Each Measure Feature: FHMY

FEATURE

FHMY’s influences are spread across the tapestry of his debut LP like an amnesiac might spread photos from their past across their bedroom floor—in hopes of reconstructing their own history. The ten tracks that comprise The World You Grew Up In No Longer Exists are littered with touchpoints from his artistic journey. The record begins and ends with references to two pillars of the emo and post-rock movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: American Football and The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die.

The album’s opening track, Egyptian Football, serves as a nod to FHMY’s home country and the American emo band American Football. With the savvy of a great curator, FHMY weaves together elements of math-rock and samples taken from the video games he played as a child in order to depict his attempt to recapture a sense of place and identity. “Memories,” he sings, “of spending 20 with you / are long gone.”

FHMY carries this idea of lost memories into the album’s second track, memoriesyouwillneverfeelagain, which ends with a sampled recitation of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem “Life, Life,” as heard in the master Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. FHMY’s allusion to Mirror, a film in which the aging protagonist reflects on his life’s memories in a stream-of-consciousness manner, is appropriate, as it mirrors the reconstructive work FHMY is attempting with this record. It’s a highly effective sequence in the album, as the meditative recitation is layered over FHMY’s lush post-rock stylings, ushering the listener into a period of introspection.

There is a line in the poem “Life, Life,” written in Russian, which, translated into English, reads:

“Death does not exist. / Everyone’s immortal. Everything is too. / No point in fearing death at seventeen, / Or seventy.”

It’s here, in the closing moments of memoriesyouwillneverfeelagain, that we begin to get a sense of FHMY’s purpose in this album’s composition. Despite Tarkovsky’s confidence, as we perceive it via the poem “Life, Life,” in the immortality of humanity’s souls, FHMY seems intent upon drawing his own conclusions; he appears inclined to question Tarkovsky’s certainty, given his own feelings of disintegration and loss of identity.

However, this process of consideration is the journey he takes his listeners on, and he arrives at a brief moment of respite in the album’s title track—a four-minute instrumental that feels like an epiphany. There are no words put to this track, though, and in a presser released with the album, FHMY says of this track, “It is up to the listener to define this title in his or her imagination.”

The album ends on a dour note, subverting the optimism found in the ambitious band name The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die and bringing the project to a pessimistic conclusion. However, a faint glimmer of hope can be found in I Keep Not Dying, the record’s seventh track, which, in yet another allusion to Tarkovsky, reflects FHMY’s recognition that his role as an “artist” is both a gift and a curse—he is duty-bound to the difficult work of being alive in an “ill-designed” world. After all, an ill-designed world needs someone to bring harmony into it.

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