In his notes for Ball of Wax 68, Galen Disston – aka Galenbaby – asks, echoing Erk Satie, “Can music be wallpaper?” But then he goes on, “If you look at the wallpaper enough, do you start to see yourself?” This, as I alluded to in regard to Domenica Diavoleria’s track, is the thing with music that’s considered (or intended to be) ambient, or treated like furniture or wallpaper, and what I believe Satie may have discovered, despite his best efforts at creating music to be ignored: You can’t stop people from looking at the wallpaper, and when they do they may discover more there than you, its creator, ever imagined. (And I say this as someone who has sat and listened to one short Satie work played over and over for hours on end.)
So it is with much of the work you’ll hear here on Ball of Wax 68, including “Do Wild.” These fluttering boops and tweeps, phasing in and out and piling all over each other, might seem at first like a series of oddly soothing noises playing in the background, but if you pay enough attention you’ll start to hear new patterns and relationships, notice when strange new timbres shift in and out, and discover that you’re actually listening for the first time in a while. Maybe even listening to yourself.