What's Tonight To Eternity? - Cindy Lee (2020)
“Could this be a life without love, without loss”
I was raised by the radio. I was around five years old when I figured out how to work one, and taking it into my room it became my constant companion and primary exposure to the outside world. In a family that didn’t have any particular cultural interests, the radio became my primary social influence. It was how I discovered ideas and developed curiosity. It was the radio that gave me a critical platform of knowledge and a way of approaching the world.
This is not to say that I was listening to sophisticated commentary on the latest world affairs. It was commercial radio that initially drew me in. Chart music. I was obsessed with the charts. In Melbourne, on one such radio station Saturday nights were dedicated to the Australian Top 40, with Sunday nights the American Top 40. While being fascinated by comparing the two, I would also create my own personal Top 40, moving songs up and down each week. Introducing new songs as I discovered them.
In the mid-1980s to early-1990s, and as a child, to be a music enthusiast required dedication. Without the ability to purchase music, to hear music that you liked required sitting by the radio and waiting. This led to hours of time spent patiently by myself. When my parents purchased a cassette recorder I quickly monopolised it. It gave me the ability to capture songs off the radio so I could hear them on repeat. A double cassette recorder allowed me to make my own mixtapes.
As I aged and gained the ability to be more independent, the radio remained the dominant feature of my life. I wasn’t a social teenager. I attended an all-boys school, and as each year progressed it became increasingly clear to me that the company of men was not something I enjoyed. Yet I wouldn’t speak to a girl around my own age until I was 19. So I would spend the vast majority of my time in my room. However, I didn’t gauge my independence by my sociability, instead I understood it through the expanding of my musical interests.
In Melbourne there is a path of musical development one can follow from commercial radio to the ABC’s youth radio station, Triple J - that played more alternative music – through to the city’s wonderful community radio stations like 3RRR and PBS. These stations eschew the playlisted formats of conventional stations and instead broadcast highly specialised music programmes from an array of genres and eras, presented by people with serious knowledge of the music they play.
The radio was a distinct form of cultural engagement and education because it required imagination. The act of simply listening allowed for far more interpretation than the television, and so it was a more personalised experience. Prior to the internet, there wasn’t the easy access to information on bands and musicians that could distract from the imagery you could create yourself in your own mind, or the random pieces of information you could put together from a glimpse of a band photo, or catching video clip. Music had mystique.
This mystique was compounded by the low transmission quality of the radio. Songs taped off the radio and then transferred multiple times between cassette tapes would produce a further distinct degradation of the sound. Yet this was not a negative, as the degradation became essential to the listening experience. It was the sound of days that blended into each other, the hazy space between waking and sleeping. The crackle and murmur of solitude.
Cindy Lee’s album What’s Tonight To Eternity? is built on this sentiment. A sound that sees the lo-fi quality of the recording as a feature of the listening experience. The creation of a sound that seeks to evoke a certain kind of nostalgia, one that embraces the fuzziness of remembrance. This kind of music has come to be described as Hypnagogic Pop, a genre related to the chiefly British Hauntology, and which spawned the garish 80s pastiche Vaporwave (with its niche visual subset, Simpsonswave).
Nostalgia is now arguably our dominant cultural experience. While Gen X and Geriatric Millennials may not yet be the captains of industry, they are the captains of culture. These groups are those who were culturally active in the pre-internet era, but whose teenage years – or early 20s for older Gen Xers – were lived during the crossover period. They are fascinated with this era (roughly early-80s to mid-90s), and are keen to feel it once again through the music, films or TV series that they create.
However, unlike the first album by How To Dress Well, which attempted to recreate the distant hum of early-90s R’n’B filtered through the PA system of terrible suburban shopping malls, Cindy Lee has sought to reimagine a different era, that of 1960s girl groups – a musical era that the artist was not actually alive to experience at the time, but one that has gained a certain reverence with musicians who seek to blend experimental forms of music with elements of pop. Broadcast being the prime – and unimpeachable – example.
In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym distinguishes between “reflective nostalgia” – which is aware of hardship and loss, and “restorative nostalgia” which seeks to resurrect a romanticised vision of the past. The former serves the purpose of reminder, a way of understanding the past as an essential tool for creating a positive future. While the latter tends to be mired in a rose-coloured rear view vision, and in its extreme forms seeks social structures that are in tension with modern-day realities.
Instead Cindy Lee’s music is what can be described as “revised nostalgia” – a reimagining of a past that never was. This involves an interpretation of 1960s girl groups that is far darker and more sinister than the original music movement (the experiments of Joe Meek aside). What’s Tonight To Eternity? is bleak, eerie and confrontational. Its hooks often compete with abstract noise and distortion, with the album at times being both elegant and off-kilter.
The collapse into a wall of feedback on I Want You To Suffer would seem like the self-sabotage of an otherwise astonishing pop song without understanding this conceptual framework. While the wistful filmic strings on The Limit are purposefully recorded too loud to create audio peaking, and they seem to float above a song that feels like it being both constructed and deconstructed simultaneously. It is an album that is committed to the details of a clouded recollection, while also creating a distinct re-imagining of the past.
Returning to Melbourne in May 2021 after six months in Iceland, I was required to spend two weeks in hotel quarantine due to Australia’s Covid-19 protocols. This enforced solitude felt reminiscent of my childhood with days alone with the radio. I had only discovered What’s Tonight To Eternity? several days before leaving Reykjavík and both the sound and the sentiment of the album was intensified by the setting. Playing the album on repeat as I drifted in and out of sleep due to both jet-lag and the need to kill time.
Not that I found the quarantine difficult. In fact, I felt preconditioned for such extraordinary circumstances. Although I have friends, I have never been in a romantic relationship. I’ve never thought it could be possible. I haven’t had either the instinct or expectation that forming such a relationship would be a natural part of my life. This is partially due to the learned solitary behaviour from my youth, and partially due to considering a relationship to be a privilege that I could never justify.
Despite this, I don’t think I have ever felt lonely. Of course, one would have needed to experience love and connection to truly understand loneliness. It only exists in symbiosis with its opposite. And loneliness can also be relative. Highly sociable people can feel lonely in mere hours by themselves, whereas I can easily go a week without speaking to another person. Yet I would not consider myself a misanthrope.
Loneliness for Hannah Arendt was a particular way of being, something she distinguished from solitude. For Arendt, solitude was necessary to be able to engage in an internal dialogue. It was what allowed people to forge independent and creative thought. It was how people fostered empathy. Arendt believed that “living together with others begins with living together with oneself.”
Loneliness, on the other hand, was the very opposite. It was a lack of empathy, an inability to think complex thoughts, to weigh options and perspectives. It was an avoidance of commonality, and therefore devoid of conscience. Arendt believed that loneliness was tied intrinsically to ideology; the need to submit oneself to the ideas of others. One may feel the need to belong to a group, but this was distinct from being civic.
Yet solitude cannot be an absolute. If one is entirely solitary then it prevents the lessons drawn from contemplation from being implemented. To be civic requires actual civic engagement. This is where I find myself, not lonely, but not civic either. Stuck instead within a ruminating purgatory. It’s a state that attracts me to albums like What’s Tonight To Eternity? – where reflective, restorative, and revised nostalgia all compete for ascendency, because lived experience seems out of reach.
This is how nostalgia becomes a defence mechanism, because even within reflective nostalgia the pull of romanticism is strong. So while my attachment to the radio was sincere and highly formative, it was also driven by external pressures. An unstable home environment meant that being alone in my room was less a choice and more of a necessity. The radio became my way of adjusting to this reality. I can claim that this was formative in a positive way in terms of the expanded horizons I feel I have from my interest in music, but it was only developed in response to a negative. A negative that still dictates the way I live decades later.