“The unreality of the seen brings reality to seeing.”
– Octavio Paz
Cash flow, blood flow, electrical currency. A temple of transparent walls. A sudden flourish of meaninglessness. Semantic resistance as forward thrust. Nmesh, enmeshed in the mesh of Pharma.
A matrix, maybe. Of power and violence. Of fakery and glitz. Of a brutal urgency — a vertigo of acceleration. An album knee-deep in the realms of the sexual and the linguistic, made up of signals, signs, and samples whirled straightforward from the seethe and soil of the sea right onto the tongue. Our tongue, inside the interior of a cassette tape, or a skull, or a video store, or a video game. Our eyes, lost in a stream of images.
To skid, to drift, to leak, to warp, to hallucinate. A facial intimacy only half-there, a mortal distance only half-dreamt. Multivalency and polysemousness. Relocations of ordinary circumstances: ideological frameworks dumped into the Sewers of the Psyche. A mist that screens them dimly. A door, opening.
The power of vaporwave, the powerlessness of vaporwave in society. Adventure without the risk, relaxation without the come-down. Pharma is music as graphic simulation but, at the same time, as the thing-of-itself. Nmesh plays with a musicianship that plays with the illusion of musicianship, suggesting that hidden in the depths of an album is a part of a walled-off inner self safe from the judgment of the world. He has the urge to blur, to melt, tissueless, voluptuous. Sense is continuous, slamming into our pathway. The surface circulates. An access to contexts, 24/7, recyclable — a virtual deli of our desires. The mood made of neon jelly, the moon, a womb. It blooms, blue, into clusters of pure matter, into mousse. Neon mousse. As all possibilities of relation get held in tension. A lure’s decor. A decor’s blur. An urge’s lure.
White Lodge Simulation is an opus. Outside as it is inside, or could be, or has come to be, on a figurative border of sentience and extinction. It glimmers in a radiance of inattention, radical and hypnotic. I think of website portals and a stoner’s nihilism, coupled with the memories of bad acid trips and bad times on marijuana while lurking around the city, hiding behind trash cans. Snowflakes as snare shots falling, & behind them: the social, economic, and political shells within which vaporwave operates and by which they are customarily defined.
The “v” word. Nmesh breaks that, slashes it, puts it in a sci-fi/horror flick, pans it. Pharma embodies hybrid auras via bacterial vrooms. Takeoff, takeoff, a suggestion of takeoff. A moon between swaying lanterns; a tongue between licking tongues; a monster’s tongue on a senator’s lips. The actual, the accidental, the adjacent, the Easter eggs laden with ingots of gold. The radio, the TV show, the internet. Nmesh teaches the listener how to listen w/o hierarchizing the musician-listener relationship: that’s Pharma’s secret. We end up sleep-drenched, in an infinite quagmire of samples, eating steamed bear claw with jellyfish and cinnamon, along steep sheets of glassy rock, thinking about the government.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yes, we wept, when we remembered vaporwave. We let the world enter the genre; we let a whole b-side of remixes remind us again how music begins with osmosis, remixing a form of embodiment of another. Pharma begins steeped in mystery, in government secrets, in phantasms, in hard-drives inside vaults immersed inside administrative centers, and ends as a node to the body. We just entered a room — a huge room — multiple rooms. (Or, if you like, a kind of Black Lodge.) A brown from the sky, a blue smacked on the buildings. A meaning, a fundamental constituent of human life, a problem, a dream. Celadon lined, with jade. It was only a dream, this album. A power that enters, transforms. A system to rearrange, to transcend.
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