Walk in file, dance in line,
take another leap toward an early grave now.
Imagine waking and sensing that the strangest fact is not your troubles but that you are here at all. In his 1927 work Being and Time, Martin Heidegger turns our gaze to that plain astonishment. We arrive unbidden, born into histories and habits we did not choose, and yet must answer for how we live among them. Time is not the clock on the wall, but the stretch of memory behind us and possibility before us, narrowing toward death. Most days, we drift with the crowd’s murmur. Then a tremour of fear and loss clears the air, and we feel the brief, stern charge of choosing our own life.
Lachlan P. Rother, operating as Ohms, has taken a page from Heidegger and wired it straight into the dancefloor. Geworfenheit, that famously thorny term about being thrown headfirst into existence, becomes less a seminar topic and more a wiry, kinetic groove you can move your hips to while pondering cosmic injustice. Born into a world you didn’t choose, handed a script you didn’t write, and still expected to improvise: that’s the thesis. Rother makes it swing.
The man’s résumé reads like a roll call of Melbourne’s underground circuitry: U-Bahn, GLASNOST, High Control Group, and you can hear that lineage in the bones of this track. The arrangement jitters with odd time signatures and rhythmic guitar figures that feel like they’ve been diagrammed, dismantled, and reassembled with deliberate mischief. Dissected drum patterns skitter beneath it all, forming a nervous but danceable groove that nods toward Talking Heads’ twitchy intellect, Yacht’s playful precision, and The Contortions’ crooked funk. Then come the wacky breakbeats, tipping their hat to Regurgitator, Sparks, DEVO, and more, because sometimes existential dread needs a little hip-hop shimmy. We also love a vibraslap moment, and this one delivers the goods in spades.
Instead of shouting into the void, Rother offers a carefully measured diagnosis of the void itself, dissecting the economics of despair with an engineer’s clarity and a poet’s fatal shrug. Free will gets exorcised in real time, right there between the snappy snare hits and the elastic bass.
Rother wrote and performed the song himself, then teamed up with Andrew Robinson, Timothy Dunn, and Stuart Mackenzie of King Gizzard for recording, engineering, and mixing. The result balances clarity with just enough abrasion to keep things interesting.
Geworfenheit turns existential philosophy into something you can march and do a genuine David Byrne dance to, a reminder that being thrown into the world might be absurd, but it can also be hella fun.
Listen to “Geworfenheit” below and order here:
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