Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Album Review: Life Patterns - Bedroom Days

I'm sure you're parents, or an annoying older person of stature in your family, at some point, informed a younger you that playing video games or obsessively looking things up on the internet was a waste of your life. That same person (if they are still alive) now probably spends about 80% of their time either gaping like a trout in front of an HBO Max stream or doom scrolling through Facebook. And they're not going to like you pointing out the irony in this. Trust me. I know from experience. But seriously, I always found the accusation that interacting with electronic mediums as somehow unjustifiable to be a misunderstanding of the potential that such technological avenues provide for expanding one's horizons and honing one's skills. I learned a lot from my aimless, late-night wanderings on the world wide web during my adolescence, and rolling internet investigations driven by curiosity are still one of my favorite internet pastimes. Further, video games can teach you problem-solving skills and (depending on the games) can even help you to learn how to remain calm and think clearly under pressure. I guarantee your folks didn't grasp this back when you were a kid, and they definitely don't get it now. Especially if their like most people over 60 who get their entire understanding of the world is served to them in a regulated, low-nutrition, info-pellet form via algorithm. Technology, for better or for worse (but for me, mostly for the better), defines and sculpts the contours of your life, and your relationship to it will inevitably help to shape your understanding of yourself. I admire what Portugal's Life Patterns brings to this conversation with his latest album Bedroom Days. Here, the composer examines his camaraderie with computational technology and the nostalgia that he has embedded within him for its more antiquated forms. His step back into retro-revivalism takes the shape of synth-rock reinterpretations of progressive states of muzak and '90s era counsel title OSTs. In the present, these sonic touchstones are generally defined by their limitations, but for their time, they represented incredible leaps forward in terms of processing power and oriented the listener towards a sense of high-velocity creative thinking that seemed to scale exponentially and infinitely. Life Patterns reifies this abstract continuum at its roots with incredibly soft and pastel-colored synths and guitar lines that whiz in a wave-like pattern across your sensory spectrum like the pixelated ribbons or the flight patterns of gravity-defying geometric shapes that populate a pre-loaded screensaver. It may seem odd to some for Life Patterns to center the experience of his interactions with such stone-aged processors and graphic renderings as the inspiration for his own highly imaginative music, but it shouldn't. Technology of the era he is referencing carried with it a message of empowerment and the promise that it was a tool that could be used to unlock your innate potential. Today, computers and all manner of web-enabled machines are technically more powerful, but the dream that they could set us free has mostly disappeared. We realize now how our lives are ruled rather than enriched by what monopolistic tech enterprises offer us in terms of content curation and always-on connectedness and how these "services" intercede and interrupt our attention and mold our understanding of the world for private gain. Life Patterns actively recalls the memories of a time when technology was more closely associated with a sense of independence and appears to hold out hope that this promise of these instruments can one day be renewed.