g h o s t i n g 2D FUN AT GRID WORLD!

[Adhesive Sounds; 2016]

Rating: 3.5/5

Styles: braces, rollerblades, 1991 Pontiac Trans Sport Minivan, Umbro shorts, bowl-cuts
Others: On Air, Pimples in 3D, Night Dolls with Hairspray, Foxy Baby

I recently found a composition notebook for sale at a thrift store containing the following journal entry, which reminded me of the post-hyper-nostalgic, meme-blending, anachronistic bootleg tape 2D FUN AT GRID WORLD! by g h o s t i n g:

July 11, 1996

Dearest Diary,

I dreamed last night about being older but still being able to experience commercials that I had seen as a child between episodes of Saved By The Bell. Like when Pee-wee married a bowl of fruit or when the Tanners met the Winslows, my sleeping thoughts became a crossover cocktail about my older self meeting my today self. In this dream, both selves weren’t concerned about politics, Earth’s geography, or Bruce Jenner on drums. No, I spoke to myself about perfectly quaffed hair, twirled the phone cord with my index finger while chatting with Luke Perry hotlines, ate nail-polished popcorn, and imitated Will Smith as Fresh Prince twisting his bike-messenger hat during the intro credits.

We went to the shore. I nailed every choreographed move during beach volleyball. In mom-appropriate jean shorts, I questioned myself why being was such a chess board of Joeys from Blossom. It was then when my former self became shocked that the future barely beheld a population that rarely listens to physical music. Even finding out that Green Day was a Broadway play in the city was too much to handle. So instead, I watched a Mad About You episode — where they’re locked in the bathroom and have sex for three minutes, the length of future commercials — in the palm of my hand. Then I reminisced about braiding Chrissy Bothman’s hair during the Crash Test Dummy’s presentation while faking a mutual crush with her on the D.A.R.E. lion. But really my crush was on her. That heart I drew around Xena: Warrior Princess’s face on my folder.

There was a hair salon along the boardwalk where I got matching Rachel haircuts while reciting my favorite In Living Color taglines with the stylists. Walking along the boardwalk and into the sunset, I was making a list of all the best local car, insurance, and grocery commercials with street performers. Finding all the ways to live alive. Waking up three minutes before my alarm goes off. Hair in curlers and dreading some vocabulary quiz I hadn’t studied for. But emo is just now kicking in, and I might dye my hair black this summer.

Love,
Bethany Blanchard

It’s not (usually) my M.O. to write clearly about music. (1) I embed streams, so descriptions feel moot; (2) you can subscribe to PR mailing lists that already tell you how to listen to the music; and (3) clarity is just not fun. Ryan Howe, James Ferraro, and Sam Mehran had presented hyper-nostalgic sounds to listeners years ago, but the genre — if one could call it that — that they dabbled in somehow got unstuck from the Interweb. This hyper-nostalgic “genre” was equal parts recontextualization and time-machine. What makes 2D FUN AT GRID WORLD! by g h o s t i n g  so intriguing is that it withholds both “equal parts,” blending the current notion of musical and record label abundance [sub: SoundCloud, Bandcamp, etc.] with the faded memory of all the old blogs that used to share “underground” music, which are (now) practically non-existent. If I had made 2D FUN AT GRID WORLD!, it’d have been much more negative and aggressively political because of the various ways all these blogs had been intricately defunct’d or stricken or broken apart. (My version would have sounded like garbage, too; the only musical talent I have is whistling.)

g h o s t i n g  takes 2D FUN AT GRID WORLD! to the extreme, jam-packing it with a plethora of modalities accessible for fans of this hyper-nostalgic “genre,” including sounds similar to the taped, drone-type VHS meditations being produced around that time. But most importantly, it’s an interesting gateway into a short-lived genre that will hopefully be increasingly spun out and dabbled in. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of genres that grace a “hyper-nostalgic” presence, but nobody has graduated “Leather High Schoolthis magna cum laude than g h o s t i n g.

Links: g h o s t i n g - Adhesive Sounds

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