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How to sleep with your arms above your head

from Tutorial Music by Andrew Tham

/
  • Cassette + Digital Album

    Designed by Los Angeles-based artist & writer Miden Wood, this lil' number looks like a homemade cassette produced by fictitious home tutorial expert GoldenRod. They're okay at making tutorials but they are *very good* at drawing cars.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Tutorial Music via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 7 days
    edition of 50 

      $9 USD or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $1 USD  or more

     

lyrics

Begin by falling asleep on the couch.
Get nice and cozy on the big, comfy couch, with all the lights on, and the TV on, and you’re in your street clothes (not that you have pajamas anyway), and you didn’t brush your teeth, and maybe your hair tie is still in and you’re not sure if that’s what’s causing the bald spot at the crown of your head, but you’re too tired to take it out, and you’ve lost track of your glasses and it’s only a matter of time before you pass out with them on your face and bend the hinge and the next time they fall off your face, the right temple breaks off, and it’ll be right before your big bike trip around Lake Michigan so it’s not enough time to get a new pair and you have to ask your roommate to solder the metal back together and it feels pretty solid, you just can’t fold them up anymore when you take them off, but that’s not really an issue 'cuz you seem to fall asleep with them on all the time nowadays, but they’re loose on your face, that’s for sure, so by the time you’ve biked 300 miles to a grimy gas station bathroom in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin to take a dump in an actual toilet with actual running water and you stand up to wipe your ass (who does that by the way? How many adults stand up and hover squat over the toilet to wipe their ass? Is that why your thighs are so ginormous, or is it from all the biking?) the glasses slip right off your ear and onto the floor and directly under the doomed urinal and yes, just as you predicted, the right temple snaps off again and you have to duct tape it to the frames for the rest of the trip, all 800 miles, where each night you sleep in a tent with a pocket by your head that the glasses barely fit into without being folded, just like you, zipped up in your sleeping bag where you can no longer sleep with your arms above your head, zipped up with your arms trapped by your side like a corpse in a casket, and you become acutely aware that sleeping just feels like you’re practicing being dead and this is where you startle yourself awake from couch slumber, with the lights and the TV and the clothes and the glasses on and you exclaim “holy shit I’m gonna' die” like all the time this happens you wake yourself up right after your first REM cycle with a fart of existential dread, your mind just can’t help itself, it just has to poop out this little terrifying reminder before you get to deep sleep and now you have to find a way to distract yourself into being comfortable again, like taking your pants off, like muting the TV, like pretending your asleep, like sleeping with your arms above your head, sleeping in the sun in the grass off the coast of Lake Michigan, your bike behind you–your sole possession, peacefully unattended–your belly full of chilly cool water from that hose pipe, thinking to yourself “‘if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy.’ That was your feeling—Clarissa’s feeling, and you felt it, you were convinced, as strongly as Woolf meant Clarissa to feel it.” [Shakespeare / Virginia Woolf, kind of]
Begin by falling asleep on the couch and forget the rest until tomorrow night.

credits

from Tutorial Music, released April 23, 2021

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Parlour Tapes+ Chicago, Illinois

Parlour Tapes+ is Chicago's first contemporary art music tape label.

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