“Romance your life,” TikTok girls tell you, urging you to add whimsy to your morning routine, spritz on plenty of perfume, and practice gratitude. All nice suggestions, although I've found the simplest way to idealize the world is just to look out for it. Step outside in late November, when the cold air carries the smell of distant fires and the interior homes of strangers seem ablaze with light, and you may feel yourself slipping into a kind of rapture. Your fingers start to tingle, the edges start to blur. you romanticize the world by exalting yourself in it.
Alternatively, you can look at the ocean. “On our water planet, we return to the sea for a diagnosis of our current condition,” wrote critic David Toop in 1995. Ocean of Sounda shape-shifting meditation on ambient music. “Immersion in deep and mysterious pools represents an intensely romantic desire to disperse into nature, the unconscious, the womb, the chaotic stuff of which life is made.” We reach, again and again, to the sea as a metaphor – for the unconscious mind, vast networks of information and music, which evokes the formlessness of the ocean, the way it moves and how it makes us feel.
Essential Mixtapea comprehensive collaboration between French producer Malibu and Swedish producer Merely, it starts with birdsong, the flick of a lighter or a tape recorder and the sound of driving: fast wind, tires on gravel, a flash metronome. We hear soft voices whispering about colors: “The purple sky… The blue of the ocean… The red of the fire…” A synthetic pillow shimmers in the background, translucent like water, as the conversation continues: “Dawn blue .. yellow sun…” “No, we don't need more yellow.” A car window is rolled down and suddenly we hear the ocean crashing against the land – a split second of chaos, fading as the current leaves the shore.
The two friends recorded the mixtape on a trip to southern Sweden: layering field recordings with samples, airy synths, clouds of reverb and vocals stretched and slowed to sound like weeping angels. In their respective solo work, both Malibu and Merely repurpose pop tunes into moody compositions that at first glance seem unstructured—songs that ache with romance and value for the form. There's an obvious kinship between the wistful edits of Merely's Bandcamp posts and the sample-based euphoria of Malibu's alter egos, from her dj lostboi work to her work as a belmont girl, mixing fast edits with lo-fi dreamy floodlit shots on a rainy highway, city lights seen from an airplane, or an abandoned beach house pulled into the sea.
