I am become determined, fuelled by some fiery desire to change, to truly improve and become something objectively significant. But to be truly better, you must focus on the aspects of your personality that you dislike. To be able to improve as a person, to grow as an individual, and to get closer to approaching your ideal, you must either withdraw from other influence entirely and become a completely solitary individual or else use your interactions with other people as mirrors, to understand yourself through their reflections, i.e. Lana’s Jim, "cause I was filled with poison, but blessed with beauty and rage."
If you choose to interact with someone, therefore, you must never accept incomplete interactions that are not entirely beneficial to you. You must consistently refuse stunted connections, and unless you feel that you are actively learning more about yourself through a given interaction - abandon it. It is only through another’s perspective, within an alien reflection, that you can see yourself in a truly objective manner. This exploration must be intellectual, physical, and thereby complete, and if The Other is unwilling or else incapable of playing this role, they are not the mirror that can empower your growth.
Indeed, the presence of high art in everyday life has eroded with mainstream media taking its place. Media in the form of small-screen TV shows, celebrity culture, the paparazzi media, bestselling novelists, The Juliet Society, Dan Brown, etc. We are now connected by being disconnected. Facebook is taking the place of conversations, condos the place of nightclubs, everything is being replaced. These replacements are trivial to the main change: the trade of our reality for hyperreality, true existence for a simulacrum.
This single opens with the lines: "Can you stay up for the weekend
And blame God for looking too old?
Can you find all that you stand for
Has been replaced with mountains of gold?"
This has inadvertently become a rather ironic lyric considering Calvin Harris' later move to exclusively creating music for the masses, simultaneously forsaking his earlier more independent efforts.
It is such a common human condition to feel that we are trapped but simultaneously that we are just one small hurdle away from breaking free at long last. It is the promise of that eternal tomorrow which shall be the day that we will be able to run faster, stretch out further, and finally grasp that elusive thing that we have been perpetually pursuing. All of us are fighting against the current, all trying to escape our present confines and yet, for all of our effort, we remain stuck firmly in place. It seems like there is no escape, like every minutia of our day-to-day life is just fated to be repeated endlessly like the playlist of some superlatively, unbelievably lazy DJ. I look at all the changes that I have made, but yet somehow nothing I change changes anything. At the end of every night, it is always the same feeling waiting for me, that once again there is not any grand resolution or reward, the realization that there never was. We perpetually feel that we are missing something. “I don't wanna be what I'm becoming.”
Meaning and MeaninglessnessReviewing Tim Hecker's Virgins and a meditative guide on how to find meaning in the inherent meaninglessness
The money's running out and the whoosh of the upcoming ground is getting deafening. Am I running forward or am I collapsing? Am I still getting away with my risks or is this The Great Reckoning at long last? If I was given another chance would I do anything differently?
The Void is calling and so I enter it, à la Gaspar Noé. In the town that I have spent the last three years of my life (God has it been so long?!), I still feel trapped and the music of Tim Hecker and other ambient music full of more emptiness than the ethereal. More numinous than ominous, more lonely and ethereal than New Order’s Movement, and more ill-defined than my own movement forward. Why is Icelandic and ambient music so fitting in a place that feels so empty? It’s only natural.
Music for staring at the pale full moon whilst watching the wispy, elusive phantom fumes come off your cigarette.
Ephemerality Exploring the aspect of the numinous through a review of Nina Kraviz's eponymous debut
Sensual, sexual, ephemeral but inescapable, Nina Kraviz has created something truly beautiful and unique and yet something that approaches a numinous experience.
The deepest of house reminds us of our most deep and intense memories and dreams and leads us on, a definite will-o-the-wisp, forcing us to trudge ever onward through the muck, to sail through the mist, a siren's call that leads us onto the rocks.
It's briskly walking through the freezing streets of Moscow at 3am, walking quickly because of the howling gale and the bitter cold, but never running because it's undignified. It's more Murmansk or Irkutsk than Moscow but the lights are of the boutique stores and the inescapable grim albeit everyday realities that contrast sharply with the dream-like opulence displayed publicly. The contrast of a drunk with a glimmering shopfront all in this mist, all while actively trying to go somewhere and being purposeful about it but not actually having anywhere to go to.
Veckatimest, The Essential, and The DisposableReviewing Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest track-by-track and taking a direct look at the meaning of existence
Sometimes things get complicated. It's easy to lose track of what you want or need and often difficult to realize that you're not working towards those things that are so important but instead are merely occupying your time with tedious, unimportant and uninteresting things simply so that you don't feel quite so reclining. It's important to work, it's important to do what society expects of us, in order to receive what your expect from society - a career, a standard of living, and the little trinkets that make up our life: Evian water, a Prada luggage bag, Audio-Technica turntable, Bang & Olufsen earphones. These things aren't necessities in the standard meaning of the word because they are not necessary for everyone but these kinds of little extravagance are important in order to take our mind off the true emptiness of it all - a sort of Fight Club-esque indulgence where we fill our vacant apartment-cum-souls with IKEA furniture because what else is there to do? In moments of realization such as these it's important to take a step back and find something that can float you away from all of that tedium and into a parallel musical dimension where you can be free of all of those concerns. This is what that album does.