Time Changes Everything
Khruangbin forever
Mary Retta
Khruangbin’s Mordechai album cover, courtesy of Dead Oceans
January lagged. February stalled. March, an infant not yet sure, inched forward cautiously on all fours. But soon after, something shifted. June was a windstorm; July, a great wave. August, for so long a distant fever dream, has somehow already kissed us with her heat. It’s hard to explain why time now moves so differently; why the winter chill lingered for eons while a single breath can swallow a steamy August night. Perhaps it was the fresh air, the brief death of monotony that accompanied vaccinations in the States. Or maybe the heat rendered everyone dazed. One thing is for certain: no piece of art quite captures these strange movements of time quite like Khraungbin's 2020 album, Mordechai.
Khraungbin, the Texas-born psychedelic funk band comprised of guitarist Mark Speer, bassist Laura Lee, and drummer Donald Ray “DJ” Johnson, uses every element of its artistry—from powerful psychedelic sound to meta, if occasional, lyrics—to explore themes of time, memory, and nostalgia. Self-described “music archivists,” the band members[1] pride themselves on collecting and utilizing sounds from various decades and genres from across the globe.[2] Their widespread sonic influences—from Ethiopian harp to Vietnamese opera[3]—help contribute to a nebulous, atemporal sound, one that interrupts time’s traditional march by bringing the past urgently into the present. Partial to reverb and other forms of musical echo, Khruangbin allows each note to linger longer than it’s meant to, stretching time by subverting the listener’s expectations of musical pacing. Aside from a 2020 EP in collaboration with R&B and soul musician Leon Bridges, the band rarely includes words in their songs; the few lyrics they do use are often brief or nonsensical. Pure instrumentation invites a different bodily experience. The baseline becomes the heartbeat, and time turns unfamiliar.
Everything about the Khruangbin listening experience is meant to dismantle and confuse the listener’s conception of time, shatter and rebuild it all over again. This perhaps explains why Mordechai, the bands’ most recent album released in June of 2020, has felt so necessary these last few months. Summer has a special relationship with temporality. Summertime, sheathed in a chilly anticipation, is not something we experience so much as we construct; the eager plans beforehand, and the wistful nostalgia that follows are somehow more solid than those brief months in between.[4] The season evokes a bodily nostalgia: sunburns; skin sticky with sweat; tongues dyed yellow, orange, or blue from sweet frozen treats. During a year when much, if not all, commercially successful art was rooted in escapism, Khraungbin released a collection that aimed to keep listeners solidly, if at times uncomfortably, present. On Mordechai, time is not a runner but a shapeshifter, floating on the peripheries of our consciousness like a humid August breeze.
Khraungbin was steeped in nostalgia even before it was born. The band chose their name, which translates to “flying engine” in Thai, during their early days, when the trio went through an intense Thai funk phase. Even as their following grew larger and the band’s sound moved from its original southeast Asian funk influence to a more Iranian and French Antilles inspired groove, the name, and subsequently the memory behind it, stuck. That Khraungbin would christen themselves a memory illustrates a core tenet of the band’s philosophy: we are not born once, but again and again; we meet and become ourselves with time.[5]
The idea of rebirth has been present in much of the band’s earlier music. Their sophomore album, Con Todo El Mundo, toyed with the ideas of nostalgia and memory through deceptively simple song titles: trippy, acoustic-heavy track “August 10” is a hazy, wordless retelling of a single summer day. The collection’s last song, “Friday Morning,” replays its last two minutes on a loop, slowing to an almost pause before speeding up and beginning again; morning bleeds into dusk and then dawn. In 2019, the band toyed with these ideas once more in the making of its third album, Hasta El Cielo (Con Todo El Mundo In Dub). Thriving on musical simplicity and rarely in the mood for heavy lyricism, Khraungbin’s choice of a dub album—a style of electronic music with roots in 1960s reggae which remixes an existing song by adding studio effects or removing vocals—seems like a strange choice. The trio originally intended to release Hasta El Cielo as a cassette tape sold exclusively at concerts, but was convinced by their label to record it for a wider audience. As the band may have foreseen, the album was not critically acclaimed—in a review, Pitchfork called the collection “inessential” and “an album-length equivalent of a B-side.” But the collection was made with purpose. When asked why dub as a genre appealed to Khraungbin during a 2019 interview, Speer did not hesitate: “It’s like a memory, repeating and becoming noise. It becomes….” Speer trails off, imitating the bass line fading into the breeze. “It’s memories upon memories, and you put it into a space, and you put it into a different context….I think it’s just so fascinating as a process.” This process is perhaps most clear on “A La Sala,” the dub version of Khraungbin’s classic disco hit “Evan Finds The Third Room,” where the memory of a single, emphatic yes is reshaped into yesyesyesyes, a slow-building cacophony of affirmation. Aside from its sonic and aesthetic considerations, Hasta El Cielo is impressive in its implications for both personal and creative growth: revisiting past art, rather than creating something new, can also be a way of revisiting a past self.
If Con Todo El Mundo and Hasta El Cielo introduced the importance of nostalgia in Khraungbin’s music, Mordechai solidified it. Like the band’s name, the album’s title is a memory long preserved.[6] In a 2020 interview with SSENSE, Lee disclosed that she met a man named Mordechai by chance on a camping trip the year before Khraungbin recorded their album. He invited her to hike with his wife and children, and the group trekked to the top of a mountain before jumping from the precipice to plunge into the waterfall below. Lee was so moved by Mordechai’s generosity and adventurous spirit that she named the album in his honor, though the ideas of memory and intimate, if fleeting, human connection extend beyond the collection’s title and into the core of what Khruangbin provides their listeners. “Mark is constantly recording field recordings and always encourages us to do the same,” said Lee of the band’s recording process. “They’re almost like Easter eggs. You’re putting another memory or sound that is personal to you into the record.”
On Mordechai, memory lives on and on. Two of the collection’s later tracks, “One To Remember” and “So We Won’t Forget,” operate as musical mirrors to each other. Though the lyrics are eerily similar—“say to remind me so we won’t forget,” Speer and Lee plead in both tracks—the distinct instrumentation between songs gives each track a unique stance on nostalgia: while the funky, uptempo beat of “So We Won’t Forget” denotes a memory welcomed, the slower, more classical psychedelic sound of “One to Remember” suggests something more sinister; a memory haunted. The album’s third track “Connaissais de Face”[7] is a hazy conversation between Speer and Lee, reminiscing about various people they once knew. The intimate, detailed, often spoken lyricism—“we used to listen to that song for days on end,” “have you heard from Josephine?”—coupled with the subdued pull of the singers’ gravelly monotone, make for a visceral, grounding listening experience: memories as caves to crawl inside. About halfway through the song, while discussing a hurricane that swept through the town, Speer casually delivers the band’s central thesis:
“I didn’t know it at the time,” remarks Lee.
“Time,” Speer replies, “changes everything.”
Time lives and breathes on Mordechai, a fact best illustrated by the collection’s second and most popular track, “Time (You and I).” An immediately joyous and funky anthem, the song distinguishes itself from the collection’s other more mellow hits through uptempo, funky bass lines and crashing percussion. In a distinctly un-Khruangbin move, the band included lyrics throughout the entire song. In this instance, the words are crucial to their storytelling. In a collective call that’s half chant and half nursery rhyme, the trio sings: “That’s life! If we had more time, we could live forever. Just you and I, we could be together.” The accompanying music video is a delightful illustration of this fantasy.[8] A man, dressed impeccably in shades of pink and red, saunters cooly onto the scene carrying a lime green bucket and a sleek black briefcase. He kneels on the wet concrete—not before gently placing a silk handkerchief under his knee—and opens his sand filled briefcase to create a castle. A stranger, watching shyly from afar, comes up to join him, and the pair meander all around the city, making sandcastles and dancing their day away. The video is nonsensical and heartwarming in equal measure, but perhaps most notably, everything about the couple’s journey drips with an abundance of time: the rosy blazer, chosen with care; a handkerchief, unfurled and angled just so. Against the odds, the protagonist spends the entire day engaged in dance, fun, and a newfound love. “We can play like children play,” Khraungbin insists.
Despite the euphoric instrumentation and tender, inner-child-like visuals, there is a tinge of sadness behind the song’s message. “Time (You and I)” paints a picture of the utopia we could have just as it highlights what is desperately beyond our grasp. If we had more time, we could live forever. If we had more time, we could be together. And if time runs quick, slipping through stiff fingers like a hot, fearful sand?
Well, that’s life!
Khruangbin, courtesy of Bataclan
They say 2020 was the year the world changed, but I disagree. The world stayed the same; what changed was time. Suddenly, time slowed to a pace that allowed us to watch the world steadily crumble, that forced us to see how we live among the debris. Writer and artist Eloghosa Osunde beautifully explains this process in Reality is Plasticine, her January 2021 essay untangling her own memories through the lens of non-linear time. “Time isn’t real, that’s true,” she writes, “but years are time capsules in a sense. Twenty-twenty turned me six again, treating stories like my life, the future like the present, the present like the past; stacking surreal on top of real, time on top of time.” Like Khraungbin, Osunde points to how, despite the abject horror it brought, the last year slowed down many a clock, rewinding time or stopping it altogether. Where Osunde offers a theory on time, forever changed, Khruangbin provides a premise for new possibilities. “Twenty-twenty turned me six again.” We could play like children play.
Perhaps this is what Mordechai has been saying all along. That—a connection with a stranger, a song that knows no end, a pink suit kissed by sandy dust from castles with no king—is life, not whatever bullshit an hourglass insists. Inside the world of Khruangbin, a song can last a second and a single note, a lifetime. Life is not a series of days and years but overlapping moments becoming memories as we live and relive them. When Khraungbin sings that “time changes everything,” they also simply mean, time changes. Wintertime is thick; summertime, a breeze. A child’s time is stretchy like a never-ending dough. We cannot stop the hands of time but maybe we can shake them, make peace with the ebb and flow that comes with every passing hour.
We could live forever.
That’s life.
DJ is Black, Laura Lee is Mexican and Mark Speer is white.The band also makes specifically curated playlists for listeners.This video is an excellent deep dive into Khraungbin’s global musical inspirations.I appreciated Lauren Michelle Jackson who, in contrast to the typical mythology constructed around summertime, wrote in her 2017 book White Negroes: "Summer in America means losing your mind."I’m reminded of a beautiful quote from Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa: “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me.”Interestingly, Con Todo El Mundo is also a memory; in an interview, Speer says that Lee’s grandfather used to ask her “Como te quieres?” (How much do you love me?) and Speer would reply, “con todo el mundo” (With all the world).Rough translation: “Knew of the face."Khraungbin loves to use images of adults engaged in children’s activities in their visuals. The video for “Evan Finds The Third Room” has a very similar premise.
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