350: Digital Garden

Rainbow Children (2001)
Prince liked to prove that time is an illusion by creating songs where the experiential and running times don’t match. Digital Garden is over far too quickly for you to believe four minutes have passed and yet still feels like an aeon-spanning epic. Like the rest of the album it has a readymade narrative – something about the Rainbow Children breaking through the digital garden, a surrounding barrier built by the Banished Ones – but for those not playing along at home you’re free to construct your own backstory. Serving suggestion: visualise the history of evolution, starting with single-celled organisms popping into existence and ending with the relentless, discordant voracity of the Anthropocene. Primordial soup to nuts. If Crazy You was a fragment of Brahma’s breath then Digital Garden could contain the whole lungful.