11 hours of loosely curated synthwave – probably the best genre of music to ever exist.
The Day The World Went Away
Following on from the previous post:
I remember waking up one morning as this song playing from my phone – just one song in a playlist generated by Spotify’s algorithms. It infested my dreams with an incredible feeling of bereft need for SOMETHING. Tears in eyes as they finally opened to the total absence of resolution to the void “inherent in human existence”. This is not to say this hadn’t occurred to me previously, or been accepted (what self-reflecting millennial doesn’t have an intimate relationship with the void?), just that the morning is usually polluted with an unconsciously animated façade of normal animal existence – wake up, find food, do the things to make sure you can do that again. Accidentally make babies if you absolutely have to/can’t not.
And the need for that “SOMETHING” wasn’t god, or love, or anything so easy to define and brush aside as mere trappings of a weak intellect hobbled by conventional norms. It was… UNDEFINED THING I NEED. Meaning? But sure, there is no meaning. Like god or love. Just another social-psychological imprint on the neural pathways. Of course, being something of a melancholic chap, it went on to infect my whole day. It was a beautiful and horrible kind of day I have no real memory of years later except that this song was its soundtrack.
To Live
Is to balance curiosity with comfort. Truth with oblivion, if one wants to get political.
Somewhere in the vast cacophony of the grey zone lies getting trashed and listening The Fragile when you are old enough to own property but you don’t.
Alcohol
The great sorrow of which is that it runs out and reality leaks in to fill the void.
Holy shit I have domains and blogs
Just got an email about this domain getting ready for the annual renewal. I wondered… do I want to keep this one? Do I want to keep any of them? I logged into the host and made thoughtful faces but I decided I could only really make a decision by actually coming here.
And it turns out. Yes. I want to keep this one and I want to keep all of them. Each domain and blog is a little part of me. That’s why I always insisted on self hosting, and why I part with real money to put it out there on the internet. It’s mine and it’s me. No one remembers these places, and almost no one ever knew they were here at all. To me that never mattered, or rather it matters less now than it ever did before. Especially this blog. Cyberagefunk was/is the place I let it all hang out.
Reading over some of the stuff I wrote is incredible cringe, but I get it. I remember (sort of – maybe – definitely not all the time) what it was like to be me writing that post. Maybe I was feeling proud about something that seems lame now, or I was whining about something pathetic. Whatever! My house; my shit.
It blows my mind that it is coming up on three years since I posted here last. My life is completely different to how it was then. It’s better. I don’t think riding 10k is anything to boast about. Fucking n00b. I don’t live in the town’s shittiest apartment. I have cool lights I can set to fit my whim. I have like a million computers. I’m happy more often. Actually, there was a period for maybe six months where I was happy. every. fucking. day. It was a blast 8) But on the other hand.
Life is exactly how it always has been. I’m more me than I’ve ever been. More isolated. More distracted. More prone to bouts of world drowning melancholy. Self indulgent. Nerdy as shit and susceptible to intense short lived obsessions. Like I get deep into cycling and I lived GCN and learned how to maintain my own bike (mostly because this town doesn’t have a bike shop). I became a nut for gathering personal metrics, smashing PBs, and making sure it was all immortalised on strava. You didn’t really ride if it isn’t on strava. I’m still into all that stuff but the total consumption of body and mind ebbed away to a more normal hobby level.
NIN. I have listened to so much fucking NIN since I wrote here last. I think I never really let myself enjoy it because it wasn’t what serious industrial kids aught to do. The Fragile is probably my favourite album. Period. Out of all the albums I love, The Fragile has not been far away the last three years (I’m playing it right now). People say, yeah but Downward Spiral is good too. Sure. But it’s no Fragile. Absolute fucking master piece.
Anyway, that’s it. Maybe I’ll be back soon. Or maybe it won’t be until that thread of nostalgia reminds me of the cool places I used to smash out some words.
J. C. Rage
I’m Fucking Tired and I Think I Might Be a Replicant
This is an I’ve got nothing to blog about day. I’m wrecked and I’m looking forward to sleep. I hope I have kinky AF dreams, but I think I’ve turned into a replicant. It all started when I stumbled upon this Blade Runner themed ambient sleep track. It runs for 10 hours and is a mix of all those ambient sounds and music that made the first movie so atmospheric. Apparently it has stuff from the second movie too.
Anyway, after having fallen asleep to this a few nights running I think I may have uncovered my true identity. If this is the case then soon I will be uttering my last words and I want to go out like Roy Batty.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
So I’m going to sleep, or to die.
Shifty-eyed Mess
Today I woke up with a fuck this and fuck that and fuck you and hurry the fuck up and boil, kettle. Then it was a day of too much coffee and high anxieties, my greatest achievement, unfucking a thing I fucked. So by the end of the day I was a jagged mess, bathed in adrenaline and caffeine overdose – a wild-shifty-eyed, uncomfortable in own skin, thoughts racing, grinning-way-to-big mess. Wires crossed. All lights green.
I am now sipping a shiraz aged in whisky barrels, jaw throbbing dully as it unclenches. Life is stupid.
Suicide, You, and I – Synthwave at It’s Best
Glass Apple Bonzai’s song, “Suicide, You, and I” has been a frequent play for me. It doesn’t matter how suicidal I feel – completely, somewhat or not at all. It’s an absurd, camp, and entirely over the top staring into the eye of the subject. It’s everything that’s good about synthwave.
Sure, it’s about a couple of people carrying out a suicide pact, but the synthwave sound and tongue in cheek sampling and lyrics invert the subject into an absurd caricature of the situation, mocking the way society views suicide – it’s a coping mechanism. I think CBT therapists would approve of dealing with such thoughts by creating a work like this. I certainly do, and even just listening to it has help hose down suicidal thoughts.
I don’t think it’s meant to be making fun of suicide, or at least, not in a belittling way. It’s more like an acknowledgement of those feelings and saying, well what can I do with this? And thus the song was born. The Artist also has a song titled “A Synthwave Song About Suicide”, so it’s a topic that has some meaning for the artist, but really in this age, who hasn’t considered ending it all.
I couldn’t find the lyrics anywhere, so decided to attempt to transcribe.
And so the end is near
I see it all so clear
We hear the darkness call
It’s time to end it all
Your blood a sacrifice
The holy gift of life
Walk in defiled light
And give it all tonight
Last time we knew it was two of us
And we just have to believe (we just have to believe)
Breakdown a suicide, you and I
Envision how it should be
Forced hands and you and I do it right
With the knife on the floor (with the knife on the floor)
Breakdown a suicide, you and I
And We can’t take any more
On the darkest night
We’re paralysied with fright
But when I take your hand
I know you’ll understand
Our blood a sacrifice
The holy gift of life
Into the fire light
Until the end of time
Last time we knew it was two of us
And we just had to believe (we just had to believe)
Break a down suicide, you and I
Envision how it should be
Forced hands and you and I and we do it right
With the knife on the floor (with the knife on the floor)
Breakdown a suicide, you and I
And we can’t take any more
Last time we knew it was two of us
And we just had to believe (we just had to believe)
Break down a suicide, you and I
Envision how it should be
Forced hands and you and I do it right
With the knife on the floor (with the knife on the floor)
Breakdown a suicide, you and I
And we can’t take any more
We just had to believe
We Just had to believe
END SONG LYRICS
Anyway, I’m sure the joke isn’t for everyone and some will see it as crass, tasteless, or exploitative, but I for one, love the shit out of the song and reject any negative analysis of it.
Music: The Great Love of Life
Still feeling good. What the what? Right now I’m sipping on wine and about to dish up one of the finest chillis to ever grace the planet.
My All The Stuff playlist on Spotify has swollen to over 111 hours of music (111 hours and 1 mins to be precise). The idea has always been to dump anything I remotely like to this list then make themed playlists. This has not really happened. I’ve been burning my way down from top to bottom and am currently at 27th of August 2017 (Sins of The Flesh – Sister Machine Gun). Given that I haven’t added much in 2019, to date, and almost half of all the tracks were added in 2016, I have a long journey ahead.
I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate when it comes to Sister Machine Gun. A little too much NIN, but with a few decent tracks in their own right.
This list really is a rambling mass of genres and artists. Sometimes an artist appears only once, a song cherry picked from the Discovery Weekly or a suggested playlist. Some tracks I don’t even recall hearing. It has become an infinitely renewing source of stuff to listen to.
Music is one of the greatest joys in life. Don’t let it become part of the background noise of living.
Sometimes it sneaks up!
Happiness. Sometimes it just sneaks up on me, and I wonder, am I at the start of a manic episode? Usually it’s happiness (I think). I’ll enjoy it while it’s here, but once it’s gone I will wonder if it was ever hear at all. Once the feeling is gone it’s like it never was.
Maybe it will be a few hours. A couple of days. A week, maybe. What’s causing it? Well I’ve occasionally been double dipping on my antidepressants, which I shouldn’t but when every day is grey and nothing matters, why not live a little! Also pushing harder on the cycles and enjoying wine in more moderate dosages. Maybe it’s none of these things. I mean my life is a joke. What do I have to be happy about. Well, it’s my joke, damn’t.
Hope you’re all enjoying your own jokes too, or super-serious-what-evers.