“Tension is the great integrity.”
– Buckminster Fuller
Rave synths break through ethereal strings, bending them into a contorted form that betrays their delicacy. The resulting contrast teems with honesty. Beautiful, slow, peaceful, then hard-hitting, distorted, upbeat. A reflection of life, really. Moving from mood to mood, pulled between emotions. “The great difficulty is that ‘our moods do not believe in each other,’” Maggie Nelson writes, reflecting on the words of Emerson: “‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only which lies in its focus.’”
The push-and-pull between peaceful and chaotic in “Still Life,” a collaboration between Staycore artists Toxe and Mechatok, is an apt parallel. If music survives on tension, then Staycore’s musical output is alive and well. Stream below.