I love the concept of the uncanny valley. As an idea, it helps explains a lot of these 21st-century anxieties that have been haunting me as of late. The grasping for human likeness (and failures to do so) are nothing new. It’s not even the notion of sex dolls or robot cashiers that terrifies me. The fact that smart people are now stripping away that human likeness from actual people is quite a new degree of existential stress.
That depersonalization leads to me finding all sorts of lovely works that share that vibe of anxiety, music like surface tension. L.A.-based Model Child seems to have figured out that weird discomfort, an emulsion of oily groove and tart psychedelia. “Hey Friend” is a track that absolutely drips, oozing concrete buoyed only by anxious sweat. Accompanied by the visuals of the obscenely talented animator Jamie Wolfe, this track is knocked up another plane before sinking back through the grate. Whatever brain cell(s) you’ve got dedicated to primordial aversion/fascination, consider the switch flipped.
Between the sweltering of sublimated hysteria in Wolfe’s animation and Model Child’s slouchy swooning, I don’t know whether I’m entranced or uncomfortable. Perhaps a bit of both; “Hey Friend” hits some nerve, the same one sitting right at the bottom of my uncanny valley. I adore it all the same.
More about: Jamie Wolfe, Model Child
