Just a week after Minneapolis producer Recycle Culture's 18-min. dive into balearic ambience, Drown Me Up, he returns with In Transit II, the sequel to his best non-Taylor-Swift-remix release to date, imo. Downtempo zone-outs are his forte—the type of music to act as a support system for life—and In Transit II begs to be paired with a good book. In my case, today, it's been Frederick Barthelme's Waveland. I only recently found out about the author, and have been more or less swallowing whole his novels from the past few decades. My favorite passage is below the album stream, retyped for posterity as I'm prone to do.
Download: Recycle Culture's In Transit II
Each day after [his ex-wife's] sudden departure with his brother, Vaughn felt a little better, a little cleaner, a little more relieved and comfortable. He was still surprised, too, but mostly he felt unlatched from a responsibility that he hadn't really wanted in the first place. Some kind of ease had settled on him and replaced everything that had been getting at him since the night of his birthday dinner at the Palomino Restaurant or maybe before that, maybe even since the divorce. Maybe even before that. When you live with a woman for a long time, after a while you make a lot of excuses for what you don't feel, but unless you're a fool you don't believe the woman is at fault. It's that the world changes beneath your feet. Things go slow at first and the change is so small that it's almost imperceptible, and you pay it no mind. And then, years later, the change seems huge and it seems to have occurred overnight. Suddenly you aren't the person you were. And then, where once you thought not wanting what you used to want was punishment, suddenly you think it may be a blessing.And things stand still.
You watch the moon reflected on the swarming gulf water, and you think, That's enough. That's all I want. I just want to sit on this broken-down deck on this night in this cool weather with this breeze blowing over me and watch this moon lift into the sky—remarkably oval, remarkably pearly, remarkably aloft. And you want to think this in just these words, and you know the words aren't right, they aren't even close, and that doesn't matter. The deal is that it's just the moon in the sky reflected on the gulf, the water hissing and receding, and you're in the middle of it, and you're just a small part, an unimportant part, but a part nonetheless. Your job is to be there so the moon can hit something when it shines at the earth. You are something to hit. And that's the way it is for the rest of the world, too. What people say and what they think, who they are, what they think about you, what they ask of you, what you want, what you give them does not matter. It's that way for everything—the sounds of the night, the breeze on the back of your hand, on your knee, the shoe hanging off your foot, the pressure of the plastic chair against your elbow or your forearm, the sound of the light waves falling on the beach, the twinkle of the lights on the oil platforms offshore, the smells, all the stars in the sky, the shadows that crawl past—you're something to hit. You're a receiver. You're an antenna.
(Buy Waveland here.)