these photos are really all that matters, because no photos really can matter. I thought briefly of bringing my sx-70 to the concert, one-off photographs for a one-off deal, but decided against it at the last moment. I only regret it a small amount. no photographs can and will be able to describe the experience.

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incredible incredible incredible. I heard everything. every sound was there, every piece of sound, and even the songs from isn't anything and their other EPs sounded incredible, with the richness that they deserve. as soon as I heard 'I only said' come on I popped my earplugs out to listen an incredible concert-high that lasted about twenty minutes. indescribable. I can't emphasize this enough. I was about, say, ten rows back from the front, in the front 1/5 of the entire crowd, hopefully around the sweet spot of the fifteen+ speakers strung on either side of the stage. highs and highs and highs. at no other point will I hear something that is at the intersection of being physically/sonically loud and emotionally relevant to me as this concert. all those stories I read about concerts fifteen years ago, ears bleeding, "wall of sound" -- it's all true, and more. wall of sound? nearly 24-hours past and my ears are still ringing -- much less so than right afterwards, but still ringing.

mbv, loveless, four years of music and four years of change culminating into this moment. found myself silently mouthing the lyrics to what you want. highs and highs and highs going on, one of the best highs. someone behind me kept on shouting, new york, don't be afraid to dance, and all I kept on thinking was I am dancing, I am, I am dancing right now, feeling the ebb and sway of these sonic waves, feeling the speakers pulse and feeling the resulting wave hit me like a punch, moving along to these songs.

during 'you made me realise', the finale, twenty minutes, things were insane, space shuttles taking off, earthquakes happening. if a fire alarm had gone off, i wouldn't have been able to hear the difference at all. the beat of the drums were competing against my heart's own, crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy. twenty minutes of noise, sound, vibrations. The first time the bass went off, sometime in the first half of the set, everyone half-looked at each other in awe; during ymmr at the end, the crowd was standing with eyes closed, open, some with arms outstretched, looking down, swirling heads, bobbing, in a daze, sweating, euphoria conflated with agony, delirious swirling conflation of the senses, perception collecting at the back of my head like some psychic supernatant, lights going everywhere. tumultuous ecstatic agonizing unbearable sublime experience.

afterwards walking in midtown with d, the perfect locale for such a finale, I found myself dancing under grids and grids of empty lit windows, windows inspired by van der rohe, incredible. insane. modernist architecture curating a modernist experience. outside of perceptible experience. sublime, in the kantian sense, sublime. every person I passed by I'd ask, 'did he/she just experience this thing?' were people as dazed as I was? are you as ecstatic as I was? were you there, in the front, did you all endure this event, this cataclysmic euphoric encounter? and yes, yes, did you encounter a primacy, a primal evidence within this experience? didn't we perform this archeological excavation? at the core of things, at the core of this thing so flat that it doesn't have a core, on the foundation built upon foundationlessness, did you do this? did this happen to you? were you there?