A World on top of a World
Automatics Group, The Rehearsal, and the new short music video from The Safdie Bros.
Every summer, when the heat starts to feel oppressive—like so oppressive that even being inside with the AC blasting doesn’t quite shake the prickly submission to climate apocalypse entirely—I break out The Automatics Group’s Summer Mix, a CD turned LP that is barely there. It’s music as vapor. The original premise is that The Automatics Group—aka Theo Burt—took a bunch of Big Room anthems from Swedish House Mafia and DeadMau5 and Eric Prydz, etc and stripped them of half of their musical data, leaving behind only faint sonic remnants: soft frequencies, a loping rhythm that slips between channels, creating a sound sometimes so faint that the natural world overpowers it. It’s inexplicable. Impossible to grab onto. Emotionally resonant, but frustratingly so. I keep waiting for something to happen, but then nothing happens…or maybe it does. There are plenty of places to stream this thing, but the act of flipping the vinyl is the only thing that tethers me to the record as a discrete piece of music that is, in essence, composed, as opposed to an endless experiment designed to repeat without end. It’s better to listen to it that way, and besides you can get the record on Discogs for like seven bucks, which is a lot less than I paid for it. Plus, you can read comments like this from confounded listeners:
The answer, skrimstla, is that you can listen to this record at either speed. I’m listening at 33. It is, I imagine, what it feels like to go into space for the first time.
In his excellent essay on The Rehearsal, (aka the Nathan Fielder HBO show where Nathan Fielder rehearses difficult situations with willing subjects, before the show largely rejects the initial premise and becomes more about the concept of collective perception and what happens when you recreate your life under an illusion of control that you can’t ever really have), Dean Kissick writes:
The term for this approach to art, as defined by Nicolas Bourriaud in the 1990s, is relational aesthetics: “A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” For instance, Rirkrit Tiravanija emptied out the gallery in his 1990 exhibition pad thai, and cooked Thai food for visitors every day; it was in the relations between everyone that the work was found. In 2017, a couple years after the Nathan For You episode aired, I went to a Tiravanija show at Gavin Brown’s old space in Harlem where he’d made a functioning replica of the bar from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) complete with bartender, complimentary drinks, loud music, and a merry crowd, and you really could smoke indoors, because it was an art installation, and was hidden deep inside this labyrinthine gallery building. It felt like a world apart from the world.
That last line: IT FELT LIKE A WORLD APART FROM THE WORLD goes a long way toward explaining the experience of listening to a record like Summer Mix, it’s functionally recognizable, depending on what angle you’re coming from as a listener. Maybe it sounds like the faint ambient fizz of Oval, or in the right pair of headphones, the lush natural/mechanical world of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project, or maybe it just sounds like the faint click and pop of machines working. Thinking. Constructing a world we can’t see that feels like an echo of the one we can.
I won’t spoil the Rehearsal, but by the end, Nathan Fielder has constructed a new life in order to engage directly with the premise of his own show. It’s a “fake” life in that it’s one he mapped out and is acting within. It’s fake, too, because there are cameras there, but also…why is it fake? If you commit to something wholeheartedly and do it for long enough doesn’t it eventually become real?
Yesterday, the Safdie Bros released a music video for a song called “100 Seats” by a band called Forget. The song is from the band’s recently released debut EP, though they’ve apparently been kicking around, releasing no music at all since the ’90s. “100 Seats” and the EP it’s from came out on the Safdie’s music arm of their company Elara. The EP is fine, if a little bit forgettable. It seems destined to one day be rediscovered and celebrated, but right now the most compelling aspect is the video for the track, which melds the now recognizable aesthetic of the Safdie Bros—a sort of gritty realism amplified to be a recognizable caricature of itself, with aesthetics that don’t normally read as beautiful coming across as genuine and warm. The video doesn’t feature any member of Forget, instead focusing on a bodybuilder duo and their friend in the midst of a weed and protein powder fueled recording session. It’s tense—you spend most of your time wondering when the bad thing is going to happen (in the world of the Safdies there is always, always a bad thing), and then when it does, it briefly seems like we’re collectively hurtling toward a gruesome moment, until suddenly we aren’t. I’ll watch the video many times. It’s an exaggerated version of the catharsis that makes up the back half of the song, but I’ll always wish the reality was different. Forget should be these bodybuilders. That moment should be real. The music we hear should be coming from the people we see on the screen, because that story hasn’t yet been told.