At first, it’s frustratingly present. Present, but not there.
Like the spit you trap between your tongue and inner cheek. It dips a toe into the inner ear.
Like plosives against a cheap mic. Against the butt of a phone, angled 30 degrees toward your chin by the thumb and fingertips, catching a cold breath that’s barely visible. Maybe you’re not hearing it, maybe it’s just wearing you, unraveling the cochlea and using it as a winter scarf, wrapped from nostril to collarbone.
Emerge as drainage. Rhinoviral snorts and grunts. My co-worker watches first-person videos of roller-coasters on a laptop. He says, “Jude, you’ve got it all figured out and all I’ve ever wanted to do was build these things. But I could never do the math”. He’s .40 liters of the way through a bottle of peach propel.
“third construction (b)” blossoms in the sinuses. Its ASMR-inducing guitars dig into the membranes and get a firm hold on your slimy humanity — Leningrad Synthetic Orchestra is as infatuated with unnerving textures as he is with pleasant composition. This particular cut, snipped from his there is no language in the hereafter LP, flexes his virtuosity when it comes to both, dropping tinny, 6-stringed pluckings down a Plinko board of pedalboard delay. The tune’s jittery — muddled, even. It’s fluid at a boil, bubbling at a meniscus just below the earlobes, somehow shielding its host body from harm. Sneakily, it becomes the conscious itself.