Crowded - Sarah Juers

A spacious arrangement on a song called “Crowded” speaks to the relief of articulating a litany of pressures. Sarah Juers’ EP “Cyberspace” sifts through a mind dominated by social media. The reverb-soaked “Crowded” also reflects a certain sense of being lost in a world where to be known is to be followed online (an impossible task for one among millions of digital selves.) The artificiality and inconsequence of this leads her all the way to questions of existence. The reason for this is that cyberspace reveals the human condition.

Cyberspace has amplified already existing tendencies towards distraction, narcissism, and coping mechanisms for loneliness. These tendencies are intensely personal, but also universal. A crowd of people clamouring for attention and receiving either nothing, or nothing substantial. Social media has taken the marketplace into our personal lives, so we’re all selling, all the time. We have become seduced into a system which feeds on our vices and leaves us lonely. Paradoxically, in this crowd of like-minded people, it is hard to find solace, empathy, relationship or community. “Crowded” is a crying out from a prison of corporate and simultaneously individual loneliness, a concentrated, self-realised, beautiful lament.

This sense of space is refreshing given the subject matter, since the online world is designed to leave us with very little room to think about what Sarah is writing about. We are not supposed to think too much, to learn, or to reflect. Otherwise we might arrive at a similar disillusionment, which sets the stage for a dangerous following act - a movement into healthier and more life-giving preoccupations - and maybe, as the next song on “Cyberspace” suggests, a shift in worldview.