Jukebox
Matt Brand
Where does music take us?
Where do we take music?
Is it good for us and our movement through time, or a sticky psychic-sludge that ultimately traps us in the past's thickening amber?
If it’s the latter, then can we ever go backwards and undo its psychic trappings to free ourselves?
Matt Brand’s 400+ poem debut explores these questions as it moves through innocence, joie de vivre youth, romance, loss, discovery, self-sabotage, inquiry, and refined clarity. Through this, the collection investigates the dialectics of pop music and how its hauntological essence both helps and hinders our personal development as listeners moving through supposedly linear time.
Here, poems are songs—summoned spells from the past to free the reader from time and its trauma as they maneuver through the present. The book's organization mirrors an actual jukebox, where readers can select a suitable "song" for their mood or current troubles from the book's 52 "albums" of poems, complete with album artworks.
The author wrote the pieces of this collection during his formative years, and then compiled and designed around them years later, housing his own seance-like reintegration with the past in the book's very pages.
Recommended for music-lovers, Hegelians, Derridians, the suffering, the broken-hearted, the haunted, the nostalgic, Mark Fisher fans, and curious readers alike.
May pair well with Burial records, Ivan Seal paintings, The Caretaker, serial experiments lain, liminal spaces YouTube videos, Janek Schaefer, Chris Marker films and CD-ROMs, Last Year At Marienbad, Andrei Tarkovsky films, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, oldies, vaporwave, Boards of Canada, William Basinski, and practically any music from one's past.
Download the book’s Introduction - PDF (143.7 KB)
Where do we take music?
Is it good for us and our movement through time, or a sticky psychic-sludge that ultimately traps us in the past's thickening amber?
If it’s the latter, then can we ever go backwards and undo its psychic trappings to free ourselves?
Matt Brand’s 400+ poem debut explores these questions as it moves through innocence, joie de vivre youth, romance, loss, discovery, self-sabotage, inquiry, and refined clarity. Through this, the collection investigates the dialectics of pop music and how its hauntological essence both helps and hinders our personal development as listeners moving through supposedly linear time.
Here, poems are songs—summoned spells from the past to free the reader from time and its trauma as they maneuver through the present. The book's organization mirrors an actual jukebox, where readers can select a suitable "song" for their mood or current troubles from the book's 52 "albums" of poems, complete with album artworks.
The author wrote the pieces of this collection during his formative years, and then compiled and designed around them years later, housing his own seance-like reintegration with the past in the book's very pages.
Recommended for music-lovers, Hegelians, Derridians, the suffering, the broken-hearted, the haunted, the nostalgic, Mark Fisher fans, and curious readers alike.
May pair well with Burial records, Ivan Seal paintings, The Caretaker, serial experiments lain, liminal spaces YouTube videos, Janek Schaefer, Chris Marker films and CD-ROMs, Last Year At Marienbad, Andrei Tarkovsky films, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, oldies, vaporwave, Boards of Canada, William Basinski, and practically any music from one's past.
Download the book’s Introduction - PDF (143.7 KB)
