BARREN ILLUSION​​

 

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Ambient reverberations of the analog, processed digitally and looped ad infinitum. This sound opines a vague melancholia of 'better days' gone by but its particular quality of dejection evokes a sense of mourning over it. Instead of golden nostalgia induced by embellished additions, it embodies a lost future through its subtractive process; reverb as spectrality.

 

This mourning of a time that should have been but never was is induced in its inability to express itself beyond its loop; it reveals an inability for self-liberation, unable to envision a passage (of time, of space, of potentialities) yet trapped in perma-kinesis. There is a desire to escape but no characterization of what lies beyond; what was initially an allure of the past is now the inability to leave the past. Why does the sample play over and over? How can one locate one's self within repetition? Existence in such generates a broken present, a broken present, each present perpetually erasing itself before it can move on and locating itself back to the only place it knows. Each iteration an echo of an echo, gradually transformed into the purely-artificial with every reverberation until it crackles out the tape it's encoded on.

 

Sampling. Sampling. Over and over as if in anterograde amnesia. The inability to encode anything new, anything beyond the past present. Lo-fi beats importing analog noise despite its avoidability in the digital. Why? These crackles and pops allow for a connection to the past, allows us to buy into believing we can re-experience what we remember as 'better days' even if that past never existed as we think (or perhaps, want) to remember. It is important that this triggering of memory be not necessarily the truth, or even ours; analog distortions evoke a blanket nostalgia manifested in specific objects, but it is not the specificity that matters (hence why any memory pulled in is sufficient) – it is the universality of loss, of what is (has been) lost, presented in a most comfortable, reassuring manner. A thing cannot be valued if it cannot be lost, so the past must be remembered as a bygone which we cannot truly access at the present in order for it to be used as a salve.

 

For a moment we can relive this past through its samples but we know that we cannot truly go back. This is what produces such mourning in sampling, but after it's over where do we go in the (broken) present? Anterograde amnesia. So we once again, once again loop back to a, any past.