The great thing about pop music is that it’s so mundane—not heavenly or lofty like classical music, mammoth like rock music, or hypnotic like techno, but normal, from next door, for you and for me, always, and everywhere. I understand pop and pop understands me—we’re on a first-name basis. That’s just the way it is. And the better the pop music, the more it sticks to that principle. Carla dal Forno, who grew up in Melbourne and has since adopted the banks of the Spree as her home, takes this tradition seriously. As a protagonist in her own videos, she walks down to the lake, wanders across the city, and wakes up repeatedly (though seldom in love) in strangers’ beds. The absence of real occurences feels unsatisfying, even claustrophobic. Dal Forno wanders around aimlessly, searching at once for herself and for the world. She becomes fused with the timid, sluggish, and seemingly wasted moments she experiences—moments that lie between acceleration and deceleration, closeness and loneliness. You Know What It’s Like, her debut album on Blackest Ever Black, is a charming collection of provisional hits and the sharpening of her experimental projects F ingers and Tarcar. It’s economically assembled from the artilleries of dub and post-punk. Spectacularly unspectacular. 

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