Wasn't – Normal
Normal
Wasn't
Album
Electronic
Liam Murphy
September 17, 2024
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September 17, 2024
Tracks in this feature
Tracks in this release
The creative teams behind pre-millennium sci-fi blockbusters had a tough job. Present a futuristic world using technology that – by that society’s standards – would be obsolete. The 1990s is a perfect example of this: marvels such as the mobile phone and the internet dazzled people for the first time. With such epoch-making events, how does one make a Gattaca or The Fifth Element? How do you make something "feel" futuristic? And, past that, how do you market that futurism in an image to lure cinema-goers? How do you sell your vision of the "future"?
A quick search of movie posters from the time reveals a penchant for a cold azure blue to communicate the cinematic journeys – from Schwarzenegger's action-packed Total Recall to the goth-y cult thriller Dark City. Character’s faces or alien-looking setpieces are lit with an eerie glow. Not as alien as the neon green that had come to the fore in years prior thanks to Ridley Scott, but still unsettling and ultimately unknowable. Is it an aura emanating from the primary focus of the poster or is something unseen shining on them? The cold blue light gives little away.
It is a similar azure blue that Wasn’t paints with on Normal, a 14-track album created over the course of two years, inspired in equal parts by landscape paintings as much as by 90s sci-fi movies, combining the two in welcoming soundscapes fringed with a feeling of artifice. These two influences are evident throughout much of the runtime. There’s a tinge of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works to the release. But, whereas the Irish-born electronic legend was inspired by the rolling lands of Cornwall in his calmer work, here Wasn’t takes inspiration from the archetypal “picturesque” of landscape art and the grainy alien lands spewing from pre-millennium film.
Empty Nerve casts a porous and pulsing ambient blanket of synth, tapered down by plodding soft bass tones. A touching moment comes as we leave this landscape and are flanked by swirling pads for a short while. Further on though, keys – delivered with much more abruptness than the atmosphere we’ve settled into – play, a little one-fingered motif that seems to part-way shatter the natural ambience deliberately. There were meandering elements to the ambience, but this is sharp and stilted, shuffling in like now-dated animatronics or FX in a 90s sci-fi scene.
A similar thing happens in Origin, galloping holographic synths build an uneven but emotive atmosphere, but not before a few discordant notes float up and twang with a decidedly inexpert character. The otherwise-effervescent vista vibrates and shorts out for a small moment. These strange diversions are endearing, displaying that, although Wasn’t evidently wants to create austere passages on Normal, the listener’s experience isn’t bound by a stifling seriousness and instead enlivened by a kitsch embrace of more playful moments.
The preceding track, Remain Open, stands out as grandiose in a league of its own as Wasn’t introduces a crumbling euphoria nicked by the din of bleeps and pushing out against a relentless fuzz. Though things are kept restrained, this only amplifies the vision of the otherworldly sublime the listener is subject to. Far-reaching tendrils of blue synth hammered by relentless rain and smog. The grimy futuristic visions of 80s/90s sci-fi spring to mind clearly during this striking track.
Normal almost longs to be real. It achieves that tragic beauty that is the reserve of ambient electronic music. Emotion is communicated – achingly through sonic strokes that are layered beautifully. But, through the discordant moments and the wandering elements that settle like crude ornaments atop a fair few of the scenes, the listener is reminded of the inevitable deceit of the sound as a whole. Like a dated depiction of a lost future, a sombre unspeakable preciousness lies within.
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