TUNES // Toobin – Hemorrhaging Light / Deku Scrub

Post by Misha

Note: Toobin is the project of one of our writers here at Hullabaloo (Tommy). We want to be transparent about that. Also in the interest of being completely transparent, we really love these songs! Ok, here are some words about them:

‘Hemorrhaging Light’ and ‘Deku Scrub’ were sent to me accompanied by a poem about New York from Frank O’Hara which contains the lines:

I am a microcosm in your macrocosm
and then a macrocosm in your microcosm

He’s talking about walking the streets of the city and feeling at once big and small, and it rang so true for me. It’s hard to get a good sense of your edges in larger than life places. Sometimes it feels as though they’re pressing in on every side, squeezing and uncomfortable. Other times you’re deflated and adrift with nothing to grab onto; people slip past without talking or looking around. On still other days the city fills you up with an intoxicating sense of importance and possibility; no building is too high, no street is too busy.

At the risk of oversimplifying, this pair of songs is about our physical spaces and how we exist in them. In Hemorrhaging Light we have the experience of being cooped up inside, feeling too big and without sufficient air. The song is brief and frenetic, like the rush to leave the party and find a route home through the park. But once outside the world often expands too far. In the sprawling Deku Scrub I hear the disorientation of imagining one’s self from the bird’s eye view of watchful skyscrapers, scurrying and insignificant.

In a statement on the songs, toobin’s Tommy Ordway talks about “longing for a comfortable passive existence” since moving to New York. Sometimes I wonder if that’s possible in cities like New York or Los Angeles. To fit perfectly, and feel held in place without being constrained. Or if part of what we came here looking for was that sense of being pushed and pulled all of the time. To have our nerves set on fire every time we venture outside.

Often the actual, physical experience of living in places like these, and the effect it has on our bodies, fades into the background of routine. It’s good to take a moment with a song, or a poem, to notice how the place we live lives in us.

Buy Hemorrhaging Light and Deku Scrub via Toobin’s Bandcamp here.