What Else Is There? – Röyksopp ft. Karin Dreijer

This is a repost from my writing elsewhere.

Trigger warnings? Things that could bother people: the dark mood, time lapse photography of mold (eww), depiction of dead ducks that may or may not have been real, images of buildings falling apart in stormy weather.

This spooky jam is sung by Karin, who is not the lip-syncing floaty model in the video, but rather the tight-lipped weirdo in the ruff collar.  You probably know her from The Knife and Fever Ray.  Music is by Röyksopp.

I’m posting this because levitation.  People sometimes experience a feeling of floating in altered mental states.  Whether you’ve experienced that or not, there’s something about the feeling of it that resonates with a primal part of the mind.  It shows up in a lot of art – song, visual depictions, writing.  I found the use of it in The Lost Boys especially evocative.

I feel like the way an animal learns to move is by willing itself in the desired direction and flailing its body that way until muscle learning catches up to  desire.  In order to want to move the body at all, there has to be an inherent feeling in the mind that movement is possible, which exists before any knowledge of how to make movement happen.  (As always, I could be very wrong.)

Essentially, we’re all natural born levitators.  The only thing keeping us from being able to float towards our desires is physical constraints.  That’s no small limitation – psychic levitation isn’t real or possible, as far as anyone knows.  But the feeling is there.  And maybe the limits of our bodies are the reason evoking that feeling can be so eerie, melancholy, or abstractly powerful.

And on an entirely different note,

Float On – The Floaters

This song is the equivalent of a video personal ad for the singers.
I challenge you to invent your own additional verse for the tune.