gr_OOves ‘n j A_ms S // O // T // Y 2o2o
nO. 1/50
“Elevation” by quest?onmarc
DV:
I’ve missed my friends this year, but we’ve had our group chats and largely kept up with an online happy hour and had a lot of video calls and occasionally managed backyard visits so like, I miss them but I also feel almost more connected to them than usual? Like if I make it through this pandemic, they get nearly the credit my family does. But. What I really miss, what I’ve realized more and more as the year’s gone on, is I miss seeing my friends at places. Specifically, music places. Specifically, bars or clubs or auditoriums, specifically anywhere where it wasn’t the videochat’s muting algorithm that we had to worry about, it was the soundsystem drowning out any human voice. I miss it so much I can practically feel the sticky floors and the miasma that settles into the space when everyone’s packing in with their winter coats on and the spit of someone trying too hard to share whatever’s on their mind. I wanna hear them! And I wanna forget it immediately after, just as they’ll immediately forget whatever I shout back at them! And I miss the communal trust that we’re all sharing the most important thoughts and our bodies are vibrating on the same frequency and we’re all experiencing exactly the same things at the same time in the same place.
But it seems like it’ll still be months before we get to do that again, so I’ve turned to Soundcloud mixes in the meantime. Their mobile app is garbage and I’ve avoided it in the past but at home, it’s easy to find a good mix and spend an hour or two transported to somewhere else. There’s some shit out there (same as anywhere else) but when it’s good it’s truly great - so much better than YouTube’s so-called algorithm, or Spotify’s payola. It’s producers and DJs who will take you on a fucking journey, and who you can truly put your faith in. I started the lockdown listening to classic floor fillers - shoutout Tom Moulton’s Labor Day 1974 mix tape, I love you - but thanks to recommendations from folks like Crystal Leww, I quickly wound up in much more contemporary spaces. And the best of the many DJs I heard all year was quest?onmarc, and the single best song I heard all year was “Elevation”, a distillation of the chaos of 2020 into three minutes of propulsive, beautiful dance music, an encapsulation of the year’s entire terrible zeitgeist in one track. “Elevation” is a place. It’s what I’d been missing for months. This is a song that starts with droning, fuzzy noise, adds a pounding drumbeat and - at the signal of an airhorn - becomes increasingly frenetic and uncontrollable, shifting every few seconds to hit a new plateau but never dropping that beat or risking a missed step. It’s simultaneously elegiac and pummeling; it’s everything 2020 was and could be; it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever heard a whole year in a single song. I want to move to this in a room where there’s no room to move properly, and yell at my friends and barely hear them yell back, and put my hands up and head down and feel that bass in a way I know my body will punish me for in the morning. It’s worth it, or at least I can hope it will be, and nothing in this terrible year has made me feel both more anxious to be back in those beautiful communal spaces, and more happy to be alive in this unprecedented terrible isolation, as “Elevation” delivers in three ecstatic minutes.
MG:
In a year full of tragedy and strife, stillness and restriction, worry and isolation, chaos in place of routine, routine in place of discovery, and moon-dictated tide of boredom in and anxiety out, there’s perhaps one small thing worth celebrating: I FINALLY GOT A SONG WITH NO WORDS TO SOTY NUMBER ONE. What’s this year to a bridge troll like me? I eat misery like it’s a kitchen cabinet filled with spinach cans. And after all that eating, meal after meal of disappointment and bodies stiff from too much sitting, I shit out this gem. Alright, onto why “Elevation,” specifically, is our wordless (not even a vocal sample, I cry) selection for the top spot. DV says it’s the whole year in both potential and kinetic energy and I’d go a step further and say that you can only accomplish something so vast and idiosyncratic with a piece of tightly structured electronic music. Even a single lyric would take “Elevation” from the realm of universal to the drawing room of multi-purpose. Here we have a world of imagination housed within a world of brutality. The production is bludgeoning, the kind of excessive force that indicates a crime of passion, but in response our bodies soften and absorb all the tension, transmuting it to movement and flailing our limbs to the beat (or around it, as the case always is when the limbs are mine.) Do we need the hurt to feel the glory? Absolutely not, that’s preposterous. We can’t avoid it, though. We can’t control it or contain it or direct it but when dealt a blow we can dance. It’s the lesson at the heart of everything from Mary Poppins to Footloose to “Common People” and “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.” But these are all ancient and steeped in a calcified whiteness that is alienating to a future world with better possibilities. The dance is up to our imaginations and that’s where “Elevation” truly excels. This isn’t a dark song for a dark room during the darkest part of the night. It’s that, too, but nestled at its core is unbound ambition, the brightness of daylight. Truthfully, it’s anything you want to hear and without the usual dull hum of everyone else’s voices your wants are the loudest sound around.
