Review Summary: monday 28th of july 7:42pm okinawa
on the train from fujiyo***a to tokyo i put on this album for the first time and stared out the window, which is currently one of my favourite things to do. i've done plenty of it the last couple of weeks, while sojourning around japan, eating cheese coins and getting uncomfortable over cultural differences. living a "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity has an interesting effect on the brain, i think. while you're in it, it feels like a broken conceit. i've actually lived many of these in my lifetime: i've eaten in restaurants. i've caught a train. i've spoken to a stranger who has no idea what i'm saying. i've felt a long way from home. that last one is actually quite a regular occurrence for a guy like me.
but what is unique is the congruence of all these things under an unfamiliar framework. you have to work to stay aware of your privilege, in being here, where you've never been before – excitement isn't always an inherent response to newness. even when i am bored, i am bored in kyoto. i am bored by a stream trickling through dense foliage. i am bored eating family mart egg sandwiches. this is a different kind of boredom, and when i remember this, a healthy contradiction forms at its centre and eats away at it until it's gone.
there's a bewilderment across neighbourhood gods unlimited that uproots the often mundane subject matter and sifts through what's underneath, revealing absurdity. this has the effect of making us aware of the *process* of normalization. that nothing really is prosaic, or one-dimensional, and that actually over thousands and millions of years we have – for some reason – gone to great lengths to fix our rituals in the commonplace. in the hook of unlimited skull voices, OME repeats "i got all you [REDACTED] voices in my skull" with a disembodied delivery, which is an awfully lofty, vicious way to evince the idea that he is impacted by others' perception of him and his work. and...yeah, why do we accept a stranger's truth as our own? similar ideas make up the DNA of NGU, but they're never presented without their counterparts: every bout of paranoia is followed up with a wink, a sly nod towards the absurdity. from my coworker clark kent's secret black box: "i don't know why ya'll be trying to act like you don't know who that is, this is
fucked up."
why do we act like weird
shitisn't happening all the time? why do we act like we are jailed by a routine we probably only began on accident on a tuesday two years ago? why do we act like a monorail isn't a
fucking miracle? i was riding the train. mt fuji was shy. it pulled the clouds around its bare torso like it had just gotten out of the shower and wasn't expecting someone to be out in the hallway. i was looking at it draw back into the distance outside a foggy train window that just then reminded me of play school, and neighborhood gods unlimited did this thing where – amongst the beats that sounded like they were pulled out of an old box in someone's attic – it yanked me all the way back out of myself, where the scope was larger and i could see everything. i saw the fact that no one (myself included) has ever, or will ever, experience the two weeks i just had exactly the same. they will never do it in the same order. they will never commit the same cross-cultural faux pas to the same people. they will never miss the same home that i miss. all of this is a miracle, and the amount of times i will forget and re-remember this in the near future will always be absurd, as much as i try to normalise it.
