is not the person. It is vibration converted into data or physical groove, an organized absence capable of producing attachment. Listeners know that the singer is not inside the speaker, yet the speaker can make a room feel less empty. The digital pet and pop song are both small machines through which human care practices itself.
“Welcome Back” recognizes return as an event rather than the cancellation of absence. Someone who comes back does not restore the world exactly as it was. Time has continued on both sides. The returning person carries experiences acquired elsewhere, while the person waiting has rearranged life around the empty space. Welcome is therefore not rewind. It is permission to meet again under changed conditions.
The song’s compactness prevents reunion from becoming ceremonial. It feels closer to seeing someone step through a door and discovering that the body recognizes them before the mind has completed its inventory. Garage pop is especially good at this kind of immediate recognition. A few chords can return like a familiar face without requiring an elaborate explanation of where they have been.
“Butterfly” gives the record its longest span, although even this supposed epic remains below three minutes. The butterfly is the standard symbol of transformation, but its familiarity does not make the transformation ordinary. A creature reorganizes its body so thoroughly that the crawling and flying forms appear to belong to different species. The metaphor survives because personal change can feel equally unbelievable from the inside.
People frequently want transformation without the interval in which their former organization stops working. The cocoon is romantic when viewed from outside. From within, it would be darkness, confinement, loss of familiar structure, and faith in a process the creature cannot intellectually explain. “Butterfly” lets sweetness touch that uncertainty. Change can be colorful after it is complete and still bewildering while it happens.
The song also belongs to a project that Barker described as a new chapter after the more diary-like seriousness of Dying Adolescence. Becoming playful does not mean the earlier person was false. It means another part of the same person has been allowed to develop wings, stripes, bright colors, and a less defensive relationship with joy.
“Seventh Heaven” reaches paradise in ninety-seven seconds. That may be the appropriate duration. Permanent heaven is difficult for a pop song to represent because pop depends upon ending. The chorus lifts, the feeling becomes briefly complete, and then the structure releases us back into time. Its ending is what makes the heaven valuable. An endlessly sustained hook would eventually become wallpaper.
Seven has long carried associations with completion, sacred order, days of creation, and the finishing of a cycle. Here heaven feels less theological than emotional: the instant when a melody, person, pet, room, and nervous system temporarily agree with one another. The ordinary world is not abolished. It becomes sufficient.
“Online” brings the album’s social condition into a single word. To be online once meant actively connecting to a network. Now it can describe the background state of daily existence. A person may technically put the phone away while continuing to imagine messages, reactions, news, work requests, photographs, and conversations occurring elsewhere. The network has been internalized.
Online presence offers a strange compromise between visibility and concealment. Someone can reveal thoughts never spoken aloud while hiding the room, body, timing, or circumstances from which those thoughts were sent. People become intensely known through carefully selected fragments. A friendship may be real, sustaining, and emotionally precise while remaining partly assembled from absences.
Lo-fi music has an especially interesting relationship with this condition. Its roughness suggests privacy, limitation, and direct human handling, yet the internet allows that private sound to travel instantly among strangers. Bedroom recording no longer has to remain in the bedroom. The song can preserve the intimacy of its small room while reaching listeners farther away than many expensive studios once could.
Barker’s method grows from this union. The four-track and home setup provide texture, constraint, and the excitement of making something without waiting for institutional permission. Digital tools then allow the tape-born material to be arranged, completed, shared, and pressed into records on other continents. Lo-fi and digital are not enemies here. They are roommates passing cables under the same door.
“Story” pauses over the way lives become narratable. A story gives selected events sequence and consequence. It turns accidents into beginnings, interruptions into turning points, and whatever has happened most recently into a temporary ending. People need stories to recognize themselves, but every story also leaves material outside its frame.
A musician’s biography can be summarized cleanly: childhood discovery, first project, local bands, touring, work, solo identity, albums. Lived time is much messier. It contains repeated doubts, unfinished songs, day jobs, family discoveries, friendships, equipment problems, private jokes, pets walking across recordings, and long periods that do not announce what they are becoming.
Digital Pet is charming partly because it does not inflate these pieces into a grand artistic myth. The record allows smallness to remain small and still matter. A job can produce a band name. A cat can become cover architecture. A fascination can become a song. A supportive person can keep someone creating without appearing in the official credits.
“Movie Star” ends with another identity generated through distance. A movie star is enormous on a screen and physically absent from the room. The face may become familiar to millions of people who know almost nothing about the life producing it. Stardom is intimacy industrialized.
Ending the album there introduces a playful tension. 1-800-MIKEY’s music rejects the polished scale associated with movie stars, yet every performer participates in some version of projected identity. The microphone enlarges personality. The cover freezes a moment into an emblem. The stage turns an ordinary person into someone watched. Even the most sincere artist becomes partly fictional when received by strangers.
The difference lies in what the fiction is asked to do. Corporate celebrity often makes distance resemble accessibility while protecting the machinery behind the image. 1-800-MIKEY makes accessibility from the machinery itself. Tape noise, short songs, handwritten lettering, everyday subjects, and uncomplicated declarations keep the seams visible. The character and the person do not perfectly coincide, but they continue waving to each other.
The album was written and recorded across 2022 to 2024, a period when work, friendship, touring, and online identity were still reorganizing after the pandemic’s great interruption. Digital Pet does not carry that historical weight as a solemn concept album. It shows the smaller adjustments through which people resumed living: welcome backs, work-from-home routines, travel desire, online connection, romantic uncertainty, and the decision to make something cheerful without claiming that cheerfulness solves everything.
There is real discipline inside these apparently casual songs. Writing ten memorable tracks without allowing one to reach three minutes requires an understanding of what can be removed. Lo-fi does not mean uncomposed. The fuzz, vocal distance, keyboards, and quick endings create a world where nothing has enough time to become self-important.
That brevity also restores replay as part of the form. A twenty-one-minute album can be heard again before the emotional climate has dispersed. The songs begin behaving like digital pets requiring repeated visits, but the care moves in both directions. The listener returns to keep the record alive, and the record returns a little energy.
Maximum Rocknroll compared its melodic fuzz-pop to late-1980s Subway Organization bands, which makes sense, but Digital Pet belongs equally to the newer Sydney garage ecosystem surrounding Gee Tee, R.M.F.C., Tee Vee Repairmann, and the networks connecting Australian bedroom recordings with overseas labels and listeners. The music is local without being geographically sealed. It carries Western Sydney, international DIY influence, Japanese affection, American tours, European pressings, and internet circulation inside the same small body.
The phrase “for all the cuties” could have remained disposable promotional language. Barker turns it into a quiet definition of audience. A cutie is not necessarily someone conventionally attractive. It is anyone willing to approach the music without demanding emotional armor. The record addresses the part of a listener that still wants songs, toys, pets, bright colors, friendship, and simple affection after adulthood has explained why each of those things can become complicated.
Punk often gains power by identifying what deserves destruction. Digital Pet asks what deserves feeding. That question is no less political. Attention is limited, and whatever receives it grows stronger. Cynicism can be fed. Isolation can be fed. The need to appear unimpressed can be fed until it becomes a personality. So can friendship, play, melody, humor, curiosity, and the courage to create something openly lovable.
On the cover, the orange cat has no interest in these distinctions. It has found a warm human platform and occupies it completely. Barker’s face is obscured, the planned pose has collapsed, and the image becomes better because control has been interrupted by an actual relationship.
The pet is not digital after all, but the photograph is. The moment travels through screens, servers, files, blogs, and record databases until it reaches another room. The cat remains heavy. The song remains light. Somewhere between those conditions, 1-800-MIKEY keeps answering.