SOUNDTRACKMUSIC - "SOUNDTRACKMUSIC" LP

Surely each of us at some point has felt the unheimlich suspicion that nothing is real, that the world or our experience of it is false.

On their first album, this sensation is what Soundtrack Music seem to soundtrack: our own anxious projections onto the smokescreen of what the Romanian author Max Blecher termed ‘irreality’.

In his 1936 novel Adventures in Immediate Irreality, Blecher’s alienated narrator suffers crises of dissociation and depersonalisation, often distrusting the fixity and substantiality of the world around him and, most distressingly, the solidity and dependability of his own private self.

Photography, cinema, and most of all, fairground waxworks, arrest, unnerve and obsess him, not least for how, in an uncanny perceptual inversion, their heightened artifice seems truer to him than reality itself.

Soundtrackmusic have discerned a similar kind of cognitive vertigo in our present age of surveillance capitalism, where global tech megacorps seek to direct and control not only our online behaviour, but our inner lives.

While many of the seeds of our current collective crises, including the climate crisis, were sown in the late-1970s, so too was postpunk’s spirit of communal aesthetic dissent. Soundtrack Music carry it forward into the fog of irreality that currently collectively engulfs us.