Just Roll. Just go out into the dark night with a sword in your hand, battling evil. Battling internet addiction, battling eating fast food when you have a fully-equipped kitchen and cookbooks for all kinds of cuisines that you could eat. But still, go out, switch out that sword for a bow in hand and a quiver on your back, a password in your memory, chatroom after chatroom after chatroom, into a subreddit as deep as the Mariana Trench, into a poem 40 pages long, a poem four books long, an epic poem, a book, the book of your life, the cookbook of your life, of all the fast food you’ve eaten — now completely shitted out, but still deep within the memory of your small intestine. And don’t forget to roll.
It may sound like a lot of odds and ends, a lot of trips on Google Maps, but we’re here. A wave of nausea, a few raspberries. One wish. A mortal one. A real good one. Arriving at the doorstep as the parade turns on our street. Small cups of tonal sadness. An OS X machine, turned on and humming. Sitting on a vintage chair or laying on the bed. Just Roll. In an effort to further understand this release, I am at danzodanzo.com, the website of Dang Olsen’s art. I am looking at a series of images, underneath a header: PAPR. This art — dozens and dozens of pictures — is psychedelic, bizarro, and weirdo, with an element of cosmo-trash thrown in. Sprinkle in the unconscious memory of Seinfeld playing on mute as you sleep on the couch, and you’ve got it. Picture after picture, of weird creatures, fueled by LSD, shrooms, and living in end times, almost all of them against a backdrop of purple and blue swirled together. They’re busy, like hieroglyphics in a dusty pyramid, and spiritual, like living on a tiny island with only a coconut tree for nutrition.
What I’m learning as I’m listening and looking is that: what is called the Universe is a large object that contains other smaller objects like solar systems, wave packets, and Just Roll. It wouldn’t be a dream tape without another entity: my ears. My eyes: closed. My mind: asleep. (I’m dreaming, of course.) My vision: opened. I’m in a poetic state, which means I can’t trust language anymore. Can the same be said for sounds? Are they to be trusted? Moreover, how do I use them? Chimps have digging sticks. Bees have flowers. I have Just Roll. The way to use it, in theory, would be to pay attention very closely to how it sounds and be transfixed by that experience, going out into the dark night again, swapping my bow and arrow for a switchblade knife and a Metrocard. But there’s another object somewhere beyond that. Beyond the listening. There is an object inside of this musical object. No, not an object, an objective. A cause, an effect. A foam. A cosmic foam. A quark. Two quarks, dreaming, of course.
OK, this fairy logic won’t help. I’m awake, my eyes open to these synth sounds, half-vapor, half-new-age, skidding past those two genres, entangling narratives, and arriving at a long table underneath the sun. At a banquet. The day after tomorrow. New life. This music’s got me feeling that everything — from iPhones to killer whales to E.coli — is somehow interconnected. Everything is enmeshed, caught in a mesh, caught in a reddit chat, caught in a text message. We’re all on the internet, trying to find solace while the cop cars zoom by in the distance, performing their language. This secondary life becomes the first life. Two lives, two quarks. Digital quarks. Digital galaxies. New-new age. Post-vapor, but true vapor. Vaporwave outside of vaporwave. More deli than spa. More peach cobbler than sushi roll. More Blu-ray than VHS.
More about: Dang Olsen Dream Tape
