Remember you speaking about titling as a potentially uncomfortable but if-done-right useful, expansive tool.
The words you’ve used here to name and frame halt me as listener and turn me to reader before I even can.
Humour invites wonder and confusion and double-takes of sense: eyes-narrow, quizzically, in the mind. You find subtle, weighty ways—ambient, expanded, in reverse—to flip script. Tricks. Diversions. Leapfrogs launched off from logic that keep us cycling and deciphering through possible meanings.
Riddles to try to solve for a lifetime.
What does it and how could it?
How funny-freaky-appropriate to sub in style there, an instrumental machine, a self-generating system, the system, the industry, at large, the "scene", sinister, as a theory, a what? money, no more work and why, because we've expanded, a rhyming pattern to be detected and if so am I supposed to hear it or do you mean that it's undetectable because each ABABCBCDCDED has grown to some incomprehensible, insurmountable size: a high rise; or, expanded like stretched, with the rhymes warped out of context but still recognizable in some distorted way, as in, metrically? Does my reflection look back at me? Or do I? Can I? Is that to be ignored? Is what’s reflected projected out? Are we ever reflected? And what? Does this bother me? Do I drink the water in the pool and does it take me into itself and is that the same? Do we fall for any and every little thing instead of ourselves, the whole world? And lose ourselves through that? Do we reach an understanding of experience outside of literal or treated reflections, although we’re trapped in the lattice of seeing and mirroring all the same?
See the way I cycle?
Because the sounds are cycling. Where to? Up and around beside behind folded back pulled through. I think of the river, its ecosystem of currents, its glassy smoothness. I think of kneading dough: a non-cyclical cycle contained in a board-sized frame, which later strengthens the bread, helps it grow. I think of your other record, recently reheard, and how this tape relates. How the record ones existed in some open, boundless plane and these two are more contained: patterned moths, each wing a mirror image, that you've let fly around in the open cage of your closed hands.
“Terza” maybe a bit like a collage: elegant craziness held in place by the edges of the canvas. A restless, laconic hop-scotching that rotates and spins like Steyerl’s “Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground...The idea that we even need a ground in the first place...A fall toward objects without reservation, embracing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any original stability and sparks the sudden shock of the open: a freedom that is terrifying, utterly deterritorializing, and always already unknown. Falling means ruin and demise as well as love and abandon, passion and surrender, decline and catastrophe. Falling is corruption as well as liberation, a condition that turns people into things and vice versa. It takes place in an opening we could endure or enjoy, embrace or suffer, or simply accept as reality.”
These concepts, moments, off-kilter binaries gather in “Narcissus” into something much softer, scrambled (as eggs, folded in with feathery herbs).
Whatever you were handling here, you treated it so gently, like a secret.
Gentler than I think I’ve ever heard from you before.
Humble like a cave.
Almost wooden feeling.
Vaulted, deeply muted.
As if the reversal of light were air, and the expansion of water was a footprint left in mud, hardened by the sun, remembered for later.