Review: Malibu - Vanities (2025)

The night is young. Gold, sweet night. The coffee swells so slowly to the bottom of the paper. All lights on in the houses. When the membrane of night breaks it leaves us no voice but to be buried in the future-- to rid ourselves of the future and be buried by it. These are the barriers to resemblance. The word ‘vanity’ comes from a root that means emptiness, that is absence, and the word ‘voice’ comes from a root that means voice, since probably a word for voice has been around roughly since we started speaking, which in that charming old tradition gives it more presence than just about anything, go figure. A whisper is the absence of a vibration in the throat and a secret is the presence of a secret. Present in the sense of current. Tides. A secret is the presence of a tide. A secret is the absence of an extra reflection on the glass perimeter of the sorry. Sorry for going vainly into that good night. It was good. It was delightful.

Kant said music is form without content, and depending who you ask that might mean absence without absence or presence without presence; in either case we have here an empire du vide. The word ‘vide’ is one letter from 'video.' Cinema is what that old bourgeois shklovsky fretted would get us too close to that eternally foreclosed angel, content without form. (Of course film is not video, and it wouldn't be until he was almost dead that shklovsky could even begin thinking about the latter, which would probably have been around when sony released the vcr for consumer purchase and vito acconci was masturbating in a gallery in soho and stuff like that.) He said: “We live as if covered with rubber.”

The contentless, the empty voice slides off of every surface; it dares not reflect off the audience to lay qualities back upon the speaker, like a coat of lacquer.

How strange: I imagine love like a lost truck. It's louder. The number of points of contact always wavers deliciously and is held. The number is indifferent. You are not the lover who I always had, have always had; if anything you are the double origin of this same indifference. No love like mine exists.

The word ‘ambient’ comes from— just kidding, how lame would that be.

Malibu is a french musician and if there’s two or three things I know about the french it’s that they have a real self-awareness re things like philosophizing and romantic afternoons, no matter how central those things are to the life of pleasure, which is another thing they tend to like but be very self-aware about, although to my mind being self-aware is itself a bit of a slutty thing to do, but anyway. Afternoons were probably invented by the french. Romance is in a certain sense a german invention and probably perfected by the italians although obviously sunsets are characteristically american and fail every time to be self-aware, only maybe ironic, which i think is different. It’s nights that are anyone’s game. At night there is not even the lineage of absence and invention— there are plums and there is the manageable wish to be held like a pose.

To rise over the interstate like a fog, like a palisade angel. The night is young but it is deep, and it is the voice of this record, from the sirens that swallow the nightbirds over the opening of ‘nu’ to the life-destroying sub bass at the end of track 9. The number of points of contact always remains and is different.

Lactonic is a word that describes a scent. There is to me some kind of affinity between ambient music and scent; both are exactly sensuous; both are diffuse, invisible, quickly dissipating objects which our language is very anemic in the wake of, at least without resorting to descriptions of other, more solid or visible objects as proxies. Though certainly people have tried, like with “lactonic.”

Kristeva, also of the french inclination, said the desire to turn back into an ocean is suicidal, because the absence that separates us from the world is the essential feature of our being. She said: "The fluctuation will be permanent." Turning back into an ocean is probably the least slutty thing to do, which is why not even the most neurotic of us has been successful at it. The closest are probably ravers, who Malibu obviously has a deep respect for, most evident in the stunning inclusion of trance music on her best “United in Flames” mixes for NTS, but also I think audible in the way some of these glassy vocals slip around over the drones— some throbbing memory of a dancefloor. The ocean is a sweetness beyond compassion, beyond vanity, anything. The ocean is a dusty fog out the CGI penthouse window. Just see the lights on. Just say it to me again.

Last week at work someone handed me a hundred dollar bill for a tip and for some reason my first instinct was to tell him to “have a blessed night,” so what the hell is that, I mean I don't remotely believe in that nor was I raised with even a working understanding of the bible let alone any of the mechanics of blessing or salvation, my mom is a jew in the technical sense but tried to convert to catholicism when she was 9 and envied the cohesion of her school friend’s italian-american family but later on she mostly did acid. My dad’s dad is recently pentecostal. Freud said that he himself never personally bore witness to the state of becoming an ocean, although he appreciated that it's what a lot of people seek access to, at least momentarily, through religion. He said: “It is impossible to escape the impression.” I make a lot of coffee and then I buy my friends’ bus tickets, I buy them a kebab too. The night is tritely, unmistakably blessed.