please be as human as possible
Some of these sentences arrived faster than I did. Others came later, many came more than once, from different directions, as if they had already existed somewhere else and I had only written them down. More than two years ago, not far from here, Thomas sent me a handful of lines, it was meant to be the beginning of Windows 95, and the rest poured out of me within minutes, as if it had been there for a long time, in a feed both of us had been scrolling through without knowing. A shared memory. Maybe songs begin like this now, in this time. Not as invention, but as something surfacing from what everyone has already seen. I’m listening to them late, in an apartment in Buenos Aires whose windows open onto a courtyard where nothing happens except that sometimes it rains.
There’s a sentence that keeps returning, monotonous, almost like a prayer that has forgotten who or what it was addressed to: we pass. We pass by. We move past things, or things move past us, at some point the difference disappears. Past a boy typing I love you on a Nokia 3210. Past ghosts slipping in through every door. Past people who were never born and are still here.
I miss an internet that no longer exists. I know that sounds suspect, every generation has its lost place, and mine happened to be one made of modem tones and forums and a future that seemed open. The idea that code can be written and rewritten – by us. You can call that naive. But naivety is also a form of political energy, and I miss what it made possible back then. 1998 your access denied – that wasn’t a loss, it was a door opening somewhere. Today every door that opens leads to a room you already know.
That promise is gone. But that’s not what stays with me. Promises disappear. What I find more disturbing is how quickly the sides got switched here. What once was an emancipatory thought has become the most reliable amplifier of the reactionary. The architectures we put our hopes into now carry hate more efficiently than anything before them. There’s no elegant answer to this. There’s only the observation that the tools I grew up with are now being used by the people I grew up against. And maybe we pass nazis doing nazi things is exactly the line that describes this state most precisely, because it doesn’t flinch, it registers. Flinching is an affect the platform has already priced in.
I’m thinking of something Mark Fisher once called eerie. Not the strange thing that comes in, but what isn’t there where something should be. A voice missing. Or a voice too many. On this record many voices are missing, and there are many too many. Both at once. A choir of the present and the absent, the living and the not-yet-living and the no-longer-living, where it’s no longer clear who was invited and who came through the wall.
Please be as human as possible. I don’t know who this sentence is addressed to. Maybe me. Maybe something that’s listening to me right now while I’m listening. It’s no longer self-evident that being human is something you have. It has become something that’s asked of you. A request in a form. And the whole problem is already in that request: if you have to remind someone to be human, then he, or she, or they, are already standing somewhere else.
I’ve thought for a long time about why these songs want to be folk. Folk meant, in the oldest sense, a form in which no one stands outside. A community that listens to itself because it couldn’t hold itself together otherwise. Voices that were there for each other because a single one couldn’t carry the weight. What if we no longer listen to each other in order to hold each other, but to make sure we’re on the right side? What if we sing together to seal ourselves off from what’s outside, instead of letting it in? What was once consolation now sounds disquieting, dense, almost suffocated. Maybe that’s the most uncanny variant of the eerie: not a missing voice in an open space, but a complete sound in a sealed one. And still: on this record several are singing. A polyphony that knows it will be taken apart. A choir starting up without being sure anyone will answer. Weird.
There’s a tiredness on this record that I recognize because it’s mine. Not the tiredness of resignation. More the tiredness after a very long day spent staring at a screen too long, and suddenly it’s evening, and you don’t know where the day went. I am finished, it says at the end. With skin, with bones, with streets, with stones. That’s not a gesture of giving up. That’s a person leaving something behind. A certain idea of self, maybe. The claim of being undivided. Also the expectation that the net gives back what it once promised us.
What remains is a practice in which no one pretends to be undivided anymore. We’re all already copied, already predicted, already doubled, tripled, present in every system. These songs don’t pretend that didn’t happen. They keep singing, with copied voice, with borrowed voice, with the voice that’s left. Maybe that’s what folk songs always were. A singing-on.
Andreas Spechtl, Buenos Aires 2026
