After graduating Oberlin College in 2022, I stayed in that small Ohio town for an extra year while living with my close friends. I wanted it to be a pleasant year, yet it was a disaster with affordable rent. Amongst other reasons, I had to deal with Ohio’s desolate healthcare system. Every day, I would be on hold trying to get in contact with someone who could get me on a waitlist to see a physician so that I could get a referral to a psychologist so that I could wait on hold trying to get in contact with someone who could get me on a waitlist to see a psychologist so that I could get a referral to a psychiatrist so that I could wait on hold trying to get in contact with someone who could get me on a waitlist to see one. I felt a sort of spiritual connection between the helplessness I felt at the time with the emptiness and repetition of the social media content economy.

JVKE is an American TikTok pop star who made a few hit songs around 2021. The biggest one was “Golden Hour”, which became my fixation at the time because of how it widespread it was and how it was promoted. His promotional videos were so bizarrely fake to me and the song was just pure grocery store filler. It’s a vague love song with no arc, some wonderful harmonies, and some egregiously caucasian rapping. He made the mistake of making a BandLab remix challenge, which meant that the stems to Golden Hour have been available for use for derivative works without licensing. I started making neurotic remixes of Golden Hour at an atomic level. John Oswald’s album Plexure was a big influence, of course, but I wanted to tune out all of the sample-based experimental music I knew so that I could do something insane.

Prelude to Golgi Hour was made in 2023 as the first step in my larger project Golgi Hour. Every day since at least February 2022, I have mutilated and plundered every bit of “Golden Hour” into thousands of small pieces that will be eventually assembled into the golden hour that JVKE didn’t deliver. This prelude was originally mixed for 4 channel audio and was premiered at a Peabody Computer Music department recital in fall 2023.

For a sample, please cue this file at 4:00