Chad VanGaalen - "Cut Off My Hands"

So the other day at work I had to write this thing. Just a little blurb, said the email, about this guy here. He does 4D printing. Look at the notes if you get stuck. I'm new, so I look at the notes a lot. Right below his job title, in a parenthetical, there was an answer to the question I didn't even realize I had:

So it turns out the guy, his job was - is - to design and build materials that can change and adapt to different conditions over time. The goal is to eventually have whole cities that just build and fix themselves without us even asking. Roads that seal off their own potholes like it's nothing, buildings that brace themselves ahead of time for storms we haven't named yet. You get to go about your business while the world around you (the same one we once anchored with, what, pegs? Poured concrete? The mute kind? Like chumps?) does its thing. Alone. Or in tune with itself.

What I'm learning about this job, the more I do it, is that sometimes writing these things is easy and sometimes it's less so. Imagine, I typed, deleted, then typed again. Imagine a city that doesn't need you to live.

Chad VanGaalen - "Where Are You?"

I love Chad VanGaalen's music, whatever that means. The songs on Soft Airplane are threaded through a clutch of crucial moments in my mind; same deal with Diaper Island, which I could probably sing through in my sleep if you asked me. But to be honest, at this point those older records mostly stay on the shelf. There's something about their songs that pulls a tiny, tense knot in my spine; listening to them feels like reaching into an old memory and discovering some connection's come loose. I don't know if this is because I've papered them over with relistening, or if there's something in the music that misses itself, but even his still songs always feel a little worked up to me. Like they're constantly checking to see if you're checking.

Ever since Sean asked me if I wanted to write here, I've had this little nausea gnawing gently on my throat - the worry that I'm not really qualified. I try to keep up with music but there's no method, I'm not diligent like some people I know. The songs that end up sticking with me always just happen to swim up at the right moment. Shrink Dust, VanGaalen's newest album, came out in April, but when it did I thought oh, I probably know what that sounds like, and then I completely forgot about it until the other day. Who knows what made me look it up? The fourth dimension is time, or whatever, I guess.

These songs are built out of the same materials as VanGaalen's older ones, but the tension that once tugged them along's dissolved somewhere en route to the present. This is music that's fully entrenched in its own weirdness, and in that it's resplendent. No struggle, just a self that touches all edges, swallows everything it meets. These songs do not care if you're looking. Imagine a bored lake lapping into itself, a road healing its own cracks over and over. Imagine a city that doesn't need you to live.

[buy] // image via my own dumb computer