MALNEEZY made Night Time Fever while college, relationships and questions of personal worth were becoming difficult to hold together. Night Time Fever College supplies a calendar of deadlines and assessments; emotional life acquires a harsher logic when a person borrows that calendar to judge their own development. I hear the album’s central problem as one of authority: who gets to decide the pace at which a person should become capable of living comfortably with themselves. The ten-track album has a satisfying extent for that inquiry, moving through darker electronics, dance music and ambient calm. The energetic production suggests somebody actively making decisions about sound during a period when making decisions about life had become harder. My interest lies in the forms of attention those decisions offer a listener.
The science-fiction synth character of Reshaper and the cybernetic dance feel of Daydreamers establish an intriguing vocabulary for such a personal record. Electronic production makes expression revisable: a sound can be rebuilt, a rhythm redirected, a mood given a different intensity. I hear a possibility of self-invention in that process. The machinery offers the imagination several ways of occupying a difficult experience, and the production is energetic enough for the experiment to remain physically enjoyable. Yet the fantasy of an editable self also carries a demand. Someone preoccupied with personal worth could hear another instruction to keep improving the design. The pleasure and the pressure coexist in my response to these futuristic sounds, giving their promise of transformation an interesting ambiguity.
In Spinoza’s Ethics, affect involves changes in bodily power together with the ideas of those changes. An encounter can expand or constrain the possibilities of action. Reading Night Time Fever through that account, I’m interested in how the darkness of Where It All Starts coexists with the impulse to dance. Several capacities can develop at once within a complicated emotional life. The energetic production supplies a physical basis for that thought, inviting movement while the album’s more sombre character remains available to attention.
Bergson’s account of duration shifts the question towards the way experience accumulates. In Time and Free Will, successive states of consciousness permeate one another; the present carries what has already been lived. Music supplies a particularly clear example, since an earlier note remains involved in the experience of the next. On MALNEEZY’s album, an ambient passage arrives in a consciousness already affected by the more energetic electronics. The sensation of calm therefore includes a history. I find that continuity important to the record’s appeal, especially as the shifts in intensity alter what I attend to inside the music.
Artisk Lovers is my most relaxed highlight, with an ambient calm that keeps my attention unusually active. Spinoza distinguishes action, whose explanation follows from our own nature, from passion, in which we are only a partial cause. A pleasurable external influence can still organise us passively. The meditative music becomes a particularly absorbing place to consider how willingly we participate in the moods arranged for us.
My attachment to ambient music makes Sleep Until You’re Ready the favourite, and its place at the end changes my understanding of the album’s energy. MALNEEZY reveals a different stylistic possibility after so much electronic activity. The title also introduces a precise condition for returning to activity, with readiness depending on an experienced state. The word “until” still anticipates a return, however. Rest remains attached to the prospect of doing something again, which leaves open the purpose of that pause. It could prepare a person to resume the same demands; it could also allow the criteria for readiness to become their own. Across ten tracks concerned with personal worth, the moment of return has become something a person might judge from within.
A critic could turn that ending into a neat certificate of progress, and my enjoyment of the record depends on keeping its pleasures more varied than that. The darker electronics, the dance impulse and the meditative passages all deserve attention on their own terms. My philosophical reading follows the changes in what the music invites me to do: move, concentrate, become absorbed, remain still. The closing ambient turn is especially persuasive because it makes me reconsider the value I have attached to all the preceding activity. After an album made amid the pressures of college and relationships, I’m moved by the possibility of deciding for oneself when to rejoin the action.
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