Lately I have been having trouble sitting still. After a month of nonstop work in some form or another, and with a big project now mostly completed, I was looking forward to lounging around. But it seems I’ve forgotten how, my brain still wired to expect continuous, frenetic activity. I stare at a clock that reads 5 p.m. and realize I only have to play video games or read a book for the rest of my day, and the overworked mind that I thought would be relieved asks desperately, “Is that it?”
Lately I have also been switching between reading two books: Simon Reynolds‘ Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, a comprehensive history of rave culture, and Alan Watts’ The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, a comprehensive history of mankind’s illusory separation from the self. Both, coincidentally, connect their topic to the supposed utopia of the womb, the pre-birth bliss in which we are surrounded by a reassuring void and free of the so-called individual’s anxiety and alienation. This is one of those frequent periods for me where my life and my reading seem to synch up entirely—when I read about this amniotic safe space, be it literal or metaphorical, I always think about my recent fidgeting and how lovely it could be if I could just ease into the soft bobbing of my idleness.
I made myself sit still while I listened to Gacha’s new record Send Two Sunsets this past week. The moment before the music began, my brain began grasping in rebellion for activities that seemed, at that moment, crucial to complete: “Find a notebook. Change into something more comfortable. Adjust the thermostat. Dust your lamp.” But I resisted that resistance, and as the opening track “Abandoned City” emitted a languid guitar over ethereal drones, it felt as if a long-needed sedative was settling into my head. Through the rest of the ambient first third of the release, I found relief not in the fact that I had nothing to do, but in the fact that I could finally accept such a situation.
Even in its more agitated moments—on “Duras,” where an elevating arpeggio evokes the memory of certain Floating Points tracks, or on “Pulsing,” where a meandering yet intelligent vocal melody is interrupted by brief shocks of fragmented synth stabs—there seems to hang a protective film over Send Two Sunsets, allowing the listener to witness such anticipatory fervor while still being shielded from its unsettling intensity. And again I must think of the womb, where one is carried through an inevitable cold, vivid reality in a tissue-lined bubble of oblivion. This reality can—and must—be dealt with later, but not now. For now, only a calm and comforting preparation for what lies ahead. When I listen to Send Two Sunsets, I feel like I am being trained in a similar way that I was before I left my first utopia. The music here grants me the resources so that even in the midst of my post-birth life, I can find that coveted space that sits between restlessness and apathy: contentment.
Send Two Sunsets is now available for pre-order via Apollo Records & R&S Records.