As someone who has been obsessed in a very niche portion of the field of plunderphonic music, I was very excited to branch out and listen to something other than vaporwave, let alone something that was made by my best friend and one of the greatest personalities I know. All Night Internet Café by The Late Late Show is an EP released under an alias penned by fellow University of the Arts student Stephen J. Davies. It clocks in at a mere fifteen minutes altogether. However, into those fifteen minutes, Davies was able to successfully cram a hazy ambient experience, bursting at the seams with dripping, cool neon.
Picture this: it is one o’ clock in the morning on a Sunday, the city seeming like an abandoned wasteland. You can hear the electric humming of the club’s fluorescent sign. Slinking through the slightly ajar front door, a droning performance of Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” is in earshot. It reeks of espresso and clove cigarettes.
All Night Internet Café is exactly what this feels like.
It took me countless replays until I felt that I would be able to compose a review that would serve this small release, being almost mundane in the world of music releases; this is the shortest album I have ever listened to, yet enjoyed basically as much as a full-length album. Feeling under the weather while racking my brain on where to start with ANIC, I turned in for the night some days ago, feeling fatigued almost immediately after taking some antihistamines for my illness. In that surreal state of semi-consciousness, I turned to the EP again. And while this may seem like an exaggeration, I felt a transcendence take place. My body was still in bed, but my mind was in the middle of a time-warp back to a coffee house from the late 1950’s. This music brought upon me a total state of euphoria and calmness.
Davies undoubtedly knows what they are doing.
