❝Everything Always Changes, For We’re Truly Here❞
❝Everything Always Changes, For We’re Truly Here❞
Some albums you listen to. Others you sort of drift into, without really knowing where you’re going or how you got there. Lauren Duffus’s Everything Always Changes, For We’re Truly Here feels like the latter.
I first came across Lauren’s work through Bianca Scout, whose own music has a way of pulling you into its strange, otherworldly orbit. So discovering this collaboration felt like following a thread and seeing where it led. And what an interesting place to end up.
A collaboration between 2K88, Lauren Duffus, Rainy Miller and Bianca Scout, the album is strange, beautiful, a little unsettling and not especially interested in explaining itself. Which, honestly, is part of the appeal.
I keep coming back to the title. Everything Always Changes, For We’re Truly Here. There’s something quite lovely about it, isn't there? A reminder that nothing stays the same, that we're all just passing through things, people, places, versions of ourselves. And that perhaps the whole point isn't to hold on too tightly, but to be here while it lasts.
The music feels a bit like that, too… It's hazy and disjointed in places, with vocals that seem to appear out of nowhere and then disappear just as you're getting attached to them. There are moments that feel almost intimate, followed by something darker, heavier or so abstract that you stop trying to make sense of it. Electronic textures, bass, fragments of melody and voices float in and out of one another. Sometimes it feels like listening to a conversation from another room. Sometimes like remembering something that may or may not have happened.
And Lauren's voice! There's something about the way she uses it that I find mesmerising. It doesn't always feel as though she's singing to you. Sometimes she's somewhere inside the music, becoming part of the atmosphere rather than sitting on top of it. You catch a phrase, a feeling, a little flicker of something recognisable, and then it's gone, vulnerable, ephemeral.
I like music that leaves me a plenty of room to think. Music that doesn't insist on telling me what it means or how I should feel about it and this album does that beautifully. It can be disorientating, and there are moments when the atmosphere matters more than the melody, but I don't think everything needs to resolve itself into something neat and understandable, life rarely does after all.
There’s a disconcerting impermanence running through it all, gluing it together
Maybe I'm reading too much into it. Maybe that's the beauty of an album like this. You bring your own thoughts, your own memories, whatever happens to be going on in your head that day, and the music gives them somewhere to go.
It's not necessarily an album for every mood, or even every listener. But for those moments when you're feeling a little disconnected/dissociated from everything, or perhaps a little too aware of everything, it commands you to sit your ass down and it makes for interesting, disquieting company.
And perhaps that's enough… just to be here for a while. Listening. Feeling something. Letting it change.
