Miami Horror
Illumination

It's been since I was twelve years old that I started feeling indifferent about the holiday season, sometimes almost annoyed by it.

Not always, of course. In fact, in my last years of school, the holidays became a fabulous opportunity to mess around like crazy with friends, eating pizza straight from the box lying on the couch playing Tekken, trying to make the bombardino at home, complaining about the lack of light drugs under Christmas, somehow managing to sneak a kiss from someone. It might not have been much, but it was definitely better than today: here I am broke, with no prospects, and no trust in the future, standing outside a Chinese bar drinking Fernet with ice and smoking menthol cigarettes that I stocked up on abroad. "Kourení vážne škodí vám i lidem ve vašem okolí," the package seductively whispers to me. "You're absolutely right, tobacco friend, but there's nothing to be done. I can only dive into memories." And here it comes, the nostalgia. Longing for something from the past, usually never truly experienced and idealized to the point of ridicule. This tendency has always existed, even among the youngest. But if once this phenomenon pushed people to vote MSI and buy horrible calendars, today at most they spend hours watching old commercials on videotape; certainly more useful for the individual and society. I too am a victim of this fake nostalgia (the VHS kind, not the DVX one), but for this occasion, I decided to choose the period to remember on my own.

We were talking about 2010 earlier: do you remember how it was four or five years ago? We were all younger, the 'zarroni' had just started replacing electro-house with dubstep, Di Pietro was still in parliament, and bands like MGMT, Kisses, and Empire of the Sun were all the rage that then who knows what happened to them. Teenage and carefree stuff, synthetic pop, cheap psychedelia, and plenty of melody. Electropop and synthpop (but is there a difference?), synthpop and synthwave (and what about here?), electro-disco, and indie pop (which is indie with little keyboards which isn't really indie). Among these groups also Miami Horror, Four guys, obviously Australian, who "oh but do they really need to be four of them?" and they give us Illumination, a little record that in its unpretentiousness doesn't have a note out of place. And in a game of Russian dolls, we fall from forced nostalgia for a recently ended life period into the plastic nostalgia gifted to us by the four Australians who "they could come from Australia or Canada". Driving away from Miami on the highway with the dawn behind and Soft Light on the stereo. Giving in to Jamaican drugs in the back of a Beetle like in a Tame Impala video while listening to Summersun. People have left the beach and the disco is yet to fill up, and you're there watching the sunset, drinking horrible nameless cocktails and listening to Sometimes; then the dancefloor starts filling up and Grand Illusion starts playing.

Miami Horror, Illumination, 2010: it might not be much, but it's still fifty minutes of never-lived life memories.