Finding comfort online is often quite hard.
The internet can be a cold place, the amount of information can make us feel overloaded, the people are often distant, rude, self-absorbed. The idea of finding comfort on the cold of the web is something that is not often explored through music, and i feel that Sintel does a wonderful job of fully portraying that feeling, that journey on this EP. Finding comfort on YouTube binges, on extensive Omegle sessions, on reading Wikipedia articles, these are things that make us feel both completely disconnected and at the same time, connected, not necesarely to ourselves or others, but rather to something else, something mechanic, something mathematic and calculated, robotic. These activities can put us on a certain state of trance, a guided meditation where the guide is an algorithm, a machine, a code.
When i first stumbled upon this release i knew i had to give it a listen. The cover caught my attention instantly. I've seen that before, we all have. We're so used to clickbait that we don't know what to make of it when it's presented to us as art, as a concept. This kind of unwelcoming design would turn me away from a YouTube video, but on the case of this release, it brought me in. I was expecting a sound collage, maybe even a shitpost, a joke, but i was wrong, and i am glad i was. Literally one second into the album i knew i was in for the kind of experience i could only get from these algorithmic meditations. A sense of disconnection from everything, of absorption into the online.
In regards to the sound, "Top Ten most Epic fish of all time" is a beautiful mix of ambient and electroacoustic music, welcoming, yet conscious of its cold, vast nature. It truly is an immersive experience that can only be described as "online". The beauty of this album lies on the fact that its concept is such a personal one, such a normal one to experience on a daily basis on our hyper-connected online world that it just feels wrong to have such a lack of it on our music. It's such a human experience, yet no one has tried to portray it, to elevate it to an art status. And i'm not sure if it can be done in a way as elegant, as pure, as personal as this one.
Listen: Bandcamp