Put on headphones, close your eyes and merge into Benedikt Frey’s 'Fastlane'. Imagine you’re sitting in the driver’s seat of a an automobile, one with exceptional horsepower and torque, and as you stare out the windshield you see the red light, warping in fata-morgana, about a mile down the road. It’s a straight road, black top, two lanes, and against your better judgment you’ve decided to floor the gas. There’s no hesitation in your muscle, your ankle or the ball of your foot, which you’ve realized is some kind of universal pivot, a first point of contact that merges your body with the will of machine. In this moment you’re in awe of the reality that you, a human being, an animal, could have grown out of pond scum into something so advanced as to engineer this thing, a mechanical beast capable of such overwhelming power and exhilaration, but you also feel a seductive dread, an outside force diverting you from caution toward a dangling carrot of curiosity, asking yourself, How far can I take this thing? The dread, now constant, is numbed, equalized by an adverse and intoxicating gratification. You feel both of these sensations in real time, however, instead of taking responsibility for yourself, friends, family and innocent bystanders, you cement your foot to the floor and lean your head back. The noise around you fades to mute, you smell the benzene-scented air, feel the wind on your face, the menacing vibration of the vessel you control beneath you and every grain of asphalt under its tires. This mile has now lasted an eternity and you’ve left your body for some outside view, as if you’re watching the high climax scene in a film. You’re past the point of no return so you embrace this sense of abandon and lean into fate. The film has become slow motion, crawling at a pace so mesmerizing you convince yourself there is an option to eject yourself from this madness, but as you finally let go of your last morsel of fear, you run the red light and become the nucleus of a fantastic glistening sculpture of torn metal, glass, oil, broken dreams and heartache. 'Fastlane' may be just drum machines and synthesizers if you’re timid, but listen harder and hear a catastrophic reality of existence, a wreckage so gruesome we dare not rubberneck, but it is our nature to stare.

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