I should tell you that, on a Saturday night early in 2012, I told my roommates that I was staying in and found something on the internet. It was late, around 1 AM I think, when I found this thing on the internet, and it became very important to me, inarguably the most important thing. Around 4 AM, when my the roommates returned from the bars, I was awake with this thing in my room.
See, what I found on the internet was a song, but first it was a black-and-white video shot from the passenger seat of a car to music. The car in the video drives slow down a road empty but for its dirt and coursing foliage; a single moth flashes white hot early on, lit up by the car’s headlights, but other than that. Then the road becomes paved, teeming with life, or signifiers of life: cars passing other cars, a tunnel, lights that threaten overexposure: structures and infrastructures that humans build. The camera wobbles, but I don’t know that it trembles, because trembling requires a person to tremble, and there are no people in sight.
Midway through this video, credits somehow roll, and I became very nervous for the song, absurdly. This song is the single most important thing, and it wouldn’t be right to do it so wrong. But the car continues and ends, as the song does, abruptly, early, wrongly, as expected.
I found the song in its complete version that same night, not much later. I got to know it, and I was so happy. By the early morning, the song became for me a part of a record, but I still prefer it alone and disfigured, as it was that one time on camera.
