If you are in a place, #5: Typhoon's New Record

Typhoon - "Wake" [Official Audio] - YouTube

Typhoon's New Record

If you are in a place, listen to Typhoon’s new record Offerings. (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music). I knew nothing about this band until their song “Post Script” was placed perfectly as the last track on a playlist made for me by a person who makes me feel nice things. I compartmentalized the track though, associated it only with the playlist, and never thought to check out any of the band’s other work. That is, until I got word of this record.

Since the odd and lovely time I spent in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence– where I explored, among other things, a bad alcohol habit, a penchant for sleeping on people’s floors, and writing about my childhood– I’ve been obsessed with memory.

Here’s a fun fact that I learned from an episode of RadioLab: the memories we remember most are the ones that are least accurate. It turns out that each time we recall a memory, it must be rebuilt from the ground up. And each time it’s rebuilt, the mind rebuilds it just a tiny bit differently than the way it was before. So the more you build, the more you change. A memory you recall randomly, once, ten years after its occurrence is probably more accurate than something you recall every day. Imagine.

I say all of this because Typhoon’s new record is about memory and the loss of it. And what it means when we lose the thing that truly makes us whole. This is one of my greatest fears. That one day I’ll wake an old man unsure of how I arrived there. Memories are the tendons that hold us together. What would the loss of that connective tissue do? As Kyle Morton sings on “Wake” (which I linked to above because you have to start the record from the beginning and listen to it all the way through; there’s no other way to experience this album):

My life one brief unbroken loop—goes round and round with nothing left to hold onto.