Magdalena Bay – Mercurial World

Wonder when the neon-lit late night drive entered our collective daydreams. Wonder when its now standardised images began to infest our streaming platforms, infecting them with thousands of late night drive playlists populated entirely by reverb-drenched vocals + soft synths over a pulsing bassine and a boom-bam kick-snare beat. What would an armchair-clad pop psychophilosopher type make of our collective imagining of streetlamps and stop signs speeding past trapezoidal windows at a hundred kilometers per hour? Millions of wheeled single-occupant monasteries speeding from an apartment to nowhere and back, past rooms of people with opinions on bottom lines, Kafka, and San Francisco’s real estate bubble. And what would such a grey-haired pipe-smoker think separated such late-night drives from the daily commute or the interstate roadtrip as he browsed the spread at his local tobacconists’?

Perhaps he would think of it as a liminal space between all that was and all that might be. A sort of suspended state for life and all its preoccupations. A meditative pursuit of catharsis between the activation of a clutch and the firing of an accelerator. Hands on a steering wheel, a never-ending series of forks on a never-ending series of roads, a seemingly infinite night, the inevitable return to the womb-like four walls of home. The illusion of control, the illusion of choice, the illusion of timelessness, the illusion of security. Exploring without risk of losing one’s way, all the while fighting off thoughts of an impending Wednesday, silently repeating – not yet.

Wonder what it is about the soundtrack of this dreamstate that transforms a flimsy plastic chair in the corner of a sheesha café into a bucket seat and a safety belt racing into the night? Perhaps the aforementioned tweed-clad anachronism would link the image of a late night drive to eighties Hollywood, with its pictures of bright cars being driven through dimly lit midnight streets, soundtracked by the music of the age – synths and vocals soaked in reverb, the subby kick sound of a drum machine, and its chunky snare drum. Perhaps he would think of movies like Less Than Zero as being the source of our shared reveries of long late-night drives, and albums like Magdalena Bay’s Mercurial as being lost soundtracks to these myths.