Back in My Life

The vocoder effect that runs through Alice Deejay's work always carried a particular emotional paradox — a voice rendered inhuman by technology somehow conveying longing more nakedly than an unprocessed one could. This track wraps that processed vocal in a production landscape that's all upward motion: rising synth arpeggios, a piano line that keeps reaching for higher registers, a drum pattern with an almost breathless forward lean. The late-nineties trance influences sit closer to the surface here than in some of their material — the breakdown section achieves genuine melancholy before the build reclaims everything in a surge of sustained synthesizer. Lyrically the territory is the emotional aftermath of separation, the particular ache of wanting to return to something that was good before it went wrong. What the vocoder accomplishes is to render that vulnerability strange and beautiful simultaneously — the sadness doesn't feel self-pitying because the voice delivering it sounds like it's coming from somewhere slightly beyond ordinary human feeling. This is music for the end of summer, for late-night car rides when everyone has gone quiet, for that specific kind of nostalgia that attaches itself to a sound before it attaches itself to any specific memory.