Valerie Kuehne
Description: music and performance for the apocalypse
My phone switches over to slow mode on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, just west of Bedford. Spotify glitches and coughs, I want out of the car and this is only the beginning. I put on a CD: the new EP by Forced into Femininity. I prepare myself for impending continuity, I’m thirsty for it, picking at the steering wheel cover, shuffling my hair. The album begins. I light a cigarette. My eyes narrow at the opening beat, a tiny city nudges at my temples and fills the car and –
Glitches. Confusion conjures difficult scenarios – stopped in traffic, full of bugs, an erroneous paint job, this world is full of soul that I will never know.
Glitches. My astonishment feels extreme but I can’t stop comparing this coincidence to the experience of witnessing an accident happen a split second before it actually does. It takes me a few more glitches and the entrance of a vocal line to realize that the glitching is intentional but it’s too late. I’ve already entered an extreme territory where glitching is the condition for truth. I’ve driven right through it, sense data sliced open like a curtain and it turns out that this particular alternate real
Valerie Kuehne