Hrdvsion - I Can't Exist

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  • Whatever it is that is singing on "I Can't Exist" is a particularly tortured example of a recurrent figure in electronic music I call The Sad Robot. He shows up in tracks like Soul Clap's "Lonely C," as well as Kanye's album 808s and Heartbreak and even Kraftwerk's "Computer Love." Sad Robot demonstrates that there's something in music about pretending to be a robot that makes it easier to shoulder certain feelings of isolation and alienation, feelings that Hrvision ramps up to Samuel Beckett levels with the words (I think) "don't want to meet you when I can't exist." Fair enough: not existing would certainly make a rendezvous slightly awkward to say the least. With the vocal's careening pitch and metallic sheen and impossibly distant choir, the tune comes off like a leftfield electro-disco version of Burial, conjuring the faces of angels moving through a burned-out basement, shafts of light leaking into an abandoned building, or the denizens of a cave world extending below the subway. "Disappearing Act" pumps up the gritty electro beats into a start-stop work-out, and its vocals seem to directly admonish Sad Robot's self-pity by announcing "there's no loneliness…" as if Sad Robot has finished wandering the streets alone and has popped into the club to lose himself for a while on the dance floor. Ada ambitiously attempts to resolve the dichotomy of darkness and light by stitching the two tunes directly together in a kind of mash-up remix that eschews electro for downtempo broken beats and mellowness that sounds like Sad Robot went to the coffee shop to write in his journal.
  • Tracklist
      A I Can't Exist B1 Disappearing Act B2 I Can't Exist Vs. Disappearing Act (Ada Remix)
RA