I have the suspicion there is something to do with memory at the heart of this cassette. The tidal washes of synth combine with spectral vocalizations to create an inner-thoughts oriented space. Here are memories or dreams, or some combination of the two, because who can say they absolutely know the difference? The A side is “Awake” and the B is “Retrace,” like an amnesiac’s morning routine: get up, have your coffee, try to parse out dream from reality, the subjective experience from the objective occurrences.
Even for those of us with a “normal” sense of memory, when an actual event has passed by and been locked away in the winding hallways of recollection, it becomes hard to piece together exactly what took place. Just for starters, consider this list of memory biases on the Wiki, which is the tip of the iceberg. All of that is captured succinctly here; the un-centered drifting, the individual notes like points in time peaking out and then dipping below the drone once again. That’s really the core of it: we can revisit our past, but it’s intangible, fleeting and almost futile. Even when awake we can only retrace by proxy.
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