An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

Sometimes when I dream I feel like I'm somewhere I shouldn't be, like I discovered derelict corridors of my mind that would be better left unfound. When I listen to An Empty Bliss Beyond This World I get to travel through them. I have a painting of this album's cover, it was a gift from an ex-girlfriend. This album doesn't return me to those memories, it refracts them, along with all of the others. The secret of this album isn't just that it somehow "represents Alzheimer's" but that it represents the shadows and joys of reminiscence itself.

This isn't an album meant for headphones, it's meant to fill space and alter it accordingly to the sound's own logic. It isn't meant for people old enough to remember the records sampled either. Instead, it uses its selections to depict images the way Monet's blots of paint begin to resemble flowers, gardens, and waterlines. The emphasis isn't on the faithful reproduction of old images, but warping records through enough effects and looping that they start to create some of their own by refracting the memories furnished by the listener. In this way, the degenerative disease it takes its inspiration from is raised to a universal dimension.

I'm back at that apartment again, my girlfriend and I just had sex on my floor. When I look into her eyes, they don't look the same anymore. They're black and mottled with stars whose constellations I can't comprehend. Her skin is starting to fade and melt as my arms try harder to hold onto something slipping out of my grasp. Horrified, I get up and rush to the door to leave. More stars, bleak and frozen. They glow and glimmer to the rhythms of dust on a vinyl record. It's as if they were made of paper that's beginning to burn. I'm floating above every house I've ever lived in, looking at people inside that I can sometimes remember and sometimes not.

I'm starting to remember everything we did together when we were dating, from restaurants that were torn down, to bowling, to giving and receiving gifts, to each of us crying in my car. I don't want to say goodbye, but the pianos and trumpets are taking me somewhere else. I can hear the faintest murmurs that sound like broken radio transmissions, buried under thick clouds of fog and saturation. I see every book I've ever read, with all their pages taking the shape of an infinitely long corridor leading to a blinding light. The pages are flying past me, their words once static now blurring together as I drift closer to what I can only imagine is death and a faithful reunion with everything I've ever lost.

There's mom and dad, together again, in an old apartment with only one bedroom that all five of us are crammed into. It's even better than I remember because here my Super Nintendo was never broken. I don't really want to live here, do I? In a world where I've never discovered the crushing permanence of philosophy and Marxist theory? I have to get out, and I want to get out. Why won't you let me? The album plays again, string sections shuffle to a steady, almost geometric pace, tracing their lines that a muted trumpet follows before cutting out, extinguished like a match, only to loop again. Its shadows start to lap at my feet before crawling up the length of my legs. It's completely and totally numbing.

Help me, mom.

586 words.