Matt Christensen — Home or Whatever That Is
The faint dissonance, which reverberates in these halls, is haunting me. The floorboards moan under each step, crying out in pain — or perhaps that’s a sign of relief that someone is giving them a massage after a spell of disuse.
Despite being a full house under quarantine, everything feels different. It’s the eerie calm before the hellhounds, the catastrophic storm, the band of roving baddies, and eternal darkness descends on our isolated hamlets.
We speak of social distancing — even cracking jokes about being practiced at the art. But it’s really a disservice that we only turn to our neighbors in time of need, and hole up in our homes when there is so much of the world to see and experience. But it is a frightening place, never more so than now when everything looms so large. Let’s not forget this feeling.
It’s this romanticism of the between that echoes on Christensen’s latest solo outing, Home or Whatever That Is. The distance between Christensen’s music and his words is measurable, though he speaks about a better time and place. “We Could Melt into Eachother” speaks of a world falling apart when we speak, so we find ourselves embracing the silence (“existing in a vacuum/no one understands anything”). It doesn’t take the threat of a looming illness to drive us to putting barriers between ourselves and the world outside, only to steal glimpses of its beautiful stillness outside a window as the world sits still.
Christensen’s ability to encapsulate a moment, be it a mere projection of our psyche, or the very real and cognizant present, is at its best when he mimics the spareness of our thoughts meeting a currently empty reality; a blend of desperation and guilt where we find out that after decades of tearing ourselves away from the world, what we really need is trust and truth from each other. We let the bad actors rip togetherness from our bosom. This is the time when we take our distance and make it a unifier. And when this crisis ends, we must find a way back to each other — a way to blend, mix, and melt — that finds us on equal footing and common ground again.
I don’t know about you, but I need us right now. This house of ours is empty without all of you in it.
