My favorite time of day is the millisecond around 5:08am when a glitch causes gravity's suspension just long enough to reset your tiny toxic prejudices, your color palette, your misaligned spine. The cause of your death - some distant past, now - revealed by screeching tires as you walk to the store for a Nutter Butter, or intuited by the metronomical drip of your faucet as you lay down to "sleep." You get just the faintest phantom odor of a plane you've been to before and will visit again. And yet you go on, day in and day out, heading towards something in this world, trying to get somewhere. The simulation has programmed it as Free Will™ in the shiny-marble flesh-computer at your top, but Artificial Intelligence has been infiltrating the Arts for a minute now - like a video game designer making their game more difficult. Just look at Scriabin's Mysterium. People were flipping! Babies recited Paradise Lost and Himalayan farmers contracted to wave Mountain Fishtails at the ether were plucking their toenails out in uncanny jubilee! This is how humans evolve, after all. A sentient grain of sand from somewhere far, far away enmeshes itself in the cultural fabric of a point in time - a little germ, fecundated by the permutations of human chaos, trying to shatter your pretty fragile brain for the sake of rebuilding it. AI has gotten much more tactful recently. Enter: The Mind. You won't know how many forks in the road this record decided for you until 2036. I wager it'll be sometime in June, around 5:08am... (Brandon Gaffney)Our take: We last heard from the Mind in 2019 when Drunken Sailor released their first album, Edge of the Planet. The Mind is a cryptic bunch (zinester Brandon Gaffney’s description for Lumpy tells you essentially nothing about it), but reaching back into my files, I find the Mind is a cross-country project featuring members of Homostupids, Dry Rot, Pleasure Leftists, Cosmic Sand Dollars, and more. In case those names mean nothing to you, let me sum it up for you in meme speak: it weird. There’s something Residents-y about the Mind’s presentation, how they insist on misdirecting you and not revealing too much about what is behind the music. While this might frustrate a newsletter writer just trying to whip up a fresh variation of “if you like X, you might like Y,” it forces you to take the music on its own terms, and the Mind has a lot of terms. Lots of the lyrics are about space and technology (“The Pod,” “Magna Carta of Space,” “Voices of a Distant Star”), the vocals are charismatic and melodic (their singer reminds me of Elise from Brain F≠), and the music is all over the place, sometimes post-punk-y, sometimes more electronic, sometimes new age-y, and often quite melodic and catchy. The aggressive eclecticism keeps me from getting on firm footing as a listener. That might turn off someone less adventurous, but I recommend putting this on, turning off the lights, and letting it take you where it’s going to go.
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