l’esprit depart (literally = mind departure) :
The moment when you are sitting in a taxi after a long night on the crawl and you begin to feel the tape loops in your mind becoming fuzzy and drawn out. There is a feeling that displaces the band you watched play soothing synth jams in Bar A to Bar B, where in fact there was no band, but instead a DJ spinning hypnagogic reel-to-reel tape constructions. The out-of-place-ness of the fractured memory gives you a headache, and the imagining of the two together further splinters other memories of the night — standing next to a dancing girl and feeling a slight bristling of skin every time her hair brushes across your cheek; popping a pill in the bathroom with your mate because he tells you it will help you relax; standing out on the street corner and feeling that for the first time you can embrace the cold of the night as an internal warmth; at the apartment with your dog waiting for the gang to arrive so you can go out and have a little fun — into a soup of common hedonism that slowly rolls away into blackness as you watch it.
The physical process of forgetting what has happened because your brain is over-stimulated.
So the taxi rolls. And you find a gradual beat that comes with the rolling stops and the street signs and the weird, outdated pop playing on the radio. In a state of disconnection, the world becomes music, and you listen intently, realizing you have stumbled across something new.
Vondelpark’s excellent debut LP, Seabed, is out today on R&S Records.
• Vondelpark: http://vondelparkmusic.com
• R&S Records: http://www.rsrecords.com