“Romanticize your life,” the TikTok girlies tell you, urging you to add whimsy to your breakfast routine, spritz perfume liberally, and practice gratitude. All fine suggestions, though I’ve found the simplest way to idealize the world is just to pay attention to it. Step outside in late November, when the cold air carries the smell of distant bonfires and the insides of strangers’ houses appear to burn with light, and you might feel yourself slip into a kind of rapture. Your fingers start to tingle, edges begin to blur; you romanticize the world by sublimating yourself into it.
Alternatively, you might look to the ocean. “On our watery planet, we return to the sea for a diagnosis of our current condition,” wrote the critic David Toop in 1995’s Ocean of Sound, a shape-shifting meditation on ambient music. “Submersion into deep and mysterious pools represents an intensely romantic desire for dispersion into nature, the unconscious, the womb, the chaotic stuff of which life is made.” We arrive, over and over, to the sea as metaphor—for the unconscious mind, vast networks of information, and music, which evokes the ocean’s formlessness, the way it moves, and how it makes us feel.
Essential Mixtape, a full-length collaboration between the French producer Malibu and the Swedish producer Merely, opens with nearby birdsong, the flick of a lighter or a tape recorder, and the sound of driving: fast air, tires on gravel, a turn signal’s metronome. We hear soft voices whispering about colors: “The purple sky… The ocean blue… The fire red…” A synth pad shimmers in the background, translucent as water, as the conversation continues: “Dawn blue… sun yellow…” “No, we don’t need more yellow.” A car window is lowered, and suddenly we hear the ocean crash against the earth—a split second of chaos, fading as the current ebbs from shore.
The two friends recorded the mixtape on a trip through southern Sweden: layering field recordings with samples, airy synths, clouds of reverb, and vocals stretched and slowed to sound like angels crying. In their respective solo work, both Malibu and Merely repurpose pop melodies into moody compositions that at a glance appear unstructured—songs that ache with romance and value feeling over form. There is an obvious kinship between the wistful edits Merely posts on Bandcamp and the sample-based euphoria of Malibu’s alter egos, from her dj lostboi project to her work as belmont girl, pairing quick edits with dreamy lo-fi footage of headlights on a rainy highway, city lights seen from a plane, or an abandoned beach house being pulled into the sea.
