How Do I Know If My Cat Likes Me?

Description

How do I know if my cat likes me? is the debut album from organists Ellen Arkbro and Hampus Lindwall with visual artist Hanne Lippard, an existential meditation on the empty expanses of our automated everyday. Developed during Arkbro and Lippard’s 2023 residency in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, the album deadpan satirizes the numbing aesthetics of corporate life, from hold music to online banking. How do I know if my cat likes me? extends the lineage of Roberts Ashley and Barry’s drolatic conceptual poetry, hammering at the sounds of language until they dislodge all signification through pleasantly mind-numbing repetition. Listening to this record is like doing a Captcha over and over until all the characters turn into hieroglyphs, or finding yourself bogged down in a tautological customer service argument – except after arriving at nonsense, one stumbles upon unexpected, transcendent beauty, where language transitions from pure function to pure aesthetic, shimmering with possibility.