synopsizing the movie that plays in my head every time i listen to nascent by alexander panos
this probably isn't as interesting to read as it is for me to imagine in my own head, but i wanted to write it down. maybe u will have fun imagining it too
This is the intro to the album, you pretty much get every flavor of sound that the album has to offer in one short burst. This is the title sequence & opening credits, where all the nonexistent animators & vfx artists would go. I imagine big bunches of text popping into existence with each impact.
This track is in a weird spot, it's the longest one & it was made much earlier. It sounds like it's in a different world, so I treat it as an establishing montage of the human world. We're introduced to the protagonist, who I'll call Alex for convenience but doesn't necessarily represent the real life producer behind the music, represented by a live action human actor for the time being. The track feels like writer's block, frustration, pounding on a desk, (the domp domp bit) pacing around the room, moments of existential fear in between the doldrums of solitude. Twilight depression montage.
Sutter begins the purely synthetic "internal" portion of the record. We enter a liminal/metaphorical space. Alex spasms and transforms into a 2D animated dog furry while floating far above a green field with too much synthetic blue in its hue. Huge wide shots of Alex's body flying backwards with the artificial landscape in the background, hitting with those massive manipulated vocal hits. The track ends with him slowing and coming to a gentle rest on the grass.
Alex opens his eyes, sees only the pure "blue screen of death" shade of blue in the sky. Abstract glitches and squiggles zap across the screen in time with the music. Alex is beginning to ruminate, represented by him drawing patterns with his paws in the sky as the track begins to pick up a consistent tempo. The glitches and patterns are played with his fingers, building in intensity until the climax shows a vast mirror that fills the entire sky approaching rapidly, and then slowing, the dog boy in the reflection growing until it comes face to face with the viewer, and then a cut to black.
Lights are out, audio-reactive abstract animations shudder into being with the synthetic voice, warping and pulsing with the track's modulations. In the moments when Alex's real voice pokes through the synthetic mush, his dog form coalesces, still blurry and struggling to become fully contiguous until the very end, where Alex sings the album's thesis directly to the camera, against a pure black background.
He breaks the mirror here, the impacts are his fists striking the surface and releasing burning waves of fire and electricity. At the end, the part with the consistent bursts, he begins clawing at his reflection, screaming, seizure inducing flashing lights imply that this hurts him too. As the track calms down, the mirror disintegrates.
This track begins the portion of the album that is trying to claw itself back into reality. He's not there yet, beyond the mirror Alex finds another liminal space, a primordial river, and as the track builds, more concrete images begin to flash into existence before crumbling again. He can't get out, he doesn't want to get out. He shields his eyes, cut to black.
This is the bit where Alex says a poem to himself and runs back to reality with all his might. Emphasize the "You flake, you human life" line, he says it with gritted canine teeth and his doggy ears lowered, resolved to claw back to his humanity. After that exalted rush of light and color passes, he opens a door, and slams it behind him.
This track is resurfacing, coming back to reality. The synthetic glitches fall back completely, icons of a city street come into existence, populating the white void in time with those guitar chords. Alex isn't visible yet, but the images are revealed to be the view outside his window. The POV shot looks down, and he sees his human hands again.
Ok, this part is so cliched & shmaltzy that it makes me embarrassed to write it out, but there's only one conclusion this story can have. The glitches re-emerge, the synthetic elements that were previously contained come back again. It's his fur. The dog re-emerges, Alex transforms again like a magical girl before opening his front door & singing the final hook, walking through a live action environment with shapes and colors from his liminal space following him. The paradox is resolved. He is multitude.
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