Cruisin’…

Irvine, California: a planned city, a snow-globe of modern pleasantry, “a community where people can live, work, and play in an environment that is safe, vibrant, and aesthetically pleasing,” they maintain. A good stretch of it is taken up by the business grid—rows of vanilla buildings pristinely landscaped, palm trees and all. While monotonous and at times disorienting, this streamlined metropolis does possess a certain magic, once you’re free of whatever agenda it is that brought you there. For me it would appear on drives back home—mountains far off behind wide open desert, hints of a coastline nearing, and a rare kind of night-silence only possible in a place so loyal to the nine-to-five routine; commute turned cruise.

Edmund Xavier must see it as well, to have chosen this particular exit off the 405 for such an expansive sequence—its first half locked in a groove, its second cooling down to dusk. The track covers about a third of Any Exit, his latest release with Moon Glyph and further proof that no name sonically suggests the art of driving quite like FWY!. Only a handful of tapes remain.