Computer Love is a project from Baltimore producer Finn Martel. He uses his incredible skill, sense of timing and ability to sort overlapping grooves to examine the concept of eternity on his debut EP Forever. An investigation he successfully mounts with the aid contemporary digital pop's era defying melange of aesthetics, aka hyperpop.
Eternity is a concept that hyperpop is well suited to address as the genre represents a kind of musical form from nowhere, one that draws from the entirety of late 20th-century pop history with equal flare and enthusiasm, turning the past into a rotating, flat spiral of endless groove that powers the present.
Now it is fairly cliche to observe that one's creations, specifically their art, are an attempt to transcend death and somehow achieve immortality. For this reason, when an "artist" holds up the denial of death as the theme of their work, you can usually disregard it entirely and save yourself an encounter with an egregious stunt of insufferable narcissism.*
Forever is the exception to this rule. It takes for granted that most human activities, whether the observations and rituals of religion, the inquiries and intellectual rigor of philosophy, the tenderness and conscious care demonstrated between lovers, and even the conversations that happen within a well-maintained friendship, are all, to some degree, an affirmation of life, and by implication, demonstrate a hope (however faint) that the life which our thoughts and actions acknowledge and perpetuate will extend forever.
Like the diversity of human activities, the recognition of life, and its indeterminate length, is addressed in different ways throughout Forever. Such as through the slinky and hazy interchange that forms the central pillar of the wet and mellow "The Weather," where the convention of a phone call between Finn and Chicago local Ondine is used to examine the dimensions of an endless epoch as captured by an informal conversation about clouds and rain and casual plans- the momentary threaded like beads along the chain of the infinite.
The next track, "Clio," is less subtle in its examination of the impermanence of forms and consequence of change, parsing out the causes and fallout of a relationship that has dissolved due to a failure of expectations rounded out by an accompaniment of heavenly synths and an awesomely physical swath and set of '80s toms.
Later, the track "Eternity" exhibits a dark percolating contour, one which it borrows from gothic, post-industrial dance music and '10s R'nB a la the Weeknd, a combination of characteristics that illuminates the trap of chasing the abstract in exclusion of the real, a pursuit which strains one's connection to humanity, demonstrated in the song by a single repeating declaration, heralding like a scream from a dissociative nightmare, "It don't mean a thing!," emerging in the form of an acid-fried house interlude, where words become chopped and mangled as if they had been slide through a digital abattoir.
The following track, "Berlin," in contrast, feels like a parting of the clouds, the slicing of a cataract, and a piercing of the delusion and myopia that had previously held you, a personified grasping of the tender palm of a friend, the aid you need to lift yourself out of the hallow well of egotism and self-conceit that had previously held you. It represents the type of clarity that sometimes hits you early in the morning when you are in a different and unfamiliar place, a rapid onset of clarity through which you can discern, what is, and should be, your true path.
Forever has a lot to say about eternity, but its real wisdom lies in what it offers as perspective on the here and now. Life has its terminus. You will eventually reach an off-ramp. What matters about life is not how long it lasts but what all the small things that happen and are done to affirm its importance. As implied by the whistful ruminations and grateful tone of the song "Learning to Walk," the point of learning to stride is not so that you can walk forever, but rather to understand the significance of taking each step forward, and the necessity to offer others the chance to do the same.
