A glorious night of no particular significance, Totally, the new album by Baba Stiltz. Recorded in Helsinki in a studio with a drummer and  overdubs committed in 5 days. Ballroom-sink songs of loss, grief, long  drives on the I-5, centralized acquisitions, and corrective conditioning  towards the prolonged effects of computerized lifestyles.

Every song looks you straight in the eyes, crooked and veering  towards a light fixture off the side of the mirror. Ambivalence and  assertions track us, down some gauzy networked afternoon. Relatively,  perfectly, three dimensional. Proportions as they appear to us from  outer intuition. Sometimes meaning is evoked through pure nothingness.  Concealed and nothing known. We have no need for any paradise informed  by anything beyond what is directly in front of us.

Stone repetition thwarts the possibility of control and surrenders  itself to understanding. Who are we, and what are we trying to  understand? To understand being universally greater than being  understood. There are soap operas everywhere for those with eyes to see.  You don’t have to look as hard as we currently look. The dramatic is everywhere, we breathe it unintentionally, then we come to hate it.  Haptic, embodied facts of a tedious life lodged in the jowls of history.  Everything under the sky being the best bedlam has to offer. Your  family, your relationships, your memory. As you eat a burger you are  reminded of every sharp protrusion and corner under the florescent  lights, the same lights you see when you’re born, and although unconfirmed, when you die.

Some of these songs were written years ago, some recently. The bookshelf and television set come into full view. Women/men come and go.  Stars and poseurs collapse under their alienated contradictions, the  search for truth yields to continued gradients of probability  (collapse). Spatial order maintains itself through perceptional feeling.  Silence, singing along to Roger Miller, people entering and leaving,  figures hovering over you in your dreams and waking hours. Cool and fun, Totally

— Barrett Avner

Photos by Elsa Hammarén