In the modern hyperconnected world, physical distance plays a much smaller role in our daily lives that it has throughout history. Phone calls, zoom meetings, social media, and texts all allow for conversations and ideas to move freely throughout the world without the vector of a physical body. During the global quarantine of 2020-2021, the world was able to construct something resembling a functional society with the lowest level of physical proximity imaginable. Even after quarantine has ended, university students post to online discussion boards, typing with classmates whose voices they’ll never hear, and people clock into their jobs on laptops from states, countries, or oceans away.
This may lead one to believe that physical proximity has lost its value. It may seem that there’s nothing to gain from meeting a friend in person when you can just do a video call, and there’s no reason to go out of your way for a concert when you can watch a recording of the same event online. Yet, ask anyone and they would take the concert tickets and coffee date over an isolated screen. There is some magic to be found in the physical presence of other bodies, and we feel the weight of it when it’s gone. It’s the reason why long distance couples break up and why live concert attendance has skyrocketed in the digital age. This intangible magnitude influences our actions, dreams, and more, despite being experienced less in the day-to-day. It’s also a recurring theme in The Japanese House’s music.
Amber Bain (stage name: The Japanese House) is an alternative-pop artist from Watford, England. She was born in 1995 and made her musical debut in 2015 with the EP Pools to Bathe In. Bolstered by industry connections with Matty Healy, Charli XCX, and George Daniel, Bain’s intriguing mellow electronic sound and mysterious branding quickly accumulated buzz and momentum before the 2019 release of Good at Falling, her official debut album. This was followed by her sophomore album In the End It Always Does, released in 2023.
It’s within In the End It Always Does that Bain intensively explores themes of distance and magnetism in relationships. The album’s main themes are cyclicity and heartbreak, but ideas of proximity and distance play a central role. Bain draws attention to the relationship between physical and emotional distance, using it to demonstrate the rises and falls of a relationship.
In the opening track, “Spot Dog”, a disjointed piano intro ushers in dreamlike synth and lyrics on feeling anxious about leaving. It’s mostly instrumental, and sets a reflective tone for the rest of the album. The song is brief and repetitive, and its almost nursery rhyme-esque cadence feels both sweet and slightly uncomfortable. The repetition indicates to the listener that Bain is stuck in a cycle, toggling between feelings of comfort and the insistent knowledge that something beautiful is coming to an end. The only lyrics are a short chorus, repeated twice: “I don’t want to go yet / I don’t want to come yet / laying on your chest / I think I know you best”. They give the impression that this refrain is something echoing in Bain’s mind. She’s savoring a sweet moment and not wanting to leave it, because in the back of her mind she knows it may be the last one. The threat of imminent physical distance is linked to imminent emotional distance, as Bain knows that as soon as she gets up and walks away, a moment of emotional intimacy will end and likely won’t return. This fear of endings without return can be linked to a sort of scarcity mindset that the internet offers empty solutions for. The reality of life is that every moment is unique, and they begin and end without consideration for how someone may be experiencing them. People try to prolong a feeling because some part of us fears we will never feel it again, even though it’s impossible to make a good thing last longer than it’s destined to. Modern technology attempts to soothe this anxiety by recording videos or soundbites and letting them play on a loop forever, but the captured moments fall short of the real thing, and the feeling is still lost or altered. This relates to why the live music industry has skyrocketed post-Covid: two years without live performance made people more aware of how a recorded song can’t measure up to a live one.
The soft, anxious rumination in “Spot Dog” also serves as a segway for the story of Bain’s break up in the next song.
Track 2, “Touching Yourself” features a deceptively catchy pop chorus and encapsulates the feeling of a relationship growing apart. The first half of the song feels cute, flirty, and sunny, but the mood shifts as Bain’s relationship strains. As she explained in an interview, “[she’ll] often write half a song when [she’s] in one place, then when [she] tries to finish it, [she’ll] be in a completely different place” and the song “ends up taking on a whole new meaning”. In the second verse of “Touching Yourself”, Bain mirrors the first verse with a new emotion. Distance has highlighted the issues in her relationship and now the couple seems frozen, suspended in limbo between who they were before long-distance and who they are at the time of the song being written. Bain tries to recreate ideas of who they used to be in her mind (“picture your face”), but imagination is an insufficient imitation of reality, much like how technology and Bain’s partner’s texted picture are insufficient replacements for actual connection. The tension culminates in the bridge, when Bain sings “know I shouldn’t need it but I want attention / know I shouldn’t want but I need affection,” highlighting her and her partner’s lack of communication and Bain’s longing for actual connection. This song demonstrates how physical distance has inhibited the couple’s emotional closeness despite their attempt to use technology to bridge the gap.
Bain continues to lament about distance and absence in relationships in tracks three and four – “Sad to Breathe” and “Over there” – before transitioning away from the theme in track five “Morning Pages”, featuring Katie Gavin. In “Morning Pages”, she begins to lean more into the album’s central theme – cyclicity – and explores the roles physical and emotional distance play in life’s cycles.
“Morning Pages” was inspired by a popular writing exercise from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, in which the author writes down everything on their mind, first thing in the morning, until three pages are full. Amber Bain drew the story and content for the song “Morning Pages” from her journal with the help of friend and co-writer Katie Gavin. In the song, Bain and Gavin tell a story where the central figure is searching, mentally and physically, for their partner. It is unclear whether the girlfriend in the story is an ex, a current love, or just some shrouded dream of a person. The verses detail specific memories of/with this person, but the chorus is where the theme of proximity is relevant: “Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself right where you were / on the corner went looking for her / she had something to tell you, she can’t quite remember / but wait for a second, it always comes back to her / you always come back to her”. The song describes the feeling of chasing closeness with someone who is just out of reach. In many ways, that feeling of almost – that precipice – is what we experience when we call a friend to talk instead of being in the same room as them. The computer screen’s barrier makes you feel like you’re chasing a dream. It’s so close to reality, but the details are just a little pixelated. Bain finds herself repeatedly searching for someone who just isn’t there, but there’s a conviction that they’ll be reunited eventually. In the digital age, we spend hours with our eyes hooked on a screen, searching for the feeling of wholeness we can only find in real, in-person interaction. Tone is lost over text and social media only offer empty solutions to loneliness and boredom, but we keep scrolling with certainty that it will make us feel whole eventually. This is how digital interactions become so addictive: if they were truly fulfilling we would have no need to continue them infinitely. They offer to foster community while driving people apart, compounding and creating more need for an easy fix to every problem they contribute to. We find ourselves almost whole, but just barely disconnected, just like how Bain finds herself searching for her love on the street, nearly together, but she’s just disappeared around the corner. And, instead of accepting that the dream she’s chasing will never be real and moving on with someone new, Bain’s dream’s elusivity keeps her hooked. The pursuit of an elusive dream distracts us from the life in front of us.
In the first few tracks, Bain identifies distance as a source of pain and mourns the loss of proximity. We listen and understand that distance has caused anxiety, ruined a relationship, and that the proximity that was once there is worth grieving. In morning pages, she identifies our addiction to almost as the cause of the distance. When we spend our efforts seeking out cheap imitations of reality, we miss out on true closeness with others, which then only increases our desire for the empty coping methods that caused the issue in the first place. This could look like chasing an idealistic daydream, like in “Morning Pages”, or it could manifest as our over-reliance on pared-down digital interactions instead of real-world communities.
Altogether, this paints a comprehensive picture of our current societal relationship to distance. We use technology as a replacement for proximity and it initially seems like nothing has been lost in the exchange, but the voice call doesn’t pick up on your mother’s quietly exhaled sigh and the chat thread can’t carry the scent of your date’s perfume. The details seem insignificant at first, but their absence erodes our sense of reality over time. When we equate digital interactions to physical ones, we start to forget the importance of the little details that make us feel and experience our days rather than just watching them go by. Over time, the absence of these little details starts to wear us down, and our need for interaction grows. This leads us to rely more on easy digitized connection, and the cycle of tech dependency feeds into itself.
Technology is often a useful tool, and it’s true that it has overall improved global communication. It’s wonderful that relationships aren’t as damaged because of a move, but at the same time, the art of the letter is lost. Texting in emergency situations has saved lives, and constant communication with family eases routines and anxiety. Yet, simultaneously, the constant draw of communication needs in our pocket leave us with one foot out the door in real situations. Interconnectedness over distance comes with the loss of physical and mental presence, in both our real-life and digital interactions.
Our relationships with technology and distance are complicated, but if one lesson can be abstracted from In The End It Always Does, it’s that the best choice is often to set the phone down and just be there for the people you love. The impact you make on other people is the most important thing you will ever make in your lifetime. Break tech’s addictive cycle of almost and embrace the wholeness of being mentally and corporally in the same place.