One of the first times I met Universe’s Hunter John in the flesh, he generously volunteered to drive me and my bandmates to a gig we were playing on the other side of town. Because we couldn’t think of any better way to return the favor, we decided to pretend he was in the band so he could partake in the half-off steak dinner plus drink tickets offer that had had our mouths watering since we agreed to play the show. We got a little paranoid that the promoter wouldn’t believe us, so we asked Hunter to climb up on stage with a synthesizer and perform a continuous drone throughout the first song of our set — at the end of which I was unfortunately obliged to kick him in the shins, because the song had ended and he didn’t seem to notice.

Now that I’ve heard some of Hunter Johs’s records, I kind of wish that we had dropped out for a bit and let him drone on. Gazing, Gazing, his second MP3 lp, is sweeping and cavernous and varied enough to constitute an entire universe unto itself — albeit a half-synthetic one, built partly upon the human voice, partly upon the primeval technological prostheses of the drum machine and the analogue synth. Sure, synthesizer tomorrowlands are nothing new to this here universe; but what if we all closed our eyes and imagined we were hearing one for the first time? “I,” one of the album’s opening tracks, captures the blurry-eyed feeling of being born into the impossible silicon wonderland that Hunter has dreamed up, blinking against a line of 2-dimensional palm trees and watching them change from blue to magenta as they sway in the ambient bit-torrent. It is a birth in every sense of the word: the dawn of a new “I,” standing on the rubble (both physical and virtual) of all the “I”s that came before.

Universe, “I” (Gazing, Gazing)

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