Eyelids

by Tau Tau

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“All GTB nepotism aside, Eyelids is one of my favorite albums of 2012. Real talk.”
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  • Digital Album

    Immediate download of 12-track album in your choice of high-quality MP3, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire.

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  • Compact Disc

    Jewel case edition of album including four bonus tracks.

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    edition of 25 
1.
02:10
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2.
04:53
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3.
04:20
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4.
03:16
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5.
04:22
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6.
03:21
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7.
04:07
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8.
03:32
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9.
04:27
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10.
02:26
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11.
05:36
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12.
04:32
lyrics

about

GTB007
Eyelids is proudly synthetic and unabashedly heartfelt pop composed out of monolithic patches of sound, internet horoscopes, and ASCII poetry. It's both a reaction to personal events and a love letter to an ever-evolving, constantly chaotic digital culture – an attempt to marry the personal and universal in an immediate way.

credits

released 20 March 2012
All songs written by Conrad Tao.
"Preparing A Three Course Meal For A Buddhist Monk" words by Liam Bland.

Recorded between January 2012 and March 2012 with Casio Privia PX-330, Sennheiser MM70i, GarageBand, Korg iKaossilator, Aeolian Harp, PixelWave, YouTube, and Soundflower.

tags

tags: pop identity pop personal effects New York

license

all rights reserved

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Track Name: Skies
Please stay awake for this. Don't close your eyes, you'll miss the best part.

Decaying inside my porcelain shell is something vaguely resembling knowingness. And though I won't deny it's dying, I haven't given up yet. There's a still a bit to resurrect.

So won't you look up into the sky?
Blood splatters my hands, and you just turn away. I assume guilt.
This can't be how it ends.

If we could turn back time,
would we try this again?
Track Name: Press Repeat
I don't want to go back to square one.
All the stares and the lies and the whispers and sighs, together, they make me invisible, like sheets of cellophane drifting away.

And I, my dear, unlike your precious soul, would like very much to be seen.
Yes, I, my dear, unlike the things you hide from me, would like to be out in the open.

I don't want to open up my eyes.
I'm afraid of the things I will realize.
When the mystery fades out we all will fall into sleep and we will say goodbye.

This is why you ask me for a light at 3 A.M., and I give you one.
This is why you ask if I'm all right at 4 A.M., and I say I'm fine.

And I beg you, my dear, to press repeat.
I want to hear this again.
Track Name: Strung
Because each shade of green is countered by a vivid pink,
because precocity withers in the unfeeling air,
because every hermetically sealed Martha Stewart-approved inadequately lit cocoon is more suspended than the last,
because playlists are named ‘late nights’ and ‘please rest’,
because the cities bleed into each other and time zones are penciled across my eyelids,

because your years outnumber mine:
we are lost.
Track Name: Sleepers
Tear me down until all that's left is the little bit of dirt under my fingernails and torture me from afar, when I can't be there to experience pain firsthand. Send me pictures of all the things, of all the memories that we could have shared if I drank out of kegs and didn't feel a thing.

Watch me learn as I pick things up. We waited for too long, it's true. "Wait for me, I swear I'll keep up.” But no, and no, and no, it's always a shake of the head.

Fuck that.

Stray heel digging into the pavement, where are you going? Who are you seeing? I've got a little pinch of hurt and you won't feel a thing. Because the music they're playing here is so passé and they're saying sweet nothings at the door, we're running down to the graveyard now to break our necks.
Track Name: Preparing A Three Course Meal For A Buddhist Monk
Ticking tocks on a clock, the one in the kitchen above the baker’s rack, the one Aunt Jane always says looks zen and Uncle Bobby won’t look at. He’s so practical, she’s so untouched, untuned to this frequency. They always argue about which beach to camp at. He wants to be close to bathrooms and potable water.

Aunt Jane finds shells and sea grass. She doesn’t know what potable means, and the sea is so close, and blue and deep and green.

She ignores when Bobby tells her it’s a lake. Mother just rolls her eyes and makes Long Island Iced Teas. I’m surprised that they like the same drink.

But mostly, I wish they wouldn’t talk so loudly at night, competing with the clock. When they visit, my dreams are as zen as the baker’s rack in the kitchen.
Track Name: ♌♊♋♏
“Put out some feelers today. You've been working hard and may have felt as if you've been barking up the wrong tree.”

“Avoid anything that feels like a responsibility today — your energy is too good to worry about what others think of you!”

“Make sure that you’re applying your energy to your own projects.”

“It's time to pass carefully from reflection to action.”
Track Name: Sentience of Detritus
In the midst of his fingertips, I am looking for a softness. And as I lean in for a kiss, I find myself looking into an abyss.

There is no light in here.
The end is near.
Track Name: Upon Arriving
Head towards main,
go to the end of sixths,
and there you will meet people who speak in orotund tongues, eating ambrosia made from the remains of a thousand disposable cameras we left behind.

Don’t ask where you are going towards.
Don’t ask questions at all.
Track Name: Precious Savior
Stuck taking pills that I don’t want to take, and I’m feeling so lost like I’ve made a mistake, and I can’t help but wonder if this was a make or break it moment wasted. I wanted to comfort and be the good person in this never-ending maze of landmines, but you are confined by the walls of your hollow castle.

Eyelashes line the floor, and you wonder why.
You think you’re a savior.

How does it feel to grow up in the midst of the so-called fracturing of our generation's consciousness? You subscribe to your own notions and expectations. You're a cosmopolitan aesthete, you are. But as I drink cider out of a Styrofoam cup while looking out at the Hudson, I realize the detritus I leave behind is just as sentient as the experience of living.

And I think I need some time, because I'm wide awake and your pupils are huge right now.
You think you're a savior.

All of the losers you fucked and got high with outside of classrooms eat away at your eyes but not your mind. You leave things behind at Goodwill for somebody else to pick up and use, occasionally. And people sit at your desk, DJ-ing shitty songs that they heard two weeks ago at a party where all of the booze was Nikolai. They want to go back to that place and time.

Godspeed.
Track Name: 0Äø’+4¡t7Hø6CΩFkΔnW!h¡
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Track Name: A Stopgap
As you sit behind the steering wheel of the Corolla that you rented at the airport, and highways – damp with rain that fell not one hour ago, that, a few miles away, turned a used Kerouac paperback into a wet sopping mess on the pavement – as they stretch out into the night, there is no flickering orb waiting at the end.

Your stereo is on, and the song is railing against The Man. And though you try to resist the sensation of needing somebody to hold you, whispering sweetly that everything will be okay, the woes of a thousand lonely kids writing in their journals in dimly lit bedrooms across Middle America are a suburban siren's call.

But your windshield hides from the harsh light of nothing jobs and scalding concrete saved for those days when your slipjoint just won't do. Remembering the person that you once were is difficult when you can't see through your past. Yet you try, and you try, and you try, and you try, again and again and again.
Track Name: Upon Viewing Two Porcelain Figures, II
Go forth and terrify if you have to, if it means you’ll go. You’re spitting in my face, asking me if I’m suppressed. I can see the canvas behind you, flapping in the wind where you’ve opened it up. Don’t roll your eyes. Again, you ring in my ears: “What do you see?”

Some trees, an empty street, and two white men: suspended, gazing at me, wondering vacantly if they are visible at all as one dances in the cool air with the other in hand.

Flowers lining the street crumple and the air grows stale. I wake up again alongside cases of Perrier and a vase, filled to the brim. It looks at me, listens to my thoughts, and laughs a silvery shimmering laugh.
“You’re so easy.”

And as the glass flings itself against the wall in an attempt to rinse away the pain, it shatters into a million pieces.
We are swimming in them now.