After all of my shows this year I would DJ this song. Once a show ends the first 5 minutes or so are kind of a wash because everyone is telling everyone else how good it was blah blah blah then try to figure out where they are all going after this. The first two songs played are just going to get talked over. The third song will also get talked over, but people will also listen passively as it fills in the valleys of their small talk. “Calculate” was my go to song three.
After a month of playing this song for everyone once a week I realized that they were starting to learn it. It’s a longer song at over 6 minutes, and it has 3 distinct parts that all share a propulsive rhythm with this unique circular synth sound. I can’t tell if it is a keyboard of drum pad, but it has the hypnotic effect of a spiral. This is the part of the song I saw people learn first, but I don’t think they knew they were learning it. I would see them sway back and fourth and circle their hands in pattern with that sound, and their hands would intuit the big shift from one section of the song to another. I overhead someone say “Oh I love this song” the last time I put it on. It has under 1000 plays on Spotify.
Getting a song stuck in your head is an oddly intimate occurrence. Whenever there is blank space in your mind there is this song sitting on deck to stop you from thinking about how your relationship with your parents effects you to this day, or whatever. Why interrogate why you are afraid of dying but compulsively do risky activities when you can interrogate who let the dogs out? A few months ago someone was sleeping in my bed when I could not. We went to sleep together, but I woke up 2 hours later and lied there as I wondered how much longer I had to pretend to be asleep, and this song filled the valley of my morning. At breakfast she told me that she kept waking up and was waiting for me stop sleeping. I still wonder what the fuck she thought about that whole time.
