Sleeve notes
Zora Vael, printed on the inner sleeve.
Six songs about a person I mostly knew as a notification.
I want to be precise about that, because people keep hearing this record as a breakup and it isn't one. A breakup requires two people to have been in the same room enough times to have somewhere to leave from. What I had was eleven months of extremely good conversation conducted almost entirely through a screen, and then a silence that I am still not certain he experienced as an event at all.
That is the thing nobody warns you about. There is no scene. Nothing is said. The relationship does not end, it just stops being updated. And you are left holding an archive — every word, timestamped, searchable, in the exact order it arrived — which is more evidence than anyone has ever had and no help whatsoever.
So the songs are named after storage. Cache, history, receipts, an error page. Not because I think that's clever. Because when I sat down to write what I actually had of him, it turned out to be files.
The one I find hardest to play is the fourth. It's the only one that isn't about him. I was three songs in before I noticed that I'd been mapping the way out of every room I've ever walked into, usually before I'd taken my coat off, and that the reason the silence didn't surprise me is that I had already rehearsed it. He didn't leave me somewhere I hadn't already planned to be alone.
The last one is ninety seconds and there is nothing underneath it but one pad and my voice, and it does not resolve, and that was not a production decision.
Thank you to Roz, who kept the take with the mistake in it, twice, and was right both times. And to Deniz, for the least amount of interference I have ever been shown.
It came out on a Tuesday. Nobody was told. That was the point.
— Z.V.