cassette – Edições CN

You are alone on your bike, cutting through the wet asphalt beneath the neon glow of the surrounding billboards. Your map app crackles metallic commands in your earpiece, algorithms that decide your route through the urban labyrinth. You have just left the artificial heat and the smell of frying fast food, a world of shiny plastic and blinding lights. Your smartphone vibrates against your thigh, another code, another ride, another fragment of the city to traverse as the illuminated windows of the buildings slide past you like disconnected screens. This isn’t the opening of a new cyberpunk novel or a TV series about precarious metropolitan workers. This is Gavin Vanaelst’s real life, or to be more precise, what his life was for a specific period when he worked as a courier for Takeaway, a delivery company specializing in meals and groceries of all kinds. Vanaelst, however, wasn’t exactly a model employee during his shifts for Takeaway, using part of his time to record ambient sounds with his phone. In fast food restaurants while waiting for orders to be picked up and delivered, but also on the journey that was necessary to reach customers, privileged in their own way, with whom every relationship was reduced to the bare minimum. Later, in his home studio, our ‘sonic courier’ added a piano and minimalist electronics to the field recordings, transforming daily alienation into a soundtrack that is also a political manifesto. Takeaway Loops represents a subversive artistic operation in the very heart of digital capitalism. While the platform economy transforms workers into interchangeable avatars, Vanaelst overturns this logic: he transforms precariousness into creative opportunity, alienated time into a space of resistance. What makes his operation particularly incisive is its ability to reveal the social stratifications hidden behind the apparent neutrality of the app. In the pauses between the piano notes, the echo of that distance that separates the courier from the customer barricaded in the comfort of his own apartment resonates. Even the choice to name the album Takeaway Loops is not accidental: the loops are a metaphor for the seemingly endless cycle of notifications and star ratings that traps the gig economy worker. On the seven tracks, there is a palpable tension between resignation and resistance, between the blue of the urban night and the corporate orange imposed from above. Vanaelst’s music forces us to look at what we prefer to ignore: the programmed invisibility of those who support our small daily luxuries, the social fragmentation accelerated by algorithms that decide who stays out and who stays in.

 

Gavin Vanaelst – Takeaway Loops