december 10th, 2022

the group recorded a single ep in 1982, which was largely forgotten. surely it's thought of on occasion, but you might be the only
person to have thought of it again this month, if not this year. maybe that would surprise you, but only a little bit, is the thing

you look at the singer's name. they were in a few other groups in 1982, similarly forgotten for the most part but
their existences were recorded nonetheless, with copies of at least some releases possible to find on the internet

now you look at the drummer. the drummer is credited solely on this release. to the world they exist as a line
of text on maybe a couple of different database webpages. beyond this they have been lost to public history

you start to wonder about the drummer. a hundred such archived recordings
you've approached, & only now do you experience these sorts of questions

what was the drummer like interpersonally? would you have gotten along with them? what were the life circumstances
in that country, at that time, that led them to some adjacency to some music scene through which they felt compelled
to play the drums on this particular recording? what else might they have been involved with, recorded or not?

& it's not just a biographical form of information that would sate these questions. you wonder about their inner
complexities, or their humble simplicity. did their playing have some particular psychological utility for them
or was it something done quickly & forgotten, a glancing encounter with the practice of recorded music?

day-to-day, what was it like? who were their friends? how did their friends' work schedules intermingle to produce the
times they could find to spend together? what did they have for breakfast on june 25th, 1981? did they have breakfast?
did they have friends? was there meaningfully a scene in the first place? & how did every room which found even
secondhand relevance to the recording of this ep feel, with all the nuanced character that a room can have?

this all might elicit a feeling of "sonder" & the constant depth & detail of history & everyday
life, but this isn't the point of the story. the point is to capture this quality of the ep itself:

the ep functions as an emblem of the idea of something being out of the way, arcane for its age & lack of data

secondarily, it functions as an emblem of something out of the way being scooped up against all odds from the decades
of time crushing piling on top of it, & given full consideration if only for a moment. heard, evaluated, shared...

in the ep, all the complexity described here is collapsed into the comparative simplicity of this emblem. the meticulous detail & variability
of the lived days which concerned its creation all led up to its manifestation here, in some other world, a world that deals with the mystery
beneath emblems. this emblem was the terms on which you came to know of the ep & of the drummer's name in the first place. there's
nothing you can do about this reduction. it happened to the hundred arcane recordings prior, & it will happen to the hundred after

this art-salvaging process can be a worthy project, sure, but it will never speak to all that the ep is ultimately only
a trace of, a sign that something once occurred. the salvaging project constitutes its own world in the present day, with
its own rules, its own standards of interpretation, separated by a decades-spanning wall from all that it lightly touches,
diverse as what it touches may be. it is subject to the comparative simplicity of all these emblems. it feels almost
disrespectful to the richness of life that you should try to come to know it by these residues

but then, even with respect to what we ourselves actually live, is it not unavoidably disrespectful to
that richness anyway that we must all come to know it through the pinhole of a singular perspective?

in any case, maybe it's only through this obscuring that the ep can acquire its particular power
to play in the imagination & truly possess the mystique of the pseudonymous artistic persona
behind it, the artist now faceless & swept away, leaving only that persona behind

~

every random minor foreign politician or athlete with some banal wikipedia page that you can barely place into
any contextual framework that has meaning relative to your life can be, for instance, the untold day-to-day
story of a five year old who one day heard one of that figure's few mentions on some local talk radio station
& made maybe some crass pun about their surname that they laughed about with their six-year-old sister
& this progressed into more of the unrecordable fluidity of juvenile banter & then they were
ushered into a car to visit a relative's house filled with storied objects & so on