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I assumed that moving this week’s post back to Friday would lead to me actually discovering new music to write about but all I’ve done this week is listen to Amnesia Scanner, which makes writing this post significantly harder. I’m not particularly sure as to when (or even how) I first stumbled upon their work but I’ve been constantly looping it for the past forty-eight hours, presumably as I’m too lethargic to seek out anything else. Amnesia Scanner are a Berlin-based Finnish electronic music duo who make tracks that sound like drowning in a bathtub filled with Diet Coke – I’ve seen their work described online as being UK Bass or Deconstructed Club but neither label really seems to fit their creative output, they seem to live in their own sickly-sweet world that eludes clear description and I find it enthralling. The duo’s production is nearly solely based around their approach to vocal processing – samples are essentially tortured through post-processing, pitched up, and detuned to the point of sounding actively sinister. Amnesia Scanner essentially use the human voice in the same way that Aphex Twin modifies his drum machines – the original sound is contorted and mangled to the point where only hints of it remain, creating something uniquely tormented in the process. American jazz musician Ornette Coleman once stated that “jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night, but differently each time”, utilizing cheap plastic saxophones to contribute to the harsh, wailing quality of his performances. Amnesia Scanner are great as they take this approach and apply it to the human voice, artificially channeling the same atonal intensity that made stuck-up jazz critics despise “The Shape of Jazz to Come” in a way that feels simultaneously refreshing yet languid. It sounds vaguely like a summer spent wearing face masks in the heat, but perhaps that’s just me projecting a bit.

The thing about music is that you’re not really supposed to be writing about it. Music is fundamentally subjective – your review scores will never be right, your readers will just get bored if you just list whatever instruments were played on each track, and your personal emotions do more to shape your opinion on a record than any objective qualification. You’ll never actually be able to translate the experience of listening to a song into words, at best you can just distill the intensity into something that spurs others to seek it out, and at worst you can just sound like you really want to be an academic. I don’t think I’m personally capable of writing objectively about music and that freaks me out a little, mainly just as I’m running out of phases of my life to condense down into paragraph segments. There’s only so much you can say about listening to Sam Ray records on trains and you can only make so many vague references to records being intense until your reader (let’s be optimistic and assume we even have one) gives up and returns to their really intense Geoguessr session. Whenever a record doesn’t fully click I often find myself scrolling through its RateYourMusic reviews in the vain hope that by reading about another person’s strong emotions I’ll suddenly gain an appreciation by proxy – I don’t particularly care about what some random person thought about the drum machine used on a certain track but I find myself obsessed with the feelings said drum machine surrounded. Writing is arguably at its best when it focuses on translating an unattainable intensity – a gig on the other side of the country, an emotion you’re yet to feel, or the experience of actually understanding the appeal of metal. What that looks during a time where a decent chunk of everything recorded is available on Soulseek is really beyond me however.

It feels concerningly good to get properly obsessed with an album again, especially when you consider how many hours I spend each Monday choosing what records to write about. I’ve basically done feck all but listen to music since lockdown started but none of it seems to register – albums end up blending into one another, my last.fm charts all seem suspiciously similar, and revisiting an album from 2018 feels easier than pretending to follow whatever gets released. New albums take at least two or three listens for me to fully appreciate – this is a bit of a problem when I’m barely arsed to listen to something the whole way through once. It feels nearly exciting to find something that warrants the three repeat listens it takes me to understand it – I’m still in some state of stasis but at least it’s morphing in some way (and at least a new album cover will stare me down each time I open Spotify). I have something new to repeat over and over again – a new way to look back on and define this era of my life nostalgically once I’ve forgotten all the details that aren’t related to music. My lockdown has been defined through getting some minor excitement out of the utterly banal – whatever dopamine I do come across arrives from pretentious electronic music, the idea of having endless football highlight shows to catch up on, and getting more than two likes on a tweet. The other day I joked on Twitter about how lockdown killed any ambition I had towards life – my only real power fantasy at the moment is just driving to some random leisure centre while listening to an Oli Xl mix and I feel as if these rapidly lowering expectations help shape my relationship with music in a minor way. I’ve stopped wanting music to offer me some form of escape but to instead capture my full attention for more than five minutes – even if I only want that full attention solely so it’s slightly easier to write these music posts.

Each day I edge closer to seeming like the world’s most pretentious wannabe English major and there’s feck all I can do to stop it – or at least it seemed that way when I overslept on Saturday and missed out on a Trotskyist Zoom reading group session as a result. Actually leaving the house and interacting with real people who don’t know (or particularly care) about whatever three topics I’m obsessed with arguably grounds me a fair bit – I have to translate my Paul Durcan jokes into a language that normally-adjusted people can pick up on and that prevents me from reverting into utter pretension, presumably saving my soul in the process. As all people who write about music on a regular basis should, I often feel a lot of shame and I think that this is why my obsessions eventually diffuse – my friends can only pretend to understand who Eoghan Harris is for a certain amount of time and that means that I’ll eventually give up on mentioning him, even if I do so solely out of a misplaced (yet well-deserved) sense of embarrassment. Like all the sporting events that I pretend to follow on Twitter, lockdown has put a temporary halt on this external shame mechanism – I’ve been free to stew around in my minute fascinations non-stop for what feels like ages and it turns out that perhaps the shame served some form of purpose, even if said purpose was just ensuring that the one person made to read this blog post doesn’t actually realize how much of an arse I am. My life feels like it’s entering some minor form of stasis – my sole aim now seems to just be annoying the arrangements of pixels on my phone screen that serve as my sole connection with the outside world, something I’m excelling at solely through my inability to start writing about actual music.