- Autonomous sensory meridian response, ASMR in its abbreviated form, describes a variety of audio-sensory experiences made popular via internet videos aimed at triggering physical sensations in the viewer, often with the use of whispers, intimate mouth sounds and finger tapping. While ASMR could be considered a musical experience it most often isn’t.
Sydney natives Jai Love and Jack De Lacy present an ASMR experience apart from the rest. With the former currently based in Los Angeles, their long distance, internet mediated band ASMR is kicking it old school over email and offering a distinctly musical touching at a distance. Their first release, We Can Destroy - released on De Lacy’s own Urban Cowboy Records - is aptly themed around the mediation of human relations through new technology and its various covert ideological deployments and fantasies.
The EP opens on Breakfast, a meandering synth smooth jazz instrumental centred around the audio from the iconic Breakfast at Whammyburger scene from the 1993 film Falling Down, where the dissatisfied lead inadvertently creates a hostage situation in a fast-food restaurant which arbitrarily refuses to serve him breakfast after 11:30am. It transports us back to the heyday of complaining about arbitrated relations, as well as a wider kind of psychological violence. Sonically it’s an outlier from the rest of the tracks on We Can Destroy, which more closely follow the blueprint of effect submerged vocals, clashing lo-fi synths and the distinctive percussive sounds of the Roland MC-303 drum machine laid out on Monogamy Man.
The choice of drum machine and the way it’s used lends itself to comparisons of experimental pop band Xiu Xiu, who utilised the same machines throughout several of their early albums. The music has a similarly anxious and emotional core, hinting at inspiration from darkwave as much as from internet-based outsider pop musicians like Tonetta. The repetitive chants of Time Machine or Social Media hint at this and towards a '60’s garage rock sensibility as well with minimal but effective instrumentation.
Ultimately, ASMR’s We Can Destroy hinges more on its conceptual intrigue and a variety of associations than on a presenting a clear musical goal or style, leaving a variety of brief ASMR-like tingles of modern malaise in search of a shared long distance thrill.
- Jaden Gallagher.