YUME BITSU

It’s been a beautiful Sunday, I can tell you. Slow and soft as well as energetic and full of life. Of course, I slept nearly till noon, as I always do, when Saturdays get very long. But I hadn’t drunken the day before, so I woke up to the sounds of my love rummaging through our household with a clear head. Yeah, angry I was, but the sun and the long overdue warmth of the first real springdays washed away any bad emotions. Then we dorve over to her parents, as you usually do on Sundays, for lunch, and then did some work-out and ended the afternoon with ice-cream and a walk through the sunny streets of the the sixth district. All the shops were closed, but aforementioned sun and warmth drew people out on the closed shopping-streets just the same. Good to see, that people can enjoy themselves without buying stuff. You have to feel these moments of peace and quietness as long as you have them, because there is always another Monday coming, another workday, another stupid and senseless chore to fulfill.

Time has become a main and very big word for me in the last weeks and months. Stress at work, where you just try to stay atop of all the work to do, like a swimmer in a big ocean of strawberry-jam, makes you feel that there is to less and to much time at the same time. Of course, clocking in long hours at work, you spend less time with your friends and loved-ones, so you feel a loss at time. Then you feel that everything has become so fast all of a sudden. When I went to school there was no Internet on the free market. But nowadays the information is out there at any time, so bosses feel that they should have all the information at anytime. And they completely ignore that a) this information has to be found and b) that this information has to be processed to suite their wishes. Both costs time and bosses don’t like costs. Anyway, they rarely ever sit back to think about the status of the information available. One day, the facts might indicate one strategy, the other day something else. It’s not the world that changes so fast these days, but our (possible) knowledge of the world. Some bosses, mine includes, seem to think that they do have to react to every new information the marketplace puts to them. But to me, they act like runners, that constantly change sides of the road and the track they are on. All the while, walkers, who took one step after the other towards a previous defined target get there in the almost same time as the directionless runners, but without all the exhaustion and stress.

Of course, the walkers follow a long-term goal and only that. The runners follow both long-term-goals and micro-trends. But what is better? What is more humane? And what has this long rant about my personal school of time and economics to do with Yume Bitsu? I will be there in a minute.

Lately; I have also been thinking, that now, that the internet has put the speed of work up to simultaneity, the next important step is to slow down to zero. There are already some management-seminars where managers can learn how to stand still, to feel the pulse of time rushing by without being angstridden or fearful of missing out. Everything is available at every moment in time at anyplace – but who really wants that? We have to start to feel time again, to feel the slowing down and like it.

Yume Bitsu have understood this point and the celebrate it. They play very long and slow songs, but they manage to draw you into their sparse chord-changes, the longwinding-melodies, their seemingly neverchanging harmonies. Guitar-strings are striven softly and the drums are next to unhearable, only sometimes bringing in a short and heldback pattern. Yume Bitsu want you to close your eyes and start to float and feel time and place they way you nearly have forgotten how to. Later on, they throw in a straightforward popsong or two, with distorted guitars and a pounding beat, somewhere between old Yo La Tengo and U.S.Saucer, but they keep it smooth and simple, so it won’t wake you up. If you fall asleep to their music, I don’t think they would mind, but being the soundtrack to your dreams could just be what they want to be.