Track of the Week: AS Fannning answers the riddle of time with snythy noir tones on ‘Today Is for Forgetting’
Words cascade in the climax of the song like leaves from an old oak in an autumn storm. Berlin-based Irish crooner AS Fanning is back once again with a glowering existential reckoning set to snythy tones.
Initially, the classic Berlin disco textures feel like a departure, but soon enough, his rumbling timbre folds them into the sort of instrumentation we heard on his superb 2023 album, Mushroom Cloud. This time out though, there’s a retrofied noir spy element to the pulsing, glossy, Depeche Modey sound.
Taken from his forthcoming album, Take Me Back to Nowhere, Fanning describes ‘Today Is for Forgetting’ as being about “about the psychedelic experience, and the feeling of entering some kind of no-man’s-land between this life and the next—or another dimension of existence, not black or white, but grey.” But in a gripping juxtaposition, the song is anything but liminal, feeling fully realised and poised.
This anxiously exacting mix of a beat that feels knowable and a pouring stream of words that prevaricate creates a song to be wrestled with. Fanning provides a beat catchy enough for you to give it the endless listens its thought-provoking prose deserves. Despite the textual wealth, its structure is minimal, and that’s a masterful move that allows the songs and its curious words to flow and swell.
The silky ebb and flow skillfully matches the track’s main theme. “There’s no consecutive sequence in the way time runs,” Fanning explains. “There’s just a central character with various moments and timelines swirling all around him, and it somehow falls upon him to make things make sense.”
This wasn’t entirely fictional in Fanning’s thinking. “I read a book about octopuses that suggested one of the first things simple organisms developed was a sense of time – before they could see or hear, they had to know whether their surroundings were better or worse than a moment ago.”
For Fanning, this raises questions about whether time is something we discover or something we construct. “Our sense of time is like sight or hearing – in one way it lets us perceive something real, in another it’s just something we’ve devised to quantify reality in a way that’s useful to us.”
In short, it’s not your average pop song, and it’s all the better for that deep thinking that might have been deemed overwrought in the same ‘80s era its swerving tones revisit.
Drawing from JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, the accompanying music video, directed by Neil Hoare, places the spectral figures of Marilyn Monroe and Lee Harvey Oswald in a feverish montage filled with umbrellas and spray-painted walls.
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