“Where? Show me, where is this love — I can’t see it, I can’t touch it…can’t feel it. I can hear it, I can hear some words…but I can’t do anything with your easy words…”
Bronx-bred Joey LaBeija’s sound remarks upon a cartography of exhaustion in the well-secured brutality of club sound. Abrasive sound-strands often express the darkness of shattered dreams, the inferno, the hatefucks pouring out of an unforgiving metropolis; but, LaBeija moves into immersive, softer environments that soundtrack complex pain brimming behind glossy synthesis. Amidst crisp surges of phased pads, the metallic brutality of ballroom and vogue can be heard — but it’s twisted into a shinier, more elastic, potentially more devastating form: make-up splattered eyes sealed shut with caked glitter, euphoria as servitude, or the survivalism of post-organic bare life.
That life is inconsolable and constantly calling out for love, or representation in love — a tension clearly shown in the tenderness expressed throughout LaBeija’s sputtering club enviros mingling tautly with wild synth color — from the high swells of “Euphoria,” to the sensual bells of “Scrub.” Such tension implies a kind of illness, an essential form of life and living, an active/passive living that demands an experimentation with suffering. In “Joey’s Inferno,” we can hear a voice call out — “Can I live, can I fucking live?” The voice modulates between crisis and desire, the precise headspace where profound possibilities open up: a landscape Shattered Dreams occupies gorgeously. Crisis, or the shattered dream, is a beginning that creates its own space-time, a reconstruction, a moment when the solid ground of despair or exhaustion erupts into euphoria, where the continuity of darkness can perish in daydream.
As always, more from PtP soon.
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