on Deltron 3030
2026-07-11
There's something kind of magical about digging into art from around the time of your birth. Things you saw the reaction to and echoes of throughout your childhood, but with an adult understanding of the context. I was a Millenium baby, and I'm always really charmed by 1999ish art looking into the future, hazarding guesses as to how the adoption of the internet will change us. I used to think a lot of those predictions were naive, but the internet has become so indistinguishable from real life at times since 2016 or so.
The thought of Y2K heralding the apocalypse was a popular morbid fantasy. Though digital infrastructure didn't collapse and plunge the world into crisis, something about the capital-O order of the 20th century did end, in a way we're only really seeing now. Early naughties culture didn't dwell on the non-event that Y2K appeared to be, but the media I grew up with was characterised by being knowingly post-Millennium. Similarly, my own early artistic instinct was defined in opposition to a stuffy legacy-media environment that I now wish hadn't been replaced by a Web of maddening static.
By the time I got old enough to seek out art, culture had well and truly moved on. It's a weird byproduct of how long a childhood feels like to live inside.
In a similar vein, I listened to Nick Drake's Pink Moon last week. I saw the CD around the house as a kid (and was always creeped out by clown tooth on the cover), and listening to it makes me dream of the life my parents lived before me. The timbre takes the shape of nostalgia itself, the vocal tones are soft and the mix is warm; the album occurs to one as flashes of childhood memories do. I've been feeling old lately, often in a bad way, but I'm thankful to be at an age to organically explore art my parents loved and use it to connect with them. I called my mum earlier to chat about it, and got a recommendation for a John Martyn album. Thanks, Ma.