The neilaworld member shares a new single featuring co-production from wildcard
Listening to mixed matches is like being underwater. On his new single, “notinlove,“muffled subs glide beneath dense, liquid pads as a distant ghost sings about a lost and forlorn love. Drum machines establish a guiding groove, but the point is not the rhythm or the elements of composition, only the way they melt into each other, like different liquids running together in the basin of a storm drain. He uses reverb judiciously but delicately, subtly critiquing the organizing influence of the ‘lead’ sound in modern pop composition. Instead of a leading melody, vocals blend with synth lines, collapsing together into the soft, aquatic motion of the chord progression.
The effect is reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine, loveliescrushing, and other outstanding shoegaze projects. But while 20th century gaze dispersed the motifs of rock through experimentation with early analog equipment, mixed matches draws upon the circulating whirlpool of the digital instead. It is no longer a matter of intensification, of stretching sound with saturation pedals and chains of other effects. Rather, it is a matter of music becoming an environment, of creating a lake of sound. It is vaporwave and Brian Eno that are the key precursors here. Not a requiem for some eclipsed moment in the history of music, mixed matches explores the ambient terrain of history, recovering abandoned toys and synthesizing lost objects in the here and now. It is music that brims with a cold, whelming sorrow.
And yet, his aim is not to cure this sadness, to provide some reassuring or cathartic reprieve; instead he dwells on the materiality of sadness, transforming the language of depression into a musical shape that can be felt and held, if only for a moment, like silt slipping through fingers at the bottom of a pond. “And whether you want to get away from me / You’ll always be close to me.” These words grope at the violence of digital presence, a catalog of the dead past animated by the flickering and insincere promise of nostalgia. His voice sketches whorls across the harmony beneath like ripples across a body of water. Listening, we are on the sea floor, staring up at these wrinkles as they trace the shape of our lonely distance from the surface.