The sun is keeping longer hours these days. While I welcome the incoming months of bright skies and rising mercury levels, I will keep my same late hours.
It’s how I’ve always been. When I was a kid I would stay up late watching television deep into the night. I was fascinated to learn, at a fairly early age, that MTV did still play music videos. Granted, they were on at some ungodly hour. 2 or 3 in the morning or something like that. Memories of my afterhours music binging from that time are hazy at best. Surreal, really. Half-remembered. I would pass out eventually, tucked in by the flickering glow of the television. That was my indoctrination.
Here I am now, typing this out in my darkened apartment. Streetlights are lamping the street below. The buildings across the way are darkened and devoid of movement. The bright screen of my laptop burns into my corneas. My headphones fit snug over my ears. It’s late. I’m dialed in. I’m passing out. The more things change, you know the rest. Of course, I could snap out of this mode at any time. Living in the city as I do means that finding ones self in the middle of the action is as easy as throwing on a jacket and hoofing it down to the nearest subway station.
Martin Brodin’s Badabing is the perfect soundtrack for the state I’m in. Brodin’s brand of sleek, minimal electro disco is totally urban in nature. These synths and manipulations are enabled by technology. The samples – squealing brakes of subway cars, jet engines taking off overhead – drive this point home. And is there any genre of music more synonymous with late night city life? I don’t think so. The track saunters with a self-satisfied gait. You can’t fault its ‘tude though. Badabing is dripping with cool and every drop of swagger exuded is well earned.
That’s not all. Brodin’s work also reminds me of my yesteryears. Of my time spent taking in too much music too late into the night. I can’t quite put my finger on it. The key synth motives, restated time and again, are elevated from hooks to hypnotic charms. Context is lost. Stimuli flicker in and out of the periphery. The guitar line that pops in near the middle adds texture but not enough to grab onto. Another synth wavers in and wavers out in short order. It’s a feeling of knowing what you’re looking at, but not quite knowing what you’re seeing. Let this enfold you.