idle gaze 058: slowed + reverb + collaged + blurred
the emerging creator playbook that taps into the feelings deep inside our heads.
“Can you feel it? When I look at you, I feel it too.”
This looped vocal refrain fills the cavernous, industrial interior of Berlin’s Kraftwerk building during a performance by musicians dj lostboi and Torus, performing at the annual Atonal - a festival for electronic music, back in September.
“Can you feel it? When I look at you, I feel it too.”
The repeated phrase, a loud whisper, is drenched in soft reverb, and floats hauntingly, like a mirage, on the dreamy, sonic surface of a 90s trance melody, interwoven with piano segments from 2000s era film scores: maybe the soundtrack of American Beauty, but I’m not exactly sure. Every sound is stretched out, looped into infinity and obscured in a thick fog of oceanic white noise, making it hard to tell what exactly you’re listening to.
But what I do know, instantly and viscerally, is how this makes me feel, and how it’s making everyone else around me feel. Everyone knows the feeling, but few can put words to it. It’s lodged too deep inside the vast corridors of the sub-conscious to make sense anywhere else. Trying to retrieve it to the surface with rational explanation is futile, out in the open it’ll instantly disintegrate into nothingness.
But today’s creatives have found the means to give shape to these abstract feelings inside our heads. Artists, content creators, musicians - like dj lostboi and Torus - are mastering an emerging mode of creation that’s taking hold in culture. A form of expression that has the ability to dislodge the obscure moods that linger in the vast corridors of the mind.
This emerging playbook for tapping into the feelings deep inside our heads consists of a number of editing tactics: slow down, reverb, collage and blur. These techniques have an uncanny ability to create something that feels deeply introspective and ethereal. ghostly and hallucinatory. This is the era of ethereal creative expression: a place where dream state is the natural state.
Let’s start with audio: over the past few years, Spotify and Youtube have been flooded with ‘slowed & reverb’ edits, a trend where popular tracks are slowed down and applied with a digital echo, creating a druggy, melancholic ambience. Pop songs, that would usually feel upbeat, are transformed into something darker and brooding. The normally chirpy American Boy by Estelle: now a sad, reflective ballad. The lowering of the BPM reveals a vulnerable interior below the sheen of the pop-timistic surface. As @hounddog844, a prolific slowed + reverb producer observes: “Lowering the tempo of a track gives the listener a sense of calmness and a chance to get a hold of the details that the song hides.”
Our social feeds are also now equally preoccupied with trying to get at a certain emotion that lingers deep in the collective consciousness. The pressure to post carefully edited highlight reels, carefully orchestrated backgrounds and poses is long gone. In it’s place, users begun to gravitate towards laissez-faire, blurry photo dumps and moodboard collages. The mission here is no longer to show reality, but to convey the vibe of your reality. The CoreCore TikTok trend of last year exemplified this (explored further in idle gaze 039); video montages of random, but, on some deeper level, interlinked video clips playing one after the other, designed to unlock a deeply rooted feeling within the viewer.
Meanwhile on Instagram, a new wave of meme posters are pioneering the format of so called yearnposting: carousels with words in sans-serif type floating over hazy landscapes or still-lifes, stating enigmatic truths like, “time is spacious” or, “I know that love is real”. Yearnposting is a way to weave images and text - abstract but poetic - to articulate something that wouldn’t have been possible with plain text or a single image alone. As Michelle Santiago Cortés describes it: “These posts can feel like portals that transport you to those infinitesimally small moments where the light, the air, and the thoughts roaming through your head all click into place.”
Slowed, reverb, collaged and blurred is also an increasingly dominant aesthetic in today’s movie industry. A24, the production house with a cult-like fanbase and unfathomable amounts of cultural capital, are masters of this; releasing films that unlock some sort of core emotion hiding below the surface. As a result, A24 has become shorthand for a certain movie experience, one where film is treated like visual poetry with meaning, movement and metaphors spilled over every frame. Designed first and foremost to connect with a feeling deep nestled within the viewer.
Film01, the most hyped underground film event of the past few months, by the mysterious new age spiritual substacker Angelicism01, is also all about getting at what’s happening inside our heads. The 3 hour long film, with sold out viewings in New York and Berlin, is essentially a montage of social media cuts, found footage, and vertical iPhone videos from the Downtown NYC Dimes Square party scene; an audio-visual rollercoaster ride through a certain zeitgeisty moment in time, designed not so much to be watched, but to be felt; it was described by one reviewer as “an endurance test, assaulting every sense you have.”
It’s no surprise that this desire for the ethereal is taking over the cultural landscape. We are becoming less interested in watching, listening or understanding through a purely objective lens. We are undergoing a broader shift away from the prevailing, Silicon Valley-driven ideology of scientific rationalism, entering a new chapter steered by what social theorist Zach Lamb refers to as “noetic feeling”; our sense of intuition, the “felt to be true”. Lamb argues noetic knowledge will become the prevailing organising principle for culture, a backlash to the shortcomings of explaining and expressing the world though empirical research and observation alone:
We’ve run up against the limits — political, cultural, and social alike — of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost — a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent — must be restored.”
Through this desire to tap into the sense of wonder and transcendence harboured in our inner wisdom and implicit understanding of the world, we’re beginning to organise and express ourselves through the vernacular of vibes and energy. We’re seeing the continued rise of macro-societal trends that are deeply anchored in our deeply personal, lived experience, from the continued mainstream engagement with psychedelics, emergence of new age spirituality and proliferation of therapy-speak.
In this new noetic age, we’re choosing to slow, reverb, collage and blur reality, distilling it into it’s felt experience. Songs are not music, but keys to unlock core memories. Films are emotional moodboards. Content creation is a means to process our shared reality. As
once wrote: young people have become masters of “using digital tools to figure out what it means to be alive”. And nothing conveys the feeling of being alive more vividly than a poetically disjointed yearnpost, a blurry photo reel or a slowed and reverb playlist. It can feel disorienting and messy, but it’s how you get hold of the truth below the surface.
This is DIY expressionism. Conveying feelings with the cheap tools of smarphone camera and social media editing. That is, when there is intentionality. In many instances, it's simply about people copying an aesthetic.
I feel like @Sotce 's TikTok played such huge part in the rise of yearnposting (never heard the expression before but so fitting). She had this way of posting the esoteric e-girl stuff, but underpinned with genuine 'wise' spiritual teaching (I think maybe she trained under an actual buddhist teacher when she was younger?). So much of the sound-bite, Jenny Holzer-esque truisms that are written on these images actually hold really beautiful teachings that come from eastern traditions/mindfulness and meditation. Aiden Arata's affirmation TikToks also come to mind.
I enjoyed this post as always Alexi!!