What is a comeup? An ascent in visibility, in wealth, in status, in aura. When we come up today, though, we don’t sublimate to a place above the physical, we swell and become conspicuous. Views, likes, reach, weight. The platform on which we find ourselves gives way to more platforms. Grids overlaid on stacks, ourselves foldings of insecurity (because clout, like sand, can be decimated by time) atop these anxious piles. London-based “non music” producer 0comeups’s One Deep, released via New York City’s increasingly abstracting PTP imprint, is an ontology of planes and spheres collapsing into a single point suspended in blind constellation. Atomization means that what one point shares with all other points in a system is also what separates it from them. As One Deep has thoroughly internalized, once we ascend to the next platform, we are merely “On The Roof Texting,” entering our next illusion in transcending the one prior.
The compositional toolkit comprising One Deep harnesses views from deep within the object (art-object, value-object, subject-object), which is obscured by the nature of our location within it. Indefinite suspension is a dominant modality, as white space hangs between the record’s repetitive, blunted, and detuned phrases like a dysphoric, aftermarket incarnation of the pregnant rest between looping iPhone ringtones, hooked into consciousness from all points and angles at once. The unmitigated digital slushy of opening tracks “Go Plug” and “Renew Me” — with their increasingly adversarial tones and languorous, belabored voices swarming from familiar no-places — perform a saturated incomprehensibility, an impacted language unable to access the source of its gestures. As uncanny adhesive bonds rend and flange in purgatorial torment over the repeating pattern of anxiously time-keeping bells, “Renew Me” pleads with the queasy inexorability of trauma from within the object, time and identity around us to a dull, aching common point within us. Scorched, digitized granules of impoverished reverb-space and inhospitable digital compression adorn the foregrounded voices, while an unceasing shift of background contingencies comes to resemble a grid in lieu of anything actually predictable. The normalization of chaos becomes our bombed-out lullaby.
If the opening excursions of One Deep, in their iterative performance of full atomization from within the object, harness the unconscious language of an event horizon packed away inside a scooped-out, shared separation, the record’s serene, hallowed apotheosis in “Try To Levitate Above It All” is a calm within the eye of the hurricane, expressing in a single poignant gesture both a resigned disconnect from the hope of meaningful connection and an undying desire to rise above a sea of commodified, endlessly circulating detritus. Erected from the mournful testimony of a single tone-texture rather than the churning miasma that constitutes the remainder of One Deep’s tracks, “Try To Levitate Above It All” orchestrates gorgeous auto-elegies from the segmented humiliations and compressed, constrained, and distorted soul-flights of the subject from within the object, the elevated repose of its quasi-airy biomorphic chorus escaping through the bruised, impacted washout of an informatic bottleneck. The track’s slightly elongated runtime elicits something like a momentary reprieve, an bowing of semiosis itself to the horrifying grace of massive, writhing flows of bodies and information that flush through and overrun preexisting channels of meaning. It may be worth reconsidering every prior attempt at expression in order to heighten one’s own sense of perception.
“Hyperspice” tears back into an arpeggiating, blastbeat-spliced synthesis poem laden with more straighforwardly New Age-y swells and patterns reminiscent of Rifts-era Oneohtrix Point Never. “On The Roof Texting,” with its stop-start manipulation of our sense of time, closes the record in much the same vein, in a brief two minutes raising a chorus of segmented auto-identifications, startup sounds, and alerts. If the obscure node of perception that unveils One Deep evinces first the trauma and then the serene of shared separation, its final tracks split the difference, as “On The Roof Texting” and its subdued sorting quality achieves something like comfort in the measured categorization of overwhelming variations on the question of being. The object, in its indefinite sameness, turns inside out and subsumes consciousness. Its rhythms lull us to sleep as they beckon us to radically calibrate ourselves to their shapes. When we awaken, we are charged.
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