This song was pitched very briefly with the captivating subtitle ‘Elvis trying to use Windows 98.’ Clickbait, you may think. But upon listening, upon hear the guttural abrasive vocals of PORTALS curling round each pointed word like a cyberpunk savant fortune-teller and the gabbering liquid gooey instrumental, this description seems quite spot-on - at least superficially.
“Looking back,” Alejandro Cañellas, the human behind PORTALS, kindly explains, “it seems the track focuses on the law of correspondence. Every line is a reference to either looking at myself from within myself or from without.”
Accordingly the lyrics of ‘WAKELAST’ - taken from a recent double-single Voult//Wakelast (tagged ‘win98core’ on SoundCloud) - are cryptic and self-examining. The refraining nature of it gives a mantra quality to how it is delivered, making it feel like a frenzied, searching howl into the vaulting void: “eyes look into the next life / myself always outside / eyes look into the next life / I stand behind my eyes.” Not to mention how it is viscerally scrawled into the air by the vicious vocals, falling thunderboltish on the bed of garbled plasma noise - a sample taken from 'jacket funk' by pilotredsun track. ‘WAKELAST’ is like a brutal reflection, self-reflexive poetry in the form of a fist to one’s own face—aggressive existentialism.
“It's like a hall of mirrors,” Cañellas tells us. “I think people should spend more time in mirror halls cause no matter where they look they're forced to stare at themselves and at their own vampire elementals and smoke demons.”
- 🔔 Listen to the Voult//Wakelast double single over on PORTALS' SoundCloud.
- 🔔 There is also a suitably abrasive and glitched-out music video for the other track 'VOULT' to illustrate the garbled existentialist aggression of the track. This can be viewed on YouTube.
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