Zhir Vengersky has been making noise for thousands of years, and now, in A.D. 2025, Farewell, My Lovely stands as a glaring aberration, and as the next logical step, in the artist's rich and creamy oeufs oeuvre. A marked departure from its predecessors, this album sees listeners kidnapped and haphazardly stuffed into the glass-bottom Honda Civic of the mind and subjected to a series of increasingly baffling fantasies across California's derelict highway 80, perhaps the most jarring of which is the back-to-back pairing of international sex jam Macht Schau (Kanon) with the shining baroque excellence of Tarantula (Desert Line Lost). Highlights are numerous across this album, from 26 and Balding (Going Bovine), a bleak treatise on aging, to the bleaker Bleak (Another Face in the Glass), but in this writer's opinion, the zenith of the record comes with Multiplied By One (Red Brontosaurus), an educational magnum opus about carcinisation and the feedback loop of Self. Farewell, My Lovely sets a new high water mark for southern Californian computer music and a new low for the United States highway system.
I had the opportunity to sit down with the artist in a smoky back room at Hodad's, a seedy gentlemen's club situated in San Diego's industrious Gaslamp district. He stood three feet away, wearing a tiger print sport coat and taking inordinately sized puffs from a gigantic silver cigar. Questions were prepared, but the only response he gave was "What's it to you, bub?" I didn't know how to answer. It seemed he was trying to turn the interview format on its head in a show of subversive punk rock ethos. It was working. It would be only a matter of time before I was surely had. Thankfully, the interview was terminated prematurely by an ambulance which had crashed into the building, striking and rendering Vengersky unconscious. After being placed into that same ambulance, the artist was declared DOA at a local hospital. So was I. I'm a ghost.
(Thelonious Dump 2025)
