Have you ever found yourself in a shopping centre after all the stores have closed and the customers have gone home? How about in an airport terminal at a weird hour, wandering past endless vending machines and empty waiting rooms? Maybe you've visited your old school as an adult, or stayed late alone at the office, or walked down a particularly long hotel corridor, but the chances are, at some point, you've encountered a liminal space.
An internet lore-ridden phenomenon amongst Zillennials, liminal spaces are defined by ageing buildings devoid of life, silent except for the humming florescent lights above, and conjure up a sense of unease and strange familiarity while passing through. There's no obvious threat in a liminal space, but the uncertainty and loneliness of the surroundings is enough to shake you.
The feeling of being caught in a liminal space has been hanging over mxmtoon lately, throughout the recording of her third album and the period that preceded it, actually, so much so that the phrase became the title of the album.
Having been a part of the gaming world for as long as she can remember, mxmtoon (or Maia, as she's otherwise known, her surname impressively still kept under wraps) found herself in the YouTube rabbit hole of the video essayists discussing the ability to 'no-clip' out of reality and into 'the backrooms', a fictional level of endless liminal space. So, what's all this got to do with indie-pop, then?
"I was doing more research into liminal space, generally speaking, and the idea of liminality and why, when we look at a photo of an abandoned mall, what emotion that evokes out of us. It's this sense of nostalgia and sadness and also fear that comes up too of being confronted with something that feels familiar but also feels absent," says Maia. "I think that that was a lot of what I was going through at my life at that point, and still, even to this day, liminality is really central to where I am right now in life, and the transition period of coming from one place to another and kind of getting lost in between in the process. It felt like a perfect marriage of two different things that I was thinking about heavily, something that I was really into in a nerdy perspective, and then also something that I was going through in an emotional perspective."
