me & you by Betty Hammerschlag

This Friday, Berlin experimental artist Betty Hammerschlag released her first album, me & you, a psychedelic ode to all things radio pop. Vocal hooks repeat in unpredictable oblong loops, sounding as if Hammerschlag is randomly switching between tracks on an Ariana Grande CD. Similarly to the way that the human mind will breeze past misspellings when reading, Hammerschlag’s songs get mentally autocorrected to something a bit more familiar and recognizable, triggering a brilliantly unforgettable whiplash effect. All the while, a deep synth drone fills out the background, constructing a menacing setting that transforms this curiosity into anxiety.

By transfiguring familiar pop sounds into a menacing, unknowable cryptid, Hammerschlag creates a musical liminal space, a scene deeply unsettling yet completely mundane. Such a place repulses us. We cling to the familiar sounds in her music for safety as these sounds slowly grow spikes that pierce our desperate hands. All of this goes to show us how fragile our sense of safety is. Despite news media transforming genuine threats into mundane annoyances, as outrageous acts of violence increasingly become background noise to an overstimulated public, we still for some reason feel significantly more uncomfortable when viewing mundane objects in the hands of an inventive artist.

-Michael