“Romanticize your life,” the TikTok girlies let you know, urging you so as to add whimsy to your breakfast routine, spritz fragrance liberally, and observe gratitude. All high-quality recommendations, although I’ve discovered the only method to idealize the world is simply to concentrate to it. Step exterior in late November, when the chilly air carries the odor of distant bonfires and the insides of strangers’ homes seem to burn with mild, and also you would possibly really feel your self slip right into a form of rapture. Your fingers begin to tingle, edges start to blur; you romanticize the world by sublimating your self into it.
Alternatively, you would possibly look to the ocean. “On our watery planet, we return to the ocean for a prognosis of our present situation,” wrote the critic David Toop in 1995’s Ocean of Sound, a shape-shifting meditation on ambient music. “Submersion into deep and mysterious swimming pools represents an intensely romantic need for dispersion into nature, the unconscious, the womb, the chaotic stuff of which life is made.” We arrive, time and again, to the ocean as metaphor—for the unconscious thoughts, huge networks of data, and music, which evokes the ocean’s formlessness, the best way it strikes, and the way it makes us really feel.
Important Mixtape, a full-length collaboration between the French producer Malibu and the Swedish producer Merely, opens with close by birdsong, the flick of a lighter or a tape recorder, and the sound of driving: quick air, tires on gravel, a flip sign’s metronome. We hear gentle voices whispering about colours: “The purple sky… The ocean blue… The fireplace crimson…” A synth pad shimmers within the background, translucent as water, because the dialog continues: “Daybreak blue… solar yellow…” “No, we don’t want extra yellow.” A automobile window is lowered, and instantly we hear the ocean crash towards the earth—a break up second of chaos, fading as the present ebbs from shore.
The 2 mates recorded the mixtape on a visit by southern Sweden: layering subject recordings with samples, ethereal synths, clouds of reverb, and vocals stretched and slowed to sound like angels crying. Of their respective solo work, each Malibu and Merely repurpose pop melodies into moody compositions that at a look seem unstructured—songs that ache with romance and worth feeling over type. There may be an apparent kinship between the wistful edits Merely posts on Bandcamp and the sample-based euphoria of Malibu’s alter egos, from her dj lostboi mission to her work as belmont woman, pairing fast edits with dreamy lo-fi footage of headlights on a wet freeway, metropolis lights seen from a airplane, or an deserted seashore home being pulled into the ocean.
