My overriding feeling after multiple playthroughs of Bogdan Raczynski’s latest, You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever, is that I’ve been on a time-traveling adventure. Even though these are described as ‘sketches,’ chained together they form a vivid soundworld. Each snippet is a self-contained idea, ranging from midnight, subterranean raves, and charred electronics to dungeon synth-esque introspection, bubbling arpeggioscapes, and drifting sonic mantras. Together, its layered whimsy fully realized. There’s so much music here yet it never feels overwhelming. Though based on Raczynski’s breakdown/treatise below, maybe it just leads to more questions. Either way, we’ll have a lot of fun exploring these sounds.
1. gearee
What if you had a good idea, a really great one in fact, but intentionally kept it vague?
2. newdiv
Would it still in fact be a good idea if you didn’t extrapolate it out for listeners? What if they had to do the heavy lifting of trying to determine where it might go?
3. fairalign
Is it even a song at that point? Is it an idea? What’s the difference?
4. coughyspns
Perhaps the act of truncating can elicit something new. Maybe it’s akin to playing the listener as an instrument.
5. bangsaft
I start it off, leave you hanging, while your mind fills in the rest with where you think it can go, where you would like it to go, or maybe it just falls flat on its face and goes nowhere.
6. djstus
I reckon there are so many ways to approach the meaning of music. Relatedly, maybe there are also infinitesimal ways to approach the making and sharing of music?
7. hundrecision
This singular method of an album is so neat it stinks of capitalism. Where in life do you find such perfect cohesion; The Uncanny Volley of Audio?
8. zownthram
What if a release contained snippets of these ideas that would later be opened up for free for interpretation by other musicians?
9. visionsrevisions
What if a release was actually an invitation to commune with others rather than a dead end?
10. bowgh
What if by sticking to this stale, generic, and unoriginal model we are just acting as pawns and cogs in the business cycle, fighting for continually diminishing scraps?
11. fallybli
Did you know that people used to drink mercury? And we used to use lead in wine and decorate our homes?
My hope is that in the future people will look at our time with a similar kind of horror.
12. faq
But instead of toxic chemicals they will wonder how we were so foolish to have such a toxic relationship with creativity and money.
How they could have thought anything good could come of mixing the two when the potential for uninhibited creativity available to all is capable of providing so much benefit to humanity and the world?
13. yewt
I dunno… it’s too easy to go down this well ofwhat-ifss. What remains, today is that art is consumed but ultimately not valued.
14. shttwobe
I am just thinking out loud, and though I come off as angry, I am just trying to distract myself from the myriad horrors swarming around. And frankly, I am of the opinion that if you are not angry you are pessimistic, because it means you have no hope and have ultimately given up.
15. sicksicksicks
It seems downright irresponsible and/or stupid to get caught up in thought experiments about music when there are babies being bombed.
16. deweyedair
And yet, I sometimes wonder if there is a twisted web of a connection between a lack of creative resonance and a lack of empathy and callousness and greed and destruction and stealing and colonizing and misogyny and racism and borders and eventually a disassociation so literal that even blood becomes meaningless.
17. rew
It’s stupid, right?
I have more questions than certainty. So much so that the more certainty with which someone speaks the less I trust them.
18. gauq
What do you think?
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