Welllllllllcome back everyone! This month’s roundup consists of 16 releases with fairly short reviews, and then two reviews of Andrew Hess’s 41-minute behemoth Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1 that literally take up the first two thirds of this roundup, where Ethan and I navigate the socio-political complexities of the piece’s iconography and attempt to work out what to make of it all. Everyone should read Ethan’s guest review - it’s easily the best and most important part of this roundup, in my opinion - but it might be helpful to know that the first piece is the only lengthy one. Thanks also to pocke, Fern (from the channel Branches), and banky for their guest reviews!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
The Caretaker's Everywhere at the End of Time music project is a six-album series which explores dementia and memory loss by looping and degrading samples of ballroom music from the ~1920s–1940s. The Caretaker describes Stage 1 as "most like a beautiful daydream. The glory of old age and recollection. The last of the great days." Andrew Hess's Everywhere at the End of Time aims to produce a Line Rider track series set to The Caretaker's project, with this month's Stage 1 release looping various scenes from America around the 1950s. During that decade:
Grassroots direct actions were being organized by the civil rights movement in response to Northern and Southern white resistance against the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling on Brown v. Board of Education.
The country's rising automobile industry, fueled by increasing car ownership, grew to become a major pillar of US economic power and the hegemonic mode of personal mobility.
The country was being geographically and economically transformed by the Interstate Highway System created by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which was used as pretext to destroy working-class and nonwhite urban neighborhoods to build large freeways from the suburbs which in turn accelerated migration of white people from racially mixed cities to segregated suburbs.
Hess's EATEOT Stage 1 presents nostalgic scenes of middle-class leisure, courtship, and mobility from this period of US history:
Figure 1: Stills from Andrew Hess's EATEOT Stage 1. 1) Car with 1950s-style tailfins, probably a Chevrolet Bel Air (late 1950s), and implied to be the vehicle used for transportation by the rememberer of the memories in the track; 2) Nighttime picnic with two glasses of wine; 3) Diner with two straws sticking out of a milkshake at a window; 4) Marquee listing "Vertigo" (1958 film) as the currently-screening movie at a theater with off-screen promotional posters of "Gone with the Wind" (1939), "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" (1958), "Vertigo" (1958), and "Forbidden Planet" (1956) on the wall.
misremembered
My not-quite-first reaction while watching Hess's EATEOT Stage 1 was:
This is because of the music accompanying EATEOT Stage 1 and the "Married Life" montage, as well as the visual similarities with "Married Life" scenes which I remember clearly:
Figure 2: Juxtaposed stills from Pixar's Up and Andrew Hess's EATEOT Stage 1. 1 & 2) The striking similarities between Carl and Ellie's house in Up's "Married Life" montage (left) and the house at the start of EATEOT Stage 1 (right) - right down to the shingles and window casings and gate of the white picket fence - reflect Hess's modeling of the house in EATEOT Stage 1 after the house from Up. 3 & 4) The similarities between Carl and Ellie climbing a hill in Up's "Married Life" montage (left) and Bosh riding up hills in Hess's EATEOT Stage 1 (middle & right) are probably coincidental, but the latter still reminded me of the former.
Then I rewatched the montage and realized to my horror that after watching (or as a result of watching?) EATEOT Stage 1, whose nostalgic memories match the tone of the first quarter of "Married Life", those were the only scenes of "Married Life" whose visual content I could immediately recall. I had somehow lost my visual memories of the montage's subsequent scenes of grief and regret and gaman. As Victoria Chang writes in Dear Memory:
We often speak of memory as something that lingers, that returns again and again. Maybe memory is more like a homicide, each time it returns, it's a new memory, one that has murdered all the memories before.
Those scenes I had forgotten are the parts which had made Up so meaningful and moving when I watched it as a lonely and isolated and depressed gay Chinese American kid going through high school in suburban Metro Detroit around the start of the 2010s. In the shadow of California's passing of Prop 8 and the automotive industry crisis of 2008-2010 which was economically pummeling Metro Detroit, I was aching for the promise of a white picket fence and a white husband and a white homonormative lifestyle offered by the same-sex marriage campaign talking points (almost explicitly, such as in this Australian TV ad) and the It Gets Better videos (much more implicitly) and the first quarter of "Married Life" (by projection) - a promise which was both nearly the only remaining reason I could find to keep living at the time and the thing which had seemed most unattainable to me based on what I had seen of how white gay men talked about asians online and in media. But there was no alternative on offer, so what could I do? Hence my willful and depressive retreat into aching daydreams for this american life without such unruly things as nonwhite bodies in a white society. Without such unsightly things as me. And yet -
And yet knowing that the [Gay] American Dream is really just a beautiful daydream - and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder - doesn't make the escapism of its hollow promises less tempting. Indeed, the parts of Up which I've remembered with visual detail and not just as summarized plot points are those idealized frames showing the life I wished I could be able to have: that confidently respectable 1950s-esque heteronormative white domesticity which I was told to desire and aspire to, except maybe with a same-sex marriage. If given the opportunity I'd certainly be tempted to try it on like a Disney ride or Halloween costume, to cosplay as someone who could've shared in that post-WWII optimism rather than inheriting their mother's traumas of growing up in Taiwan under the political repression of the US-supported White Terror period (1949–1992). How nice it would be to become Carl or Ellie in Up - either will do / they all look the same anyways / I'll even settle for being the miscarried fetus or the talking dog / anyone but Russell / just press the damn button and turn me white already / I'm so tired from being paranoid about any interaction I have with white strangers. If I could just sink into the numb bliss of historical amnesia, even just for a moment, or two moments, or three moments, or...
Nearly a thousand [steelworkers at Great Lakes Works] have since lost their jobs. The layoffs came at an inauspicious time for Donald Trump, who won the Presidency, in 2016, by flipping Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by a combined total of seventy-seven thousand votes. (His winning margin in Michigan, barely ten thousand votes, was the slimmest of any state.) Two days before Election Day, Trump had held a rally in Macomb County, Michigan, a national bellwether for the white working-class voters who were once known as Reagan Democrats. “We are going to stop the jobs from going to Mexico and China and all over the world,” Trump said. “We will make Michigan into the manufacturing hub of the world once again.” A Republican Presidential candidate had not won Macomb County since 2004; Trump carried it by nearly fifty thousand votes.
Throughout most of the 1950s, the big three automakers mostly earned hefty profits—but autoworkers themselves suffered from layoffs and insecurity beneath those numbers. [...] The auto industry’s instability started in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when materials shortages bedeviled the business. [...] With thousands of parts going into each car, any missing items—from seat frames to bolts and screws—could quickly result in tens of thousands of auto layoffs in Detroit. [...]
Consider how workers fared in 1950, which was generally a good year for the auto industry, with aggregate production and sales setting new records. But when the Korean War began in June, the business took a severe hit. Unlike during World War II, when Detroit became known as “the arsenal of democracy,” defense spending during the Korean War spread throughout the country to places like New Jersey, Ohio, Missouri, and California—while metals rationing strictly limited the number of cars that could be built in Detroit.
Prospective workers, however, streamed into Detroit from around the country because they heard only about industry profits, never about the problems. As a result, unemployment in Detroit was rarely under 100,000 people throughout the Korea conflict. Sometimes it reached as high as 250,000 job seekers, heavily concentrated among autoworkers.
...or you get in trouble when beautiful daydream ossifies into compulsive lie, when the escapism of amnesia takes over your life, when your nostalgia directs you away from any future which would meet everyone's basic social, material, and psychological needs for a dignified life. When your politics are paralyzed because you've trapped yourself in a fictitious past of the great days.
Figure 3: Stills from Andrew Hess's EATEOT Stage 1. 1-3) The frames at the starts of the A3, A6, and B5 memories; 4-6) The frames at the ends of the A3, A6, and B5 memories. Note that the A3 memory depicts a river which flows down a waterfall into itself.
But the boundaries of each memory attempt to create this flow only for it to be ruptured by hard cuts between successive repeats of that memory. Each cut is a discontinuity, a flow-killer, a scar in time and space. It points out the uncanny structure of the memory, reminding you that you're in a loop with no exit, a loop which was designed to smoothly enclose you but which has not quite fulfilled its purpose. It might be nice to get lost in your happy memories and lose track of time, but you're pulled back and suspended instead in only a partial sense of immersion. The hard cuts disrupt the hypnotic aim of the nostalgic memories. This conflict within the structure of EATEOT Stage 1 creates the sensation of being trapped.
I became more and more aware of this trapped feeling as I noticed what my tiger-parented and internet-pilled mind, always desperate for novel stimuli and always anxious in the background about being caught "wasting" time, would start to do after several iterations of each memory: I would try to maintain attention by scanning for scenery details I hadn't noticed (as if I were playing "I Spy" during an interminable road trip), I would intellectualize by analyzing what I was seeing in order to avoid facing the emotions I was feeling, I would start to multitask by writing notes without pausing the track, I would compulsively switch to other windows and switch back after half a second, and so on. All of these are strategies my mind has honed to cope with feeling locked out from its drive to make new memories - and this was an experience of trappedness rather than boredom, because I wanted to go back and rewatch the track.
The great sonic-theoretical contribution of The Caretaker to the discourse of hauntology was his understanding that the nostalgia mode has to do not with memories but with a memory disorder. The Caretaker's early releases seemed to be about the honeyed appeal of a lost past [...]
As The Caretaker project has developed, though, it has become more about amnesia than memory. Theoretically pure anterograde amnesia is not about the inability to remember, so much as the incapacity to make new memories. The inability to distinguish the present from the past. The cultural pathology of a clipshow culture locked into endless rewind.
As I kept rewatching EATEOT Stage 1, I found myself engaging with the track differently - I would instead start jumping back and forth between different memories after a few repeats of each one, or hover over the YouTube playback preview thumbnails for the track, or my mind would wander for a few minutes and then I'd replay that segment of the track from the start, or I'd watch every repeat of various memories with the specific purpose of understanding my emotional experiences of them for this review. I think all of these behaviors are attempts for me as a viewer to engage with these memories on my own terms, in a random-access mode where I wouldn't have to experience being trapped again while engaging with all of the many things I find fascinating about the contents of the memories in EATEOT Stage 1.
hollowed
What sticks out to me about the contents of the memories is the effect they have on the nostalgia depicted in EATEOT Stage 1. There are many things I could discuss, such as the way the track mixes disparate (and incompatible) drawing projections for different objects - even in the same frame - or the way it reuses some drawings from other works (such as the house from Pixar's Up and the conifers from Andrew Hess's previous tracks The Wild and Where the Grass is Green) and repeats other drawings across memories in EATEOT Stage 1 as if to turn them into symbols abstracted from reality. For this review I will focus on the omissions - the things left out which haunt the track by their exclusion.
Many memories in EATEOT Stage 1 seem to involve other people, yet no other living person is shown in the track - in fact, the only other animals depicted by the track are a seagull and some marine invertebrates on a beach, and the only other humans are characters on movie posters. The memories imply a romantic interest who is noticeably absent. The chaotic vibrancy of city life has evaporated, replaced by empty streets under the grids of windows in urban canyons and the distant silhouettes of towers. Even traffic has disappeared, and the few drawings of cars are all well outside the city. I imagine these omissions were also/primarily motivated by other artistic reasons, and/but they create an undertone of loneliness to the memories, as if the rememberer were the only real person left in their mental world. They are condemned to relive the happy times, but without any of the people who had made that world rich and meaningful, who had given emotional substance to those memories.
Figure 4: Various scenes from EATEOT Stage 1, fixed in time and devoid of life. 1) Bosh's splash of water from entering a swimming hole is eternally frozen in memory. 2) An empty rowboat in a river somehow has its oars held in place by...nobody. 3) Bosh crosses a four-lane highway or road with no cars on it. 4) The only other human beings shown in EATEOT Stage 1 are shown in movie posters (note the cars and the freeway in the poster for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman). 5) No other person is ever seen on the residential street in a city. 6) No other sign of human presence is ever seen in the big city, either. 7) A lake with an empty boat and abandoned beach toys (note also the strange combination of orthographic projection for the boat and flat projection for the picnic bench). 8) No farmer can be seen on the tractor, nor can any farm animal be seen in the surrounding farm despite the depiction of a barn. 9) The trolley indicates a San Francisco even more empty of people than it was in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The sum effect of the reused symbols and absences on EATEOT Stage 1 is to make its depicted nostalgia feel hollowed-out and estranged - the memories are LaCroix-ified echoes of the real experiences, compressed down to the point of losing the humanity enabled by social existence. And by depicting the 1950s and cars and depopulated cities and an alienated experience of (past) life, EATEOT Stage 1 also draws an accidental connection to the racially-driven patterns of white flight from cities to suburbs accelerated by the rise of automobiles and highways in the 1950s. This brings me to the back to the topic of nostalgia, race, and racism.
haunted
In fact, the first reaction I had while watching the first memory of EATEOT Stage 1 was, "Oh wow, this looks like how I imagine a small town in the 1950s to have been like. I wonder what it might've felt like to be a Japanese American in this kind of place right after the war, so soon after the violence of being forced out of your home into the US-run concentration camp where you were trapped for half your childhood, to be released only with $25 and a one-way train ticket after so much was taken from you, to be surrounded by white people who were fine with what your country did to you - or maybe even still wanted you gone". In other words, for me this track is filled with ghosts from the 1945–1955 decade of Asian & Asian American history.
Figure 5: Barbershops. 1) Barber G.S. Hantf of Kent, Washington (population ~3000 at the time), points to his sign which says "We don't want any Japs back here...EVER!". From March 1944, after Japanese Americans were allowed to leave the camps. (source) 2) Still from Andrew Hess's EATEOT Stage 1, showing a barbershop in a small rural town with a big "WELCOME" painted on the side of its building.
The Nisei faced additional psychological challenges during their resettlement after the war. Many struggled with the fact that they had been powerless to resist the injustice perpetrated upon them and wondered if somehow they, or Japanese Americans as a group, were responsible for their treatment. Although post-incarceration responses among the Nisei varied, virtually all avoided discussing their wartime experience. The detachment and avoidance of trauma-related stimuli demonstrated by the Nisei have been seen as paralleling symptoms of posttraumatic stress. However, Tetsuden Kashima referred to avoidance of discussion about the camps as a form of "social amnesia" that reflected not individual psychopathology, but rather a group attempt to suppress unpleasant memories and feelings.
[...] the Nisei maintained a low profile to avoid calling negative attention to themselves and focused instead on fitting into American culture. Mass likened their response to an abused child who hopes that by acting correctly he will be accepted: "By trying to prove we were 110 percent American, we hoped to be accepted." The attempts of the Nisei to suppress their incarceration memories, blend in, and "prove" themselves to the country that had imprisoned them, however, took a psychological toll. Although precise data are not available, Mass also observed that a prevalence psychosomatic disorders, peptic ulcers, and depression in the Nisei population, conditions that she considered to be negative effects of the psychological defenses they adopted.
The Niseis' postwar responses to the incarceration also had important intergenerational impacts for their Sansei children, the majority of whom were born after the war had ended. While the Sansei grew up hearing their parents refer to "camp" in indirect and cryptic ways (often as a reference point in time using phrases such as "before camp" and "after camp"), they experienced their parents' reluctance to fully discuss their incarceration experiences and sensed that what had happened was too painful to discuss. The extended silence created a gap in the Sansei's own personal history and identity development, and many carried feelings of sadness and anger about their parents' unspoken pain. The Sansei were also affected by the Niseis' efforts to blend into mainstream America and protect their children by minimizing the transmission of Japanese culture and language.
There is social amnesia as a collective condition of an abused people attempting to cope with the violence done to them; for Japanese Americans, this ended up being an incomplete process as they found themselves still haunted by their experiences. Then there is social amnesia as the collective condition of the abuser society unwilling to face the racist violence they've done to others. Given the amount of history made during the 1950s regarding racism and desegregation - with Rosa Parks and the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott among the more widely-taught examples - how are we to understand the omission of even any minimal hint of such history from the nostalgia for that decade in EATEOT Stage 1? Why is the popular nostalgia directed at that period's middle-class white suburban experience (segregated, though scrubbed of the mechanisms built to maintain that segregation), rather than the disruptive power ordinary people exercised in fighting together to bend history towards justice (a sense of futurity which feels so distant in our current moment dominated by climate change and capitalist realism and pandemic anti-solidarity)? What would it mean if the misremembering at the heart of the nostalgia about the 1950s as the great days were to disintegrate, as we might expect it to in the later stages of a six-stage project about dementia? And who is doing this misremembering? What happens to them and the ghosts haunting them as they fade out of existence? What will fill the void created by their demise?
I bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists used to say, “I am here because you were there.”
I am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two. In 1945, two fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families, including my own grandmother from her family. Later, under the flag of liberation, the United States dropped more bombs and napalm in our tiny country than during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II. A fascinating little-known fact about the Korean War is that an American surgeon, David Ralph Millard, stationed there to treat burn victims, invented a double-eyelid surgical procedure to make Asian eyes look Western, which he ended up testing on Korean sex workers so they could be more attractive to GIs. Now, it’s the most popular surgical procedure for women in South Korea. My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.
[...]
I could begin writing about buying flowers from the corner deli, but give me enough pages—two, twenty, or one hundred—and no matter what, violence will saturate my imagination. I have tried to write poems and prose that remain in the quotidian, turning an uneventful day over and over, like a polished pebble that glints in the light into a silvery metaphysical inquiry about time. It is late spring. I pick up my daughter from preschool and on our walk home, we admire the perfect purple orbs of onion flowers in bloom. My husband makes dinner that we sometimes take upstairs to our roof with the view of the train and the sun that melts its blood orange into the clouds.
I write down my daily routine that is so routine it allows me the freedom to ruminate. At what cost do I have this life? At what toll have I been granted this safety? The Japanese occupation; the Korean War; the dictators who tortured dissidents with tactics learned from the Japanese and the war. I didn’t live through any of it, but I’m still a descendant of those who had no time to recover; who had no time, nor permission, to reflect.
What if we read the nostalgia in EATEOT Stage 1 as a depiction of some pathologically selective collective amnesia on the part of American society, an attempt to imagine itself as more innocent by trapping itself in a more innocent collection of memories? Without the Cold War paranoia, the segregation and racism, the environmental degradation, the gender structures, the economic instability for auto workers, etc. (i.e. without all the problems which persist in US politics today), perhaps those really were the great days to restore America to. But don't pay attention too closely or else you'll notice the omissions and distortions and ruptures in those memories which have replaced reality as your present - and the hollowness of your beautiful daydream will leak through and you will wake up only to realize how you have irrevocably lost yourself, or else you won't wake up at all. So perhaps EATEOT Stage 1, through the uncanniness of its representation of remembering the happy parts of 1950s America, evokes a kind of horror about American nostalgia built on a selective memory unable to face reality. Even if Andrew Hess did not intend such a reading, I think the fact that his track contains the potential to take on its own life in such a way makes it more interesting.
If EATEOT Stage 1 does anything with its repetition and with the time it asks us to set aside for it, it gives us permission to pay attention, to reflect, and also to let our minds wander as we do so. My review asks you to notice how race haunts this track. But even if you draw a different set of conclusions about the meaning of EATEOT Stage 1, I think your experience of the track will be richer and more meaningful if you accept its challenge to think about what we remember and what we forget.
When I first heard that Andrew was making a Line Rider track to The Caretaker’s album “Everywhere at the End of Time”, I decided that I would wait to listen to the album until the tracks came out, so my first experience with it would be via Line Rider. Thus, watching Andrew Hess’s Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1 was my first time listening to stage 1 in full. For about the first half of the video, I was soaking in the nostalgic, romantic imagery without a care in the world. About halfway through my first watch, however, I suddenly became uncomfortable. As I continued watching with a more critical eye, paying closer attention to the 50s iconography used, this discomfort only grew, and I struggled to figure out what to make of it. Interestingly, I noticed that others’ initial reactions, especially for non-white and/or non-American viewers, the whitewashed 50s iconography was received much more immediately as horrific. So, I’m going to attempt to use Ethan’s excellent contextualization in their review above of the ignorance and violence baked into the 50s iconography, in an attempt to pick apart my own reaction and interrogate what’s lurking beneath.
Something that seems obvious in retrospect but that I didn’t realize until after my initial viewing is that the musical project “Everywhere at the End of Time” is not tragedy, but horror. I unthinkingly assumed that stage 1 would be unproblematically beautiful, romantic, and nostalgic (a concept that is itself tenuous at best, but more on that later), and that the following stages would convey the tragedy of losing someone to dementia, rather than the horror of experiencing it directly. Instead, at the heart of Stage 1 is an inability to recognize that anything is wrong, embodied as a sort of optimism borne of ignorance, the flipside of which is denial. The ballroom jazz samples utilized are achingly saccharine, so stripped of any spontaneity or swing or dialogue that they are hardly recognizable as jazz at all, despite being written and performed during the height of the Jazz Age. The music samples themselves are indicative of a mass-whitewashing of jazz (a genre with deep roots in African-American culture), and a half-deliberate misremembering of the period in US history between the two world wars as glamorous and beautiful, rather than the time of the Great Depression. Taken together with Ethan’s description of the way the music samples are edited, remixed, and presented, and how that evokes a feeling of being trapped, “Everywhere at the End of Time” (at least judging from stage 1, the only part I have listened to thus far) seems to me to be less a direct representation of the tragedy of dementia, and more a representation of a certain cross-generational denial-optimism at the heart of American culture by way of dementia as a potent metaphor.
Andrew Hess’s 50s iconography, then, serves as a fantastic match for the music - post-WWII American Dream imagery representative of the same post-war denial-optimism as the ballroom jazz samples. As Ethan indicates, the 1950s is the era most often gestured towards by conservative Americans as the time to which we ought to return in order to “make America great again”. The 50s are invoked in this way not because they were the height of peace and prosperity for the people living on Turtle Island (as Ethan explains, they were a period of profound violence and oppression), but because this was the era in which optimism-borne-of-denial reached its zenith for white America. I consider myself a relatively “woke” white person, so I think the fact that I didn’t immediately clock the imagery (or music) as inherently political speaks to the powerful ability of it to convey an almost timeless sense of nostalgia to white Americans, short-circuiting our ability to think critically. Many white settlers like myself (and Andrew Hess) have been marinated in this sort of cultural imagery from a young age, as a way of passing on to future generations the cycles of denial-optimism that prevents us from confronting the rot at the heart of neoliberal capitalism - ongoing genocide and unsustainable planetary destruction that inevitably leads to self-annihilation. The imagery remains so powerful because there’s a deep longing to replace this harsh reality with comforting fantasies - a dream of a golden age we can simply exist inside of until we eventually fade away, ignoring the chaos around us and our culpability in it.
This rot papered-over with denial-optimism is subtly but unmistakably reflected in the completed Line Rider video. In their review above, Ethan notes the jarringly-looped and yet mobius-like scenes that result in oddities like the waterfall that flows into itself, the re-use of copy-pasted assets, and the lack of human figures in any of these scenes, that all work together to create a hollowed-out feeling. My experience with these details was that they were invisible until the moment I was jarred out of my daydream, but once I started noticing them, to my horror, I found I couldn’t stop. There’s a ski lift that goes nowhere. A staircase by a lighthouse leads downward directly to an enormous cliff. Several scenes have multiple horizons, as Bosh continues to infinitely descend. There’s also a flattening of perspective - in one scene, the line Bosh is on keeps shifting in a surreal way, from horizon, to the top of a hill, to the near shore of a lake, to horizon again, looping endlessly. In another scene, the ocean shore lines up with the horizon in a tangent. And finally, there are subtle but disquieting details about the world itself. A memory of a date starts to feel like we’re trapped in a time loop after the fourth cycle. A billboard on a hill is entirely blank. Log cabins, stacks of firewood, and campfires are placed throughout a scene without the visible presence of a single tree stump. The environments in each and every scene have been quietly scrubbed of anything that might not fit into its pristine, idyllic denial-optimism narrative of nostalgia for supposedly better days, suspended in time. But if you look closely - an act which the track’s looping structure seems to encourage - you can see the signs of censorship, the marks left by an eraser tuned to anything that might complicate the American Dream, invisible signs that belie the desire return to an imagined fantasy past rather than confront the continually evolving relationship between all of us in the present. Most disturbingly of all to me (and the point at which I first became uncomfortable during my initial watchthrough) are the four movie posters from the time period, in which three women and one man are depicted. All three women wear dresses, and two are draped in the arms of another - one held by a man, and one by an alien robot. In the “Gone With The Wind” poster, the man holding the woman in his arms has had Bosh’s face superimposed onto his, both implicitly gendering Bosh themself and implying the desire by whoever the owner of this memory is to be the male protagonist, controlling the narrative by “romantically” sweeping the female lead off her feet. These are not my memories, your memories, or even Andrew Hess’s memories - perhaps this is really someone else’s imagined fantasy borne of escapist denial, and we are trapped inside.
Full disclosure: I’ve been friends with Andrew Hess for over a decade, so I happen to know that the vast majority of the subtle political implications of the imagery in Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1 was, if not entirely thoughtless, largely unintentional. Perhaps this helps contextualize why I struggled to know what to do with my discomfort on first watch. On the other hand, a quick glance at Andrew’s prior work should make it pretty obvious that he is not usually drawn to complex political themes. Where the Grass is Green, The Wild, and Run Away With Me are all delightful narratives with simple and broadly relatable themes that all contain imagery similar to Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1, so it wouldn’t be difficult to conclude that the subtle nightmare of EATEOT Stage 1 was an accident rather than a stroke of masterful brilliance. For anyone paying attention, however, it’s definitely there. How did this happen? Well, I would argue that any attempt to uncritically evoke 50s iconography in order to portray a kind of universal nostalgia is doomed to fail upon close scrutiny through a socio-political lens, especially when following the structure of The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time so closely. After all, isn’t the act of looping old memories in one’s head over and over itself a sign that something is wrong? The societal function of memory is to carry forward and pass along wisdom, not as an escapist end in and of itself! Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1 is fascinating to me because it tries to evoke a kind of pure, idealized nostalgia, an impossible task which it inevitably fails to accomplish, and, through that failure, becomes something far more interesting than it could have otherwise been. I hesitate to say it “accidentally succeeds” at political commentary, because it’s so subtle that it’s extremely easy to miss - especially if you’re watching it through the same lens through which you might watch Where the Grass is Green instead of doing a socio-political close-read. Evoking 50s nostalgic denial-optimism without a clear deconstruction of this within the piece itself is, at the very least, risky - I worry about someone’s takeaway from EATEOT Stage 1 being, “Wow, I sure do wish I could have been a straight white man in small-town America in the 1950s! Modern society is so degenerate!”
However, it’s worth reiterating at this point that Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1 is only the first installment in an eventual 6-part series. I’m troubled by it as a standalone piece, but as the first installment of a work that might go on to deconstruct the big lie of nostalgia-as-escapism, and might explore and expose the sociopolitical horrors lurking just beneath the surface of its sanitized 1950s iconography, it’s extremely well done - subtle enough that the horror is still mostly invisible, perfectly capturing the way denial-borne-of-ignorance creates a blissful fantasy, one that the viewer is nonetheless trapped inside. In fact, the audio project itself was also released one stage at a time, and it received increasingly positive reviews over time. There’s an enormous opportunity here for Andrew to grapple with these topics and bring them forward into stages 2-6, recontextualizing all this uncomfortably scrubbed-clean romantic nostalgia into… something else. Something with a point to make, perhaps. Ultimately, all art is a communal process, and the idea that it ever springs fully-formed from the brain of a genius comes from the same denial-optimism as the invocation of 1950s iconography, so I’m unashamed about my intentions here to push Andrew to think critically about where he wants to take stages 2-6 and what kind of messages he wants to send. I suppose it’s fitting, then, that stage 1 is about unawareness - a form of denial so pervasive it’s not yet recognizable. The main character in the meta-narrative of Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1 is not yet aware that these memories are a cheap facade. The question remains: will they discover the cracks in the facade and reckon with the rot at the heart of their culture and values? Or will they continue to double down on this escapism borne of nostalgic denial-optimism until they slowly slip into annihilation, leaving only their denial itself as their legacy for future generations to reckon with? Perhaps the same question applies to Andrew. Perhaps the same question applies to you, reader.
I’m finding it difficult to come up with something to say about Numb that’s not just, “This track fucking owns,” but I’ll do my best. Linkin Park was so ubiquitous in the late 2000s Line Rider community that by the late 2010s liking Linkin Park had become something of a faux pas, despite the fact that there’s a lot in Linkin Park’s body of work that’s likely worth a second look. One of these songs is “Numb”, relatable to teens everywhere who have struggled under controlling adults. It turns out that “Numb” holds up remarkably well in 2022 as an anti-abuse anthem, a rallying cry to break the generational cycle.
gavinroo538’s Line Rider release Numb is a reclamation of sorts, of both the early Line Rider community’s music choices - almost nobody in Line Rider’s early days was engaging with Linkin Park’s lyrical themes or messages - as well as 2000s-era teenage angst itself. It’s also unapologetically and unashamedly a Gavin track, combining the scribbles of No Surprises, the scrawled text of WHERE IS MY MIND???, the powerful emotional themes of at the door…, and the steady, relentless build of LOST IN PARADISE. That last mention deserves special focus - the way Gavin continues to ratchet up the tension throughout Numb is incredible. The lyrics are animated across the screen for the entire last third of the piece, but Gavin keeps finding ways to crank it up a notch right through to the end. He manages this impressive feat through clever use of cannons, enormous amounts of scribbles, and careful attention to speed and camera zoom to keep just enough of the frames on either side of the current one visible to ground the visuals and maintain a sense of blazing speed. There’s also some evocative imagery in the first half of the track of Bosh falling away from a signposted path whenever the lyrics gesture towards expectations, and some inspired moments where lyrics like “pressure” and “smothering” are paired with pinches that squeeze Bosh in a way that looks organic enough to feel like a painfully suffocating grasp. My experience watching Numb is that I start out reluctantly admitting to myself that it’s pretty good, and then by the time I get to the end I’m fully immersed, headbanging to the beat and enthusiastically mouthing along to the words. In short, I fucking love it. 🙌
You and Me feels like the final form of the beautiful minimalist Line Rider track banky has been trying to make for over seven years, ever since the release of Aria, a minimalist piece groundbreaking for its time but painfully dated in retrospect. You and Me manages to convey the sweeping emotions of Imogen Heap’s vocals as well as the complex themes of romance, longing, and jealousy at the heart of Frou Frou’s “Guitar Song” with little more than some track lines and two riders. A Love Most Ardent was already a standout in the micro-genre of romantic, minimalist dual-rider Line Rider videos, but You and Me is in a league all its own. The sensual curves, huge speed changes, and usage of a single line by two riders are all back and better than ever, but there’s also an effortless elegance to You and Me. I think some of this is due to how unafraid banky is of taking huge creative risks, like using invisible lines in obvious ways, introducing a third rider for a key story beat, and the impossibly simple ending. Romantic, evocative, and ultimately heartbreaking, You and Me is an elegant masterwork. 🙌
Do you ever watch something and think, “You absolutely did not have to go that hard but I’m so glad you did”? This was my reaction both to brian david gilbert’s music video that is the source of RGSS’s audio and the Line Rider video itself. There’s so much going on in this video, from gross hyperrealistic full-color drawings of meat in various tortured shapes, to a head-spinning number of crossfaded video layers, to genuinely unsettling imagery of a cult that seem to be worshiping what they call the “meat mother”. I feel like it would be silly for me to sit here and try to describe RGSS, especially because so much of it defies description, and because the more I attempt to describe it the more I feel like I’ll be spoiling the fun. Just go watch it, please. Join me on Sunday mornings to celebrate the greatness of the Meat Mother and follow the commandments of Angus Flanksteak. Praise be!!! 🙌
What I love most about Dance Alone is how it takes the idea that Line Rider is a form of virtual choreography and makes it textual. Throughout Dance Alone, Bosh alternates between abstractly dancing with a line using integration quirk techniques, and literally dancing through city streets, playgrounds, and parks; parkouring off rocks, trees, and picnic tables. It’s kind of incredible that for all my talk of Line Rider being a form of virtual dance, this is the first Line Rider video I can recall that is explicitly about dance. In short, it’s really good. Toivo’s ability to move Bosh around exactly as he wishes is second to none, the platforms-in-clouds scenery environments and subtle slow motion work together beautifully to convey a sense of dreamy bliss, and the invisible lines are utilized in extremely subtle but effective ways to make it look like Bosh really is dancing. And it’s a great message - dance comes so naturally to humans that it really sucks that we ever decided that it was something that it’s possible to be “bad” at. Hopefully Dance Alone inspires more people to bust a move when nobody’s watching. 🙌
In most Line Rider tracks, there’s always an ambient sense of danger – the rider has to stay on their sled to survive and at any point they could crash at a height in the music. In Stitcher’s Jig, however, I intuit that the rider is safe and going to be safe, which makes it a very comforting track to me. This is partially due to the mental associations I have with knitting. I think of it as a demonstration of love, as someone pours their time and resources to make art for a relative, a friend, someone in their community, or themselves. That art is then repurposed as a hat, sweater, jacket, gloves, or blanket, and it serves both to comfort and protect the wearer but unintentionally also reminds them of the love of its creator.
This double purpose of a knitted work is apparent in Stitcher’s Jig. The lines (which are explicitly made out of wool or yarn and end on a needle, a concept that lends itself well to Line Rider) both come together to form visual art (the video, the city) but also guide the path for the rider and protect them. In this track I imagine an entity unknown to us (or the track’s creator, banky) knitting out the track for the rider, showing their love and keeping them safe. This love is unquestionable – if it wasn’t real, the track (lines) wouldn’t exist. I think it’s that unquestionable love and the unquestionable act of kindness that knitting is that make Stitcher’s Jig feel comforting.
A delightful little Halloween-themed short set to Louie Zhong’s song by the same name, Ghost Choir sees ghostly translucent sledders dancing and singing together for a bit before one of them crashes a Halloween party of living sledders who wonder aloud if they just saw a ghost. Perhaps due to the way the post-production was handled, the choreography can feel a little stilted and wooden at times, but the story is cute and conveyed beautifully. Ghost Choir is sure to put a smile on your face, even if this review is being published in December. 👍
Alongside banky’s You And Me (reviewed above) from the day before its release, Your World is Eternally Complete is a return to a traditionalist trackmaking approach after a wave of relentless experimental playfulness that has dominated Line Rider releases in the past few months. Colour layers and post-production are stripped away and only used for a few particular moments, giving the track an intentional groundedness reminiscent of a certain transition period for Line Rider. In the video’s description, pocke says the track is “inspired by gavin ig”, which may confuse viewers since the track is far closer in obvious resemblance to Rabid Squirrel releases from 2016-2019 (Daisies, This Will Destroy You, Ruby Falls, and Falling in Love) than most of gavinroo538’s work. I think the inspiration is coming from Gavin’s approach to interpreting Rabid’s work through his own. In A Rush of Blood to the Head, Gavin stylistically elaborates on many of the simplistic concepts Bevibel introduced in This Will Destroy You to fit intimately with his experience as a person and to touch on themes of intergenerationality in Line Rider.
Similarly, Your World is Eternally Complete is exploring a relationship between new and veteran Line Rider artists in subtler fashion, where on the surface, the track genuinely feels like it could have been released in 2018, but if it hypothetically was from when I was just getting into Line Rider videos, the track would feel prophetic looking back on it today. This is because of how it interacts with the song’s lyrics, which softly but firmly encourage you to “empty your thoughts”, to “open your eyes”, and to “face the weather”. The lyrics and relaxing yet exciting instrumentation of the song remind us of the importance of meditation, self-connection, and starting fresh or re-achieving a blank slate as a catalyst for growth, discovery, and forward movement into a future we will share.
Rabid Squirrel’s 2016 track Line is an early exploration of existentialism in Line Rider. Created not long after the release of the satirical head-spinning i squared and the intricately illustrated scene of Driftwood, Line was made “in an attempt to get back to the essence of Line Rider” at a time when Bevibel was “deeply ideologically at odds with most of the Line Rider community.” It encounters this essence through posing a very simple question:
What is Line Rider? But a boy on a sled… And a line?
This direct self-reflection is not an attempt to preach about how Line Rider is being over-thought or to discourage ambition, but rather an attempt to achieve a blank slate for the mind of Line Rider – to mediate, and to feel the heartbeat and pulse and breath of Line Rider itself in hopes of starting fresh and eventually re-directing how we approach the identity of Line Rider.
There’s a drawing of one’s hand placed over their heart that appears in the opening of Your World is Eternally Complete. It’s the only piece of direct imagery in the whole track, and it’s also where the track ends, with Bosh’s body and sled becoming the head of the torso. This drawing combined with the lyrics,
you’re all you need you’re all you have your heart your mind a golden river [...] your mind’s invincible
make it crystal clear that being in touch with one’s self is a core theme of the track.
I said Your World is Eternally Complete has a prophetic quality because pocke consistently sticks to a very 2018 trackmaking style, but sprinkles little hints of our current community’s trackmaking vocabulary throughout. A few examples of these “hints” are the wavy layers of lines during the song’s first dreamy instrumental section which resemble the ending of Rabid’s Falling in Love, a section with a light snowstorm filter indicative of current experiments with post-production, and a series of branching swirls during a noisy drum fill which evoke a similar frantic chaos to the spirals in I Want to Be Well. All these references allude to visual ideas that have been used for narrative purpose this year, but in 2016, our current culture around storytelling in Line Rider would have barely been imaginable. One of the only people who might have been imagining something like it was Bevibel.
I imagine Your World is Eternally Complete as a letter addressed to past Bevibel during those years of struggle and deep reconsideration – a letter reading, “let's take over the world and do everything we could ever imagine but in a cute and wholesome way” to encourage them to keep discovering the possibilities of Line Rider’s identity and their own. And I’m not conceptualizing this weird Bevibel fanfiction because I’m a diehard Rabid Squirrel fangirl with a Rabid Squirrel shrine in my bedroom, but because Rabid’s tracks from 2016-2019 define a transition period for the identity of Line Rider. I obviously mean this figuratively with the radical shift in approach making and discussing art, but also a literal gender transition of Line Rider. In Line, Bevibel is questioning the gender of Bosh as “a boy on a sled”, and thus, their own gender and the dynamics surrounding gender in the Line Rider community, and how all that shapes the way we approach Line Rider and our lives. Given that Line Rider and its community have been some of the most essential parts of us learning about our plural and trans identities, all of these elements feel so relevant and important to a track that feels like it’s uniting generations, reaching toward something bigger and indescribable, and recognizing the past while keeping a keen eye toward the future. There’s an inescapable hopefulness to Your World is Eternally Complete that I think resonates universally, and that comes from pocke’s ability to blanket layers of emotional and historical nuance underneath one of Line Rider’s simplest forms of outward expression.
here comes the sun is the first Line Rider video I would describe as “deep-fried”. The movement is so simple that it’s almost nothing, but the presentation elevates the piece to one of my all-time favorite Line Rider shitposts, second only to banky’s BEHOLD. The realistic full-color drawing of the sun, the slow motion to create comedic suspense, the camerawork emphasizing the distance of the fall, the hilarious music sync, and the distortion-heavy post-production - pocke deploys all of this in service of one extraordinarily silly joke. I wouldn’t have it any other way. 👍
Kepler-22b is something of a surprising release from Malizma - creator of numerous precision-heavy works such as Carbon Fiber, How, and Gamification - since there are no obvious cannons or glitchy quirk techniques to be found. That’s not to say that Malizma’s excellent movement chops don’t shine through in places, but the majority of the movement is relatively basic sledding in service of a story of a kid building a telescope because they wish they could be an astronaut.
Kepler-22b is structured beautifully, with offsled dream sequences where our sledder flies through outer space, breaking up minimalist sections where the sledder travels past iconography outlining the story. Not every moment works for me - some of the story beats are a little unclear, and my guess is that Malizma is simply struggling with telling a story through visuals alone, something he’s never previously attempted to the best of my knowledge. However, there are plenty of moments when Kepler-22b surprises and delights, such as asteroids flying by to represent drum fills, a sled spiraling through a galaxy to reunite with Bosh, and a reveal of a second rider looking at our main character through a telescope. Overall, it’s a great time. 👍
mold does this remarkable thing where it presents the viewer with a visual that seems totally overwhelming at first, and then allows plenty of time to adjust to it and notice the subtle shifts in it over time. pocke takes an additive approach as the track moves forward, slowly layering more and more ideas on top of each other until mold has become a swirling, jittering mass. The combination of this with music that also consists of layered loops that subtly shift over time did an amazing job of drawing me in. It’s mesmerizing. 👍
Everything about but now we are here seems to point towards regrets around childhood - from the song’s regret-soaked title and lyrics, to the poetry excerpts in the description, to the sing-songy chorus evoking childhood, to the childish doodled drawings reminiscent of Freaks, to the simple baby’s-first-Line-Rider movement, to the blurry, choppy, sepia-tone video. As we move through the track, we encounter branching paths in the form of alternate routes for the sledder - roads not taken - sometimes ones that look much more dramatic and exciting than the path we take in the end. One particularly striking moment is a scrawled sentence in which true feelings are half-written and then scribbled out, downplaying “I love you” to “I think you’re kinda cool”. Wads of scribbles float around the screen after this occurs, having now become symbols of suppressed feelings haunting us. but now we are here is so focused that it feels like art made to process feelings around a specific something or someone, even if it’s very cagey about what or who that is - and there’s something emotionally compelling about that kind of vulnerability. 👍
I’ve rarely felt compelled to review a track made on mobile, but Yr Million Sweetnesses feels like it calls for one. The movement and scenery are both understandably rough due to inherent limitations of the medium, but Jade works within these limitations to craft something remarkably affecting. Yr Million Sweetnesses weaves rough, slow movement in a relatively compact area with scribbles of flowers, skies, water, fences, buildings, and scattered body parts. There’s a striking juxtaposition between sweetness and horror here - in Yr Million Sweetnesses, the disgusting and the beautiful exist right alongside each other in distressing, even overwhelming contrast. It’s hard to write about because it feels like it short-circuits my ability to analyze and process a work and pokes at a difficult-to-describe ache deep in the core of my being. Yr Million Sweetnesses is an beautiful scribbled mess that feels like it gets at something real, at least for me. I don’t think I have words to explain it any better than that. 👍
¡Ö, what joyous segmentætion! 🪱 Hoow mærvelous, to be-é a little wœrm, to wriggle en theë dirt. 📸📸📸 ¡¡Picture itt ñow!! Envisagé suchh earth-ly delights — süch comfoort, to be-ē surroündedd by fôod, 🍎🍎wrapped in th-e embrrace of thåt which giv-es you liife, (ALWAŸS &&& FØRE-EVER).. To be-è imbúed w/ such purpöse that me-re 🧠CONSCIOUŠ-NESS eludes youu, but motivætion (wriggle//eat//reprodúce) per-sis-ts in yr smâll-est chünks. ¡little woœrm, Yoòu have a pur-pose accomplishèd thru mêre ex-istançe! In consumptiôn, you ar-e doîng ex-xactly thàt which yr bödy requ-ire’s for süssteanace. 🌏 ¿In ur wörld, what is left to do?
¡¡¡fly!!! ¡¡¡ FLY, WŒRM !!! 🕊🕊🕊 raptúre is föund in the mel-o-dee of move-ment, of coœl æir whistłing by ùr gröss, slimy l’ill bod-eê. truè free-dom lives in the wriggle of an unencumbered wòrm. ¡¡in the MO-mentt!! 🚫📱¿would û DÆRE to compr-ess yr mind in2 a späce with nó past or fúture? ¿can yoū picture yrself unn-shackled from törmentt &&& beaût-ee alike? 🫠❤️ ¿wou-ld yôú love yrself, if you wereé a wœrm? 🪱
A clever CSS modification of the rider graphic to repurpose the scarf as a wriggling worm body is a stroke of brilliance from Anton here. I could sit here and try to analyze worm from a narrative perspective (Why does the worm fall from the sky? Why does the worm shoot back out of the ground into a tree? Why does the bird on this tree branch simply sit there and stare at the worm?) but I feel like I would be missing the forest for the trees. Bosh is a worm! That fact alone is enough to delight in. worm feels less like a complete piece and more like a hilarious demo, but as proof-of-concepts go, it’s stellar. Maybe one day creators will be able to easily create custom physics skeletons so we won’t have to resort to janky hacks like this one, but in the meantime I hope to see people coming up with creative ways to use worm-Bosh going forward. 👍
There have been innumerable attempts to copy DoodleChaos’s 2017 viral hit Mountain King, including one channel which has made no less than four different versions. To the best of my knowledge however, Spaghetti King is Mountain King’s first ever parody. It’s kind of surprising it took five years! I think this is because Line Rider comedians tend to deal more in memes and inside jokes rather than anything with broad appeal like Spaghetti King. It’s not exactly hysterical, but Spaghetti King is great for a chuckle, especially as it uses meatballs to closely mirror the beats of DoodleChaos’s original work, as well as its ending, which I won’t spoil here. As someone who liked Mountain King when I first saw it but has since grown tired of its ubiquitousness, I had a great time. 👍
Full disclosure: I pitched in to help Jade buy a laptop after her previous one broke so she could make Line Rider tracks again. I believe this was the first thing she made with her new computer, and also the first time she’d ever touched video editing software. So technically I guess I partially funded this piece. Nice.
The most striking thing about I’m Cis for me is the extreme contrast between the low-effort track, the sound of intense screaming and noise music, and the bizarrely incongruous and largely random clip art animations superimposed on the video. A highlight is when a giant arrow appears to indicate that the sledder is a “little pissbaby”. I’m Cis is the most Dadaist Line Rider work I’ve ever watched, deriving its comedy from the absurd and nonsensical, which I suppose matches the absurdity and nonsensicality inherent to the concept of gender. All this is to say that I’m Cis is, without a doubt, one of the Line Rider tracks of all time. 🤷
There were so many remarkable releases this month that I thought about skipping writing about this one. But the last time I reviewed a Matthew Buckley track was almost a full year ago, when I heavily praised King of Pride Rock. A lot has changed while Matthew was away, both for me and for the Line Rider world more broadly, and my review of King of Pride Rock is one of the reviews I look back on with the most regret. I loved that track to death when it came out, and that kept me from giving any serious thought to the role race might be playing in it, and thus I completely missed the ways it reinforced Disney’s whitewashing of anti-apartheid African music until I was pushed to think about how race shows up in Line Rider art, which I wrote about a couple months later. It’s strange, then, that this also marked the start of an 11-month-long Matthew Buckley hiatus, during which the Line Rider world has been inundated with spectacularly unique and introspective works, such as Mount Eerie and The September Trilogy, that caused a significant culture shift in Line Rider art. Summer/Storm, a work that felt gripping in May of 2021, feels almost quaint today. Sure, it’s a stellar musical visualization, but it’s not really about anything, is it?
Russian Dance is your standard crowd-pleasing Matthew Buckley fare, no more and no less. The sync is impeccable, with lots of signature Matthew Buckley movement ideas, but there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before. If you’re the kind of person who could never get enough of Summer/Storm, you’ll dig it, but I don’t know how likely it is that those people have read this roundup all the way to the end. 🤷
