"Hello? Operator?" says one of the many different institutional women in this video. "I'll connect you right away." These two sentences of dialogue would fit in perfectly with "Private Booths for Sallow Suits" as a sample, not just because of the iconicism of the Henry Mancini-esque piano line or the visual cues of curly-haired women smiling as their clipped desks float through the air. It would also make sense as an echo of a particular yearning you can hearl in these chopped typewriter beats; the yearning for the exciting world of the early computer-age, where just having a machine that did something you would normally have to do yourself was a novelty. Wasn't it grand that there was something that would put words on a piece of paper for you without using a pen – and they would look the same every time? That joy, the joy of learning there is a machine that can do it for you, is gone.
"Private Booths for Sallow Suits" is available now on Human Resources' Firetalk Records cassette, Oxyc Woody II.
