“You Are in My System” — The Human Pulse Inside the Machine
There’s a strange poetry to obsession when it’s translated into code. In the early 1980s, while most pop music was still clinging to the warmth of analog instruments, two musicians in New York began to imagine desire as something synthetic, programmable, repeatable, precise. The System, Mic Murphy, and David Frank weren’t trying to build a metaphor. They were just chasing a sound. But what they made with “You Are in My System” (1982) feels, in retrospect, like a prophecy: a love song written from inside the circuitry. At first listen, it’s pure electro-funk, that tight, relentless groove; the drum machine’s steady insistence; Murphy’s voice threading through digital haze like someone trying to reach another human being through static. But even then, something about it feels uncanny. It isn’t just the technology. It’s the way emotion and machinery start to blur, until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. The track was born from David Frank’s obsession with the synthes...