It’s a familiar story: picture you and the person you love. A wrong word, or a silence when you should have said something clever. There’s shift between the two of you. Acidic words, rising voices. Then silence, a taste like metal in your mouth, and the ground suddenly feels unstable. You don’t know where you stand with them anymore. Jeremy Voltz captures that unstable post-fight feeling with gusto in his single “Floating on Glass.”
It’s the calm after you slam the door/When my heart stops beating so fast
The song is just shy of three minutes long and consists solely of acapella vocals, each vocal layered on top of the ather to create a fractured, mirroring soundscape. The vocals are sharp and fragmented; the harmonies intertwine in strange weaving moments, the vocals stitching together for brief flashes before melting and darting apart again. The effect is delightfully disarming. The sonic texture shifts between warm, grounded harmonies and disorienting, kaleidoscopic vocal bursts that align with the lyrical content and thematic resonance of the piece. I mean, look: don’t you feel weird after a fight with the person you love? There’s a familiarity yet a foreignness, a change in the coordinates between you.
My heart stops beating so fast/And I’m floating on glass
Glass is both smooth and sharp. The moments of grounded harmonies in “Floating on Glass” feel like running your finger along the rim of a glass cup. Imagine dragging a soft bead of water along the edge, the cool and slippery softness. The song’s jagged moments feel more like examining a shard of a shattered lightbulb. Imagine the pricking corners, the tension of the draining light. You get the idea.
I’m warm from heat of the past I’m warm, but it doesn’t last/And I’m floating on glass
The music video goes for a similar duality, albeit in a visual way. Voltz’s music video for “Floating on Glass,” which is the brainchild of artist Brian Michael Jensen, features Voltz singing with his face broken into countless iterations. It’s like looking at him in a funhouse mirror – cast in pink and blue neon light, the viewer is instilled with that same unmoored feeling that you get post-fight with a partner. The sense of not quite knowing who you are looking at. Unfamiliarity. Multiplicity. At times smooth like glass, at times sharp like glass. Not quite in the air and not quite on the ground. Floating.
Stuck within a moment in the past/And I’m floating on glass
The leading vocal track has a glassy effect in and of itself. It’s high, delicate, and breakable, though supported by the other vocals. There is something non-linear about the song – it’s a track you can sink into and forget where you are, how you got there. Voltz captures a distinctly human experience in “Floating on Glass,” and embraces his message on both lyrical and sonic terms.
