Review

Charli XCX - Brat

Water Damage @ Union Pool, June 13

Dripping @ Sparta NJ June 14-16

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M. and me discuss Brat. She talks about how Charli expresses insecurities so many musicians experience. Charli manifests her confidence from within the insecurities. And she hates taylor swift.

I’m going to write a review as a bender, find some way to connect Brat to Dripping. But I’m also going to try to have fun.

No one’s really sure what direction to go in. The noizos apply for fellowships; the rockers lament the decline of the market. How to create a place to share and experience music? The latter brings M. and me back to Charli. Charli captures the insecurities of being an artist. The proliferation of metrics (billboard, streams, presales to concerts) create an endless leaderboard, one that goes all the way down as micro-scenes are measured. The measurements are chosen by artists; the quantification is another way of comparing oneself to other artists, determining one’s ‘worthiness’ of making art, gauging one’s value. Would it be terrible to say artists become their own bosses? The voice in your head to improve, to maximize your art, to be an entrepreneur of your own creativity–this anxiety speaks through the numbers.

Gin and tonic at the bar. Lots of rockers who are taller than noizos. I’m using a plastic straw and trying to be more mindful when I write. I tend to hunch over my notebook instead of existing purposefully in my body. I feel so pulled by the pen, as if I’m sinking into the flow of my cursive. I love my handwriting, it’s so me. Water Damage about to rock.

I wonder if it’s elitist that I think writing is the best way to convey information. Maybe just conceited.

An early mourning over the sand.

Giving myself to the droning highs, sand across my eyes. Sunken under grinding kicks, toward finality.

A measured thrash, a smile.

I’m trying to remember to breathe. I felt better on a spiritual path.

Ran into S. Talked about Thich Nhat Hanh. She had recently been to his monastery a couple hours out of the city. I think about how my mom says I’m more enlightened. The hard part is to not compare.

I almost overheated on this bus, but really I’d just had yogurt, coffee, and grapefruit juice. Ate my salad with my hands.

No poly discourse this weekend, I think to myself after sensing the tension between the couple in front of me on the bus.

“The midsummer sun rises very early”

Haziness and definition. The grotesque is obscured and focused. Define the form but let it distort in on itself. Interconnect holes.

“Follow your breath while listening to music

Listen to a piece of music. Breathe long, light and even breaths. Follow your breath, be master of it while remaining aware of the movement and sentiments of the music. Do not get lost in the music, but continue to be master of your breath and your self” (83)

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness

Charli is competitive. On “Sympathy is a knife,” she dances b/w self-acceptance and self-loathing. Maybe this is the nature of competition.

“I don’t know if I belong here”–>”I’ve been looking at you, putting holes in your head.” The constant sway of being outside love and being pulled by it.

Details in the beat, ways in which the synth accents deform into the groove, the simplicity of the drum and Charli’s vocal lines, returning to the simplicity of rewinding.

Expert mixing and stereo field, creating an uncanny space for the performance. Charli lives here, between the desire to be the biggest popstar in the world and the impossibility of that desire b/c of her vulnerability.

I left my zoloft and tooth brush at home.

The thing about vulgarity is it needs to be immediate and striking.

The cutting closeness of “i think about it all the time.” Charli questioning what she wants from her life. Does she want a brat?

Teach yourself to fly: I was already trying to remember my breath, its gentle peacefulness.

Carmen Villain: Sunken sub bass become sea foam become aphrodite

How much does language get in the way of peace and joy? Do I give language to anxiety or anxiety to language? Language itself through concepts, ideas, understanding of relationships themselves that cloud experience (or give solidity to it). A back and forth.

12:30am. Waves cut through the haze. Movement and breath. As if lost or at least following the runner darting towards a collision. What would it be like to saw through to the point of, oh wait, too deep. Hanging in the buzzing back and forth. Only for a limp body to parade through the scene. Maybe there’s something morbidly poetic about two limped bodies stretched across time. Summer 2022, a different ensemble. The tricky thing about perspective is it makes you look at things differently. The umbrella becomes a tent or it is three outstretched arms.

Drawing fabric is so tough. The ripples are made of light.

Echoes of subjectivity. On the dance floor, you see the delayed shapes you could hold. An echo moves away from the original to become itself. Decay and distortion hang on the skin, like tattoos dancing toward the person the wearer would like to be. Unfolding meaning in the disoriented non-choice. But this unfolding is where the echo interrupts, of a different person I could be, maybe more feminine, thinner for sure (like when Charli sings about worrying about what to eat).

Breath and dance hold the echo and the original in relief.

I got lost for a while in the dark of the woods.

Open pasture, night sky

Against the forest backdrop, the fireflies danced

I tried to follow one

Morning/afternoon

Can lines bend?

Does a shape breathe?

Walking alone or in the crowd

I don’t know what time it is

Maybe years ago

Crying after the reading. It’s always or maybe it’s just often the case that when you try to avoid people, they end up showing up. In some ways, people are cascades of forms. Brands, tank tops, that type of bang that approximates a mullet but veers off into a different lifestyle. The soft hum of sadness moves from gaze to body to an interrupted moment of tumbling toward the past.

Tapping the bottle, left to right, ear to ear.

Wombs and eggs and mothering oneself. The infertile mother of becoming part of who one wants to be. They started talking about touch. At some point, they started touching, but then it become a story about how they met through touch. The performance of the telling of the story, as it becomes what it is. But there’s this emphasis on H. having a bad time, on the return of the infertile mother as enacted and lived through a friendship. And there’s something about gender, about process and transition. And they want to imagine the rave is a space in which the same connection can be reenacted again and again, the eternal return. So we first become a circle, then a cross-hatched basket, a way of holding an egg, an infertile mother. The criss-crossing stretching from ankle to ankle, then wrist to wrist, then heartbeat to heartbeat. There’s an invasiness to holding someone’s pulse. But there’s an invasiveness to being a fetus, an egg, burrowed in the mother’s body. Heartbeats and BPM, the wellness industry as expanded into the rave space. The breath collapsing into closer and closer forms, spiraling inward as the basket’s stitching becomes tighter and tighter–until we all lie on the grass, hands on wrists, pulsing.