♫♪  Joey LaBeija - Shattered Dreams

“Where? Show me, where is this love — I can’t see it, I can’t touch it…can’t feel it. I can hear it, I can hear some words…but I can’t do anything with your easy words…”

Bronx-bred Joey LaBeija’s sound remarks upon a cartography of exhaustion in the well-secured brutality of club sound. Abrasive sound-strands often express the darkness of shattered dreams, the inferno, the hatefucks pouring out of an unforgiving metropolis; but, LaBeija moves into immersive, softer environments that soundtrack complex pain brimming behind glossy synthesis. Amidst crisp surges of phased pads, the metallic brutality of ballroom and vogue can be heard — but it’s twisted into a shinier, more elastic, potentially more devastating form: make-up splattered eyes sealed shut with caked glitter, euphoria as servitude, or the survivalism of post-organic bare life.

That life is inconsolable and constantly calling out for love, or representation in love — a tension clearly shown in the tenderness expressed throughout LaBeija’s sputtering club enviros mingling tautly with wild synth color — from the high swells of “Euphoria,” to the sensual bells of “Scrub.” Such tension implies a kind of illness, an essential form of life and living, an active/passive living that demands an experimentation with suffering. In “Joey’s Inferno,” we can hear a voice call out — “Can I live, can I fucking live?” The voice modulates between crisis and desire, the precise headspace where profound possibilities open up: a landscape Shattered Dreams occupies gorgeously. Crisis, or the shattered dream, is a beginning that creates its own space-time, a reconstruction, a moment when the solid ground of despair or exhaustion erupts into euphoria, where the continuity of darkness can perish in daydream.

As always, more from PtP soon.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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