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Someone with a broken knee gets off the tram and their seat is taken by another person, also with a broken knee.
A moment passes and you find yourself staring at the door, supposing the number of limping people getting on the vehicle is stuck on a loop. You might think you've heard this one before. You might have an idea of what happens next. Your assumptions may or may not turn out to be true.
The focal point of key revolves around repetition; a sequence developed, echoed, then disarranged. Try closing your eyes and imagining two people sitting across a wooden table, conversing in patterns on a shared piece of paper. One pencil drawing a design, another disrupting it, going over the edges. Just when you start sensing what might follow, the sequence breaks and you find yourself being led in another direction.
Notice the images moving past your ears: a story told with a soft voice, a murmur, a hazy memory, a song that sticks with you throughout the day, but you can't recall its name or the artist who performed it, and there's no need to check.
After reaching your destination, get on your feet, feel your knees cracking. Leave the tram, cherishing this hint of uncertainty.
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key is an album by Levi Lanser and Natalia Panzer, aka ana reme, released by Lynn on September 26, 2024. It was mixed by Makoto Oshiro and received mastering treatment by Nick Klein for PLEN AUDIO. The artwork, titled "We slept with our backs against the weather", was made by Saga Charlotte. The album is available on SoundCloud, Bandcamp or for free download here.
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Read along.
2. demands of the times I don’t even look at my house and I live here. Grey cloud that won’t let out rain, blown away. Feeling stuck in throat, don’t come.
I hear it won’t. A big sense of blue light. Love, anything.
In the sky, there’s a question posed by a painter in strokes and impressions. It repeats itself, and repeats itself and replants itself.
An almost forgotten twist at the limits of kindness and who persists.
4. underlies She told me about a shop, being next to it, a covered, semi-private space where we would sit not doing not anything at all. Strength in this stillness and a long defense on the theme of not moving, as if this were a talent to acquire or skill or to be learned.
She described the ability to get up and go as fragile and the gentle stirrings of indecision as an often necessary pause. A joke, a diary, a mood board. Endless pairs of white sneakers walking by fringed in gold. The scene mimicked one from a film whose title I suggested and she denied.
There’s something vapid in memory, as if the only reason to hold onto anything is just to prove yourself right some of the time.
Does everyone lean on these fabrications so heavily or just me? To think, it’s not just me, and that each take on a delusion will be perfect in its indifference. One of them changed my life, in long strokes, all texture. So I had to ask: am I seeing planks of wood, their weathered grain? Or perhaps smudges from fingertips? Or, imprints from fallen petals? Pressed into the background, they leave their mark, as clothes hung for too long in a shop window will become stiff and brittle, sun bleached on one side, never to return.
If you look anywhere long enough, you’ll see a face. I saw your’s with grey clouds pooling over. You sent me a photo, which I took to be my own. In this way, I’ve lost the very idea that made so much sense upon waking.
8. her infotech The day is so much longer when I am on time. Scarf flying, pleasant staff. She sings I wish I was cool, I just want my friends to get me, I just want to be seen right. These mistakes of perception that bend to the perspective of a pillar or curve.
Waiting, two dogs start as if to fight but then end up passing each other by. I respect this tension. I am early. Overcommunicating because or in spite of my sense of time but not really needing to. Sometimes needing to.
The food came out almost too fast and so our lunch was over before we’d even settled in, rushed into a full silence. A drink, good and summery. I limped towards its end. Later, sitting on the floor meant that everyone had to look down at me and I could hide the bits of myself that I wanted to hide. Likewise I’ve been kneeling, staring at my hands on all fours, reaching out as if to touch each side of the room, an impossible position reflected back in facing glass doors.
9. nun Someone with a broken knee gets off the tram and their seat is taken by another person also with a broken knee. When I bend too quickly mine crack as sticks might snap underfoot, the soft flesh of the branch inside running red. Sprinting to catch the tram, bags and scarf flying, I think about how an ideal city would be programmed so that when I am waiting for the walk signal at a busy, two-way street, the light would change just as my tram rounds the bend, and I could cross the street, no rush and with ease, and step onto the tram in perfect harmony. I suggest this to a friend and she imagines a city freed from the pressure of cars, a solution that undoes the logic of my poor fantasy.
Desire paths cut through the noise of this. Bass gathers in corners. Candles must be lit with a match and if not, something is off. She appears and then recedes. When is enough? Is there time? I discuss my attraction to time, feeling cloaked in time, in a wash of old time, which in some ways protects me from the present, where I’m out of sync, easy to love and easier to despise. Here, flowers dry up in the vases. I’m not sure if I’m hearing people or birds. A long silk scarf flows out behind her, a shock of black hair, a short black skirt and high heels on which she leaps along the edge. Red fingernails, a stiff red collared shirt, red ceiling lights, red poker chips, a red glass. I look at her face in the soft orange light of the bar, my friend, and she is beautiful. I understand her more at a distance, many-sided, and in relation.
The city is full of free-standing wooden kiosks shaped like hexagons or octagons, sometimes painted green but more often a chestnut brown, with pointed roofs and walls of bright windows. In this tiny space, 5 meters or so squared, it feels as if the whole world is here. Why would I need to look anywhere else? Through the door, I think to capture the way that the light is falling on a crate of red plums, late afternoon, subtle and golden, draping around the box like a loose scarf. But somehow, I don’t want to be that person, snapping pictures and moving on, not even considering the fruit as a unit of measure, as something not for the taking, as time to buy, a real treat, a bigger steal.
11. rendering no position immune Running away. Between people. I slip and am alone. I wear a cloth. I pull on a dress. It fits. I will put on an apron. I will get somehow to the shore to tie my apron. I have a plan. The plan is a fated performance. I have the day off, a reach. I do not want to, much. The plot occupies its own place even when no hedges separate the plots. This is respected. He was wrong. I have checked the dates. I have plotted the coordinates as told to me: Miami, Moscow, Chicago, a smaller city. Her leg against a tree, poised and frozen. A very high cut. A very large face. A dirt path that skirts a construction site and wraps around a stone wall. It was not there before I noticed it on the stone path. I’ll get up with a microphone made of paper or sticks, chocolate wrappers, photos of phone numbers printed in orange on the windows of cars. I stop. I take the photo. The bow made of dirt or sand, tomorrow, made of glass, not yet posted. Outside of a restaurant I’m no longer hungry, suddenly from cleaning the glass: I know this feeling. Lifting the bag: I know this feeling. Tying the bag. I know I’m scared because I have my clothes on. But they don’t fit me. The bag is a blue colour called super, baby, empty.
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