Breaking up with reality imagines that the last 12 months of Covid lockdown is similar to the feelings after a breakup in a long-term relationship where everything we have assumed as normal is no longer there and instead our existence is defined by new boundaries and limited experiences. Nod at the Fox presents this thought as a thirty-minute monologue with the text, music and sound recordings created and read by Eden Harbud. It is an intriguing stream of consciousness, a rambling flow of thoughts reflecting on the impact such new ways of living have on each of us and at times verging on madness driven by the loneliness and isolation of being shut in our own homes.
The Deluxe experience offers the script to read and a short five-minute video of the opening thoughts which hints that this audio-visual version might have been the original intention before settling for a simpler voice over a still picture of an origami rabbit in the grass. The voiceover of Harbud is calm, soothing, in control for the most part and maintains an optimistic tone. It is also realistic about what this is. In his opening thoughts he says this may be “a load of fluff” but he hopes “some will connect” and if not “don’t bother to brush it off”. Well, it is more than fluff, there is a creativity about the soundscape both the sounds we miss like tube trains and crowds laughing and the sounds that dominate our lives like the ping of a message arriving on our phones.
