Recently I learned about this god-awful thing known to astrologers as the “eclipse portal,” a weird energy gauntlet between lunar and solar eclipses during which the vibes are volatile. I had a bad feeling when I heard that this month’s total lunar eclipse—the first one in three years—would feature something called the “Blood Worm Moon,” which would appear blood-red as it slipped into Earth’s shadow. Even the name repulsed me, and I happily slept through it. Almost immediately thereafter, terrible troubles began to befall me, as if I had been hexed by some stupid moon witch.
Generally I listen to sad music when I’m happy, and when I’m sad, I play no music at all. But I make an exception for the work of Malibu, the French producer whose ambient-ish songs are sad but hopeful, rapt with wonder, totally alive. Between her pair of solo EPs, last year’s Essential Mixtape with the Swedish artist Merely, and the more ephemeral output of her various alter egos (reconfiguring trance and pop hits into melancholy mood pieces as dj lostboi, or pairing quick Logic experiments with bleary lo-fi footage as belmont girl) is an extended universe of sounds for piners, yearners, and dreamers. And if it’s true, as I’ve been told, that heaven is a place on earth, then I believe it can be accessed through her monthly radio show, the sublime United In Flames.
The world Malibu conjures on her long-running NTS show seems to exist solely between twilight and dawn. She draws from her own database of achingly gorgeous edits, where vocals are swathed in reverb or stretched to sound like angel choirs, and slips them alongside deep cuts from Orbital or Basic Channel, big trance anthems looped to stop short of the drop, whispered pop melodies that dissolve like ocean spray, or a muffled field recording of a fireworks display. Often she shares the space with kindred spirits: transhumanist guitar hero ML Buch, Dutch chillout nostalgist Torus (to whose blissful “Summer of Love” she adds her signature synthetic strings), or Casey MQ, co-producer of the year’s best pop record. (Malibu opened for a few stops on Oklou’s recent tour.) For one episode last year, she stretched a single Evian Christ song into an hour-long meditation, overlaid with thunderstorm rumbles and her own murmurs into the ether: “You and me… we share the same breath…”
The accompanying visuals are potent if you, like me, consider a desktop folder of mostly Tumblr-derived jpegs to be among your prized possessions. Over the years, Malibu’s honed a distinct “United In Flames aesthetic”—desaturated photos of sunlight sparkling on water or street lights blurring in the rain, glimpsed in passing like the scenes outside your window from the backseat of a taxi to the airport late at night. Together, the sounds and images evoke a certain feeling—sleepy and sentimental, lonely in the good way, the kind that makes you feel as if you’re on a private mission. It’s a mood that always brings me back to Burial, specifically an interview he did circa Untrue, when he spoke of staying up all night so he could be alone. “What I want is that feeling when you’re in the rain, or a storm,” he said. “It’s a shiver at the edge of your mind, an atmosphere of hearing a sad, distant sound, but it seems closer—like it’s just for you. Like hearing rain or a whale song, a cry in the dark, the far cry.”
It all speaks to a nostalgia for… a longing for… well, for what? In the author David Toop’s 1993 book Ocean of Sound, a masterpiece of criticism on ambient music, he rejected the term “background music,” pointing instead to 20th-century music’s immersive qualities. The way the Velvet Underground or Philip Glass or Slayer’s music seemed to permeate the cells and derail the conscious mind hinted at a modern yearning “to float free in a liquid world of non-linear time, heightened sense perceptions, and infinitely subtle communications.” (He paired the book with a compilation that played out like a United In Flames prototype, where songs from Aphex Twin and Ornette Coleman blended with the sounds of chanting monks or barking seals.) You might interpret Malibu opening a recent episode with Brian Eno’s Windows ’95 start-up sound time-stretched into four minutes of transcendental drone as a post-vaporwave reflection on stuck culture, or the romanticizing of a half-remembered past. Or possibly we’re all just homesick for another life.
The muffled melodies of melodramatic trance tunes could potentially hot-wire the neurons of anyone’s dopamine circuit, though it probably bears mentioning that during the late 2000s, I spent a couple nights a week frizzling my nervous system with ecstasy procured from a kindly Polish guido in Chicago’s western suburbs. The soundtrack to those days was a semi-maudlin mix of peak-time “progressive house”: Deadmau5’s Random Album Title, or Kaskade’s “4 AM,” which lived a second life as an AraabMuzik banger. Usually that was followed by Air France’s No Way Down, whose heavenly Balearic pop songs functioned like lullabies for fucked-up adult babies. I can still remember lying in my best friend’s bed at sunrise, willing my eyeballs to stop twitching while the Swedish duo whispered sweet nothings in my ear: “Just like a dream… No, better…”
So dear to me is the music of that time—pure enough in schmaltz that it horseshoes back to cool—that I almost forget it soundtracked the very worst years of my life. Now I can barely access the sadness I knew then, but the echoes of the music reinvest my life with meaning. These days, I turn to my favorite episode of United In Flames—last November’s, featuring Torus—which nearly brought me to my knees when I first heard it on the shoulder of a Montana highway last fall. Something about Elysia Crampton and Jeremy Rojas’ “Dog Clouds” felt ancient, sacred, personal:
Great dark dog clouds
Scream, screaming, barking
Along the whole Western horizon
In a prodigious uproar of mad goodbyes
To the city and burning embers
That the sunset slowly unravels in its high abyss
Twinkling remixes with perfect names (“Gabriel and Dresden’s Sweeping Strings Mix,” “Harvey’s Ibiza Sleepy Mix”) melt into Duster, Ricky Eat Acid, wisps of Addison Rae. You hear the rush of the sea, the time-stretched sighs of angels, the voice of Justin Bieber sounding like a child again, and Malibu’s own voice whispering close to the mic. In these songs, I hear my life stretch into a single moment, with no beginning and no end.
What I’m listening to:
