“The internet eats the world as its denizens crave the real.”
With a skin of shoegaze, and deep malaise churning beneath, Professional Void is the first studio album in seven years by Astronauts, etc. (That is, if you don’t count the brilliant improvisational solo piano album Gestures from 2020.)
Written, performed, recorded, and mixed by Anthony Ferraro in Vallejo, the new album is very good. As the artist describes, the first half is an upbeat, distorted, and hazy “cloud rock.” By “Attractor”—the album’s midpoint—the sounds of ethereal smoke (“or is it vapor?”) remain, but things start to slow down. Side B, Ferraro says, “reaches back for earth” with much of the same crunched out aesthetic applied to folkish, almost twangy grooves that culminate in a washed out jazz guitar coda.
Engaging with Professional Void and the artist’s posts about it bring to the surface a lot of feelings and questions. Like: What is the point of making music? Or, if the making of music is an essential part of an artist’s existence, what does it feel like to promote it? Why would an artist promote their work on a social media platform known to be damaging people’s daily well-being? And why would an artist distribute it to a music streaming platform whose profits go to funding the military in the middle of a live genocide? And why would fans share the album with each other? And why would a writer on the Internet publish these words about it? Maybe this is why: Not just to enjoy and bear witness to good art, but also to bear witness to each other and our unity in repudiating the world’s so-called status quo.
See Astronauts, etc with Mare on Thursday, October 23 at Bottom of the Hill.
