Kele Fleming welcomes you to her new single and video Carrier Hotel — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
The Victoria folk-rocker connects two separate concepts with the same name to examine our relationships to technology in her newly remastered, synthwave-tinged single.
For those who don’t know, a ‘carrier hotel’ is a facility where servers and other computing equipment owned by multiple enterprises share space. And, of course, hotels are often places of secrets and intrigue, a break from the humdrum of everyday — a place for one-night stands, affairs, being on the lam, or simply cloaking oneself in a shroud of incognito and anonymity.
In this imaginative work, Fleming imagines the carrier hotel as a setting in a hard-boiled detective story. “It’s about shifting identity in the ‘cloud’ and becoming someone else for convenience and fantasy,” she explains. “Ihe Internet and social media give people the ability to become shapeshifters and become someone else — if you’re shaping your identity through a make-believe world, are you really connected to, and present in, your real world?” Fleming makes it into a futuristic film-noir:
“From streetlight to streetlight
Wind your way down Front Street
You dodge the net sweepers
Squeeze through a choke point
You carry a message close to your heart.”
You can kiss but we won’t tell at the carrier hotel
We’re all a little closer to hell at the carrier hotel.”
The song is meant to explore the realities of reality itself, as well as anonymity and image management on the Internet, Fleming explains. “We have no secrets in the networked world. There is a data echo for every move you make. A digital artifact for every facet of your identity, every crumb, that you leave in the fibre optic pathways.”
Cowritten with longtime collaborator Ron Yamauchi, Carrier Hotel initially appeared on Fleming’s 2016 album No Static, and this version is the 2023 remaster. Since the pandemic, Fleming has been collaborating with DJs and, as a result, her music has taken an unexpected change in direction. Her songs are intelligent, conscious, and often challenging, documenting her thoughts on the environment, society, and politics. A proud member of the LGBTQ2A community as well as an older woman in the music industry, Fleming’s presence in today’s music scene is an important one in making it a more diverse and inclusive space.
Check out Carrier Hotel above, hear more from Kele Fleming below, and keep up with her at her website, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
