ADD TO PLAYLIST: .belville - Vie Olin

You know that tendency to put labels on things? To give bright and arbitrary edges that separate this from that and the other? That’s probably why we are such big fans of the Skeleton Coast, a stretch of Namibia where the desert meets the Atlantic. Who is to say, in this empty, foggy, inaccessible and utterly demising part of awful earth where the beach ends and the desert begins? Who and why will draw lines in this sand and say ‘Sorry – no deck-chairs in the desert’? How granular a separation between two things can be made when the separation may not be important at all, for if shipwrecked there, you are going to die in the sand.

Maybe that’s why we’re so keen on .belville. They’ve got a dot at the beginning of their name like they’re a file type extension, like you could plug them into a computer and tell immediately if they were a PowerPoint or a Word document or a movie file. But listening to Vie Olin, we can’t tell if the moisture and the salt staining our collective collars is the sweat of running through the desert towards the coast or the last few drops of seawater evaporating away as we hurl ourselves from the ocean towards death inland.

MP3: .belville – Vie Olin

Catch .belville (who we will now give a hard time for having, by their own admission, three albums of material that they have yet to record – GET ON IT) at 1:40 on the Numbers outside stage at Saturday’s Westheimer Block Party.