by David Wilikofsky
It’s almost the end of October. In any other year this would mean exciting things were on the horizon. First you’d have Halloween, followed shortly by Thanksgiving. Blink too long and it’ll be Christmas and then New Years. Nothing about 2020 has felt normal, and coming into the home stretch feels no different for myriad reasons. It’s been the strangest year many of us have lived through, one where social isolation has become the norm and our basic understanding of daily life has been upended. It’s a reality that’s reflected in the latest album from former_airline, Postcard from No Man’s Land.
former_airline is the project of Masaki Kubo, and they’ve amassed a sizable discography over the past decade. Postcard from No Man’s Land was largely recorded at home this year during the COVID-19 crisis. It’s a fittingly subdued affair, filled with instrumental tracks that mirror the psychic terrain of our new lives. Most tracks opt for gentle ambience, motorik instrumentals or some combination of the two; much like Kraftwerk used these sounds to mirror driving down the autobahn, Kubo uses these sounds to interrogate the introspective nature of our current predicament. Although these instrumentals form a base for the album, Kubo picks and chooses a wide variety of other sounds (from dissonant buzzing to gentle hums and squeaks) to populate these interior landscapes.
Quarantine provides ample time for self-reflection and thought, and Kubo interrogates this in different ways. More often than not it’s subtle; a disembodied voice or some discordant sounds emerges from the ether. These interruptions act like memories or thoughts flitting through your mind, some lingering and others disappearing shortly after surfacing. At other times these distractions consume entire tracks. Closer “S. Sontag in the Psykick Dancehall” is a great example, featuring a driving dance beat that cuts through the washes of ambience in the background. Vocals flit in and out, sometimes unintelligible but always encircling the listener. These aren’t sounds being experienced in real time; they all live in the same psychic plane as the rest of the album, albiet as a more vivid memory than the rest. In the end it’s just that: a memory of an unnamed club from a time that’s long gone.
Or at least that’s one reading. When viewed in another light, that closer can be seen as a beacon of hope. If the whole album is about the solitude and self-reflection, at the end we finally emerge from our stupor into communal catharsis. Maybe the haze of the past year remains, but we’re free. We’re surrounded by friends and strangers, brought together by a desire to let loose and live a little. Whether real or imagined, it’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I prefer that ending a whole lot more.