Anhedonia Everything - Mike Kleine

Joe has Mike Kleine on the show and they talk about showing results, plays, video games, categorization, life, and more.

You can contact the show at noisemakerjoe@gmail.com - Just put WTR in the subject line.

Contact for Mike Kleine
Twitter: @thefancymike
Website:  https://www.mikekleine.org/

Contact for Joe bielecki
Twitter and Instagram: @noisemakerjoe
Website

Patreon

Art photo by Arielle Tipa

The artist appears around 11:16PM.
There’s smoke and fog and haze and purple lights.
The artist begins his set with what Andre would later describe to Sara as, “Soft and simple music.”
Just floating Farfisa organ sounds and scattered swatches of heavily reverbed pads. Almost like a sound check. A lot of it, unassuming.
(Let it be said,) Andre is not impressed.
And then it picks up a little bit, after a few minutes. And the music itself turns out to be pretty good. Andre realizes that in a live setting, the artist’s music is nothing like the iTunes tracks he previewed.
The music becomes much more powerful. More immediate. Visceral, even. Almost palpable.
The music is loud and enormous.
Onstage, the artist’s setup is minimal. You might never think a table with just a handful of custom synths, a Farfisa organ, some cassette decks and a few effects pedals could produce such great sounds.
Andre stares hard at the artist.
Compared to a more dynamic performance, from like, say a rock & roll band or even a full orchestra, watching one man on stage for something like ninety minutes, just pushing buttons and turning knobs might seem like an uninteresting activity to the layperson but to Andre, this was heaven.
The cold electronic blips, the distant ambient washes, the high definition surround-sound atmospherics, the languid synth swells, the deep rumblings of the Farfisa organ, the over-saturated tape hiss, the drippy cavernous echoes, the other-worldly wind chime sounds, the hazy buzzing effects, the hushed murmur and din of unintelligible human voices and side-conversations (happening), the waves of static—it doesn't matter to Andre anymore what anyone has to say about music.
This artist is a prophet!
It’s at this point that Andre begins to have a moment of higher consciousness.
He closes his eyes and succumbs to the ambiance of it all. He lets the sounds transport him to distant places.
Andre thinks about the universe, his essay, about his interminable desire for recognition, about his unrequited love for all things music, his passion for deep research, about all his failings and abandoned projects, his broken dreams, his student loans, his noticeable lisp, his receding hairline and about everything Marfa said.
He sees planets, a parallel universe with colours extending far beyond the visual spectrum, a place that should not exist (where Andre and everyone else is made of metal and archaic circuitry), images upon images of broken statuettes and floor plans of destroyed museums.
Andre sees the beginning of the universe, hears planets exploding, witnesses black holes disappearing (and then reappearing), more planets exploding, moons and atmospheres and rain clouds and dust storms and undiscovered pressure systems and earthquakes and tsunamis and interminable warp barriers.
Andre tries to open his eyes, in an attempt (albeit futile) to escape these (to him) terrible visions, (as he now feels as if he is about to have another panic attack) but all Andre can see when he opens his eyes, is fire and smoke and clouds and dust and bright lights.
And then all of a sudden, almost out of nowhere, bass sounds exit the room and what’s left is pure static, empty warped cassette tape and the intermittent sound of a fog horn, all warbled and masked and obfuscated by sheets and layers of dense pink and white noise. And then nothing else.
Andre feels like he can’t breathe.
He grabs at his face because it hurts so much.
The artist bows to the crowd.
Andre cries.