Surround by Hiroshi Yoshimura from 1986

 

I was at a desk on the big campus. It was coming round to Christmas again, and getting colder, but you couldn’t really feel much of anything in here. I never, ever left. It was an office, but nobody was coming through. None of the clocks worked, but you could rely on the certainty of night to strike itself. In whatever hours there was daytime, I sorted the incoming post, then reorganised it for the convenience of whoever my next colleague would be. This became quickly inconvenient. I knew only my own system, my own series of tracked motions to form a memory game. No queues formed. No stranger passed by. 

 

To keep it from complete isolation, there were a few of the guys from Security posted up in the back office. They kept to themselves, except when they cooked. They always ate red meat: bacon at breakfast, microwave burgers at lunch, mince for dinner. They created fumes that kept the building in a saturated air. Nothing new came through this place. The parcels were the same boxes, just repurposed, reshaped, relabelled for a different kid. Nothing was ever really clean either, only refreshed twice daily by ethanol sprays and blue paper towels. It was dark when you showed up, and it was dark when you left. There was nowhere more comfortable to spend your life. 

 

There was a coffee shop downstairs. The girl was nice. There were these flapjack bars for 99p at the campus shop. None of the staff knew me, except as the person who used to work in the canteen. I didn’t need to have a masters degree here. I was just. I was online. I was the lamb and thinking that this pasture was all I’d ever need. Fuck it bro, c’mon in, the grass is green and the earth is damp and we are penned in only by our belief that we are penned in. Let me log this maintenance request, and then we can run wild. Let me organise this amazon delivery, and then we can frolic. Let me work this day alone, and let me come home to someone at night, then we can be anything we want to be, really. 

 

I was just getting into Unchained. This was the season of Sharvara. The format was good, open, and as was the way with the precognitive lag between the OCG and TCG, doomed. If it got really bad, you can just play a different deck in Edison. Bring whatever you’ve got on you anyway. I’d let myself spend. Three PHHY Triple Tactics Thrust from the metalhead who ran a Costa in Helston. The Unchained core from Drew for the same price. I’d got secret rare Imperms, Ash and Tour Guides to match. Pre-ordered S:P for £60. Pay in three and fumigating my brain with as many posts from the Knock-Off Garden of Eden if the Garden of Eden was populated by skinny, clumsy, divined twinks. There was a game I played in Geek Retreat where I saw this attitude pay off. This was the quality I cared about. I could settle for this. 

 

This could be my disgusting little life. Going between the only two meaningful locals in the county around the twelve hour shifts, praying the estrogen started working, accepting death as the white wine or the red wine ask for more and more to really make a dent. Getting louder in my own time, getting angrier at myself. I was standing on a cliff made of melting plastic, and brother, the smell will never wash from your fingernails. I was neglecting the ephemera I’d rooted myself in for the last four years of my life. I’d stopped writing. It was all about the plastic, the card, the new body that could be ignored, or alone, or incapable of growing roots. cards that shine back at me could be enough. Quarter century collection Eldlich playmat could be enough. 48 hours a week at £12.50 an hour fit snug in the budget. It was zero hours, but not really. I wanted more, but not really.

 

This type of living (call it a breakdown or die a coward) is brilliant. You play Skyrim with the music set to zero and just walk around until you’re tired or bored. You spend your days off under blankets. You drink and don’t feel guilt. Sure, you’re scared every time you leave the house, and think somebody from the days before will recognise you, and you’ll have to confront the reality that this flesh still holds a visage, a message, a meaning to anybody who once knew you. So you learn the ways to never be seen. I bought a pair of glasses I never really needed, but they changed my face enough to trick the conscious brain into thinking ‘you’re doing enough. You’re taking care of yourself. This is okay’

Amateurish self-recriminatingly-aware music writing will want to complete the sentence Surround by Hiroshi Yoshimura is . . .

 

Don’t take the lick the wrong way. If the goal is to close the distance between the writer, the reader, and the music, then I’ll take my own convoluted route to get there. What you want to hear is a recommendation, or something to let you really know what an album feels like to listen to before you commit to it. If you’re reading for a recommendation, be wary that this is my space. This is my only room. Let me hang whatever I wish on the walls, the door, the ceiling. Judge me for keeping it as I do, but take with you this: Surround by Hiroshi Yoshimura made me feel like I was in The Pale of Skyrim. This is music you get lost to. It rings, and forms into flickering bodies of mist. It’s cold on your mouth by its thinness that exhales, and becomes more by its own command. You’re not eating either. I want you to know this is an exercise in placement. I want to explain (in part to myself, for posterity, and in part for writerly exercise) why this album means what I want it to mean. Let any religiosity I devote to my own sense of music come with a qualification, or confirmation. 

 

Surround was a gamble, found mostly through chance, by way of Kakashi by Yasuaki Shimizu, by way of Syro by Aphex Twin, by way of Smoochy by Ruichi Sakamoto, by way of New Constellations by Ashra. Between these five albums, you could calculate and map each sensory experience the collective individual may undergo within the span of their life. This is the free-flowing formalisation of breath into a sonic homunculus. This is music that is living in the space you permit to surround you. This was the ephemera. This is the music of your sleeping eyes. I can almost speak it, but you can only hear it, blue and dazzling, garish and beautiful, softening and complete. 

 

 

 

 

 

isn't this just easier, anyway?

Please, please, please do not misunderstand me. I wanted so much more. I had stayed there for four months longer than I was meant to because I fucked up my PhD application about a year prior. I hadn’t taken on the feedback, nor had I read the rejection email fully. I had been overwhelmed with inertia: that this was the window for success: That reaching through and rushing meant I was finding my grasp: that academia was a  long, shaggy dog joke where I knew the punchline was never the purpose. I couldn’t settle for failure, so I elected to completely abandon myself instead. I wanted more, and isolated myself with a belief that this is what I really wanted. Isolation, away from those with more, and selfhood, to be content with want, knowing I could strike harder, faster and stronger when I next put myself to task. 

It’s not long after the mechanisms I had confused for comfort were returned to by others, colleagues, at a push. Offices were repopulated, academics came through, pleasantries were exchanged. The kitchen and hallways underwent deeper cleans ahead of spring. New training was issued to the boys in the back, who came to work in their full uniform now. I got the interview, but never got the job, until I got the job by passing circumstance. I had nothing to do with the final decision that pulled me out and away from the desk, other than cosigning and consenting myself to a job in teaching. This was what you wanted, right?

 

 January is a different trip. It was meant to be the year of Yama, but we all know how they went. It will always get colder, and windier than you knew to expect. It’s impossible to remember this, because your heart is warmed by caloric adoration and genuine connection as the year resets itself. I’d go to my locals, twice a week. I’d take my prizing. I’d see my friends, and try not to think about the people I was isolating myself from. I knew there was worry there. I was bad for ignoring it. I won’t chance forgiveness. 

 

Plus, be so fucking for real and tell me it isn’t easier to stand on the hills outside Windhelm with your headphones plugged in to the Xbox controller than it is to be a living, breathing adult woman. I reject escapism absolutely. It is a dull and generally tepid response to why you, as a player, reader, listener, lover are drawn in. That tether comes from something deeper within the vessel of your being. If you are retreating into the cave, what draws you to the cave, and why do you see it as a place of safety? Why do you seek safety at all? How much longer do you have to live, and will living safe nurture you to good health?

 

I will continue to romanticise those few dreary but self-determined months. It’s hard not to. I found ambient music and doused myself where I could. I justified my isolation with this methodology. You could find me, if you really looked, but there’s no point just looking. I had made myself a part-thing, your zero-hours-girl, second best at locals but winning when she learned her cards. When I went home, I’d cycle downhill with no helmet on. The roads were sometimes empty. The phases between the body and the being were thinning. It was comfortable. I knew what I was, then.