Many are instantaneously familiar with MonoNeon thanks to his hilarious, logic-defying bass covers of celebrity vines, TV segments and interviews (if not his work with Prince(!)). An understated component of these videos, though, is their expert ability to bring attention to emotion at it’s least salient and the sheer pointlessness of trying to immortalize oneself on the internet. On the 16-track monolith “I Don’t Care Today (Angels and Demons in Lo-Fi),” the man draped in neon expands on his methodologies and delivers a masterclass in musique-concrete-funk and head-spinning abstraction that is melancholy, self-destructive and ultimately relatable to its core.
Thematically, we’re traversing the relationship between technologies and human emotion, how the former can mediate, disrupt and even give birth to the latter. Of course, skeletal funk romps are MonoNeon’s weapon of choice (“I Wish I Never Met You”, “The Jam For The Lord”), but he quietly patches together a capricious vernacular of gospel organs, hyperreal kitsch, vaporwave sludge and ambling, cosmic ooze in the backdrop. The words here, (“Log into my sweet love/Download my desires”) give us some direction, but it’s the restless movement from one, dizzying section that really works wonders in portraying the kind of maniacal, totalitarian information overload that we somehow overcome in trying to be real with each other.
Nearing the conclusion, we glide over near-cathartic territory; the contemplative ebb and flow of AWFM’s verses on “Look in The Mirruh,” transition wonderfully into “Women, Water & Weed.” MonoNeon’s yearning meditation on life’s true delights is warbly, comforting and the mirror image of an ever-consuming digital despair. After all that, why be sweet and souful? Of course, those familiar with his artistic manifesto know very well that a refusal of categorization, an experimental approach to layering the traditional with the alien and a penchant for stunning color schemes, among others, are all but essential principles of MonoNeon’s expansive body of work. If anything, a song like “Women, Water & Weed,” followed immediately by a song like “Thick AF” just makes sense. Doesn’t it? It has to.
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