If a demigod wanted to look at humanity, his point of view would be that of urban rooftop or aerial drone photography.
Conceptual web:
Streets are arteries and buildings are cells
Walking outside and dissociating
Dissociation/detachment
Sewer slithering
Sunyata/Anatta
Urban crawling
Summer Haze
Ketamine
Athens
Tokyo
MDMA
2020
“Echospace Liumin” by Deepchord points to a lot of things that I’ve been trying to put into words.
I felt that I was legitimized to push forward “Liumin-core” as a distinct aesthetic when I shared the album to friends and it was picked up as a meme immediately, as they independently arrived at similar thoughts thoughts I had about it. A tl;dr of Liumin-core might revolve around the semantic shift of the word “enchantment” from being connected with stereotypical rural fantasy settings to modern urban environments. Otherwise, it is the deredditification of cyberpunk - as it exists now and not as a sci-fi future.
A musical reviewer seems to have arrived independently at similar intuitions , but shies away from getting to the root of it:
Stephen Hitchell, Echospace, was asked on the obscurity of the album title in an interview on Headphone Commute, saying; “There was a small shop in a seedier side of Shinjuku called “Liumin” it flickered in neon lights and resonated with Rod in that very moment. Something about the city and the moment, after he had spent weeks conducting field recordings around Japan it was on this last night there the concept was complete, he brought it up when he came back and the title grabbed us both.
We walked for seconds. We just popped into another bar that looked a bit better, and I was immediately taken aback by this strange, almost religious experience and excitement, a sudden fondness. The red lights of the overhead lanterns, I was like a firefly, just completely drawn to it. As we sat down, I started to realise that this was Mecca, at least for me, my friend to this day just does not get the album.
Naming an album that documents Tokyo and the passion of travel after a tiny bar in Shinjuku, might seem odd at first, but I get it, now more than ever. Rod and I have had presumably vastly different nights at Liumin, but I think we have both came away with this certain je ne sais quoi. The calling that travelling and backpacking beacons out to people. The world is as small as it is large. Tokyo, the most populated city on the planet, in a city of millions, sometimes all it takes for bliss is a couple drinks, a wonderful atmosphere, and an eccentric Japanese man singing Don’t Look Back in Anger with two jocks on tour. We left Liumin, around 4 in the morning, beautiful, inexpressible feeling.
Some comments on youtube:
This is what the future sounds like to me. Ethereal, dense, somehow lush while sounding so clean and synthetic
The interplay of otherworldiness and urban life, weaving mystery into the material contemporary.
Deepchord presents Echospace Liumin
Many people seem to be arriving at the same conclusion that the abstracted urban view contains something sublime. Icycalm seems to think similarly , but associates the view simplistically with all the infinite opportunities and potentialities available in the city.
And what do these people see in the above images (or, indeed, the many more like them that are currently sitting in my hard drive)? I’ll tell you because there was once a time, not so long ago, when I used to stare at similar pictures for hours—whether sitting in front of a computer monitor, in my mind while walking the streets, or in my sleep (back when I actually used to sleep). They see excitement, action and adventure. They see a city that, as the cliché goes, never sleeps. They see a sci-fi landscape right out of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
We usually associate enchantment and the mysterious with the calm sanctity of rural areas, the serene forests, the unknown mountains, melancholic/romantic solitude. Part of the intuition is that this conception is obsolete, and that the real re-enchanment of our age is happening at crowded cities. The environment of a magical realism updated for the 21st century is the contemporary metropolis. Every neon-lit backstreet has its own tribes of people and its own occult history, unwritten and lost in time except when recounted by its participants to their friends during a lack of interesting things to say. I try to think of all the fights and arguments, the business deals, the friendships and loves cultivated, everything else that has taken place here. I like to dissociate and immerse myself in random urban locations like streets or buildings and try to think everything that has happened there over the years. Important cultural or corporate locations are especially interesting for the wide ranging 2nd order effects created: important local company offices, hard drives and documents with business secrets, a cultivated modern mannerbund, the daily rushes of dopamine and adrenaline in success and failure.
“Enter the Void”, also referenced by the review above, is Liumin-core when it offers us top-down 3rd person views of Tokyo, each city block containing spaces that have been vehicles of human experiences. Observing the windows of the apartments of a building we notice the multiplicity of lives happening all at once in it, all the people with their friends and families just going on with their lives, and this zoomed-out vision reinforces a conceptualization of the city as an organism, with streets as veins and buildings as cells, humans abstracted as neurons with simple signal input/outputs. All of this under the premonition of an emerging international digital-neural overlay, the global brain, the insights of Lain of the Wired.
Flânerie always seemed like a psychedelic activity to me, in that the sense of self is being lost in a meditative pure perception of everything happening around the wanderer. It offers time of total disconnection from normal life. Detachment unites with immersion as we blend in the crowd, unpersoned and ready to absorb sensory experience, essentially living frames from the lives of every passer-by. A walker in nature or in a small town is never truly alone, precisely because the low density of people causes them to differentiate themselves from the environment and feel self-conscious. It’s only among the mass that we can fully detach away from 1st person to see the world from a distance as the demigods do.