B-Side Guys

Some musical projects transcend mere songcraft to become multidisciplinary explorations that demand engagement beyond passive listening. Linoleumville’s “to see you and talk” functions as both standalone composition and entry point into a larger narrative ecosystem that includes their forthcoming concept album “1: a rip where a river should be” and accompanying literary zine created by Ben Dodd and Alex Blake.

What immediately distinguishes this folk-electronic duet is how it embodies structural disintegration as both sonic experience and thematic device. The song’s sparse composition—built around delicate fingerpicking and subdued electronic elements—creates negative space that forces listeners to lean forward rather than sink back. This intentional minimalism mirrors the literary zine’s fragmented narrative approach, where characters Wallace and Connie move through disconnected temporal episodes, their relationship simultaneously beginning, developing, and ending across overlapping chronologies.

The lyrics create a haunting paradox of intimacy and dissolution, juxtaposing mundane relationship markers (“to hold hands and walk”) against cosmic dissolution and religious imagery. This collision between everyday experience and metaphysical rupture appears throughout the accompanying zine, where phrases like “temporal weight” and “mugginess of confluence” describe both emotional states and literal landscape features.

Most compelling is how the project explores memory as unreliable narrator. The song’s perspective shifts between tenses, questioning whether its narrator “knew” the subject well or is currently knowing them, suggesting relationships exist simultaneously across multiple points in their trajectory. This mirrors Fragment 8’s moment where Wallace looks at Connie “their lives playing behind his eyes” despite being strangers in that timeline—a narrative technique that challenges conventional storytelling just as the music defies traditional song structures.

Linoleumville’s slacker rock and slowcore influences manifest in their refusal to provide easy resolution or conventional melodic payoff. Instead, the composition’s restrained intensity builds through lyrical repetition and gradual textural elaboration rather than dynamic shifts. This artistic choice perfectly complements the zine’s recurring motifs—the riverside scene, the diner meeting, the reference to John Gregory—which gain significance through repetition across fragments rather than linear development.

By releasing “to see you and talk” as the first glimpse into this conceptual project, Linoleumville demonstrates remarkable artistic ambition, creating music that functions simultaneously as emotional experience and narrative device. The song becomes a portal through which listeners can access a more expansive artistic universe—one where relationships, like rivers, don’t simply flow forward but ripple outward, creating complex patterns of connection and separation across multiple timelines.