Serial Human remaster
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The 20th anniversary remaster (21st actually) of Serial Human is now on Bandcamp.
Here's what a recent review says about it:
"This exists in my musical lexicon as a surprisingly sad album that's trying to be happy. A young man on his own in a new world, wanting to get lost in the wonder of it all but finding it challenging to accept all of the cruft that comes along with it."
Abdicant, who wrote this, is the first to truly tap into the underlying feeling of this album. Other reviews from that time talk in a broader sense – for instance Igloomag describe Serial Human as "dramatic, severe, tense, relentless and hugely compelling". Some, like Sutemos, simply miss the point (and that's OK) – "[it] is a neutral album..." But not this little paragraph above. It goes straight for the feeling of disappointment, the disillusionment I felt with the large city and its people, after having moved from the sunny, quiet, dead-in-winter Burgas, to chaotic, loud, dusty Sofia.
Despite the cover art, Serial Human is less of a hysterical Brave New World take on us becoming programmed, predestined, track&traceable, copies of one another. Instead it ponders how we ourselves accept to grind and monotonously loop, and slowly construct these good-looking from afar fronts, until one comes closer and can see the imbalance, or hollowness, or harm. To every nice thing, a catch. For anything of value, a disproportionate amount of time lost. Underpinning many a warm relationship, a calculation. Dreams interrupted. Injustice. Television.
And so Serial Human is that – myself at the time dealing with uprooting myself in search of "better", with the dilemma of accepting getting remoulded to standard vs stumbling around mapless, in a squiggly trajectory, among the cruft and the weight and pretentiousness of the city.
And, dear listener, I haven't found any profound answers in the years since. Simply, over time, I have learnt to let it be, and to see it as expression of some collective wisdom if I can. And in works like Chaos Crop, or ||, to let things play out, to try and capture things that emerge, to hold on to what after all these years is really a delicate truce.
Enjoy. ♪♫