Valotonin wrote:Like I say, this is speculation based on my hopes for happier music to come.
Musically, I'm not sure where it will go. Conceptually, I have ideas - they don't seem like they'd make for happy music. They seem like they're getting increasingly caught up on the idea of exploring some of the larger innovations and landmarks of humanity starting more or less at the time of their birth, and how humanity has reacted to those things over time.
Geogaddi is kind of this blend of numerology, the occult/cult figures and psychedelia. Talking about the late 60s and early 70s, that's when LSD took the world by storm. TH jumps ahead 10 years and its sort of steeped in cold war fear and has that VHS horror feel to it.
Logically, the next step is to take on the internet era. They told us that the internet was evil and to wake up when they first got started, so it would be kind of a full circle thing. In terms of innovations and social impact on the world, the internet is probably the biggest thing to happen to our society since LSD was popularized.
I think their next big idea is going to be something like a "Geogaddi signs up for Facebook and Twitter" type of concept, if you want to reduce it to a snappy soundbyte. You look at the kind of world we live in now and how it's been shaped by the internet, the decisions that many make in terms of entertainment consumption day to day boils down to a numeric review average, some people live their lives via their social media accounts, their number of likes, shares and retweets are incredibly important to them. It almost makes me wonder if what they are doing right now with social media is sort of a meta commentary that runs along the lines of what they're about to drop on us or will release someday.
Modern life right now is this weird secular version of many of the themes previously explored, but it's kind of cold and sterile, there's no space for kaleidoscopes and gyroscopes. Decision making is all based on numbers now, but it's also how certain people insist on obtaining their information on the world, willingly stuck inside these hermetically sealed echo chambers where nothing that conflicts with their worldview is allowed inside, much like how life inside a cult would be. Numbers and cults, sound familiar?
There's simply too much information out there and I think the human mind is conditioned to consume information the way our bodies handle nutrition - if there's a surplus, we will always flock to the foods/ideas that we personally enjoy by default. Essentially, the internet has boiled many of us down to a bunch of instant gratification loving, no conflicting information consuming, relying on numbers to make our decisions for us thoughtless drones. Well, that's the pessimistic view of it at least.
Full disclosure, I enjoy technology, technology pays the bills - I've got all my media neatly organized via Plex, but I also have a study with a turntable and a proper collection of hardcopy books too. Sometimes convenience can be good, but I also think that being tactile or doing things the hard way keeps us centered. I think it's possible to both embrace the good and criticize the bad parts of modern convenience.
Anyways, how do they make that theoretical type of album without being heavy handed, preachy or seemingly biting the hand that feeds them? I'm not sure that they could pull it off, but I like the idea of what they're doing now right now as subtly kind of proving a point somewhere down the road for future work.
