Blue 42.
Your crust-sealed eyelids peel apart, only to find that your vision’s segmented by the interlocking bars of a facemask. The scent of shock-absorbent foam, cooked by your own body head, throttles your breath.
Stay awake out there, kid.
Easy for the fullback to say. As far as you know, their consciousness hasn’t suddenly been transferred into the tail end of an offset-I formation. You pump your arms back and forth a bit to test the limits of your strength — these appendages are heavy and thick, but cut through the air more easily than yours ever have. It’s like carrying around a can of Coke after lifting heavy furniture: you’re loose, breaking gravity’s pull.
Sure, you’re disoriented, but dream logic and the thrill of the moment have imbued you with a wild sense of confidence. You haven’t read the playbook, but you’re willing to improvise.
“Down. Set. Hike,” barks Galen Tipton, in a voice more stoic and breathless than you anticipate.
You don’t even see them move. One moment, they’re collecting the snap. The next, they’re stuffing the pigskin squarely into your solar plexus.
…Don’t just stand there, dazed like that! Find the hole in the offensive line! And pay no mind to the fact that the defenders have morphed into navy-blue bedsheet ghosts. It comes with the territory. The gridiron phases into a dark, mirror-like surface as you charge forward, trucking through the opposition’s defense and giggling in half-horror, half-amusement as the makeshift phantoms vaporize at the touch of your stiff-arm.
No time to un-knot the dreamscape. Just break for the red-zone.
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“ਭ३౽=͟͟͞͞(((ഽʻ⁸ʻ)ഽ lurch ਭ३౽=͟͟͞͞(((ഽʻ⁸ʻ)ഽ,” the penultimate track off of Galen Tipton’s treats 2! EP is as simultaneously unnerving-yet-playful as the record’s cover art and exclaimed title suggests. The Ohioan producer evidently composed their most recent output with the Halloween spirit in mind, populating their signature skittering percussion with gruesome organs and squelches of brass. It’s an entire tablet screen overtaken by pop-ups of dancing skeleton gifs: overwhelmingly goofy to the point of legitimate creepiness.
Despite its off-kilter rhythms and awkward textures, “ਭ३౽=͟͟͞͞(((ഽʻ⁸ʻ)ഽ lurch ਭ३౽=͟͟͞͞(((ഽʻ⁸ʻ)ഽ” functions as a legitimate banger. The bass knocks enough to bump in the whip while the snares evoke the sound Hudson Mohawke perfected in 2014 on his Chimes EP. It’s the aural sensation of a sudden surge of power too intense to handle: a radioactive spider bite in sonic form.