With apologies on this rare delay to our usual Friday publication, we hope you enjoy these recommendations in the relaxed spirit of a slow weekend read. This week: revisiting the myth of London-based jazz/alt-pop artist Leto Grand, the textural possibilities of compression, and the redemptive forces of fantasy and reality in Yung Lean.

Recommendation: Leto Grand - “Theme”

“Hello Grand Audience.” I’m checking back in this week with a new favorite artist - London-based alt-pop/jazz man, Leto Grand - who released another beautiful single called “Theme.” I wrote about Leto and his track “Lovely Walk,” and Leto himself in a more general sense a couple of months ago. Check that out for some context.

“Theme,” has the attractive quality of a home-spun sample platter from the library of Leto: distinctive saxophone hooks, atmospheric percussion, marching band whistles, little bongo fills. Most impactful are the chopped vocal rumination of Leto that persists throughout the track - little taglines, fragments of introspection, and imagined or remembered commentaries on Leto Grand himself and his band, as from the adoring mouths of Leto fans and the previous nights lovely audience, recalled and whispered under the breath in solitude, walking to meet a friend for breakfast.

Sold out, full house, sold out, full house, sold out, full house

Classic grand

Classic grand

Sold out (classic grand)

This is Leto’s Band (sold out, sold out, sold out)

This is Leto’s Band

Leto Grand

[...]

Sometimes we stand and find the light

Through a diamond bright

Smoking hot vampire white

With properties of dynamite

Amplify, amplify, amplify

The best place to see the band

Out of the green of the North to the South

From stage to shining stage.

Encore, Leto, Bravo, Bravo

Leto Grand, Encore, Encore

I love how this track invokes some expansiveness and sense of purpose in how Leto approaches his music and his local scene. It appears both reflective and aspirational, and it’s inspiring to imagine how Leto builds upon this sort of small pond mythological interior in such a relaxed way. The world and music of Leto Grand comes from a deep place I think. Yesterday I saw his instagram announcement that he would be unable to respond to messages for the next couple of weeks, as he is embarking on a walking trip in Tibet. Classic Grand. Amplify, amplify, amplify.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Che - REST IN BASS

I’ve got a piece in the latest issue of Spike talking about Che’s REST IN BASS and its utilization of compression as an aesthetic tool. This production tactic pervades rage rap in general, and its sensation-hijacking functions have intensified in concert with the style’s developments over the years. Yeat’s “Sorry Bout That” felt bracing in 2021, but it now sounds tame compared to recent material.

The evolution of the formal constellation of sonic space and loudness is central to such a periodizing distinction. (We remember the loudness wars.) I argue that extreme compression can enact a kind of generative flattening, synthesizing affordances by “doing away with micro-variations at the levels of amplitude and spatial depth.” Consider this alongside certain works by Morton Feldman or King Tubby, for example. It is possible for the foreground and background to phase in and out of sync, even eclipsing one another. I’ll be thinking more about this.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Yung Lean - “Agony”

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been listening to Yung Lean’s 2017 track “Agony,” sent by an angel. It’s devastating. Thirteen years ago, in 2013, Lean’s “Kyoto” had many of us in a complete chokehold—annunciatory for a sound that has only recently carried out its arc. “Agony” instead, is timeless. There’s no date on it. No cultural analysis therein, no rumination about its aesthetics, its stakes, or place. It’s stripped down, just Lean’s unadorned voice and a slightly out-of-tune piano. It’s the kind of music that—if you’re there for it—also strips you back. It’s music that’s completely enough. It could be everything, really.

“Agony,” from 2017’s Stranger, carries with it the drifting lore of Lean’s previous record Warlord, released during a series of dire circumstances in his life. Heavy drug use had led him to be hospitalized and institutionalized following the death of his then-manager Baron Machatt, co-founder of the beloved Hippos In Tanks label. Warlord knelt at the altar of darkness, reveling in it to an unknowable degree-zero—a cry for help spiralling to an incommunicable place.

In the aftermath, the embrace of a song like “Agony” is stunning. His lyrics are matter-fact yet unfold in simple, profound poetics. There’s a tension in how Lean’s artifice falls away into undecorated earnestness, his expression in half-light. It’s a true “mask off” moment, and memoriam for the possibility of falling away—a redemptive crescent, unmasking masks and shedding armors. A processed guitar glitters in miniature, shining over chord phrases. A choir drifts in and away softly.

In a 2017 interview, Lean told an interviewer that “Agony” is his interpretation of Alice In Wonderland and Beauty And The Beast: “It’s about being alone in a big marble house with white marble floors filled with burning golden candles and everything comes alive when you’re alone.” Fantasy enmeshed in reality, indistinguishable. Furniture coming alive, dancing with candlesticks. There’s a slight horror to those forms becoming alive, reality becoming fantasy or vice versa—both caving in. Recently, I’ve seen the “White Rabbit” trend on TikTok, referring to viral narrative videos where users share “before-and-after” moments that highlight sudden, life-changing events. Accompanied by the phrase “the rabbit got me,” the videos feature a timeline from peaceful moments to the exact point everything turned upside down.

After everything that’s happened to Lean, “Agony” comes across as a redemptive white rabbit, carrying him into fantasy that’s manifesting as golden candles, illuminating the shadows that once surrounded him. He is at peace with the visions, singing: “It’s fine, it happens all the time.”

In Lean’s words “the dragon sleeps in agony,” angels above—”lay me down, concrete love.”

My furniture has come alive

I’m dancing with a candlestick tonight

Flying kites, raven outside my window

Smiles with fright

Isolation caved in

I adore you

The sound of your skin

—Nick James Scavo

Hello from 2020MG. Today we have recommendations of ancient organological concern, the emotional ambiance of R&B and Drone, and a phenomenology of instagram bots.

Recommendation: The Neanderthal Flute debate

“Neanderthal flute” is the intrusive thought of the week. I first encountered it while reading my Kindle on an elliptical overlooking a recycling processing facility. While entrained in my taskscape.

The flute in question is a cave bear femur with holes in it, from the Middle Paleolithic period. Some people think it was crafted by Neanderthals, while others think it was not. National Geographic dates it back 43,000 years in their article, “Was ‘Earliest Musical Instrument’ Just a Chewed-Up Bone?”. Musicologist Gary Tomlinson argues that there isn’t any “secure evidence” for Neanderthal musicking.

There is a nice sentence in Philip G. Chase and April Nowell’s 1998 Current Anthropology article “Taphonomy of a Suggested Middle Paleolithic Bone Flute from Slovenia.” “This is a chewed bone,” they write, “nothing about it is inconsistent with this as an explanation, and nothing about the bone is very surprising given that it was heavily chewed.”

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Tinashe - Nightride / Tim Hecker - Ravedeath 1972

I played some music on my stereo a few days ago—something that’s become increasingly rare given how “outside” I’ve had to be for work over the past month or so. Twilight outside, windows cracked, I put on Tinashe’s 2016 album Nightride. I was drawn to the album after listening to a TikTok of her new music that debuted in NYC last weekend. I’ve listened to this clip on loop hundreds of times over the past few days. Tinashe is underrated; I think people know that. She’s an extremely hardworking borderline star, but hasn’t completely broken through—grinding on total mood, total choreo, total vision—a security and confidence with her sound. Her track 2 On is a favorite of 2010s rap radio; and, more recently, “Bouncin’” is in regular rotation. I feel like she might finally actually break through this summer. Tinashe Summer. Just a feeling.

Her album Nightride, released in 2016, sums up a particular dark R&B atmosphere that I’ve always been drawn into, embarrassingly so. It’s embarrassing because the music could easily be taken as overwrought—verging on becoming background music—confident in its emotions to the point of becoming almost “stock.” Underneath its prefab toolkit, Tinashe has a dedication to drawing out mystery, intrigue, and mood into cohesive stretches of album—rare in a pop-R&B space that often favors beat switches and odd track-flows that can mess up the vibe. Her sound is drizzly and overcast, like orange neon pooling under drawn blinds, shared secrets, pillow talk. Producers Metro Boomin, Boi-1da, and The-Dream all create very “known” sound palettes, setting scenes for dim clubs, street-glow freeways, enshrouded bedrooms. “Sacrifices” is a perfect example—an arpeggiated gamelan VST bounces around in an icy pattern. Hi-hats skittering over drawls of moody, melodic 808 type shit. It almost disturbs me in how easy it is to draw aura and ascendent moods from this type of music. Fantastic.

I fell asleep while listening to Nightride on the stereo this past Sunday. Shockingly, I awoke to hear not more Tinashe, but Tim Hecker’s 2011 breakout ambient album Ravedeath 1972. I awoke in the middle of the album, around the track “In the Fog II.” This music is special, and hasn’t lost any of its brutal, greyscale intensity that still seems to somehow find its way into the most intense moments of life. I consider the album to be kind of haunted for this reason. I remember seeing it live at an Appalachian arena in 2011 with my friend Xander Seren and we almost had to run outside of the venue, spooked beyond belief as 19 year olds. Hecker’s music also doesn’t always beat the overwrought allegations. But it understands itself. Beautifully.

I like both Tinashe and Tim Hecker. I’ve got two YouTube tabs from both artists open at the same time right now (“Lucid Dreaming” and “No Drums”). It doesn’t sound too bad. But, hearing them in surprise sequence with each other the other day was genuinely moving. I don’t think I need to dictate their comparison too much more; they share a kind of brutal emotionalism hidden behind their confident genre-work. And, I enjoyed their chance conversation, linked in between exhausted dreams in Spring twilight. Nightride, Ravedeath.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Jeter Jones “Da Kang of Trailride Blues” bots, Maurice Merleau-Ponty “Cézanne’s Doubt”

Every day for the last few months, Jeter Jones “Da Kang of Trailride Blues,” requests to follow me on Instagram from a brand new account. It’s really a huge honor for me that Mr. Jones would take such an intense interest in my work and activities, because (as I wrote about some weeks back) I really love his music; but I have to admit I feel a little bit smothered by all the attention. I follow his main account, of course, but it’s never enough for Jones. A new account each day, a new request: Jeter2589, Jeter3829, and so on. A deluge of Jones’ requests. It invites some reasonable speculation, I think, on whether there’s something funny going on. But I don’t want to be cynical, and I’d really like to support the work of the arch-trailrider.

What is it that Jones wants to tell me, or to know? What does he want from me? He probably wants to thank me for writing about his music. But as I regretfully decline each new follow, I wonder at the mysterious persistence of Jeter Jones, the digital avatar in my inbox.

I’d like to bracket out the possibility that this is, in fact, NOT Jeter Jones. Instead, I’ll regard these requests as in good faith: simply an expression of the proliferation of Jones in the digital world. And, perhaps even a fraudulent Jones is still, in one sense, a Jones.

Maybe I’ve been too conservative, too guarded. Why not allow the 10,000 kings of trail ride blues to follow me, and why not follow each king in return? I guess I feel like one is enough. I appreciate information being a bit centralized, when it can be. And I don’t imagine it would be very fruitful to carry on discussions with the same person across such a wide array of accounts. But again, I’m searching for the truth of these matters, and want to remain open to possibility.

Why not create a new account each day? A new domain. The central account presupposes a continuity that may be far more representationally consistent, yet actually less true in nature. Why wouldn’t there be a new Jones for each day? A Jones for every season, in a state of continual growth and change. Maybe I am nostalgic, and looking for a type of ephemerality online that I can recall, but no longer access.

One thing about the Jones account series is that there is little to no content on any of the new versions. I think that’s okay. It produces a textual resonance rather than a visual/informational one. It is a daily reminder of Jones in name alone, inviting broad consideration without direction, gestural guidance or intent. It simply names the man and the new number with which the daily expression is anchored within Meta’s vast data infrastructure.

The mysterious, shifting boundary of the many Jones reminds me of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s exposition in “Sense and Non-Sense,” in which he describes the painter Paul Cézanne’s profound and creatively generative near-blindness. He explores the question of freedom in art as something simultaneously constrained by and accelerated in its expression, as a result of the insurmountable experience of subjectivity.

“…to say that we are from the start our way of aiming at a particular future would be to say that our project has already stopped with our first ways of being, that the choice has already been made for us with our first breath. If we experience no external constraints, it is because we are our whole exterior. […] If I am a certain project from birth, the given and the created are indistinguishable in me, and it is therefore impossible to name a single gesture which is not spontaneous-but also impossible to name a single gesture which is absolutely new in regard to that way of being in the world which, from the very beginning, is myself.”

As we inevitably produce images of the world, ourselves, and each other, as with Cézanne, there is maybe an equally unavoidable exterior to what we see and know that can only really be expressed and represented at the boundary of our sight, where the imaginary of clarity dissolves into color and texture. In this respect, maybe the many Jones - true or fraudulent - offer one such texture, or reflect the representation of the basic instabilities in how we appear and what we mean in doing so. I guess, let there be 10,000 kings, on myriad trail rides, with an infinity of blues.

—Alec Sturgis

This week, car tire cadence discourse, ear nose and throat discussion, and literature review of the millennial text-sound milieu.

Recommendation: Flat Tire, Mark Fell & Drumming GP - “Intra”

I have a flat tire. So I’ve been driving around looking for the exact right one. It’s a special kind of tire it seems: even when it is flat, you can still drive on it, and I have been. This is pretty incredible. I went to the first shop and left and came back and the man told me to go down the street. I went there. He said go down further down the street. The third man said he could have it by 5PM. That is good for me.

I’m wondering this week about what elements of consistency allow for a tire to persist even in a state of total deflation. Is there some form with the wheel that can’t be compromised? Is there an inner inflation beyond the external tire that allows it to remain intact and in a navigable state?

I’m listening to Mark Fell & Drumming GP’s 2018 “Intra” today (“computer generated rhythm for microtonal metallophones, performed by Drumming Grupo De Percussao, at Fundacao de Serralves, 2017), in contemplation of this type of circular interiority. The percussive synthesis of metalophones mirrors an internal consistency of the wheel, the hubcap, and the arrhythmic period of layered minor percussive phrases feels like the oblong exterior of a broken circle in motion. I suppose I’m celebrating and recommending that today.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Suicide - “Love You”

My ENT and I get in arguments. They are friendly arguments and they are productive. He says he doesn’t mind. He wants to know how I feel about getting my sinuses microwaved. That sounds good. I need to get an x-ray first and then we’ll meet again and argue in a few weeks.

I originally scheduled this most recent visit because my left ear felt muffled and dull, in addition to the usual congestion symptoms. I couldn’t hear well. After the visit, the inner ear started to feel submerged, and then it started ringing. First the frequencies were high, and then they got lower. On Sunday the sound and pressure intensified to a degree that made me nervous.

I fast-walked to urgent care and underwent a peculiar procedure. It felt very DIY but it was very effective. The problem ceased immediately. I was then able to hear in a way that I haven’t heard in years. Music sounded unbelievably full. I got off on Delancey/Essex and was overwhelmed by sonic detail. I forgot sound could do some of these things. I had been wondering if I loved music less than I used to.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Reflecting on Millenial “Text Sound” Music from ~2017 - 2022

This week, I’ve been thinking about nouveau “text sound” music that became vogue in certain experimental music circles spanning roughly 2017 to 2022. Throughout this time, noise, DIY, or computer musicians were compelled to use text, speech, and spoken word, alongside concrete sampling techniques and concept-forward compositional structures. It was a time where Fluxus and post-Cagean music history seemed active in informing the production of new digital music—where the “word score,” as it was expanded upon by La Monte Young’s famous Composition 1960 #10 (which stated simply “draw a straight line and then follow it”), created explorative reciprocity between text and sound. Text was used as an expansion on identifying, scoring, and signaling sound, while sound was often conceptually tied to the use of text. The frame of musical composition was one of total possibility. During the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was a clear focus on unveiling histories of experimental music—from the word scores of Dick Higgins, La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, to Annea Lockwood & Allison Knowles’ Womens Work (such as Knowles piece “Proposition” (1962), which stated “make a salad”).

Our recent past’s obsession with 20th century experimental music history showcased a collective enthusiasm in the speculative space of text representing sound, and vice versa, as a unique moment in the development of digital music. Both text and sound cast into the invisible, as formal units of simultaneous legibility, uncertainty, speculation, and loose representation. Digital music’s ability to produce or sample any possible sound created a novel frame for musical production, actively considering the reciprocity of text and sound. The accessibility of digital audio workstations and software also fast-tracked ways of composing and utilizing text—text-to-speech generators, vocoders, sampling, voice actors, etc. were paired with abstract sonic backgrounds. These sounds demanded context; and, many reached for formal or at least paratextual strategies found in the history of experimental music. The years of 2017 to 2022 were also a high-era of “flat memes”—memes specifically focused on a straightforward image and text relationship. Much of this category of experimental music produced during this time was uniquely in conversation with an imagistic memetic compositional framework. Plenty of us were in fact actively producing memes related to experimental music; or, we used them overtly in the promotion of shows, music, albums, and more. While this culture is absolutely still present, it’s more forwardly evolved into short-form video in 2026. Today, to meme about niche music in the way we were doing almost ten years ago seems … wrong.

Right before this time, in September 2016, I conducted an interview with the late composer Alvin Lucier, who passed in 2021 (whose work I am sitting in a room is foundational to this discourse), and Julie Martin, director of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), the nonprofit organization co-founded in 1966 in New York by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and engineers Billy Klüver (Martin’s late husband) and Fred Waldhauer. Through Lucier’s inimitable, profound stutter, he told an amazing story about John Cage and David Tudor. Midway through his story, Lucier’s seriousness deepened. He recalled that “all of my composer friends were trying to get their pieces performed by the Boston Philharmonic, while Cage and Tudor filled up their cars with electronics and drove out in the snow.” He told the tale solemnly and with humor. Referring to Cage and Tudor as “these guys,” Lucier pushed on about “Tudor with all his wires, [how] things didn’t work… [how] 10 or 11 people were in the audience… [how] they were traveling through snowstorms, playing their own music while my friends were waiting to have their pieces performed once in their lifetimes.” As he recounted his admiration for the two, his story halted. He recalled the poet and Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins, proclaiming that he knew, before anyone else, how important these two musicians were. Lucier mused, moved to tears at the thought — “How Dick… how he knew that they were something… How did Dick have the insight?” During the interview, Lucier held his hands to his face and broke down in tears, still blown away how anyone could have.

From 2017 to 2022, the “DIY” and “underground music” communities found a lot of momentum and context within mid-20th century experimental music history—appreciating the simultaneous academic seriousness, free spirited playfulness, true experimentalism, and heartfelt authenticity found in Lucier’s story about Cage, Tudor, and Higgins. Many of us found something like this on the internet—a place where you could both joke around and find serious scattered evidence of this history, forming a brief slant rhyme with a DIY basement show or busted suitcase electronics tour.

The appetite for this musical history seems reduced in 2026. I’ll try to write more on where this text sound dialectic could go in future issues—there’s plenty more to explore there. I’ve also included a little selection of releases that form a snapshot of this 2017 - 2022 era in time below:

Jack Callahan & Jeff Witscher: “Stockhausen Syndrome” (2021)

Jack Callahan & Jeff Witscher - “ISSUES (What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth)” (2022)

Die Reihe - “Vocoder” (2017)

Die Reihe – “Tragedy In A Sense Is A Kind Of Psychic Flavor Of This Loneliness” (2020)

Jeff Witscher - “Surviving Sound Music” (2019)

Asha Sheshadri - “Interior Monologues” (2022)

Asha Sheshadri - “Looting Index” (2020)

Network Glass - “Twitch” (2020)

Max Eilbacher - “Metabolist Meter” (2020)

Daren Ho - “Videologue 2019” (2020)

Nick James Scavo - “100% PERFECT DEEP LISTENING” (2020)

Matt Carlson - Are You Interested in the Reunion of Winners? (2022)

Reece Cox - “Clang” (2020)

Theodore Cale Schafer - “It Isn’t So Bad To Be Alone” (2020)

Claire Rousay - “Dice in Santa Fe” (2020)

—Nick James Scavo

This week, recommendations include a youth music report, considering poetic disidentification, and a food/travel log from industrial Upper Peninsula, Michigan.

Recommendation: Nettspend Live at Terminal 5, April 28th, 2026 / “Pain Talk” / “halftime”

Interacting with new music can be kind of horrifying. I’ll play a track like Nettspend’s “halftime” and be completely wrecked by a billowing bass pulse with a panflute/recorder ditty arpeggio gliding over it. It’s not so different from plenty of music I’ve heard before; but, the fleeting cadence of the music’s youth and newness is enshrouded in menace. The fried, metallic sound is actually very normal—and that’s the scariest part. Showing it to a coworker still elicits pained faces—”wtf is this shit”—but the banal darkness located within the music is its own functional officewear. Watercooler type shit. Nettspend Nespresso.

This is the early life crisis. The midlife crisis is well established within the Gen X media we’ve inherited—that “you can change your life” rebelliously and drive the camaro off the deep end. The early life crisis is already chilling at the bottom of the cliff. Not driving off, but occupying the threshold of possibility for a perpetual state of life crisis. It’s an understanding that incredibly fucked up music is basically just kind of normal. Within the early life crisis, the status of the transcendental or altering your own reality is synonymous with having perpetual proximity with death, a placid dread. The early life crisis is ambivalent with how the midlife crisis precodes death. It’s not a fear of death, but a dapped up embrace. From Kierkegaard’s Fear & Trembling: “to contend with the whole world is a comfort, but to contend with oneself dreadful.” Nettspend is a comfort, contending with the whole world as a kind of worldwide “Pain Talk.”

A few days ago, I saw Nettspend with Alex Iadarola and our friends Rachel and Antonio at Terminal 5—a “back to the scene of the crime” situation after seeing 2hollis there last October. I’m admittedly drawing a bit of a blank in even trying to describe what went down. Rabid teen fans in hotdog and banana suits were pushing up against each other during the preshow—one holding a whole ass open Macbook (livestreaming maybe?) triumphantly above their head in the din of the crowd. People were slapping each other in the face and barking like dogs. There were bloody noses and security guards pouring water directly into people’s mouths. Everyone swayed in dangerous waves of compressed crowdedness. We were lucky to be sitting on a balcony like we were on an international flight, as minor fights broke out in scattered sparks across the space. Tufts of volumized “poof” haircuts made up 80% of the audience. Deer Park water bottles filled with vodka were clearly brought in school backpacks and crushed and disposed of outside the venue. Moshpits erupted every couple of minutes—as bass ricocheted in a particularly metallic timbre all over the place. Nettspend’s voice and navigation of a generic rap/autotune delivery was particularly virtuosic. He was the Batman villain in a condemned and damned Gotham City, proclaiming to the sea of teens: Who tf is u?

I’ve had a pretty insane experience with “youth music” over the last week (post-show from hosting ear and SS3BBY at PS1 last week). In Spring 2026, being 34 years old still feels early. The crisis, pretty normal. You ready?

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Suburban Lawns - “Janitor”

This week we’ll put a few excerpts dealing with disidentification into conversation.

First, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, from a 1983 interview quoted in a new essay by the great Ian Penman: “I think ultimately I’m just a sound. I don’t know if I’m a human being.”

Next, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, from a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel:

We’re not a car. We are not a car. The fact that I can buy this car brand one day and use another car brand another day, easy. Computing is not like that. There’s a reason why the x86 deal exists. There’s a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems are hard to replace.

Finally, the pre-chorus of Suburban Lawns’ “Janitor”:

Who’s your mother? Who’s your father?

I guess everything’s irrelative

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Pasties, Pentangle - “Light Flight”

I was in the upper peninsula (UP) of Michigan for work this week, photographing an electrical industrial facility. It was in a remote area about two hours driving from the hallowed football ground of Lambeau Field in Green Bay, WI. The trip was short, but I had plenty of time to take in the local offerings in the (only town for many miles), Iron Mountain. Dinner at Spud’s Bistro was a delight: I ordered the excellent pub pizza and my associate enjoyed the chicken and shrimp Alfredo. There’s a big Italian population in the area, I learned, because miners from all over Europe (especially Italy and Britain) came in during the mid-1800’s after their iron industries dried up. I learned more about this from the Spud’s bar staff, who I became friendly with, and who took me along for their post-shift drink at Bimbo’s Wine Press (an Italian pork store - but really, a bar).

There’s an intense remoteness to this area - not just geographically, but in terms of the cultural sensibility. People are extremely open and friendly, but in an understated way that suggests the isolation of long winter months even in spring. And everyone seems to already know everyone else. The Scandinavian migrant history of the area checks out here in this sense too. There’s an egalitarian spirit embedded in the commitment to maintain residence there. Bosses of industry seem to grow up there and plug into the raw material refining and extracting infrastructure. Those that aren’t in industrial labor or management seem to stay, or leave, but come back. One woman described her tenure in south Florida, joining a carnival there. She came back to the UP to raise her daughter. It seems like a good place to do that - a place that is still reliant on community in an actually intense social and material sense.

The following day, after I finished working, I went to try another local delicacy: the meat pies called “pasties.” It’s a pastry crust filled with stewed meat, potatoes, rutabaga, and so on, with many variations on the theme (but none too flashy). It’s not the most flavorful food, but filling, nutritionally complete, satisfyingly coherent. Reading a historical document on the wall of Dobber’s, I learned that the cuisine was brought over by Cornish miners (“Cousin Jacks and Jenneys”) who immigrated following the opening of the iron and copper mines. They would carry these pies into the tunnels, heating them on shovels in the dark, placed over the gas lamps, or would keep them body temperature in chest jacket pockets. Hundreds of people eating pie, tunneling in the ground, extracting resources, starting families, staying, leaving, coming back, forming the infrastructure and then expressing its social aspects over generations.

I suppose my recommendation this week is related to this sense of imperfect (maybe fraught, sometimes flavorless, potentially incredible) completeness that I consider about the pastie and in the UP. The humble form of the pie is very much secondary to its mixing, seasoning and the spirit and utility with which it’s eaten. Things have a way of cohering when the needs and roles of people and of social and material components are given (or take) space in the collective assembly.

Leaving Bimbo’s, it was beginning to snow (in April) to the amusement of all the UP-ers. As I had entered the mix for an evening, I was offered a ride back to the Holiday Inn Express. Thank you, Dennise and the rest of the generous Spud’s staff.

Here’s one great song for Spring, in the spirit of the meat pie and Cousin Jack and Jenney:

Pentangle - “Light Flight”

—Alec Sturgis

In this 28th Issue, we recommend considering the circulatory system, the “supersensual ear,” and birds.

Recommendation: Addison Rae - “Arcamarine” Remix (New Coachella 2026 Live Mix)

I’m having a generationally busy week at work—Greater New York (MoMA PS1’s quinennial NYC art survey) opened last Wednesday. The institution is also in its 50th anniversary season and we threw a giant block party for 8,000 people last Saturday. I have a show with ear this week (who I wrote about a few months back on 2020MG), and am kicking off rehearsals for a full performance program early next. My nervous system is shot; I’m socially, professionally, and chemically overextended. The dopamine just isn’t there in its natural state. I can feel the tightness of my veins in my neck and wrists. The music I’m recommending this week is a reflection on this perilous but lit state. There’s no grandstanding about music’s utility in moments like this. It’s literally a chemical vector of emotions—a textural component to rouse, insulate, protect, and animate. There’s also no easy listening here; I’ve been reaching for emotionally vibrant, if not incidental, things that are literally shocking my system AED style to negotiate the tension between interiority and exteriority—a mediating force in between obligation, reflection, and glorious interaction.

Alec referred to versions of this style of music consumption last week as potentially falling into a “sensory-meaning vacuum, sealing the collective untruth of music’s projective meaning in with the individual untruth of its cognitive unintelligibility.” I agree with the majority of his analysis last week—on music’s squeezed and compressed state as a consumptive form outside of its integrated social and collective meaning. I also proffer that this kind of negotiation (something I know we’ve both obsessed over thoroughly) is something I’m at peace with and see no unifying correction for in our current society, at least collectively. While tempting to launch into a more essayistic piece on the slight differences I have on this perspective—the chemicals just aren’t there this week. Instead, it’s a matter of just feeling the musical tension, its slippage, and the in media res “umbrella acoustemology” of our confused interaction with the existing chaotic droplets of musical experience. There’s something special about going nonverbal and just watching the rain come down. In fact, I find myself often drawing energy from the untrustworthiness of our experiences with music, and in the precarity of not knowing where our relationality “comes from”—in not being able to directly face the music. Here, we “Feel the rain on your skin / No one else can feel it for you / Only you can let it in / The rest is still unwritten.” That’s just life.

On these terms, I’ve been replaying a short loop of a new live remix of Arca’s already-existing remix of Addison Rae’s “Aquamarine” nonstop. She performed this new version live at Coachella last week alongside some inspired choreography. The track literally makes my already fast-beating, exhausted heart beat even faster—pushing it to the brink. I’m OK with this. Listening to it literally feels like I’m formulating some pact with my circulatory system, swearing fealty that it’ll be able to rest again soon—a Reggaeton strut, a sigil marked somewhere to secure a future, protective energy field that will help sustain its pulse.

Deleuze and Guattari often wrote the phrase “flee, but while fleeing, pick up a weapon” (French: Fuir, mais en fuyant, chercher une arme), adapted from a letter from Black Panther activist George Jackson. It is at once a call to action and immanent movement that emphasizes their concept of lines of flight—multiplicity as being defined by the outside, and the process of reaching toward that outside on the plane of consistency. Throughout this process, a weapon is grasped in the sheer action of fleeing toward the boundary, as the line of flight marks the reality of a finite number of dimensions within that multiplicity. There is music and relationality here.

That’s all I’ve got this week. Supposedly 10,000 heartbeats lasts approximately 1.5 to 2.5 hours. It depends on whether you have that resting rate of, say, 50 bpm, or an amped up heart rate of 100 bpm. The great Milford Graves talked about heartbeats and the parasympathetic nervous system as a current that ran through his work and percussion practice (maybe a topic for another week). Today, it’s a 100 bpm week—with much flight and many weapons.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Jeune Morty – Ivoire Feeling

Patricia Lockwood has a great essay about Willa Cather in a recent issue of the LRB, titled “Supersensual Ear.” She paraphrases a scene from Death Comes for the Archbishop, set in a cave:

Latour feels a marked unease in this place, which is both sacred and secret; he begins to perceive an ‘extraordinary vibration’. Jacinto tells him to lay his ear to the ground: ‘What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock.’ In the night he wakes and observes Jacinto ‘standing on some invisible foothold, his arms outstretched against the rock, his body flattened against it, his ear over that patch of fresh mud, listening; listening with supersensual ear, it seemed, and he looked to be supported against the rock by the intensity of his solicitude.’ The text grants us, for a moment, the gift of this supersensual ear. The substance rushes deep within the earth.

This passage has haunted my relationship with sound for the past few weeks. The listener positioned just above the earth’s crust, at the lower limit of terrestrial life – the threshold of the earthly milieu – attuned to something “far below.” The bottom of a cave occasioning both connective permeability and lithic separation. This sense of being both places at once, really. Without the ear, one would need a sledgehammer to make their way across.

I have not listened to music with a supersensual ear this week. I haven’t had time to listen intently. Nonetheless, something that I have enjoyed, which has afforded fleeting moments of substantive listening: Ivorian French rapper Jeune Morty’s Jeune Morty Vol.1, hosted by Crystallmess. “Ivoire Feeling” is polychromatic and effervescent and airy. There’s an elegant durational consistency to it. I recommend it. It inspires a sense of spirit.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Birds, Olivier Messiaen - “Catalogue D’Oiseaux”

I enjoy birds. There are some beautiful regulars in my yard. The nice pair of mourning doves that come every year (I think it’s the same two) waddle around in the garden beds, and don’t seem too threatened by my sitting in the lawn chair nearby. The blue jay, the robin, and the cardinals are also very active in the allotment. I’m going to talk about sound and birds, but the spatiality of birds is really my main subject here. To find them on or near the ground has an unstated mystery, imbued with a kind of foreignness and poetry. These guys fly. They travel tremendous distances, they talk to each other, and they come to the city, to the yard, defecate on the chairs, create nests and have families. Sometimes they die here, and I bury them in my unplanned graveyard, or leave them for the local predators to carry off and consume.

Last week I wrote about acoustemology - Steven Feld’s concept for an epistemology within and through sound itself: the layered experiences of time, space, memory, action, acoustics, and really, the texture of human life and language within our environments. Birds are fascinating sonic figures in this construction of sound and knowing, as even in the city, they impose a continual, high descant above the cacophony of cars, and the loud ambient hum of nearby trucking routes, industrial facilities, endless airplane traffic, etc. They alone occupy this specific, high-middle register of our sonic consciousness. Something that is, sort of, attentionally stable, because almost nothing competes with the arrhythmic cadence, the percussion and spectral melodisms of the bird song.

This past weekend, I slept outside in rural Connecticut on my friend’s property. Sleeping under the open sky has a rhyme in the unconscious mind for me, that fits in with the way bird songs occupy the periphery of the conscious mind. The ceiling gets raised. And there’s a dynamic acoustics to the tones and resonances of day and night, which shifts with the atmosphere, the humidity. A high and dry resonance at dusk, a wetter resonance in the morning, as the air creates a spacious kind of sonic containment.

Still basically asleep on Sunday, I heard two cardinals high above me and a good way to my left and my right, with a piercing call and response. Off to their left and their right: another chorus of these calls and more across the canopy, over the hills. Their distance from my ears (laying on a wood plank, a couple feet off the ground, next to a giant bush of yellow flowers) formed some interiority in the empty space between me and them. I listened for a good while, slowly becoming more awake. Laying still - bundled up and unseen - a rush of multiple humming birds zoomed over my head toward and around the yellow bush: buzzing next to my ears, shooting off, panning forward and back, closer, further. It was a stunning experience of sound and circumstance, and something I generally forget is possible within the flow of my normal routines. It’s a kind of listening that can not be recreated, or fully recalled, except in some unique form of sense memory, anchored in its place and time. It’s nice to simply share that this happened, and that it was a special moment, but my recommendation this week comes from a personal exercise I’ve been trying to engage in since. I want to practice some greater sensitivity to the space in which listening is happening, and also to the range of listening that can be had beyond (but not against) the containment of speakers, instruments, AirPods, or designated venues for listening. I think it’s possible that we can listen to music and sound more fully, experience it within a bigger boundary of meaning, and invite a sort of relational sensitivity to, beyond (but not against) its immediate emotional, personal, social utility. It feels like a good idea to try this out more regularly, and without anticipating or forcing any particular hierarchies of significance. Just observing and exploring an extension of what our ears might do when regarded not just as receivers of the world’s natural sonic “avant-garde,” but as situated co-creators of its clarities and intensities. There are some interesting practices and practitioners of this “deep listening” that maybe I’ll explore in detail later.

And, sort of adjacent to this way of thinking: here is some bird inspired music by the French, Catholic iconoclast composer Olivier Messiaen. It’s a cool and challenging collection that exercises a tension between the atmospheric, mystifying experience of actual bird songs, and the abstract musical imagination of the features and forms of those sounds, as mediated through the keyboard. I’d like to write more about these pieces, but for now, I’ll leave them here. Something else to listen to and think about (that I recommend).

Olivier Messiaen - “Catalogue D’Oiseaux”

—Alec Sturgis

This week, for some reason we celebrate Bad Girl Ri Ri with three recommendations: a confluence of LLM operations and Rihanna’s poetics, an analytic riff on the umbrella and Steven Feld’s musical linguistic anthropology, and a love letter to Rihanna’s specific, missing aesthetic register in 2026.

Recommendation: Rihanna - “SOS”

I increasingly use Claude Code to design software, which is what I do for work. I use it in the terminal, which is a very different experience from using an LLM in a desktop app or browser. It has particular rhythms and syntax and a pronounced aesthetic dimension.

When a prompt is entered, the system uses interstitial messaging to communicate that it is being processed:

✻ Cascading… (1m 28s · ↓ 1.6k tokens)

The ASCII art morphs while a lo-fi orange gradient pulses across the action verb as the numbers increase. If you use the default terminal, it is in a monospaced font. The styling utilizes aesthetics from the past to communicate something specific about a futuristic suite of functionalities.

When the system processing is complete, the interstitial messaging is replaced by a response. It might simply provision information, or it might want to edit files on your computer depending on permission configurations. If you asked it to create a .txt file with the phrase “Hello,” it could do that.

Each time the LLM embarks upon a task, the system generates a different verb in place of “Cascading” in the example above. Such as:

Manifesting… Noodling… Cogitating… Tinkering… Whirring… Pollinnating… Frosting… Catapulting… Enchanting… Whirring… Whatchamacalliting… Tomfoolering… Smooshing… Recombobulating… Crystallizing… Herding…

These verbs define the character of the rhythmic communicative gesture.

What kind of rhythm is this? We are already familiar with rhythms of human-computer interaction: browsing pages in search of information, commodities, or media, embarking upon goal-directed user flows in Turbotax, navigating through menus and submenus and search results. The computational rhythm we are focused on today is different: it has affordances for nonlinearity, more amenable to end-user improvisation than a healthcare website, for example.

We can think of this rhythm as a transit back and forth between two poles. This week I noticed an instance of such a rhythm in Rihanna’s “SOS.” It features a gruesome, depitched “oh” sample, foregrounding Rihanna’s positive rhythmic enunciations through background negative enunciation at the levels of pitch, timbre, and EQ – a balance of contrasts. It sounds like a sample you’d hear in an old Total Freedom edit. It’s not really meant to be noticed. It supplies a chiaroscuro function, just beyond the threshold of direct focus, which is to say: just there, supporting things architecturally.

—Alexander Iadorola

Recommendation: Bosavi Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea, Steven Feld - “Voices of the Forest: A Village Soundscape”

I’ve been loosely considering music’s expressive deficiency for a long time. Maybe you share this perspective that the settings in which we mostly hear music and sound - live, recorded, digital, analogue, incidental, presentational, participatory - feel squeezed and compressed in their indexical, historical, sensorial, conceptual terrain, in contemporary mediatized culture. We sit in a chair, we stand in a crowd, we dance, we select a track for the commute, we decide to relax or stimulate, to challenge our states of mind or reconcile our cringe appetites.

Because the experience of music is largely commercial (even passively so) for us, optional, emotionally and socially modular, it often feels as though we are supposed to know what it is or means before we presently engage it; and, that to miss this cultural synaptic spark is in some way to miss “music” entirely.

The (theoretical) alternative to this social-linguistic contract is, maybe, a sensory-meaning vacuum, sealing the collective untruth of music’s projective meaning in with the individual untruth of its cognitive unintelligibility, in a lifeless, abstract suspense. Our participation in the representational mania of music’s ultimately social life is like a physical workout - something we do to feel better, stronger and more energetic - in accepting and sitting with the equal and opposite, discomforting interiority of those sounds.

Basically, the concerns I’m tracing out would be well supported by the body of inquiry that musicologist Steven Feld called “acoustemology,” in 1992. Of this portmanteau of “acoustics” and “epistemology,” Feld asks, and then contextualizes:

“Is the world constituted by multiple essences, by primal substances with post facto categorical names like ‘human,’ ‘animal,’ ‘plant,’ ‘material,’ or ‘technology?’ Or is it constructed relationally, by the acknowledgment of conjunctions, disjunctions, and entanglements among all copresent and historically accumulated forms? It was the latter answer that compelled a theorization of sounding and listening aligned with relational ontology: the conceptual term for the position that substantive existence never operates anterior to relationality.” (keywords in sound, Novak & Sakakeeny)

I think it’s helpful to observe, as Feld does, that in the opaque layers of sonic and social situations within time and perception, that the relationships we have and form within listening are never really fully facing or grasping the nature of where our relationality “comes from,” where our musical consciousness is enfolded with its unconsciousness. As if under an umbrella, we move down the street with a rattle of disparate drops forming a single copresent noise and rhythm. We can look out from under the cover of our interiority, observe their evental scatter in media res - ahead of and behind us - but we can’t ever see through to the source of those sounds that strike us in particular, in our unique context of listening.

Returning to my initial complaint of the sense that musical experience is somehow compressed, I think there is both more to say and many ways to address that sort of experiential constriction, as a matter of listening practice and hygiene, of playing and hearing more openly, attentively, and generously. For this week, I recommend relaxing: we aren’t ever really going to face the music.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Rihanna - “American Oxygen”

2026 marks ten years without Rihanna. She has released no new music aside from the amazing “Friends of Mine” single from 2025’s Smurfs movie. Her decade-old track “American Oxygen” wasn’t included on Anti, her start to finish, no skips, masterpiece (and maybe final?) album released in 2016. Instead, it was unveiled in the album’s early PR rollout, containing its precoded thesis: American tragedy, American romanticism, American scale—an enormous Hudson River School painting blurred with tar and blood, a white horse galloping across the continental divide, with a hoof-print-tire-tread that could pull the land apart.

“American Oxygen” is a heartbreaking track. Rihanna’s voice carries its own weather and climate. It’s a heavy, apocalyptic weather. Barbadian heat. Hurricanes form over warm tropical waters when moisture evaporates, rises, and condenses—creating low pressure, drawing in surrounding air that then begins to spin due to the Earth’s rotation. The storm strengthens cataclysmically as heat is released outward. This is so Rihanna-coded.

There is something about breathing in this oxygen, hurricane air, as a process of absorbing a current of coiled tragedy, but also interlocking with a lifeforce that sustains and perpetuates the rhythm of life. I think Americans can relate to this experience rather directly. The inhalation of empire—its conveniences, its horrors—is its own cycle of romance, hustle, desire, and pain. Our experience as American oxygen-breathers and our resultant responses to our current moment in history—how we must simultaneously hold loved ones close, extend compassion outward, and cultivate solidarity and empathy within—is intense. In Rihanna’s words: Young girl, hustlin’, On the other side of the ocean.

The strange brostep squelch that bubbles underneath the track’s somber piano balladry also spirals as a storm: Rihanna’s voice a vessel on the calamitous current. “American Oxygen” feels like a videodome circularly projecting a 360° image of the sprawling, vital, but ruinous style of American life. It’s a charged, bleeding heart thrown from the Friday Night Lights of a football stadium into the throat of Yosemite, into the gulf, into the city streets. Breath out. Breath in. American Oxygen. Rihanna, we miss you.

Breath out, Breathe in

American oxygen, woah

Every breath I breathe

Chasin’ this American Dream

We sweat for a nickel and a dime

Turn it into an empire, whoa

Breathe in this feeling

American, American oxygen

—Nick James Scavo

Hello! This week we recommend the Mexican sousaphone sound and tradition, songs to wake up in space to, and the worm as a devotional figure in music.

Recommendation: Fuerza Regida - Del barrio hasta aquí, vol. 2

Last week I saw the band Corridos Ketamina perform at the recommendation of Max Ludlow. I’ll bracket that experience out for now, in anticipation of more potential interaction with that band in my immediate future. However, that show drummed up some personal nostalgia of spring/summer 2021—a season spent listening almost exclusively to Fuerza Regida. The band is a chart-topping quintet who make excellent corridos tumbados, a Mexican genre that updates traditional narrative ballads to become variously inflected with hip-hop, trap, a bit of reggaeton, and other more recent sounds. Corrido is more than two hundred years old, centering musical storytelling of historical figures, daily life, and emotional tales of outlaws, miscreants, crime, and personal struggle. Fuerza Regida’s 2021 album Del barrio hasta aquí, vol. 2, one of their earlier releases, is one of their more traditional albums, heavily featuring the bright, doubled sound of Samuel Jáimez’s twelve-string guitar, and the incessant, virtuosic punchy low end of José García’s sousaphone.

I’m particularly drawn to the way the sousaphone sounds on this album. Its presence is relentless, outlining chord progressions or locking into rhythm in staccato blasts. The modern mixing on the record gives the bass instrument an entire spectrum of excited, extraneous bass and mid frequencies. The sousaphone presents itself on the recordings as a malleable firebrand analog synthesizer like a Rashad Becker modular synth rig, despite being a 19th century brass instrument. The materiality of the instrument as the entire bass frequency on these recordings, rather than any synthesized or string bass instrument, is intense. The sound erupts out of a speaker as a complex, holistic band of frequency—taking an immense amount of breath to manifest flights of I, VII, VI minor key chord progressions, dueling with the lattice of the twelve-string guitar. I’d love to see a sousaphone renaissance in more contemporary computer/DAW environments that are usually defined by front-and-center bass-synth VSTs—as the sounding of the sousaphone itself is a frequency origin for the bass sounds of monophonic detuned Moog oscillators, envelopes, or filters. The breathwork required for playing a sousaphone has a slant-rhyme with this type of synthesis through its inherent filtering and wind force needed to produce sound. It’s an unwieldy, difficult to transport, probably hard to mic instrument … but let’s bring it back.

With Fuerza Regida, we hear sousaphone in a modern recording context that centers it as both a traditional acoustic machine imbricated with how electronic music is recorded and produced in the 2020s. I love its fidelity, and want to hear ensembles of dozens of sousaphones performing blasts of dissonance (a la Anthony Braxton, but maybe with a 2hollis tinge); or, Rashad Becker-style “Traditional Music for Notional Species” with amplified sousaphone instead of a modular rig; or, Baille Funk where the bass is carved by the presence of a lone sousaphone. A few years back, my colleague Kari Rittenbach and I spent months finding the right sousaphone player to perform in choreographer Ralph Lemon’s piece In Proximity, which we produced at MoMA PS1. We weren’t particularly shocked by how difficult it was to find tuba/sousa players with experimental leanings (we spent hours scouring the credits of performances of Braxton tuba pieces, specifically). I’ll conclude here by issuing a plea for more true low brass (sorry trombonists, we need that extra octave) in the current experimental music landscape. For now, Fuerza Regida is holding it down.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Orca - “4AM”

There is a new spaceship called “Artemis 2.” I know it exists because my FYP surfaced an explainer from Scientific American introducing me to “NASA wake up songs.” These are queued up by the control room and remotely broadcast on the spacecraft in order to rouse the astronauts from sleep. Here is the playlist:

“Sleepyhead” by Young & Sick

“Green Light (feat. André 3000)” by John Legend

“In a Daydream” by Freddy Jones Band

“Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan

“Working Class Heroes (Work)” by CeeLo Green

“Good Morning” by Mandisa and TobyMac

“Tokyo Drifting” by Glass Animals and Denzel Curry

“Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie

“Lonesome Drifter” by Charlie Crockett

If you were to make selections for this situation, you might first define two things: how you feel about waking up, and how you feel about space. You might want your selections to articulate something about your team’s mission, or the condition of perceiving space whilst in space, or a hundred other things.

You might remember the 1977 Voyager Golden Record, described by NASA as “a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials … containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.” It included field recordings of humpback whales and greetings in 55 languages, as well as musical selections ranging from Mozart and Kesarbai Kerkar to Laurie Spiegel and Chuck Berry, as well as 116 planetary images encoded in analog form.

Or you might simply choose a song that you enjoy. I might select Orca’s “4AM.” Though the more I think about it, I don’t think I would want to wake up to music in space.

—Alexander Iadorola

Recommendation: The Worm / TM Krishna feat. Vikku Vinayakram: Live at Afghan Church

In the last week I’ve had multiple extended discussions (with more than one person) about the worm. The animal. This line of thought started for me, sitting in the sun in my yard in the morning. I saw the first worm I’ve seen in many months crawling across the grass at my feet. I realized I’ve not considered the worm recently and regarded it with proper respect. As a fisher, the worm sacrifices for sport or food, devoid of its independent, auspicious contexts as the refiner of soil. They break down organic matter into nutrient-rich waste. Their tunneling aerates the soil, allowing oxygen to reach the roots of growing things, and creating aqueducts that drain the flooding ground.

When we are children, in the yard, I think we perceive and consider more of the worm’s being. They embody a quality of life and an orientation to their environment that is so different from ours, and their translucent, intestinal, spineless countenance is non-human to a degree that is, maybe, frightening. What drives the worm? The worm, like sound, moves in a wave. And worms dance when the ground resonates with the striking of rain drops.

Coincidentally, I’ve also been obsessively listening to the Southern Indian Carnatic music of the ghațam instrument. The ghațam is a clay pot - it’s one of the most ancient percussion instruments. Masters of the instrument, like Vikku Vinayakram (whose playing may be most familiar in John McClaughlin’s fusion group, Shakti), transform the ceramic into a spectral, sonically explosive vehicle for rhythm and sound. While produced in multiple areas of the Indian subcontinent, the ghațam from Manamadurai are said to have a special quality and tonal purity. It invites further contemplation of the worms appointed to process this particularly musical clay.

The rhythmic forms of Talas in Indian classical musics divide time, not linearly, but cyclically. And within these cycles, standard sub-sequences of beats, called aksaras, form a fixed, grounding structure over which the instrumentalist engages in improvisatory contractions and expansions of time (most often through combination of the jatis - the five “families” of rhythm - in groups of 4, 3, 7, 5, 9).

In Vikku Vinayakram’s philosophy of the ghațam, he emphasizes the pot as a voice that is given expression through total devotion to it - sacrificing and suffering the often painful, precise finger strikes upon its hardened surface. The fingers: like worms. The rhythm, worms. The air and sound-waves become refined, organized in resonance and the silence between resonances; aerated, tunneling in the ear, drained, nourished.

—Alec Sturgis

In this issue of 2020MG, we recommend talking about music without describing it, bebop for Spring, and some electronic dance music from South Africa.

Recommendation: The Verve - “This is Music”

I was making an argument about music recently, and my interlocutor pointed out that I didn’t really describe what the music sounded like. This was a legitimate and constructive point, as doing so would have made my argument more substantive, but nonetheless, my involuntary first thought was: well, it sounds like music. Which shortly became a new intrusive thought for me. This music sounds like music. It feels good to think and say. There is a rhythm to it, and it can apply to any music, and to different parts of music. For example a drum or a sound not recognizable as anything besides itself.

I generally find myself hesitating to write about what music sounds like, even though I know there are good reasons for undertaking the task. I used to blog about music for money and the grind of constantly describing what music sounded like made me not want to describe what music sounded like anymore. I want to say that the sound of music is self-evident but I know it’s not, because there are different models of music, music is historical, and music benefits when there is sharp competition among musicians and critics over what music sounds like.

I remember reading a Pitchfork review of Coachella 2008 in high school. The author said something along the lines of: “It was funny when The Verve announced that their next song was called ‘This is Music’ because, yes, obviously it’s music.” This still makes me laugh. But sometimes it’s not so obvious.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Charlie Parker - “April in Paris”

I’m totally cooked this week. Beyond collecting many notes (and countless texts and private diatribes) on the David Lang the wealth of nations performance I attended a couple of weeks ago, I started an intensive 200 hour yoga teacher training program this past week and my brain is too loaded to sort through the 8 pages of loose critique I’ve collected. I’ve been inspired by the broad yoga literature’s embodied and philosophical capacities to address some of the musical and cultural concerns I often write about. In particular, I’m thinking about some key differences in the “advanced” practices of yoga and the “advanced” practices of the American post-avant-garde and critical repertoires (which, I suppose, is probably my own most “advanced” practice).

I find I am deeply preoccupied with finding ways to ground the discourses that animate our critical activity in this cultural space, when the methods, the economics and politics all feel quite embattled (within and amongst themselves). This is a short way of saying, the question of synthesizing some insights about all of this has been an inspiring distraction as I’ve anticipated bringing the hammer (and sickle, perhaps) down on David Lang. That’s a longer term line of thinking as far as my writing on 2020MG is concerned, but one which I’ll attend to with regard to the wealth of nations very soon.

In the meantime (and with my apologies to any member of the mob who may have assembled this week awaiting justice against the administrative class of the post-minimalist elite) I recommend something appropriate to the moment of Spring - somewhere between the deep-historical and transcendent Hindustani classical music and perverse new music: Charlie Parker’s 1957, Verve Records album, “April in Paris.”

Why am I recommending this? In a similar, aspirational spirit as I recommended Burt Bacharach’s “Living Together” last week, there’s a warmth and virtuosity to this music that is not just purely musical - it speaks to a kind of cultural virtuosity and coherence that feels practically ancient at this point. This is not to over-romanticize a music or time in American history that was extremely complex in its own right, but is at least to recognize a convergence of art and commerce (a foundational alliance - like it, or not - at the root of our western music epistemologies, which I have much more to say on in my analysis of David Lang, and company).

This record is far from radical in the bebop canon, but Parker’s characteristic sense of line, his tonal and rhythmic intensities, applied to the romantic songs of 1930’s high musical theatre, with accompanying string arrangements by Jimmy Carroll, resonate with the Ellingtonian style narrative of a sort of American classical music. And given the wide aperture I’ve been listening through the last couple of weeks, I find it both conceptually comforting, and sonically pleasing to hear something that is masterful, commercial, unpedantic, deep and secure with its domain of depth, and of the culture in which it succeeded and proliferated its softer forms of innovation and refined sensibilities.

Treat yourself to some soft-serve. I’ll be back, along with some of my more immediate critical grievances next week.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Chongo De Flavour - “Have Fun” / Citykingrsa, Nevrr49, Jay Music, Shera The DJ - “Checkmate”

I had to slam on the brakes a few weeks back after coming across a video via Nyege Nyege Tapes of Mapanta artist Serokolo No. 7. In the clip, a group of dancers are assembled around a sound system in Ga Skhukhune, Limpopo South Africa, as an intense rhythm heaves itself forward. A crowd stomps in sequence. The video is such a clear expression of the possibility of music as a specific form that has a place, purpose, and power shaped directly by its community—its participants being artists, and its artists, participants. This has obviously happened throughout music history; but, it still feels special to hear such continuity within subgeneres of electronic music, forged by consumer technology, software, and sample packs. Mapanta is a village-rooted electronic form from Ga Skhukhune long tied to weddings, gatherings, and everyday life. Built in shared software environments (FL studio, shared sample packs) and carried through local sound systems, Mapanta moves between Shangaan rhythms and log-drum pressure with vocals in the Sepedi language. Commenting on Nyege Nyege’s video on IG was Detroit Drexciya-affiliate DJ Stingray, stating simply “Vicious track.”

This video sent me down a spiral. I ended up careening through hundreds of semi-viral TikTok videos of various dances, track-snippets, and genres of South African electronic music. Such a direct, feed-driven, two-hour sesh illuminated a thread running through various established and emergent genres—how Bacardi House, Gqom, Maptana, Amapiano, and more have evolved over the last 20+ years. In the mid 2000s, the sounds of Bacardi House and Mapantsula established very raw, functional rhythmic loops that spawned dance crews and local scenes. The genre popularized martial military-style snares, irregular synth sounds, and call-and-response vocals. In the 2010s, via Durban, Gqom emerged as a darker, minimalist, bass-heavy sound (often exchanged through WhatsApp group chats) that centralized the log-drum with little harmonic or melodic content, displaying a deep percussive sound. Amapiano, emerging in the townships of Gauteng, exploded as a global sensation of South African music—expanding on Gqom’s rhythmic pulses but reintroducing melody and harmony in the bass register, creating a highly stylized, and hybrid vision of this sound continuum.

Within this progression, I’m recommending two artists I found while surfing the feed who expand on these sounds. Together, they form (at least to my outsider ears) a snapshot on how these genres are re-hybridizing through their form and function, and physical and online distribution, in 2026. Chongo De Flavour’s “Have Fun,” carries the dance culture of Bacardi and Maptana. A stark, untreated piano melody is paired with a searing drumloop—as Chongo delivers a rapturous vocal performance leaping over the continuous rhythm. There are literally hundreds of videos of Chongo—probably in his late teens or early twenties—lipsyncing his verse with hand motions and emotes. On the other side, is producer Citykingrsa’s “Checkmate,” a moody amapiano cut with a foreboding, chant-like quality that accompanies chill dance choreo—but also creeped-out videos of people competing to make the weirdest facial gestures synced completely in time with the track’s off-kilter stomp. I love amapiano—and have been hooked with the log-drum sound since my friend Xander Seren first showed me Teno Afrika’s “Amapiano Selections” years ago. With “Checkmate,” an EDM and dubstep tinge (and stock electricity sound foley) deepen the aurafarming mood of the genre’s groove.

Interestingly enough, both “Have Fun” and “Checkmate” seem to be constantly re-uploaded under various formats and guises online—their virality being the focus rather than a consolidated link, stream, video, or profile to reference. They’ve clearly been distributed with TikTok and social media in mind, cut and re-edited to spawn and circulate, rather than farm clicks to one source. It’s about the pure circulation of the music, not the reestablishment of the profile.

A few years back, I attended Mutek Festival in Montreal and sat in on a talk by archivist and artist G L O W Z I, who discussed the virality and distribution of amapiano as being a result of South Africa’s network of minibus taxis as musical, social environments. The drivers play music loudly throughout their routes, and are often sponsored by producers and collectives to play specific songs exclusively—blowing up in physical space before being released through internet distribution channels. A hit song is “the one the taxis are playing this week”—with this physical music distribution becoming an economic, communicative, cybernetic exchange between musicians and the means of transportation. With these forms of South African electronic music, the flow of communication co-creates thriving, and varied new forms of music. It’s awesome and I recommend all of it.

—Nick James Scavo

This week, on 2020MG, we recommend the shagadelic and dialectical potential of Burt Bacharach, the existential and commercial inevitability of phonk, and the industrial anthropology of brightness as a sensorial force.

Recommendation: Burt Bacharach, “Living Together”

As promised, I’m working on a review of my trip to Lincoln Center this past weekend for the premier of David Lang’s the wealth of nations, in follow-up to my critique of Bang on a Can and classical music’s post-minimalist complacency. Spoiler: I really, deeply disliked the piece. So much so, that laboring to express why and in what ways is something I need a little more time to process. Internally, at 2020MG HQ, I’ve been referring to Lang as Dr. Evil. This week, as a bit of an interlude, I recommend Burt Bacharach, embracing a Powersian turn in the hopes of restoring my stolen “mojo.” Yeah, baby… yeah…

I love Burt Bacharach. As a composer, he produced some of the greatest, most musically efficient, harmonically and formally interesting standards in the epilogue of the American songbook. The classics like “Walk on By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” and so many others (especially in the hands of Dionne Warwick) are infinitely listenable and inspired containers of human relationship stories and kitchen-sink dramas that lend extra emotional depth to the existing poetic repertoires of soul and mo-town songs through their high-cropped, groovy formalisms and harmonic refinements. Bacharach often interjects the easy-listening dimension of his music with playfully gratuitous passages of rhythmic and textural complexity, and esoteric variations that excite the form without compromising its character, without spoiling its accessibility and emotional utility, or burdening the listener with its appeal to sophistication.

I recommend all of Bacharach, but in particular his epic easy-listening suite from 1973, “Living Together” (linked above). As far as easy-listening is concerned, it’s a surprisingly challenging listen. It has more in common in scope and emotionality, and in terms of its gestures of high refinement, with Steven Sondheim’s esoterically groovy musical theater, than with Sergio Mendes.

Why Bacharach, right now? Beyond the fact that the world still seems to need “love, sweet love,” and that my depressing experience at the NY Philharmonic demands a heavy prescription in the form of a hopeful musical antidote, I think Bacharach represents a cultural time and place that we look back on with a forlorn nostalgia. In the 1960’s, there seems to have been a profound sense for and popular experience of history as a force, a felt sense of collectivity. I won’t belabor any particular point about the revolutionary actions of the decade, except to point towards how these may have impacted the sensations and romantic perceptions of everyday life and the mundane.

Aren’t Bacharach’s tunes an incredible, intimate reflection of the general, lived sense of (healthy?) grandiosity that one might feel, assuming and pre-coding future nostalgia into the significance of being “here, now?” Terrible things happened in the 60’s. And indeed, terrible things have happened since. There are many stories about this cultural progression away from optimism - the failures of ‘68 - charted in post-modern theory, neoliberal critique, techno-pessimism, and so on. I suppose my return to Bacharach here, is infused with a personal query about the place of individual, mundane feeling in the formation of some imagined collective desire for hope beyond reason. What is the function or place for romantic cultural ideation in a time that is by general consensus, deeply un-shagadelic?

I’ve been revisiting Eric Lott’s incredible book “The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual” in which he presents a broad, refreshing, no-bullshit inquiry into the cultural, theoretical and political settings in which the gestures of critical, boundary-challenging thought have become increasingly detached from the material and social conditions that once gave such gestures urgency and efficacy. My depression around David Lang’s the wealth of nations, is in many ways, something that stems from my assessment that the existentially embarrassed, calculating progressivism of our art and institutions represents a far more dangerous and defeated form of cultural dissociation than the goofy prescriptions of free love and free expression that we often lampoon (and sometimes celebrate, see A. Powers, et al.). Fundamentally, the question of freedom has never been more complex to identify and relate to than in the technological and geopolitical moment we now inhabit. I don’t know that we as individuals, or as collectives, are equipped with the appropriate feelingful mass-cultural technologies (i.e. music) to respond to the moment we find ourselves in. And so, I recommend listening to some songs that, at the very least, propose something hopeful - maybe grandiose - but at least expressive of a peaceful confidence and acceptance of the forms from which they came.

Have we simply hit one too many times in a long, politicized game of liberal arts blackjack? Where, or who, is the dealer - when we’ve busted many times over and continue to ask for more? I don’t think the game has changed all that much. A new hand, please.

Like a grain of sand that wants to be a rolling stone

I want to be the man I’m not

and half the things I really haven’t got

and that’s a lot

There’ll be joy and they’ll be laughter

Something big is what I’m after now

Yes it’s what I’m after now

-Hal Davis / Burt Bacharach - “Something Big”

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: LONOWN & riserayss “worry (slowed)”

There’s nothing like an effed up algorithm to make you feel like the world is changing right before your eyes. The incessant proliferation of phonk music and its various shapeshifts and remixes have soundtracked the last six years or so; phonk has found its way as the perennial backdrop for short-form video slop. Alex wrote about this a few issues back with UdieNnx, HXVSAGE, Duduzinho - VISION (Slowed), alongside reflections on creatine, short-form bodybuilding content, and metabolic activity within the oddly emotional, “cosmic” palette of the genre’s sound. I’ve found LONOWN and riserayss’ “worry (slowed)” alongside video montages of Timothy Chalamet’s portrayal of Paul Atreides walking with a defiant stomp before yelling “I point the way!” as explosions, spacecraft, and hard stares are cut in sequence to the slowed rhythm. It’s wrenching stuff, and I want to take this week to get into the aesthetics, psychology, and form of this music a bit.

The DNA of phonk music originates in 80s/90s Memphis underground hip-hop, whose recent resurgence (for years now with Three 6 Mafia) was a key feature of summer 2025. In NYC, we had the “godfather of Memphis rap” DJ Spanish Fly at MoMA PS1’s Warm Up, a highlight for us. Montez Press Radio also threw a banger party with Spanish Fly, Tommy Wright III, and Le Chat at Sugar Hill Supper Club—also a summer highlight. The productions of these artists, specifically on Spanish Fly’s “Triggaman” and “Hear See Say No Evil,” clearly display the aggressive, distorted 808 cowbell which became the vertebrae of phonk music—as well as its general DIY production, darkness, and grainy, sinister, lo-fi aesthetic. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, phonk had mutated into a high-energy subgenre tied to car culture with Russian and Eastern European influence, accompanying streetglow drift videos and slowwalking drivers enveloped in a misty, Need for Speed atmosphere. The sound has become less hip-hop and more electronic/EDM-adjacent. In 2026, phonk has become established both as a de facto soundtrack for viral TikTok videos—from self-help meditations to AI vibes reels—and has also found its way into broader TV commercials. Even the New York Times has proclaimed phonk as “the sound of the doomscroll generation.”

I’m curious about phonk as a “commercial” form of sound in a continuum following 1980s muzak, and 2010s millennial whoop glockenspiel commercial music—both of which displayed an inherent optimism featured heavily in liminal and/or third spaces and commercials. Muzak, specifically, manifested as “elevator music,” “weather channel music,” and “hold music,” provided an optimism intrinsically related to capital. It provided a sense of ease and expertness linked to a bravado of 1980/90s stable corporate cashflow as a frame one could walk into. Commercialized millennial whoop indie glockenspiel music evolved to evoke a sense of independence and bright strength, establishing a stranglehold on TV commercials and HGTV fixerupper reinvention—a form of capital you couldn’t necessarily walk into, but build yourself. Even today, we hear this sound palette wholly embedded in the Home Depotistic atmosphere of setting up and buying your life, with your own independence—yet another form of aspirational capital.

Phonk is an evolution of the capitalized soundform, inverting these previous forms of optimism into a distinctly pessimistic space steeped in interiority. The message phonk provides is that you can recreate your life as a dark self-reinvention, submitting into a newfound strength in a Dostoyevskian, ascendent sigma mindset—but only ascendent when defined in comparison to the fall. It captures Fyodor’s epithet that “you have betrayed yourself for nothing,” from Crime & Punishment, only to existentially rise up from the ashes. As feed-fodder, phonk creates a dark telos that everyone, as capitalized subjectivities, must be ready for war—igniting an inner flame to push through the darkness of everyday life and global catastrophe simultaneously. It’s a brutal worldview. In contrast to muzak and millennial whoop capitalized commercial music, phonk’s palette is weathered and dilapidated. Damaged. Hope exists only in the fall, and in the climb back up.

LONOWN & riserayss’s “worry (slowed)” is a masterclass in this shitass feeling. It recalls early Tri Angle Records (Holy Other, Forest Swords), and manages to still capture a bloghaus spirit, a digital crate digging of the algorithm—the kind of track you might have been downloading on Gorilla vs. Bear in 2010. I’ve hesitated to really talk about music explicitly as a political economy on 2020MG so far, after decades of pained discourse about music as such, but the spectre of phonk really drives into the political and economic underpinnings of our enframed musical present—aspirational but sad-sack in presence. This is capitalized music at the horizon of our moment.

I listen to “worry (slowed),” and feel an indescribable darkness, and can’t look away. The world’s shittiest goosebump pricks up on my arm. It’s all a bit overwrought at this point, isn’t it?

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: The consideration of brightness

Mayakovsky visited New York City in 1925, and recounted his experience in My Discovery of America. He noticed many different types of light on Broadway:

The street-lamps, the dazzling lights of advertisements, the glow of shop-windows and windows of the never-closing stores, the lights illuminating huge posters, lights from the open doors of cinemas and theaters, the speeding lights of automobiles and trolley cars, the lights of the subway trains glittering under one’s feet through the glass pavements, the lights of inscriptions in the sky. Brightness, brightness, brightness…

Chapter 7 of David E. Nye’s American Technological Sublime explores “The Electric Cityscape,” and he describes Broadway in 1925 as “a literal universe of signs.”

Yet no sign was ever seen alone; each was a part of an overwhelming impression produced by the constellation of city lights … The electrified landscape’s meaning lay precisely in the fact that it seemed to go beyond any known codification, becoming unutterable and ungraspable in its extent and complexity … But the electrical sublime was not a mere extension of the geometrical sublime, with its olympian assurances to the observer that he could turn the city into a concrete abstraction. The electrical sublime eliminated familiar spatial relationships. In the night there were no shadows, no depth, no laws of perspective, and no orderly relations between objects.

The final sentence in the above series of excerpts seems to overstate the case just a bit, but we can appreciate the affective dimension of what it communicates even as we question the plausibility of the elimination of the laws of perspective.

Earlier in the chapter, Nye describes the genesis of the electric sign. He quotes a General Electric bulletin for salespeople:

Circulating advertising, because it can go to the easy chair by the reading lamp, may be leisurely, argumentative, and thorough in the lesson that it teaches. Display advertising, because it cannot move and because it must do its work on moving people, must be very simple, striking, and impressionistic.

Nye describes a transition from methodical argumentation to a mode of communication focused primarily on the senses. Less the production of reasons, and more the transmission of impressions. Back in January, we considered examples of highly saturated 2010s pop utilizing language in a surreal, intensely impressionistic manner. Katy Perry, “Firework”: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag … Baby, you’re a firework.” Icona Pop - “I Love It (feat. Charli XCX)”: “I crashed my car into the bridge … I don’t care, I love it.” Benny Benassi ft. Gary Go - “Cinema”: “You are my cinema / I could watch you forever.” At the time, we wrote:

These lyrics are hard to write about because they make the listener deal with a form of irreconcilable sense-making. They are exclamatory in nature, clearly, and characterized by sheer eventness. Something very important happens, but that something could also be nothing: a terrifically bracing passing thought, but one that passes nonetheless. It’s less an overwhelming instant than a sketch of its void: tremendous feeling evoked by the ringing out of its lack of substantiveness.

Now seems like an appropriate time for a refrain: Brightness, brightness, brightness…

—Alexander Iadarola

This is Issue 23 of 2020MG. Today our recommendations are regarding the ontology of both musical and James Cameronion avatars, the aurality of the wind, and a polemic on post-minimalist music.

Recommendation: Derek Bailey on Flamenco in Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music / Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, Avatar: Fire and Ash / Paco Peña - Fabulous Flamenco! / Ocean & Tulkun (Suite) - Avatar: The Way of Water (OST)

Back in January, I wrote a bit about Derek Bailey’s book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, specifically his writing on flamenco music and his conversations with Spanish composer and guitarist Paco Peña. This week, I want to hone into a particular quote from Peña: that “a complete flamenco performance is a group performance with singing, dancing, and instrumental music, containing possibilities for improvisation by all participants. The role of the guitarist is to help the singer or dancer to bring out the best of their talent. However, when the guitarist performs solo, they must also convey the whole atmosphere of flamenco.”

I’m interested in the idea of the flamenco guitarist as a soloist conveying “the whole atmosphere of flamenco,” and want to articulate some thoughts about “idiomatic improvised music” as containing both a personal commitment that crafts the evolution of said idiom, but also as an avatar—an incarnation of a deity—an embodiment of the progression of idiom throughout history, time, and space. We can look at this within the definition of what an actual avatar is—a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means ”descent,” signifying the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, or spirit on Earth. We can also look at this within improvisational idiom—the spontaneous creation of music within specific stylistic, harmonic, or other technical or formal frameworks. Here, I’m going to be talking about improvisational idiom in reference to James Cameron’s Avatar film series, which just had its third film (Fire and Ash) released a few months back.

Cameron’s Avatar, in my opinion, displays the complete totalization of colonization and the avatar concept as a mediatized and ontological reality. Throughout the films, we see human consciousness becoming embodied as Na’vi, the sapient humanoid beings of Pandora, evolving to become trained into the cultural customs and ways of the forest-dwelling Omatikaya, even reproducing and starting a family within this new embodiment. In the Way of Water and Fire and Ash, respectively, we see ontologically colonized human-Na’vi’s enmesh with the water tribes of the Metkayina, and befriend the Tulkun whale entities (who are also great composers of music); we see the villain General Ardmore also become a Na’vi, through the technological reengineering of the spiritual event that allowed the protagonist Jake Sully to embody as a Na’vi; we see a child (Spider) born on Pandora become totally immersed with Na’vi customs despite being human; we see Sigourney Weaver’s character become reborn as a child Na’vi; we see humans become ensnared in the fungi of Eywa to learn how to breathe Pandora’s foreign atmosphere; and, we see villains become romantically entwined in other villainous clans (the Ash people). Basically, the films develop a total ecological system of human consciousness extending itself into both embodied/physical and cultural spaces, becoming one with a new host planet—mirroring the transontological systems and microbiology of our actual Earth itself as a grand cosmic sci-fi blockbuster narrative.

Avatar’s transontology skirts over the celebratory, painful, and destructive narratives of culture and history to depict consciousness becoming embodied into an orbit of renewal (perpetually engaged in a subject/object collision event) forever entwined in a quest for inter-species planetary intimacy. Humanity serves as an asteroid violently impacting Pandora, an impact event leading to significant physical and biospheric consequences. Similarly, humanity colonizes Pandora in a search for sustenance and spiritual intimacy, like the colonies of microbiology themselves, forming plural systems and beings—Otherkin, Therians, and Vampires who become “transcorporeal” to connote being as a trans-species entity.

We can also extend this process to improvisational idiom. I’m currently disturbing myself by listening to Peña’s flamenco music while consulting various scenes from the Avatar series. Sully’s quest for humanity to express and embody itself on Pandora is evoked in the flamenco guitarist’s concern with their idiom—their performance serving as the idiom and also the expression of that idiom in a multi-faceted way, representative of its entire atmosphere. Derek Bailey described this as “Improvisation supplying a way to guarantee the authenticity of the idiom, which also provides the motor for change and continuous development.” With flamenco, the player embodies the history and development of the idiom in their playing—a fraught history originating in Andalusia and Catalonia—where nomadic groups in the 1400s mingled in Cordoba (the then capital of the Western Islamic world) with Andalusian folklore. The idiom is seen from the outside as something “stable” as a genre in recorded music history. But, this ignores its performative upkeep—its perpetual embodiment through expressing its atmosphere and development. The way improvisation is sustained is a progression tracing processes of human survival and conflict, but also its performative commitment and evolution. In 2026, we must ask: what happens when the atmosphere of the idiom collapses? When does that idiom need to flee to a new planet?

This recommendation might both valorize and embarrass improvisation within Avatar’s interplanetary drama. We could look at musical idioms as always finding new hosts (a new player) and a new embodiment in its performance. Certainly too, we can also look at strands of idiomatic improvisational practice as the frail human being walking on Pandora in an oxygen mask, unable to breathe within its diminishing or alien planetary contexts. In 2026, I think it’d be easy to view plenty of idiomatic practices as being unable to subsist in our current atmosphere. Improvisers, maybe time to hook up that ponytail into the grand neural planetary queue and seek union with the great Eywa. To you, I speak the great Na’vi expression Oel ngati kameie, a declaration of total acceptance: I see you.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: The Wind

It was very windy in the Catskills this past weekend. The wind was at a much lower pitch than I am used to hearing in the city. Regarding this frequency differential, artificial intelligence tells me that “what I noticed is real,” which is always reassuring. The wind was pummeling and it became hard to concentrate. At one point we stood next to a waterfall somewhat dangerously. I heard signals between 50 and 100 hz, and thought it might be all the trees funneling the wind, or the wind smashing against a mountain, or careening through the valley. Various resistances against atmospheric pressures invisible beyond their sensory effects, blowing leaves around, shepherding a bracing chill across the earth’s surface.

Back in the city, walking up a hill, I listened to GloRilla’s “Tomorrow 2” with Cardi B. In the first verse, the Memphis rapper informs us: “Just like the air, I’m everywhere.” I thought we listened to a song with a lyric about an anechoic chamber on the way back but that might have been a dream.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Bang on a Can

I’m stepping back from some recent one-offs about my heroes in the vernacular avant-garde to set up a short series on the cultural situation of contemporary classical music. This week: a critical post-minimalism literature review; next week: a review of David Lang’s New York Philharmonic premiere of the wealth of nations (a setting of the text by the Scottish economist Adam Smith); and we’ll see after that.

Bang on a Can has long been a curiosity and a sustained critical interest of mine. The compositions of its founders—Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang—each, in their own way, represent a kind of flavor-blasted 1980s-coded music intellectualism: breaking with many stylistic orthodoxies of musical modernism while also avoiding the traps of pretentious counterculturalism. Historically, this makes a great deal of sense. Academic composition was slow to accept new forms and styles (à la Glass, Reich, etc - not to mention deeper experimentalists), while progressive popular music pushed away from sheer commercialism toward higher intellectual stakes in recorded music.

Bang on a Can is one of many efforts from that moment to bridge institutional, cultural, and economic gaps in the art music ecosystem—recognizing that composers and performers with this omnivorous sensibility required new presentational and performative frameworks that reflected broader shifts in culture and industry.

I remember listening to Michael Gordon’s Trance as a composition student—with its crunched, polyrhythmic electric bass and Glassian repeating figures—and thinking: this is cool, I get it, but what, exactly, is the point? Who is this for? Why all this populist pomposity? (I’ll return to that question.) I performed David Lang’s Pulitzer-winning the little match girl passion in school, which was an incredible and moving experience. But even having absorbed and enjoyed the BOAC literature to that extent, I still feel a kind of bodily discomfort, or even embarrassment, when confronting some of the musical and cultural propositions at play.

Its core mission suggests a withered pragmatism that has aged out of step - stuck in an optimism that was appropriate at its founding, but has since drifted the way of most classical institutions: fighting for survival, defending its territory rather than pursuing music in the more general liberatory spirit it suggests. The New York Times says BOAC plays “a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn’t concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come.” But to what extent must we narrow and contort our understanding of terms like “new,” “boundaries,” “originality,” and “integrity” in order to make that claim hold?

I should confess that the irritation behind this line of inquiry, for me, comes from a sympathetic place—and from personal experience. I stopped well-short of pursuing composition as a career, in part, because the same dissipating economic and cultural conditions BOAC identified in the 1980s have not been resolved; they’ve worsened. This area of historical and industrial inquiry has been a focus of mine on 2020MG. I’m not suggesting that BOAC and similar institutions are the cause of the problem, nor that they are responsible for solving it. And yes—perhaps I simply don’t like the music, and this is all a bit petulant. You’re free to read this as a millennial complaint, and jealousy toward a moment when these optimistic efforts seemed both viable and sustainable.

However, it is precisely because the underlying conditions of institutional failure appear so unaffected by efforts like BOAC—arguably the most prominent progressive “classical” organization of its kind—that I want to examine both its noble aspirations and the artistic complacency that may accompany them. In a spirit aligned with BOAC’s highest aims, I want to pose a set of questions over the coming weeks, from multiple angles: why are the conditions not improving for “serious music,” despite sustained effort? Where exactly does this idealism that underwrites institutional projects centered on “new,” “boundaryless,” and “original” music of “integrity” come from? And most importantly: what are the structural forces we still struggle to identify when trying to create social coherence around music as a space for serious, sustained intellectual play?

I’m going to speed-run these questions here (developing them in detail later)—a couple of “whats” and a “why”—by returning to Michael Gordon’s Trance, and to that earlier question: why this populist pomp? I don’t want to dwell on or speculate about the reasons behind Gordon’s style as much as I want to meditate on how I critically hear it: as a kind of stalled-out dialectical synthesis that reflects the formal modernist modality, but renders its basic intellectual ambitions toothless. Not only is it not “boundaryless,” its combinations of various pop music genres, textures and idioms within its stable minimalist composition procedures feel so boundaried as to, again, seriously beg the question: are these what we imagine the boundaries of music to be?

I want to clarify, in good faith, that I’m not suggesting the above to be Gordon’s explicit aim. There are many virtues and great qualities in the craftsmanship, curiosity and musicality that he brings to his composition. I do, however, feel that it’s important not to let “the ear lie back in an easy chair” (as Charles Ives said). Earnest, young composers eventually become ambassadors of their craft; and musical, stylistic synthesis is a powerful tool, but towards what end? For the sake of evocation, and in the Oedipal spirit of this polemic: Bang on a Can is a concession to, or at least reflection, of the end of musical history as it had been previously articulated by institutions and music’s industrial economy.

There is a present danger that the rent-stable territories of modernist and minimalist formalism become a sort of pawn-shop for musical aesthetics: a sanctioned fence by which to launder the intellectual surpluses of vernacular music, as well as prop up the failing value propositions of the old academic estates. Lord, lords, ladies, (readers), have mercy on me, when it is my time to be judged. I’ll return to this line of thinking next week, after I’ve attended the David Lang the wealth of nations premiere.

—Alec Sturgis

Hello again. Thanks for reading these recommendations: a follow-up on the encoded aesthetics of the telephone, a consideration of musical radiance, and a Japanese lounge artist.

Recommendation: The Nerves - “Hanging on the Telephone”

Ornette Coleman in a 1995 interview on the occasion of his album Tone Dialing with the Prime Time ensemble:

Information comes to people in the form of tone dialing. When you speak of something you speak in the tone of what it means to you. Sending a fax is tone dialing. When someone reads something you wrote, that’s tone dialing... These songs were written so that the musicians would be able to express their views about the information they were using.

A tweet from a decade ago:

A boy at avicii telt me his dad died cos of MDMA and when the beat dropped he was proper crying his eyes out shoutin ‘ma dad died for this’

We are attuned in each of these passages to transmission as an act and a process. In the first, tone dialing. In the second, the drop. Coleman’s tone dialing is more open-ended and less deterministic in nature, while the drop has more rigid formal affordances. The latter is also associated with synthetic chemicals and a particular structure of feeling produced by those chemicals in concert with the EDM experience as social ritual.

Thinking back to last week, we can continue considering the signal as a mediator and a catalyst between assemblages and actors. Entraining the practice of communication at the same time that it facilitates its functioning. We were thinking about telephones, so we can return to the telephone now, following the Nerves:

I’m in the phone booth, it’s the one across the hall

If you don’t answer, I’ll just ring it off the wall

I know she’s there, but I just had to call

Don’t leave me hanging on the telephone

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Hafeez - “Amateur” / Dave - “Raindance (featuring Tems)”

“The veil is thin right now.” Or, at least, that’s what I keep saying during incidental conversations and small talk watercooler moments this week. Shit’s pretty fucked up right now, and this seems like a way to acknowledge that fact in a relatively brief but serious way. I’ve been trying to listen to music that makes me feel good as a result, and that’s opened some thinking on the utility of music and a larger psychological examination—what does “feeling good” mean to me? It seems redundant to list out all of the varied ways music has in fact made me feel wholly, genuinely good. I don’t want to go there. I think I know how to feel good and understand how music can make me feel that way. But, reserving some reflection for that this week seems like the move.

I’ve been listening to Hafeez’s album “Amateur” this past week. It’s radiant music that fits into a framework of “pocket music” I’ve been scatteredly outlining over the past few months: Mikey Enwright, ear, further reflection on the history of PC Music. The most immediate reference points in Hafeez’s production vocabulary are the Swedish artist Toxe (who released the incredible Toxe2 a few years back), Lorenzo Senni, and plenty of others who foreground the flow of MIDI into arpeggiated buoyancy. Each pluck is twisted and automated to attune its impact, its release. Alec and I recorded some thinking about this on our Flavortone podcast by outlining a “Theory of the Byoing Sound”—loosely conceptualizing electronic music’s infatuation with the “Byoing” through primordial phonetic language formation, to physics and sound spatialization, and the elasticity of sound as a challenge to “consistency.” A sonic pull, tautness, tension, and release are dynamic features that ground Hafeez’s music with its own grace and space. It’s accentuated with blithe and emotional radio drops, things like “Don’t give up” and “Heyy Hafeez,” and “Hi, I love you.” This week, such things help me to feel fantastic.

The music goes beyond just being “sweet” music. A lot of recent electronic music exaggerates a sense of child-like innocence and wonder in its general stylization. With Hafeez, kalimba, handpan, or toy keyboard tones create a space of good intentions—cut by laser sounds and wisps of trance pads that push into introspection. I hear a general gesture of affirmation—a single MIDI note literally affirming itself through its repetition and progression, elastically morphing through a cadence, a melody, a rhythm, and an affirmational lyric all at once. The stunning track “Riding Thru” coalesces into a showstopper Rich Gang Atlanta-rap-type groove. Or, “Shine” features a beautifully melting arpeggio before some wild, almost Dan Deacon-esque vocals erupt in-step with a simple snare ride. There are plenty of almost hand-cranked tiny musicbox loops and moments that are ascendent, uplifting. I recommend it.

On a different tip, Alec and I stopped into the local cig and vape shop earlier this week. It was dead quiet when we walked in but after chopping it up with the shop guys a bit, they dropped the recently chart-topping song “Raindance” by Dave & Tems—an emotional dancehall, afrobeat hit that could be basically overlaid entirely onto “One Dance.” Nonetheless, its sense of longingness, forlornness, even slight religiousness, alongside its pensive piano melody, trace a movement of redemption—an affirmative sensitivity, but also a radiance. Standing in the vape shop, hearing the lyric “You’ve got that white wine I never got to sip,” while getting my regular vape customer stamp card punched, the track made me feel pretty good.

Back to my earlier “the veil is thin” comment—I’ve been thinking a lot about good and evil in recent days. I’ve done plenty of writing and thinking about evil music—a past essay on Demonic Listening, which was a survey of the 2010s as “diabolical times.” Or other writings about the seven deadly sins, particularly the sin of Wrath, as a conceptualization of music. Throughout this thinking, I kept on writing about “the diabolic” as a principle that attempts to maintain or control the phenomenal world—to keep or preserve the flux of time. At the time, I loved how this flipped the traditional narratives of evil as the annihilating force. Instead, “The Good” could become a dissolving agent which would yield a cosmic catastrophe that would effectively release and end the phenomenal world. I still like this idea of the Good, but maybe I could do well to conceptualize The Good as something that doesn’t just mean the end of the world.

With Hafeez and even Dave & Tems, I hear that Good, with no cosmic evacuation necessary, chilling behind a radiant veil.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Momose - “The Cabaret”

In keeping with my stretch of digital crate-dig music, I want to recommend another favorite artist, and a point of longstanding personal curiosity: the Japanese lounge-jazz singer Momose.

Momose’s interpretations of jazz standards have a unique, big-swinging expressivity, colored by her free drifting execution of melody, and by her notable, strong Japanese accent in the delivery of the American song-book. Moving to New York City for a time, and releasing recordings in collaboration with GRAMMY-winning keyboardist James Alan Smith, Momose drifted back to Japan, where she still performs at local jazz festivals and clubs, with her signature mâitre-d style performative flourish.

I latched onto Momose’s 2007 album “The Cabaret” sometime around 2016. “The Cabaret” blasts off with a sort of humorous Las Vegas style simulation skit, drum roll, big band introduction and a grand announcement: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to welcome you here to the beautiful, wonderful surroundings that you’re witnessing tonight. And tonight we have a special guest. If you would please set your sushi down. Second thought, pass me a piece of that. Thank you so much. Don’t like the California roll… Now please welcome to the stage: Momose!” Momose’s high-production, synthetic jazz band recordings evoke a futuristic, global space of jazz: crisply digital in its aesthetic register, but so deeply individual as a voice, mediated within both technology and the range of stylistic affects present in the progressive possibilities of genre.

I used to work in a champagne bar when I was studying ethnomusicology. I used my tip money to fly myself to conferences as an unaffiliated scholar, and socialize under the wings of my musicology mentors. Attending (and a couple of times, presenting), my most enriching intellectual role was, frankly, as a bar-mate to any subject-matter-expert looking for a fellow freak to go deep-in-cups with and discuss the serious questions and nuanced appreciations of music.

There was something in the air for me then (at the Tex-Mex restaurant in the Old Albuquerque Hotel), that’s still active in my imagination, and which Momose reminds me of: the cosmopolitan experience of high-brow thinking and high class art forms in low-brow settings. At conferences, I met and spoke with musicians and scholars in the intoxicated drift of discussions and sounds addressed to geo-politics, institutional drama, theory, memories of music past and embraces of music present. I absorbed so much theoretical runoff from those grounded in and committed to the participatory lifestyle of music (eating, drinking, talking, dancing, playing), in the settings in which music had so often been celebrated and cultivated (bars, clubs, and so on). And in this, I gained a vocabulary for my fascination with the way that popular-genre-signifying music registers in the opaque, global story of cultural circulation and the media by which we gain access to our imperfect cross-cultural interpretations.

So, when I encountered Momose during this time - this simulation on “The Cabaret” of high production value, the global exchange of jazz style infused with Japanese language and sensibility, signifying the archetypal almost comic New York club - it became a core document of this phenomenon for me.

This week, I simply recommend listening to her incredible, idiosyncratic jazz, and perusing her YouTube channel and website. I’d start with this captivating performance of the ABC song.

—Alec Sturgis

Good morning from 2020MG. We recommend three things, as we always do: the yoga and downtempo music of Wah!, a consideration of code logics in sound and media, and a look at protagonism in Dido.

Recommendation: Wah! “Kal Akal” from The Early Years

I was cycling through some pretty serious topics to write about this week: an in-depth album review of a friend’s work that I haven’t quite been able to land the plane on yet, a look at the pre-revolutionary Iranian rock of the incredible Kouroush Yaghmaei. I’ll get to these, but I’m a bit tired. This week I want to recommend another recording that I’ve been obsessed with for years: “Kal Akal” by the L.A.-based yoga musician, Wah!.

I love the way this recording sounds. The understated walking bass line, e. piano major 7th chords staggered lazily within the thin texture of the band, super chill swinging drum kit with only a jazzy hi-hat and kick drum to speak of (no intermediate drums to be found), and the gentle, easy, but piercing resonance of Wah!’s Wah Devi repeating the simple mantra of “Kal Akal” for literally 30 minutes without variation or interruption.

There is a ton of contemporary yoga-adjacent music out there, and it runs the gamut from north-Indian classical and Carnatic influences, tranced-out mantra EDM, Didjeridoo beatbox core, euro-primativism and tribal song, hardcore synth drone, chakra frequency attunements, meditation and relaxation music, turnt Hare Krishna folk, and so on; but I’ve never encountered anything like Wah!’s The Early Years recordings, and “Kal Akal.” It’s sort of a perfect, inscrutable document for me of some hyper-localized, west-coast cosmopolitan mantra style. Beyond its overt references to yoga, the music leans heavily, for me, into the aesthetic domain of Arthur Russell’s “Tower of Meaning” or “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s Trust in Rock recordings with Peter Gordon and company. Given Russell’s “bubblegum buddhist” ethos and Tyranny and Gordon’s respective esoteric alchemies with the elements of high-conceptual propositions and popular forms, it’s very easy to superimpose the intellectual stakes of these experimentalist projects onto a shared formal and stylistic plane with Wah!. Beyond the obvious processes of repetition that these all share, there is also an omnivorous cultural sensibility that accepts popular music genre signifiers and amateur aesthetics as natural - and even galvanizing - contributors to some larger progressive late-20th century American transcendental milieu.

Looking into Wah!’s background, this sort of intellectual/cultural resonance seems unlikely as a mere coincidence. She attended Oberlin Conservatory, studied African dance and music at the University of Ghana (before a coup cut her studies short), danced/choreographed in New York for the Angela Caponigro Dance Company, joined and left a number of Ashrams and spiritual communities (including that of the disgraced Yogi Bhajan in New Mexico), and finally settled in Los Angeles, where she began her recording career in earnest, and opened for Hole (Courtney Love’s band) in the late 90’s, in addition to producing successful albums in the alternative pop and yoga space. A pretty solid CV, that gives me greater confidence in the non-coincidence of her subtle stylistically charged idiosyncrasies as existing within the large pool of American vernacular avant-garde activity.

I want to recommend a counterpart to this early recording of Wah! for context. “Girl in the Video” has the sonic markers of the world beat and eastern music styles, but is a more secular expression of typical Wah! themes. I really like the track, with its Zero 7 pop fusion, Sade-like vocal affect and Michael Franks-ian high-minded, but simple, lyrical overtness. Over wah-pedal guitar, Wah! sings about the complicated search for divine feminine love in the mediatized life of aughts-modernity.

“She stands in the smoky light show

Lights, smoke and mirrors is all she’s ever known

She stands without reverence and takes on the audience

She’s the girl in the video”

It’s nice for me - after really only listening to The Early Years, for years - to hear Wah! on such worldly and existential terms. The Early Years recordings offer what is essentially an “aura photograph” of the electromagnetic resonance behind the trappings of this later funky downtempo. It brings to mind the mantra she sings in “Kal Akal:”

“Death, Undying, Great Death, Undying, Undying Image of God, Wondrous Teacher.”

The channels may change for the girl in the video, but the undying image remains in continual re-emergence.

— Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Héctor “El Father” feat. Wisin & Yandel - “El Teléfono”

I complimented a friend on her nails. Previously burgundy, now muted pearl. Asked the name of the color, she said “A120.” I hadn’t heard of that color before. Last week I learned about a genre called “cosmic phonk,” this week I learned about A120. It’s good to learn.

In Reformer Pilates they say: “For this one, let’s do one yellow and one red. If you want a challenge, do one blue and one red.” Five color-coded springs undergird the machine, tuned to different measures of resistance. The Reformer is composed of a series of interlocking multi-purpose apparatuses. One instructor tells us to imagine breaking it apart with each exercise. Listening to cosmic phonk, freshly aware of the gel color A120, vertebrae unencumbered because of one yellow and one red and breathing a certain way.

Where are we headed with this? Toward the telephone, and the touch-tone dialing system. When you tap a number on the telephone keypad, you hear a tone. Landlines used to do this, computer phones carry the convention forward. Different numbers have different tones. You use the numbered tones to initiate the process of sending a signal through the air. Cellularly. Different springs at different resistances have different colors. We are thinking about codes and information processing.

Can you remember the precise relationship between number and pitch on the keypad? I can’t. They don’t ascend in tandem, do they? The code’s logic communicates functionality and aesthetic incidentality. One imagines the engineers saying that it ought not to be too expressive. Wikipedia: “The [Dual-tone multi-frequency] telephone keypad is laid out as a matrix of push buttons in which each row represents the low-frequency component and each column represents the high-frequency component of the DTMF signal.” Low tone from 697 to 941 Hz, high tone from 1209 to 1477 Hz.

Three songs that utilize telephonic tone-codes with ingenuity: Héctor “El Father” feat. Wisin & Yandel’s “El Teléfono,” La Materialista’s “La Chapa Que Vibran,” and Fabolous’ “Young’n.” The first utilizes the touch-tone dialing system as a melodic element, the second samples a phone receiving a message on vibrate mode, and the third samples a two-way alert.

— Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Dido - “Here With Me”

Fresh off my first readings of the I Ching last week, I’ve had a bit of what Bachelard and Althusser call a “Rupture épistémologique,” an event where mental obstacles—unthought or unconscious structures that were immanent to experience—get busted down. They spoke about this in relation to the history of science or dialectical materialism/Marxism, the falling away of old knowns as things become further known. I’m referencing it as satori. Everyone I’m talking to right now seems quick to acknowledge that we are living in a divinatory moment, called to consult oracles, hedge bets, or make unknown appeals from within and without—from polymarket betting, AI consultation, to the constant casts and speculative asks toward what’s going on, and what’s about to happen. Against the background of a groundless and uncertain state-of-affairs, casual conversations drift into this emergent mysticism, its own epistemic rupture from any economic or materialist analysis of the technologies we’re intertwined with. Althusserian thought falls away to satori-inducing epithets, deference to some mystical pull: year of the fire horse, hexagram 23, planets aligning how they may, UFOs existing within the split of the atom, whatever else.

This week, these conversations have been soundtracked by the music of Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong, or simply “Dido.” I’ve listened to “Here With Me,” the debut single from her 1999 album No Angel, at least a hundred times since last Sunday afternoon. It’s a beautiful, devastating, uplifting song. Dido’s music fits into a catalog of adult contemporary self-help music that many are reaching for in 2026. Its dubby intro feels at home within the slew of recent electronic music that appeals to downtempo conventions—attempting to fit into a cadre of rainy-UK-windowpane music. Ultimately, the thesis of these musical aesthetics, to me, is a fantastical exchange of mediatized optimism and forlornness—a situation where one could afford to have a mental breakdown, walk into the rainy streets (headphones on, trench collar popped), and emerge as their own protagonist on the verge of changing their life. Dido’s music virtually constructs and narrates the musical ascent of the atomized protagonist into an unknowable moment of inspiration. There’s a vague new-ageness to the sound, recalling the global chill-out sound of the Buddha Bar compilation albums which also emerged in 1999, that resonate with this kind of simultaneous self-liquidation and formation of protagonism.

I appreciate Dido as a white-flag-plant for the production of subjectivity that music provides. I enjoy how at any given moment one could simply pop the top off their mental obstacles and become a vessel for the power of music—literally feel it coursing through their veins, chemically induced to emerge as their own protagonist. To at-once problematize and produce selfhood whilst kneeling at the altar of a musical moment, is one of music’s many powers. Here, I’m drawn to the idea of narrative protagonism as a conceptual unit in a spiralling part-whole relationship, dissolved and formed in these kinds of musical, or mystical, moments.

Last weekend, Alex, Alec, our friend Xander, and I all had a pretty insane protracted conversation spanning continental philosophy, AI, and extraterrestrial life. I won’t get into the specifics, but it was one of those types of conversations. It was shortly after that I picked up Dido’s “Here With Me,” discovering that the track had also served as the theme song for the 1999 television series Roswell—a show that presents a timeline where aliens are hiding in plain sight as a trio of American high schoolers.

Listening to the track at sunset as I cruise over the Williamsburg Bridge toward Manhattan, I imagine extraterrestrial life existing at the site of my own atomic structure, itself an emerging protagonist that sits within the frame of my consciousness, hiding in plain sight and mind. Dido’s acoustic guitar kickback chorus sings:

Oh, I am what I am

I’ll do what I want

But I can’t hide

And I won’t go, I won’t sleep

And can’t breathe, until you’re resting here with me

And I won’t leave, and I can’t hide

I cannot be, until you’re resting here...

—Nick James Scavo

Hello. We celebrate our twentieth Issue of 2020MG this week. We recommend a physiological analogy with music, an exploration of the I Ching’s music philosophical resonance, and an inquiry into dynamics of our present Dark Age of cringe.

Recommendation: UdieNnx, HXVSAGE, Duduzinho - VISION (Slowed)

Creatine could be helping a longstanding confrontation with afternoon fatigue. I thought the crystalline substance was in my protein shake mix but it wasn’t, so I bought some. I stopped consuming that protein shake mix because it was gross. The decisive factor might also be Xanthium 12, prescribed by my acupuncturist. I recently started taking Vitamin D – could it be responsible for alleviation in the possibility space? Reading this over, it seems obvious that I should have a more coherent conception of these supplements’ holistic interrelationship. It could be none of these things or a hundred other things.

I watch short-form bodybuilding content creators because the videos are aesthetically bizarre, and because I want to develop lifting technique. They can also index shifting tides in American masculinity, often insidious for obvious reasons, that one wants to track. There are certain songs that I would only ever encounter through shortform content, and this is one of them. I might hear it in a dramatic forearm day montage, or in soccer edits, which is a sport I don’t understand. It wouldn’t be implausible to hear it in a chess edit. Spotify includes it in a “cosmic phonk” playlist, which is not a genre I know well. The song moves between these different places.

Music is frequently positioned as good for weightlifting in bodybuilding content. It is peculiar to think about a sound wave or set of sound waves as facilitating the biosynthesis of muscle molecules, promoting metabolic activity. Cells rearranging themselves. Things go on inside of the body that you can’t see, but number goes up. Functionality over beauty, or interest.

Here is the first verse of the Beach Boys’ “Vegetables,” from Smiley Smile:

I’m gonna be ‘round my vegetables

I’m gonna chow down my vegetables

I love you most of all

My favorite vegetable

— Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Loosely conceptualizing the Hexagram in the I Ching (Book of Changes)

This week, I’m going to attempt to loosely conceptualize the figure of the hexagram in the I Ching (Book of Changes) in my own way. I’m drawn to its figuration as a poetic and conceptual unit that connects to some overall thinking I’ve had on music, chance, and time. A hexagram in the I Ching is a symbol used for divination and philosophical reflection made up of six horizontal lines, stacked from bottom to top. Each line is either: Yang (an unbroken, or solid line) or Yin (broken, an open line with gaps). Because each line has two possible states, there are: 2⁶, or 64 possible hexagrams. Each one represents a distinct life situation, archetype, or dynamic pattern of change. I’ve included the unicode of a few of these figures below.

䷀䷁䷂䷃

I won’t be diving into the actual systematization or other specific divinatory or ephemeral criteria of the I Ching hexagram system. I claim no expertise in the theological or text-specific philosophical aspects of the I Ching. More personally, I have memories of Alec fifteen years ago at a coffee shop, rolling dice into a saucer of scattered danish crumbs with the I Ching open as he was notating something for a piece he was working on. Maybe I took a course or two in college in Asheville, North Carolina where we read excerpts from it. Perhaps my greatest exposure to it is through reading how John Cage consulted the text heavily throughout his compositions. Otherwise, I’m finally at a time in my life where I feel my own personal draw to reading the I Ching—and I’m encountering it at the ground level here in 2026.

I’m also still re-reading through The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. In a letter from John Cage to Pierre Boulez on May 22nd, 1951, Cage details his compositional processes throughout his works: String Quartet in Four Parts (1950), Works of Calder (1949-1950), Six Melodies (1950), his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950-51), and finally his piece Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1951), written for Merce Cunningham. Boulez had written to Cage admiring his Music of Changes (1951), dedicated to David Tudor, a piece for solo piano that was in his words “certainly my favorite of anything you have done.” The piece’s composition involves applying decisions made using the I Ching, after being given a copy by composer Christian Wolff (Wolff’s father had published a translation of the book at around the same time).

In response to Boulez, Cage writes: “At this point my primary concern became: how to become mobile in my thought rather than immobile always. And then I saw one day that there was no incompatibility between mobility & immobility and life contains both. This is at the basis of the manner of using the I Ching for the obtaining of oracles. I interrupted the writing of [Music of Changes] to write my Imaginary Landscape No. IV (1951), for 12 radios using exactly the same ideas. Every element is the result of tossing coins, producing hexagrams which give numbers in the I Ching chart: 6 tosses for a sound, 6 for its duration, 6 for its amplitude. The toss for tempo gives also the number of charts to be superimposed in that particular division of the rhythmic structure. The rhythmic structure is now magnificent because it allows for different tempi: accelerandos, ritards, etc. The radio piece is not only tossing of coins but accepts as its sounds those that happen to be in the air at that moment of performance.”

Extending this idea of what “happens to be in the air at that moment,” in some writings on the I Ching, psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung writes:

“We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. The jumble of natural laws constituting empirical reality holds more significance than a causal explanation of events that, moreover, must usually be separated from one another in order to be properly dealt with. The moment under actual observation appears to the I Ching more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurring causal chain processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. Chance ingredients make up the observed moment. Thus it happens that when one throws three coins, these chance details enter into the picture of the moment of observation and form a part of it—a part that is often insignificant to us, yet most meaningful to the I Ching. Causally, it would be a banal and almost meaningless statement, to say that whatever happens in a given moment inevitably possesses the quality peculiar to that moment. This is not an abstract argument but a very practical one. There are certain connoisseurs who can tell you merely from the appearance, taste, and behavior of a wine the site of its vineyard and the year of its origin. There are antiquarians who with almost uncanny accuracy will name the time and place of origin and the maker of an objet d’art or piece of furniture from merely looking at it. In the face of such facts, it must be admitted that moments can leave long lasting traces.”

In other words, the hexagram is the exponent of the moment in which it was cast, understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin. Taking the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance—an interdependence of objective events as well with the subjective psychic states of the observer. This character is clearly within Cage’s conception of radio waves, or even musical vibration in air in general, as what “happens to be in the air at that moment,” as resulting in a form of music.

I’d like to take these two accounts from Cage and Jung, one in Cage’s compositional and philosophical process, the other from Jung’s more literary and cultural review, to figure the hexagram within music as a time-based medium. Chance, now fully scientifically extended into the nature of reality by the advances of research and quantum mechanics, appears as “dissonant” to previous models of causality and science as Jung outlines above, as it problematizes the “observed” in general. The way in which a simple casual passage of quantum light chooses to randomly go into one position rather than another, is an intellectual miracle. The choice of 0 as opposed to 1 in binary code, in the whole of computation, is a string of miraculous event-ness. And so too in music, as its own exponent of our temporality, we see a poetic miracle of its physics, and our resulting interpretation of that moment of listening. Cage clearly elucidated this throughout his letters and sparrings with Boulez. Somehow, I find both comfort and drama by trusting chance’s radical, untrustworthy swing of natural information in this way. And I trust music for this reason, too.

The hexagram itself can also be understood as a binary sequence (like quantum light, like binary code), as it can be reduced to the binary of either broken (yin) and unbroken (yang) lines in its constitution. Here, we also see Cage’s “mobility and immobility,” we see the scientific crisis of “the observed and observer,” we see the yin and the yang_, I also see this tension in the Boulezian Amnesia recommendation I wrote in a previous 2020MG issue a few weeks back, and Boulez’ own contradictions between music and text.

Grateful to find the I Ching in this particular moment in 2026, and within all of these tense binaries, I see the emergence of a particular hexagram as I flipped six coins, ䷖, hexagram 23, or, “splitting apart.” And I hear music.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Katerina Lomis, Jacob Collier, and the Dark Ages of Cringe

I’ve been thinking about embarrassment for a while. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the decaying social/historical structures that supported music’s capacity for generative elements of “failure” in the past, leaving openings for non-deterministic musical aesthetics. I consider embarrassment an important, productive part of the creative emotional spectrum. How can you explore novel combinations of ideas and sounds, if perfection - or, control over the reception of work - is the prerequisite for participation and presentation? If you happened to attend any of mine and/or Nick’s YA computer music sets at the Bar & Grills of North Carolina (we discussed this at length on an episode of our Flavortone podcast), or the early teen battle of the band performances I was involved in, you might appreciate that I experienced relatively little musical embarrassment myself, coming up. It seems younger generations have a more difficult needle to thread.

There has been some general, ongoing discourse about the way Gen Z’s digital nativeness has been compounded by an inheritance of millennial hipster taste wars. Brad Troemel’s “Hipster Report” gives broad, and concise insight into this cultural milieu and its history. As Troemel outlines, the arts and culture wars of the aughts and tens have only escalated in these Turbulent Twenties; and, the viral punishments of failing to negotiate unstable aesthetic projects upon the high-wire of optimized hyper-commercial media platforms has resulted in a sort of cringe Cold War amongst disparate corners of content creation (including music). Musicians of all kinds have come to stockpile the proven traditional genre signifiers and the archetypes of authentic cultural forms, which successfully connote a certain historical spirit of music - presenting its forms with cartoonish, professionalized confidence, and yet deep social and intellectual paranoia.

While this phenomenon has a certain rhyme with prior historical interactions between mass cultural production and subcultures, it seems obvious that those correspondences have become increasingly compressed in their capacity for dynamic social meanings and practices. One obvious consequence of this climate is a deflation of young (and older) people’s confidence and desire to participate in and present art in a way that is casually exploratory in the realm of concepts, and their combination - a form of intellectual play that requires some basic element of social trust. One side of this reactionary cringe spectrum is, simply, non-participation. The other extreme, (examples of which I will recommend below), feels almost radicalized by the arid cultural conditions - mustering a caricature of professionalism in order to defend and iterate upon smooth-brained expressions of otherwise hollow musical signifiers. This zone of cringe death-drive is where I recommend looking this week.

One recent addition to my growing collection of case studies on this topic is the young TikTok vocal virtuoso and songwriter, Katerina Lomis. She is a talented singer and a skilled musician, but listening to her content is difficult for me on a number of levels. Her music contains an aggressive, grating combo of twee, jazz-pop affectations: “cursive singing” - the gratuitous bending of vowels and consonants that renders lyrics in a self-satisfied sort of baby-talk, die babyspracht-lied, if you’re nasty (see Camilla Cabelo’s “I’ll be home for quismoiss” clip); extreme, fast tempi and buck-wild, showy vocal melismas, whose only purpose seem to be stupifying the listener with a near-constant, compulsive utilization of her multi-octave vocal range; and, big-swinging lyrics that make me very uncomfortable (like, I should not be seeing this) in their wry presumptions of mature life experiences and poetic depth, delivered with a confident smirk and exhibitionist flair.

I was once a teen singer-songwriter, and maybe that’s one of the raw sources of discomfort for me in hearing such full-throated work from someone so young, and who projects such self-confidence under impoverished musical circumstances. I suppose I can relate, and like Matthew McConaughey in Intersteller, I cry out through the wormhole of my own life experience: “Don’t let me leave…! No! No! No!” In fact, it makes me cringe (in, and about myself) to so openly describe what I do not like in a talented and creative young person’s music. And, while Katerina’s songs are just so obviously not for me, and I know that, it still makes me uncomfortable to listen to. Why does that matter? It hits this damaged nerve for me around the question of healthy embarrassment. If we only present work that meets the optimal “mastery” quotient, that does not mean that we all become maestros: instead, we begin to excel in the optics of mastery.

I’ve been collecting case studies along this line here on 2020MG. You may have read my piece about Joshua Kyan Aalampour a few weeks back, in which I conduct another (heroic) take-down of the young, dark academic’s work and ideas. You may also have read my piece about the young easy listening composer Rue Jacobs, in which I celebrate his rare, understated style. For me, Rue is a welcome example of someone who synthesizes these optics of mastery with a sophisticated avoidance of the cringe deathdrive tendency. But the White Whale of this cringe dialectic for me is unquestionably the great one - the Leonard Bernstein of cringe: Jacob Collier. (My “Cringe Cetology,” is forthcoming - you will enjoy this illustrated monograph).

Jacob Collier is probably the most appropriate target for some kind of categorical critique here, because he operates at the highest level of musical virtuosity, commercial success, and transcendent shamelessness. Collier’s GRAMMY-winning arrangement of “Flintstones” is at once a masterpiece of his trademark “negative harmony,” and a condescending pops monstrosity. It is, however, awesome, terrifying and sounds incredible. Its ambition is sickening. Its playfulness is pathological and practically antagonistic (in a backwards way, I can relate to and enjoy this). There are insane melodica solos, and beatboxing over rhythmic modulation as the circle of fifths implodes into, and around, the beloved cartoon theme song. It is a Yabba-Dabba Doo time of the highest order - an order which, perhaps, should never have been created. Within its intense complexity and behind its playful facade, the composition dominates the listener in every conceivable, musical way - amounting to a “toxically positive” thesis about the premises and potentials of music in-itself, as if to say simultaneously: “look what you can do with music!” but really, “look what only I can do.”

These are fairly innocuous propositions, assuming that the emotional freedom from shame that Collier represents is - in some way - an existing, shared condition supported by social trust, and not purely an affordance of individual excellence and virtuosity on the level of “Flintstones.” It suggests a “bootstrap” music economics: you have equal opportunity to embrace your freedom from embarrassment, so long as you are already talented, educated, masterful, and resourced enough to produce high quality work. The implicit arguments beneath Collier’s MO strike me almost as a form of musical/emotional evangelical swindling (in the classic virtuoso way): the abundance of my musical genius is so great, that I invite you to become overwhelmed by your own inadequacy, submit to your humiliation, and buy my albums and tickets as your only form of access to any optimism, whatsoever, about what makes music great. This is the object of my deeper concern within this broader conversation: the disempowering compression of all music’s and all people’s inherent and dynamic beauty. We need to advocate for some nuclear deescalation.

Returning to Katerina Lomis, I was moved by a recent video she shared, in which she broke character, dropped her swaggering affect and spoke vulnerably about how, while she presents a joyful and confident version of herself online, she also struggles with difficult emotions and self-esteem. The fact that this needed to be said at all, communicates something about the stakes of presentation - and in some way, confirms the dehumanizing force operating behind the music and Katerina’s fraught experience with its mediatization. Because all of this context is available (not just for Katerina, but for almost everyone releasing and presenting work), it makes it all the more difficult to sift the problematic musical ideology from its vulnerable producer. For me, that makes it all the more important to try and do, as we risk slipping beyond the horizon of meaningful participation into accepting a musical life of shared, yet alienated and unresolvable cosmic narcissism.

So where does that leave us? As content aggregators of a dwindling past, like dark age scholars of the Greeks. Safe to study, collect, translate; and unacceptable, nearly demonic to presume new deviations in creativity. What would Hildegard von Bingen do (WWHVBD)? And in what revelations, what books and intonations will the seeds of our renaissance be found?

—Alec Sturgis

This will be Issue 19. This time, we recommend some additions to, and correction of, recent hyperpop discourse, a new track from Hackney’s alternative pop / nü-jazz scene, and a concentration on music’s healing psychedelia, via Disco and David Mancuso’s enduring legacy.

Recommendation: PC Music x DISown Radio ft. A. G. Cook, GFOTY, Danny L Harle, Lil Data, Nu New Edition and Kane West

Last week, X-formerly-twitter dot com erupted into a series of reflections, provocations, and discursive miscellany around the intentions and origins of “hyperpop.” The conversation surfaced as a reconnaissance toward how the genre—its vernacular use being highly contested, but not without categorical utility—has emerged and developed over the last 15 years. This was all largely churned-up as a response to Jesse Dorris’ review of Danny L Harle’s Cerulean on Pitchfork, which stated that “Whatever else hyperpop was—rambunctious, pleasure-forward, sonically inventive in tech and tempo, buzzy in all senses—it was never earnest.”

I’ll block quote the rest of the paragraph for full context, Dorris writes:

“Danny L Harle and the rest of the PC Music org folded post-electroclash, Adbusters-style culture jamming with 4chan-y shitpost nihilism to a gabba beat. Clenched with irony, hyperpop chomped its bubblegum until the bubble burst. Behind production boards, its agents worked with geniuses like Charli XCX to remake pop in her own image. But in their own work, they went hyperprog. SOPHIE released a sprawling double album of shapeshifting anthems and transgenre experiments, followed by a posthumous one that largely failed to realize even loftier socio-political-rave ambitions. A.G. Cook and Arca released triple-plus albums accessorized by coding, fashion collabs, video art, re-dos. Anything, it sometimes felt like, instead of being vulnerable enough to risk failing at making something someone might truly, deeply love.”

This position is just incredibly wrong. Even spiteful. To me, Dorris reflects a rockist bias (i.e. “vulnerable enough to risk failing at making something someone might truly deeply love”) that I would have hoped had muzzled itself at this point in 2026—especially in its uncomplex evocation of a trite irony vs. sincerity dialectic. It’d be better practice to simply say the music is bad and give reasons for why it’s bad, instead of offering such a stilted and altogether revisionist sketch of a complex history of digital technological emergence and one of its resultant musical styles. For me, I think so much of the generalization of “hyperpop” has largely led to a proliferation of plenty of shit-ass music and production-platitudes within DAW practices and sound palettes. This is one-and-the-same with any genre saturation that occurs when an appreciating audience begins to occupy a depreciating sound rather than simply compose and produce music with ideas. Personally, I’ve grown to not really enjoy quirked up random sounds glooped onto a DAW. After the progeny of some of the artists listed by Dorris above, we heard a ubiquity of high fidelity sounds that indulged in the sheer novelty of just slapping shit on the grid, which to my ears resulted in plenty of annoying music.

I have my own negative opinions about the later years of PC Music (especially the total Charli-fication of its legacy; I also didn’t really get through 7G and Apple), and even worse opinions of music they’ve indirectly influenced; but, those early formative years couldn’t be more earnest in what they clearly set out to compose. It was called Personal Computer Music. These artists, overcast by their influence, shouldn’t be held responsible for the resultant whack music made in their wake. A.G. Cook and PC Music became influential by basically updating the concept of the “player piano” into Ableton Live, with a pretty light hand, adjusting basic parameters to make sure the MIDI was sounding concise, and fitting into formal pop structures. In an interview before their “POP CUBE” performance in 2015, Cook was quoted as saying that “98% of his music is ripped off from the great 20th century american composer Conlon Nancarrow,” see “Study for Player Piano No.41a,” which reveals a parallel history of MIDI music and automation that conceptually unites with their early automation/intervention musical project. The musician d’Eon recently tweeted “so many [early PC Music] tunes hovered around III, IV, V, VI chords; using the III instead of resolving to the tonic has a weird optimistic tension and nothing else in the 2010s underground used that harmonic language. I used to tell people I thought PC Music sounded like Handel.”

More, the PC Music x DISown radio mix from 2014 was a massive impact event for this resultant sound, emerging as a part of the DISown exhibition at Red Bull Studios in NYC, which also featured an exhibition with visual artists Lizzie Fitch & Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, Bjarne Melgaard, Jon Rafman, Dora Budor, Jogging, K-HOLE, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Nick DeMarco, Shanzhai Biennial, Timur Si Qin, Katja Novitskova, Telfar, HBA, DIS, and more. The union between DIS and PC Music was explicitly focused on examining taste and consumerism—still two areas that are the center of our bottomed out tech-adjacent aesthetic discourse in 2026. The fact that this was all sponsored by Red Bull directly resulted in QT. They did this extremely earnestly, as an art project, and a serious music project. Even the term “hyperpop,” used by writers on Tiny Mix Tapes as a critical genre term as early as 2006, was applying critical tools from a speculative realism/accelerationism background—as it was also used by the CCRU crew in the 90s as an offshoot of their hyperstition concept. The entirety of any kind of theoretical thought process behind “hyperpop” has become swallowed up into its replication as a genre, which is a shame. Or not. Given that this sound is clearly here to stay, especially as it’s trickled up to actual pop stars, let’s not get it twisted that there were once actual ideas here.

For me, PC Music x DISown Radio stands as the definitive statement of the PC Music oeuvre and a masterclass in the collective MIDI sound that was proselytized widely and still very much in vogue today. It also helped popularize the mix as a new kind of album, one that audaciously premiered and distributed completely original new music and “exclusive content” with an effortless surplus value. This was all extremely novel at the time. No one really cares about these gestures anymore—as this is all par for the course—and that’s OK. The mix has savant-level composition, it has swing. It has an insane remix of Burial’s “Archangel” by Kane West. Most importantly, it has ambition. PC Music went on to sign a deal with Columbia, Danny L Harle went on to produce for Carly Rae Jepsen and Dua Lipa, and of course, Cook produced the majority of Charli’s albums from Number 1 Angel onward. At its start, the mix proclaims: A. G. Cook is 23 years old. That lit a fire under my ass as a 22-year-old when I first heard the mix in 2014.

In a recent interview in Cultured Magazine, A.G. Cook takes up a version of my suddenly-relevant-again position and rallies “Against Worldbuilding.” He was asked: Why do you say you’re resistant to the word “world-building”?

He responds: “The world building I don’t like is media that overexplains. But I really appreciate this sort of dream logic; that’s what makes it feel larger than life. When doing these zoomed-out projects, I just don’t want the audience to take away something literal from it. I want them to be able to feel it and then dig deeper. It somehow makes it more lifelike rather than giving someone a key and barraging them with detail.”

Unfortunately, with both the legions of hyperslop producers ruining many a club night, or this Pitchfork writer trying to vapidly historicize his earnestness, this might be a bit too much to ask.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Leto Grand, “Lovely Walk”

“Hello Grand audience… Exciting times!” — the tagline (and, this week, a sentiment I share) of the mysterious British singer-songwriter and saxophonist, Leto Grand. He delivers it in a Michael Caine–like Hackney baritone fry at the start of every promo video for gigs at bars, clubs, local festivals and backyards, from London to the Channel shore in Hastings. I encountered Leto’s music, due to his promotional efforts online, advertising his new single “Lovely Walk,” and an EP of the same name (featuring four remixes and an alternate, extended version of the tune). I have not heard anything quite like “Lovely Walk.” Knowing nothing about Leto or his music, the track’s minimalist drum groove, supporting a spare mix of crunched, dry synth bass, full staccato sax chord hits, and the strikingly crispy, sibilant, bassy condenser mic whisper of Leto’s vocal delivery impressed me in its strange and swaggering idiosyncrasies. It’s agnostic disco energy recalled for me the prestige conceptual “live band” grooves of Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra, and the home brewed sound of its production and mix, infused with Leto’s (I suppose) north London affect engendered in me an instant curiosity about the music and its creator.

“Lovely Walk” opens with a skit in which Leto introduces himself to the lovely walker (I recommending listening, now):

“Hi.” “Hello.” “Excuse me, uh.. excuse me… what’s your name?” “Grace….” [echo effect, repetition of the name, laugh] “‘course it is.” “...but my friends call me Amazing Grace, go figure.” “I’ll bet they do.”

Seeking additional context beyond the new release and its many variations, I found a “documentary” on Leto’s YouTube account, that I recommend viewing for an additional, textured view of the man behind the music. Basically, (if you check out the video, perhaps you’ll agree) Leto seems very cool. The “aura” presented in his musical persona is well grounded in his general bearing in the behind-the-scenes footage of he and his 7-piece band’s performance in a Hackney backyard party. Tinted sunglasses at dusk, alto sax hanging at his neck, relaxed hand signals to the horn trio at his right, generous introductions and interviews of what seem to be longtime collaborators in his band. For me, beautiful stuff: the stuff of someone who loves and feels music at his core, loves making it, and loves performing it with respected colleagues.

As I attempted to peel back layers in the myth of Leto, I wanted to also gain some perspective on the type of scene he is involved in. What are these shows like? Who else is on the bill? What does their music sound like? And, frankly, what is this style of music? While I’ve made personal associations about it, I really have no clue as to the intent and influences that are behind it. I’ll resist projecting more of my interpretations on this particular front, but will relay just a bit more context.

For their recent New Years Eve bill, Leto shared the bill from The Star in Shoreditch (simple black text on white 8.5x11): Doors, 6:00 PM; Leto Grand, 6:30-7:00; Hazlo, 7:15-7:45; Arianna, 8:00-8:30; Secret Love Orchestra, 8:45-9:15; JNVO, 9:30-10:00; Curfew, 10PM. A tight group for the pre-count-down hours. More may be said about each individual act, but the gestalt of the evening was somewhere in the neighborhood of an alt-pop, jazz, funk, ska, and, (as JNVO self-describes) “Nü Jazz,” persuasion. Further contextual digging revealed these acts as a pleasant mix of serious, yet green, amateur groups, ostensible professionals, and those in between like, I suspect, Leto Grand: aged - like the 6 year germination of “Lovely Walk” (as indicated on Bandcamp) - to a fine vintage, where mysterious aesthetic refinements and community ferment in situ. We could all hope to be so chuffed.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Nick Straker Band - “A Little Bit of Jazz”

The historical significance of the Loft is formidable and well-documented – many of our readers will be familiar with Tim Lawrence’s Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979. If not, you are encouraged to seek it out.

I went to the disco party for the first time this past weekend, on the occasion of its 56th anniversary. Though I was excited to go, I made an effort to do as little conscious expectation setting as possible. It wasn’t that I wanted to be surprised, but that I sought to be open and present. Some experiences are diminished by too-active tabulation and comparison of mental notes.

I have been intermittently rereading Love Saves the Day the past few months, and picked it up the night before. This supplied a couple generative frameworks. The first was the concept of the Bardo, which founding Loft organizer David Mancuso describes adapting from Timothy Leary:

Leary wrote that there were three stages, or three Bardos, in a trip, and I found myself using the same structure. The first Bardo would be very smooth, perfect, calm. The second Bardo would be like a circus. And the third Bardo was about re-entry, so people would go back into the outside world relatively smoothly.

In another passage, Lawrence writes that Mancuso sought to make his audio system “sound as real or live as possible,” and relays a moment that inspired the project:

‘There was this little stream that went into a quarry,’ said Mancuso. ‘It was maybe a few feet wide, and there were these little whirlpools that looked like speakers, so I leaned over and got as close to them as possible without getting wet. The sound was incredible. It was the cleanest sound I had ever heard, and there was all this information. It was almost as if I could hear the history of life, not in words but in music.’ The experience raised Mancuso’s life energy. ‘It made me happy. I knew it was correct. It was constantly giving birth. It wasn’t repetitive. It was as organic as you could get. It was coming directly from the source. And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could record this correctly so that when you played it back it would be accurate enough for you to empathize with the original moment? I wanted to be able to hear the spirit of the babbling brook in my room.’

This is an incredible quote – there’s so much there, and we want to make sure we track the key parts.

Let’s begin with whirlpools that look like speakers: two kinds of ecologies, an ecology of ecologies. A speaker transmits and amplifies but does not create sound, while whirlpools are the result of gravity, water, and geology. Does a whirlpool transmit sound, or create it? For Mancuso, they resemble each other visually and also functionally, in the moment of audition. He is bringing different types of signals to our attention, underscoring their commonality. We are thinking about energy.

Mancuso leans over and hears an abundance of information. He hears the history of life, not in words, but in music. (Music seems to be positioned as a better communicative medium than language. How can we conceptualize the relationship between musical and linguistic capacities? I need to revisit Gary Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music.)

Let’s put special emphasis on the figuration of history here: it’s one thing to listen to a whirlpool and be immersed in the present moment, but it’s another to listen and hear history. Mancuso hears this information that is constantly giving birth, generated directly from the source. It is correct. He wants to record it accurately in order to play it back and hear the spirit.

During the second Bardo, the circus Bardo, I ran into Jack and Brittany. Nick Straker Band’s “A Little Bit of Jazz” played and it was possible to hear the spirit.

—Alexander Iadarola

Happy Valentine’s weekend from 2020MG. Issue 18 contains recommendations of some contemporary southern soul music, a daily-life meditation on the wide energetic net of music, and a look into Florian Hecker’s new PAN release.

Recommendation: Avail Hollywood “The King of Grown Folks Music” and Jeter Jones “Da Kang of Trailride Blues”

I’ve been fairly obsessed with the music of Avail Hollywood and the broader circuit of southern soul musicians with whom he associates for a decade or more. Across the southern state lines with Jeter Jones, Nellie “Tiger” Travis, Omar Cunningham, J. Red The Nephew, Jefree Charles, et al, there’s a particular “grown and sexy” sound of synthesized horns and band accompaniments, sequenced drums, slow and easy tempo for tailgates and back road rides, and “mature themes.” This style of southern black music, its cultural tradition and deeper, complex history feels important to point to and also defer on (“‘The Chitlin’ Circuit’ And the Road to Rock ‘N’ Roll” by Preston Lauterbach is a place to start). I am, at least, equipped to recommend this music as a fan in describing a few things that I love about it.

Avail’s persona and the themes in his music live in a suspended world of categorically grown people (“25 and up,” in Avail’s estimation) navigating life, partying, meeting, breaking up, and engaging in many forms of adult activity (“Hit Me Up, On Facebook,” “Tung On It,” “Drinking Again”). The music’s atmosphere tends to certain extremes of human experience: celebrations, relationship struggles, sex. His story-telling takes place on a canvas of practically archetypal (and, numerous, taxonomical) adult interactions, but within these he manages to expose depths and details that are often omitted in mainstream treatments of these classic human themes, as in the song “25 and Up.”

“You know my big homie Wendell B was in town the other night, so I went to go check it out. And I knew it was gonna be a special night because… soon as I walked in the building I saw the baddest chick I’ve ever seen in my life. She had to be about 45… hell it had to be her birthday because she had that money print on her shirt. I ain’t gonna lie, I was so nervous, but your boy Hollywood had to go approach her. Well I build up my confidence. Being a young man myself, I went over to her and she told me, she said: ‘I’m officially grown and sexy, and I can see that baby, because I’m officially 45. And I’m looking for a good man, to put that spice in my life…”

“Is you 25 and up? And do you do grown folks stuff?”

There’s a certain journalism to Avail’s lyrics that appears in sync with his life and persona as a channel of the grown folks life and lifestyle, and imbues the music with a sense of confidence, authenticity and place. Photos from his Facebook account show incredibly lit, high production performances of his southern soul music for full venues of mature couples and singles alike - sometimes dining, mostly dancing. The scenes are fun and it’s not difficult to imagine how “The King of Grown Folks Music” continues to find inspiration for his material.

Alongside this setting and venue of the dinner club and the dancehall, there’s “the country” - back roads, the horse trails, the local tailgate party - which also figure large in the themes of this style of southern soul. Another king, Jeter Jones (“Da Kang of Trailride Blues”), offers his own particular set of songs and stories. His are centered, with pride, on expressing the celebratory heights of country folks gathering in trucks, on horses and ATVs, drinks flowing, music playing. There’s a deep country identity that is not only so clearly important to Jeter, but again, seems to reflect and sustain the life of the venue, the party, the music itself.

This is one of the things that I find so special about this music and its style of production and presentation: the music comes from a sense of place with immense pride, takes up its forms, exults musically in a certain clarity of its genre, engages it with artful invention, and provides new stories and new standards for new generations of folks (grown, and soon to be grown, and in remembrance of things grown).

I recommend this music, and I also recommend (if you’re in the Atlanta metropolitan area this valentines season) that you take a special someone down to Jeter Jones’ show at J.R. Crickets on Old Dixie Hwy in Jonesboro, Georgia, Saturday night. (If things are getting serious, I feel confident recommending the Jeter Jones Country Boy Lovin’ Cruise this Fall.) Chicken, steak or salmon? Asparagus on the side. Happy Valentine’s Day.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Kevin Ayers - Religious Experience (feat. Syd Barrett) (Singing a Song in the Morning)

I generally listened to music in a functional manner this week. I listened to it on the Stairmaster, reading a book and occasionally looking up at the television. I listened to it walking around, in-between tasks. It is part of my energetic economy. There were a number of moments when I listened to music closely, but I mostly turned to it as energetic stimulus, creating connective tissue between things.

I went to Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night to see Varèse’s Amériques, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. There was a huge speaker maybe 50 feet above the center of the stage. I had never seen a speaker exactly like that before.

I also listened to this Ayers/Barrett song for the first time in several years. It is like a bright light. I recommend it. These are the lyrics:

Singing a song in the morning, singing it again at night

I don’t even know what I’m singin’ about but it makes me feel I feel alright, yeah yeah

Makes me feel I feel alright

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Florian Hecker - Natural Selection

It’s nice to see a new Florian Hecker CD released on PAN records in the year of our lord 2026. Reflecting on the label a bit, there was a time where I was writing about a new PAN release every month or so—enthusiastically consuming every record in the catalog and writing a series of concept-driven fragment-reviews on M.E.S.H., Bill Kouligas & Amnesia Scanner, ADR, Rashad Becker, Konrad Sprenger, the mono no aware ambient compilation, and more. The Tiny Mix Tapes website keeps crashing (blame Marvin Lin), so I’m not linking to those here, but critically engaging with the label’s progression was a big part of my musical life for many youthful years. Here in 2026, I still avidly keep up with PAN’s catalog and look forward to its output. I’ve noticed shifts in my own interpretation of their releases, and my own willingness to fully engage in its various interests and subject matter; but, this is more a reflection on how my own attention-span and music consumption has changed, how labels have changed, even how PAN has changed—its own evolutionary gradient and omnivorousness being just as admirable as its canon. It’s nice to see PAN ebb and flow through the current of music’s own shifting contexts in both the club, the noise basement, or the Kunsthalle. Simply, I appreciate a 9-track brick of a Florian Hecker album released on CD-ROM format on PAN in February, 2026.

In anticipation of writing on the record, I dusted off my copy of Hecker’s Chimerizations text, published on Primary Information in 2013. I also briefly revisited Resynthese FAVN, a 10-CD box set and publication released through Blank Forms in 2024. The PI text includes contextual essays by Catherine Wood, Stefan Helmreich, and Reza Negarestani, as well as expanded references to his works “Hecker Leckey Voice Text Chimera,” a collaboration with Mark Leckey (with a libretto by Reza). The Blank Forms box set includes contextual essays developed in collaboration with Robin MacKay/Urbanomic, texts from philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, and more. Similar to PAN’s catalog, there was also a time where this philosophical and musical milieu was a deep pool of study and infatuation. Admittedly, about as quickly as I took these tome-ic works off my respective book and record shelves, I just as quickly put them back. I wasn’t really able to go there, and that’s worth exploring here a bit.

Revisiting Hecker’s work has unveiled a series of pretty basic observations and queries on the composition, production, and reception of computer music. More than any specific concept, motif, or compositional gesture, the act of plugging your computer into a soundsystem and presenting sounds to a mildly interested, if not defenseless, audience is one of the more baffling “norms” of musical assembly I can think of. The lack of transparency for presenting this kind of “concrete” computational sound will forever be a subject of fascination for me. Especially without context. We have to ask: What’s going on with these sounds, my friend? Throughout Hecker’s Natural Selection we hear movement—impacts, textures, sonic motions that go upwards and downward, side-to-side. There are brief moments of brushstroke synthesis, intervened with periodic silence, auditory illusions and quadratic sequences. There’s an organizing principle throughout the tracks, the press release for the music notes the album is a “constellation of pieces originating from related investigations [...] these works have been grouped together because they share very specific properties, using correlated modes of synthesis and approaching timbral metamorphosis in a similar way. Pieces that might seem incongruous at first are united not by one concept, but by a cluster of queries that Hecker has been probing diligently for the last few years, ideas related to automated file selection, database-generating sequencing systems and the prospect of synthetic cognition.”

That’s about as far as either the press release, or myself frankly, are willing to go with the work. Overall, I’m somewhat disappointed in myself for not necessarily being able to meet Hecker’s Natural Selection on its own terms, or where “the composer is at” with these pieces. This basic disappointment also recircuits back into the act of presenting computational music. So often, we are never truly able to meet computationally-generated music on its own terms aside from the act of simply listening to it. The details are not revealed, its processes—often wholly opaque. Or, perhaps this is truly its own terms? Which puts it back firmly within the category of “noise music.” We see the sonic result—which is in fact the music—but often without its procedural context. This act has become very familiar in our ChatGPT-fueled society. Here, we are in a mist of after-images and imprints, prompts that beget sequences of text and images. These materia, and in this case, this music, are the thing. Or, is it what produced them (the prompt, the process, the context) that’s actually the thing? I think this basic fundamental query is what drew many to computer music initially, and what provoked many of us to theorize and behold it so enthusiastically in expanding so much extra context around it.

I’ve also got a copy of Ted Gordon’s “The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America” queued up to read. I have a feeling this text would make some prescient observations on these points. For now, I’m mainly just enjoying the act of remembering the utter rabidity that I once had to consume and contextualize this kind of music. Again, via PAN, Natural Selection “doesn’t require any rigorous background study. In fact, it’s one of Hecker’s most playful and approachable sets in years, exhibiting the same balance of intensity, mischief and brain-twisting theory that made albums like Sun Pandämonium and Acid in the Style of David Tudor so enduringly influential.”

Maybe so, maybe so. Natural Selection actually mildly irritated me and made me feel anxious and kind of bad. But I appreciated noticing that.

I recall a series of concerts organized with my friend Eric Frye at ISSUE Project Room years ago that featured his music, alongside legendary composers Curtis Roads and Beatriz Ferreyra. Those shows were life-affirming testaments to cloaked processes giving way to the multi-channel presentation of computational (or in Beatriz’ case organic) sound. I walked away from those shows feeling imbued with energy given from the sounds that had swirled around me. I wonder if computer music could make me feel that way again (as it also did with Acid in the Style of David Tudor, most thrillingly). I’m almost pretty sure that it could, despite maybe not getting there with my listening to Hecker’s new album.

Instead of a Chimerization, in Robin MacKay’s words “integrated bodies that synthesize incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, finding a common ground, or reducing one to the other,” with the recent Hecker I’m drawn instead to the Greek mythological figure of Lethe. Lethe is the personification of oblivion and the underworld’s “river of forgetfulness.” Souls drank from this river to forget their earthly lives—one of the five rivers of Hades contrasting with the river of memory, Mnemosyne. In 2026, as opposed to 2014, computation, and perhaps computational music, might have me drinking from that stream.

—Nick James Scavo

This is Issue 17. This week our recommendations focus on a nuanced, non-linguistic affect of samples, the historical-aesthetic quality of “earliness” in music, and a deep read into the “refinement” of EDM and beyond, via Fred again..

Recommendation: Ghost - The Club

This track demonstrates incredibly advanced sampling technique. It isn’t an overstatement to call it dazzling. Motion, syncopation, variation, afterimages, gravitational voids, reversals. An array of small sounds, pitched, cut, and interlaced with remarkable precision. Today we’ll focus on one element in particular: the recording of laughter on the one, and the accompanying inhale later in the bar – at a delay, after a durational opening – preparing the loop for another refrain.

I am finding that the sound of this laughter doesn’t want to be described. Maybe laughter doesn’t want to be described in general. We could call it ebullient, infectious, or, I don’t know, free-spirited, but that wouldn’t get us very far. We are more interested in what it does, and its function triggers some pre-conscious, non-linguistic identification-effect. Not unlike the crow sample in Drake and Future’s “Jumpman.”

What does the crow sample do? Well, that’s pretty hard to explain, but if you listen to the song, you get it immediately. Again: describing it as ominous or slightly-evil sounding doesn’t allow us to make any progress. Back to “The Club.” There’s some kind of non-verbal entrainment happening here, a syncing up of disparate rhythms: tracheal, mechanical, percussive, biological. Multiple voices – very broadly construed – communicating in a sound space. Synthesis happens.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Early Music

I like “early” music. I will guess that you like it too, or that you’ve formed an opinion about it because other people that you know really like “early” music. Music from the renaissance and medieval period: we like it, and we call it Early. Unreleased music, traditional music, demos, the first-in-the-series, archival records… We like these, and they are all “early.” They are “early” in relation to a body of work that we know comes after, as a version of music that will find some further state of development, canonization, become iterated upon with some greater complexity, or refinement, etc. And, it’s noteworthy that we sometimes enjoy this contextual state of “earliness” separately, and occasionally more than the content itself. The ways in which contexts become a part of content - through the embedding of situational, cultural, social factors into the “signs” of music - is what I write about basically every week, so I’m going to bracket that out and explore this on a more granular level. So why, lateman, in this - the present moment - do you and I like “early” music so much?

Listening to Judie Tzuke’s 1982 album Shoot the Moon (2006 Remaster) as I write this, I heard a song that I didn’t know and that I particularly liked the sound of: “How Do I Feel - Demo” (it has some strange percussion at the beginning). Seeing the “demo” qualifier, and before I formed a conscious thought, I caught myself in a reflex: “Oh, a demo.” Something about the demo signifies an almost exotic set of possibilities - uncanniness, a strangeness in the mix, instrumental tones and timbres that feel uncharacteristically raw, thin vocal deliveries, exposed drums, room noise, and so on. These qualities aren’t in any way categorically unique to demos, but they nonetheless gain extra significance with that distinction. I listened to the later 1983 album release of “How Do I Feel,” and, as one would expect, it is more refined in its arrangement, it sounds better and because of that, it’s more fun to listen to. But it also entirely lacks the strange porousness that drew me to the demo. I like them both, but I have a special relationship with the demo.

I don’t think this is because of my repressed hostility towards “the arts” (2020MG is prescribed by my doctor). As I’ve alluded, the appeal of the “early” as a kind of historical-aesthetic thing in music hangs close with the general linguistic anticipation that “what comes next” is in some form of dialogue with what preceded it. Regardless of whether (or in what way) this is true, we experience it meaningfully nonetheless. To feel that we know what a song was before it became another thing, or to imagine what it might have been like, or what it might still become, is a highly imaginative paramusical experience. Why is this not merely enjoyed, but is also demarcated and imbued with valuable subtext? Is it about gaining authority or control through the sense of historicity that emerges?

Foucault’s “archive and power” argument is that we enact a mechanism of power by virtue of preferential recognition, collection, differentiation, and thus a determination of the boundaries of discourse. But I’m less interested in why authority or control subsumes the music-historical experience, and more interested in how our complex interactions with “the panopticon” reveal the soft points in such surveillance.

Freud’s treatment of nostalgia is useful, since that “early” connotes an unhealthy longing for the past - a memory protected within a defensive illusion, a fantasized reconstruction which smooths over conflict. The fact that we probably have nostalgia for the mere presence of countless records in many unknown archives is not the interesting part here for me; it is in the repressed conflict against which that nostalgic illusion is staged: an anxiety and uneasiness with time, memory and the means we have to experience and measure it. The fascination with the “early” in music is in one sense a kind of nostalgic performance that we do for ourselves, in which we fixate and substitute the unknowns of history with idealized continuities for art. Freud’s suggestion seems to be that we might correct this failure and complete the labor of mourning an aesthetic and historical opacity beyond any real clarification.

Like Anthony Fantano, I too am busy. But alongside my commitments to music, I also find time to enjoy and study football. Statisticians and ball analysts use the term “positive regression” to mark player performance that has fallen below their projections, but which is expected to return to the mean. The analogy between statistical and psychological regression catches on something meaningful in this broad field of considerations about archives and time. It’s unlikely that the poetry we find in imperfect memories and in our music-historical ideation is merely proof of our failure to exorcise the haunting discontinuities in life. Returning to the “early” steadies an otherwise shaky bridge that spans our general anxiety within time. It engenders a vital nostalgia toward the future, from the past: wherein after the demo, the music becomes what we always hoped and expected it would be.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Fred again.. at East End Studios, Sunnyside, Queens on January 31st, 2026

This past weekend, I was given a pair of comped tickets to see Fred again.. on the last night of his three-weekend-long residency at a warehouse in Sunnyside, Queens. I’ve been wanting to analyze Fred again..’s music for some time; and, this is a bit of a loaded recommendation this week as a result. Fred sums up at least a few layers of concurrent thought I’ve been having around electronic music, its production, and its ongoing refinement as a continuum throughout the 2010s and 2020s—and I’m glad this opportunity presented itself. I’m using the words “continuum” and “refinement” here intentionally, pointing to Paul Skallas’ widely circulated “Refinement Culture” and Simon Reynolds’ “Hardcore Continuum” essays that I’ll be loosely problematizing throughout this analysis as well.

As a personal experience, the event was, frankly, wonderful. It wholly succeeded in presenting a powerful, unified vision of bass sound, emotion, and collective enjoyment, even communion, with tactical production, mixing, and progression that so many musical experiences attempt to execute. Plenty of our most garish EDM and rave activities also simulate this collective experience; but, Fred again..’s music extrudes a complex and potentially insidious layer, twisting in the darkness of UK bass culture, without its precarious and insurgent historical background. Instead, Fred’s innovation has been through the embellishment of varied rap vocality (Young Thug, Baby Keem, Future, Lil Yachty, Skepta), the synthetic optimism of indie catharsis (Caribou, Floating Points, Joy Orbison, Anderson.Paak), and an omnivorous approach that seems to take in everything in its orbit—Fredifying it into a particular production texture. Syrupy autotune reverie, absurd bass, and an overall ascendent attitude all provoke a shivers-in-the-club, tears-in-the-club, hands-in-the-air music.

His collaborations and b2bs with Skrillex have positioned him in a similar caliber of simultaneously celebrated and maligned artistry—both edified and bogged down by a genuine, if not straightforward, love of music. Bass music. His contributions to the current state of EDM and club music are more detailed in the way they are consumed as both a form of wistful interiority and an externalized communal and commercial club experience. Fred is reaching toward something that’s maybe not quite there, flying close to the sun, pantomiming our desire-laden appeals for dopamine and connection within the slipstream of a continually emerging technological mysticism we’re experiencing—our disconnection giving new contours for processes of reconnection within the occasions that assemble us. Fred is almost like the Hans Zimmer of the hardcore continuum, reminding me of Christopher Nolan’s films in its coexistent severity and softness of narrative (all rotating around a core mystery that may or may not actually be there). Alec and I have recorded some roasts on our podcast Flavortone of James Blake and Zimmer, respectively, that probe some of these ideas. His music presents a cinematic flow of anticipatory moments, separated by clean and novel cuts in an exchange of revelry and ubiquity. It feels optimized and again, refined.

Danny Brown, Caribou, and Ben UFO joined at this particular show—as Fred’s hits were imbued further with 2010s post-dubstep and indie electronica, as well as plenty of varied moments that included Brazilian funk, brostep, stutter house, 2-step, and “future garage.” I sent a few videos to a friend, a great experimental musician, post-concert. Fred was surrounded by an enraptured audience either losing it in a frenzied drop or clutching their hearts, swaying with their arms around each other. His response: “when the music succeeds and is communal.” The music wholly succeeded but also almost felt too successful. A question emerged: is this greatest common denominator or lowest common denominator music? In the world of today’s public consensus, everything that’s even remotely mutually understood can sometimes feel like both.

My enjoyment of Fred again..’s music must come with caveats that demand some introspection, a turning over of stones. Firstly, it might be a bit easier to talk through why Fred again.. could be bad, as a paradigmatic example of the consumption and production of electronic dance music becoming streamlined during our technological moment. A less generous listening of Fred again..’s music would establish it as an inauthentic “fan music,” buoyed by a sincere love of the medium dialed into the stakes of a continually reworked and recalibrated, but fading, history. For example, upon entry to the concert, a sticker was placed over everyone’s phone cameras to discourage phone use. Throughout the entire show, the stickers were quickly and easily peeled off and discarded—as phones were up and out incessantly. Again, this simple gesture became a kind of pantomime that’s pointing to some kind of moral suggestion of a more authentic experience—perhaps a previous history of rave culture—and insinuation of a value system that clearly was not displayed, enforced, or even acknowledged in the slightest.

More, an essay featured on the website of Jeff Wischer’s new label Tutorial Island, titled “Occupational Hollowing and Vocational Parasitism in Club Culture: The Cognitive Limits of DJing as Art,” elucidates some negative points on the status of DJ culture and electronic music in our time. The essay establishes that “the cultural elevation of the club DJ to the status of ‘artist’ is one of the more striking symptoms of late-capitalist musical economies. The role is framed as avant-garde, innovative, and performative, yet closer inspection reveals it as an instance of occupational hollowing: the reduction of vocation to curatorial mediation, devoid of substantive creative labor.” While there’s plenty that I disagree with in the content of this essay, I take its overall point in stride and can easily apply it to my experience seeing Fred again.. Although Fred has an expansive production oeuvre (and is not solely a DJ), his is a project of fabrication, assembly and reassembly—a paratextual literature review of electronic music that’s rendered into a deeply personal, reworked, recombinant sublimity.

The response on social media before and after Fred’s show was all filled with vague superlatives: it was “life changing,” a “core life moment,” it “rewired my brian,” or, “this can’t be real.” Another fan shared a video of Fred giving prayer hands while looking up with an ear-to-ear smile with the caption: “our boy is taking it all in.” I can see why the positivity of these reflections—such a goal of music’s historical and aesthetic role up to this point—is triggering to those whose music has seemingly lost its value or presence in our various vocational handlings of it. Sometimes, when we peel back all the layers of our musical productions and positions, what’s left is our cryptic clinging to what our own musical “vocation” could possibly be. After the show, I posted a 3am IG story that I quickly ended up archiving after I got a response from a “real deal” electronic music friend. He sent a very direct and simple message: “Fuck thisssss.”

I’m not here in an attempt to be a historian for dance music and rave culture or explain why certain things are more authentic than others, or even why certain things are either failing or succeeding. Outside of our scripts of authenticity and sincerity, Fred again..’s music becomes its own kind of chimeric entity, referencing heights and depths of our communion and contentions with music—our atomization, our fragmentation, our optimization. I’m drawn into this hall of mirrors of “good vs. bad” and “fake vs. sincere” dialectics, and maybe always will be. I’m attracted to some kind of ultimate fallacy here, a palindrome of communion and separation that our experiences with music often provide. Union and disunion.

Simon Reynolds’ hardcore continuum, in this sense, could be a continuum that has been refined to include unifying moments over the last twenty years of musical production. His theory describes a continuous, evolving lineage and dialectic of UK-based dance music originating from the early 1990s rave scene, characterized by breakbeats, heavy bass, and rapid, underground innovation. It encompasses genres like hardcore, jungle, drum & bass, speed garage, grime, and more. Paul Skallas’ basic idea of “refinement culture” is that there has been a subtle shift in the last twenty years in many aspects of life around us: a refinement of design, architecture, accents, sports, video games, the environment, and overall aesthetics. Refinement culture can be summarized as a general streamlining and removal of any unique characteristics. It’s optimized. Although I think we can in fact unify these ideas as a more or less accurate critical assessment of Fred again..’s music, and the progression of dance music culture over the last twenty years, we can also safely problematize that the concept of a “refined” hardcore continuum optimized by the flows of capital also creates a set of objections: there never was such a thing as the hardcore continuum in the first place; or, it is no longer relevant to today’s dance music. We are reduced to a series of debates in this theoretical space. Laying that out here, we have two basic positions:

Anti-Refinement/Continuum: “You’ve mistaken the model for reality.”

Pro-Refinement/Continuum: “On the contrary, you’ve mistaken reality for a model.”

I think both Reynolds’ and Skallas’ reflections fall prey to the tense palindromic confusion of models interfacing with reality. Bringing us back to Fred again.., I see this confusion on full display in the reception of his music. Through his album USB, I hear the adages of a dark optimism interacting with a bright pessimism, a Nolan-esque cascade of emotionalisms and sonic/narrative triggers that we can respond to earnestly, only to be disappointed when they don’t cohere into a lasting feeling. When we peel back all the overlapping layers to his music, I’m not exactly sure what we’re left with. It makes me think of how music has served as both a model and as a reality in my life, both swerving into each other endlessly. As a text and physics. I spoke about this a bit in some writing on Pierre Boulez and amnesia a few weeks back; and, with Fred, it keeps going again and again and again and again.

In this concatenative space (&&&&&), I felt something deeply at his show in Queens. And I’ve quickly forgotten it. I’m sure I’ll be back to pick up a lot of these themes and ideas in future 2020MG writings.

—Nick James Scavo

Thank you for joining us in Issue 16. This week our recommendations cover a follow-up on Katy Perry’s lyrical idiosyncrasy, a charting of aughts progressive beats music, and an early generative ambient/drone app from a master synthesist.

Recommendation: Katy Perry - “Firework,” Benny Benassi ft. Gary Go - “Cinema,” Icona Pop - “I Love It (feat. Charli XCX) (Part 2)

“Do you ever feel like a plastic bag … Baby, you’re a firework”

“You are my cinema / I could watch you forever”

“I crashed my car into the bridge … I don’t care, I love it”

These lyrics are hard to write about because they make the listener deal with a form of irreconcilable sense-making. They are exclamatory in nature, clearly, and characterized by sheer eventness. Something very important happens, but that something could also be nothing: a terrifically bracing passing thought, but one that passes nonetheless. It’s less an overwhelming instant than a sketch of its void: tremendous feeling evoked by the ringing out of its lack of substantiveness. It’s not that I love you, it’s that you are my cinema. You are a firework, and do you ever feel like a plastic bag: I mean it when I say this, do you sense the gravity of what I say? Questions we typically ask – who, what, where, when, why – are not entirely ignored, but recast as flexible, disposable affordances.

Precise syntax is necessary for this surplus eventness to make sense and truly land where it needs to. This is phrasing that seems arbitrary, but isn’t – not aleatoric, not surrealist, but somehow non-systematic. Let’s think of some communicative forms informing popular songwriting, in incredibly broad strokes: the blues, folk music, gospel, religious oratory, storytelling, poetry, there are many more. (I’m tempted to write “therapy” but that would require more justification than we can provide at the moment.) We cannot be exhaustive here; we invoke these lineages in order to narrow our focus and describe a statement such as “You are my cinema” or “I don’t care, I love it” with more fidelity.

The obvious idiom we need to think through is advertising copy. What kind of advertising? There are different styles. The label on my organic-looking peanut butter says it was “Made for peanut butter lovers by peanut butter lovers. Grab a spoon & join us!” – we can cross this style off the list. Nike’s “Just do it” is paradigmatic of what we’re looking for and gets us closer: it makes a really fundamental and base kind of sense, yet it is also so vague as to perform more of a suggestion than a declaration – its value is in this enactment of open-ended desire-production, the prompt for search and activity. What type of suggestion are we working with here? Cars crashing into bridges, fireworks, movie-watching: explosions, instances where we take leave of ourselves, immersion in moving images, the production of memories.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Prefuse 73 - “Busy Signal (Make You Go Bombing Mix) (A Prefuse/Dabrye Production)”

I’m revisiting the archetype of the “chill technical beatsmith” this week. Inundated with early 2000s pastiche/nostalgia music—and after having a bit of a mental breakdown while listening to the band After’s recent EPs (After EP & After EP 2)—I noticed there’s a particular blindspot in the recent aughts-mania of the 2020s. The lineage of early 2000s instrumental hip hop, “glitch hop,” and jazz rap (RJD2, Madlib, Nujabes, Prefuse 73, etc.) has persisted enough in the recent imagination of electronic music that its novelty as a 2026 redux seems a bit premature, perhaps discourteously. Prefuse 73’s One Word Extinguisher, released in 2003, was a revelation to me when I first heard it at sixteen years old in 2008. I was struck by how short the tracks were, twisting into each other, spliced, truncated at every moment of progression. The suddenness of the changeups and radio-flow of its editing—ascending vocal cadences that drift off into clipped rap verse, or blocks of cymbal static that cut into full-kit breakdowns—is profound. There’s an immediate embodied futurism therein, a genotype for a subsequent obsession with chopped and screwed electronic music. In the words of the album: “I’m standing on the cusp of an elevated sound.”

I was lent a copy of the album by an older high school friend-of-a friend I had met named Jay Illestrate after we were talking about our love of Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool after school. At the time, I was also obsessed with MF DOOM. I had made a vectorized bumper sticker of the DOOM mask proudly displayed on the back of my car; and, the first electronic music I ever made was a Garage Band mashup of DOOM acapellas with Buckethead instrumentals. I called the project Mask Meet Mask. The aesthetics of both DOOM and Buckethead spoke to me as a teenage cartoon-enjoyer, drawn in by the artists’ virtuosity, anonymity, and respective comic book mythologies. The beatmaking felt parallel to sounds I had heard on Toonami, perhaps one of the more powerful aesthetic repertoires of American media as a “body of work” that I had experienced up to that point. More recently, we’ve seen these aesthetics play out across the Adult Swim universe, and most completely—at least in the virality of my feed-driven consciousness—with the “chill lofi beats to study to,” phenomena’s matriculation into youth internet culture. Beyond whatever miscalculated associations we might make between this sound and Mr. Brainwash, Juxtapoz or Giant Robot Magazine, or “Lowbrow” as an art historical movement, I still find a lot of this music to be filled with novel, nuanced, or altogether revelatory production moments.

So far, I’m once again doing some mental housekeeping with my own musical memory here, mainly in response to the clear flow of cultural memory that’s informing the majority of recent electronic music. However, I enthusiastically acknowledge the audacity of production on the actual beats on Prefuse 73’s One Word Extinguisher, particularly “Busy Signal.” Click the link and just give it a listen. Strings and rising synths foreground a lingulabial trill, otherwise known as the “fart” sound in beatboxing, angularly patterned with other mouthhuffs in a head-bopping, ridiculous arrangement. Later on, bassoon and marimba enter the frame. “Busy Signal’s” cuts are severe and IDM-adjacent, its mood simultaneously hilarious and thought-provoking. The track ends with a shanty-like vocal arrangement and bowed cello, anticipating another break to bust open into on the following track. The record recalls another favorite of mine, ADR’s Hippos In Tanks LP Chunky Monkey (check out “Slush Fund”), which explored the “casualism” of many of these sounds and themes within a wider frame of digital nu-lounge. There’s actually been a ton of this kind of music produced incessantly since the 2000s, hence why it’s maybe not as much of an uncut gem for youthful producers to mine as an aesthetic clout-parlay of high-upside sonic representational value. Perhaps it’s too bookish or exists within a half-light between technically bizarre and kind of chill. Our loss.

All of this points to the dream of electronic music for me. I’m not sure I can ever really “get over” the thrill of simply hacking sound apart into rhythm. With Prefuse 73, the rhythm is a head-nodding music, or a chin-stroking music, as opposed to the more dance-forward or pop-structured forms of our newer electronica. His rhythms are centered around the patterns of the drum kit, splashing cymbals and rolling snares, the whole of an unmoored, stylized percussion—the Drum Kit of the World. The primacy of this music as an art of envisionment—of suturing together disparate sonic artifacts into a wholly weird ass moment of time—into a drum kit—is something I’ll always be reaching for. Maybe we’re still pretending, but I do think we are “on the cusp of an elevated sound / you can listen if you want In your system let it bump.”

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Steve Roach’s “Immersion” iPhone Application Series

These cold months have me seeking music which reflects the austerity of a once daily cold ass walk to the deli. One track that’s stuck on repeat through the winter is Steve Roach’s “Traveler” from the 1983 album of the same name. When I was about 20 I had a cassette tape of “Structures From Silence” that played over and over as I drove out early from our Asheville show house to deliver catered trays of pasta with red sauce to provincial doctor’s offices in far out western North Carolina and lower Tennessee. Roach’s slow, echoic orchestrations of layered filters levitate with a centrifugal calm as they spin out variations around the fulcrum of his analog sequencing. The soft, focused quality of this music remains imprinted on my YA memories of driving past farms and through remote valleys as the sun rose. It accompanied beautiful explorations of lesser known Buncombe county, in a spirit of blissful independence that not even the watchful eyes of the rigatoni HQ dispatch could degrade.

Listening to Roach now (15 years later), it stands in as a kind of indictment of the scope-drift in current ambient/drone trends for me, which (with plenty of exceptions) seem less concerned with the gravity of a processual electronic music aesthetics, and more focused on the form’s vibe, expedience and capacity to hold sonic references without much compositional exertion. There are countless off-shoots of the form: ambient dub, dungeon synth, instrumental drone, field recording music. I’ve happily imbibed offerings in all of these ambient modes on walks, commutes, in incensed furniture stores and the like. But the comparison expresses a void in both the contemporary cultural appeal and social aesthetic bandwidth as far as compositional craft is concerned. It feels clear (and sympathetic) to me in the way they’ve emerged within the poverty of attentional pressures and exhaustion that characterizes our digital milieu. And I relate to this condition as an aesthetic profile for music production, which seems to me a kind of musical leakage - like a natural gas creeping out from within countless, dark algorithmic caverns.

There’s an economic and intellectual despair behind both the openly commercialized (“chill beats” and corny synth YouTube) and the more aloof (ambient dub, drone) that reflects this uncomfortable, generational self-reflection. I’ve had a years-long discourse with my friend, and composer Theodore Cale Schafer about this particular dimension of contemporary music. His work, more than most, has proactively dealt with many of these problems, conditions and their musical affects. That’s something I’ll return to in a future week - looking more closely at the current ambient taxonomy.

As a provisional counterpoint to this pessimistic thought, I want to recommend taking a look at Steve Roach’s series of ambient generative drone iPhone apps, Immersion I-IV. Among the first of their kind, he developed them in 2010, “freely available in support of everyone’s well-being.” The interface is simple: five crystalline orbs of looping drone, featuring aboriginal art, the planet earth, and other cosmic patterns, are mixable in its 3D plane to create a basic, customizable sound. Compared with other, more recent, commercial App Store products like Calm, Roach’s offering is heady and dark - not so much optimized for frictionless meditations as it is (like the music from which it is drawn), piercing, serious and full of Roach’s creative personality. Among mostly positive, Roach-friendly users, a handful of 1 star reviews suggest it’s not for everyone:

“I find the low sounds eerie. When I tried to use it to sleep to, it seemed more creepy than relaxing. I would like a little lighter relaxing music,”

“There’s too many bleeps and pops, and sometimes it fades to silence, only to pulse back in with weird throbbing sounds. Had there been some way of previewing the noises, I never would have paid for this. I don’t like it at all, and I wish I could get a refund.”

Fair enough. There’s a function, a place and a need for light sounds and light music. However, the resistance or allergy to “serious” ideas and forms in music listening feels like an aversion to eating vegetables. They are good for you, nourishing. And if prepared with knowledge and care, they can be exciting too. To borrow a commandment, or invitation from the name of Roach’s custom orb mixes: “Immerse Thyself.”

—Alec Sturgis

We hope you are staying warm, and in Issue 15 we recommend: a consideration of art’s cosmic stakes, expressed in the music of Penderecki, a selection of cold tracks for a cold time of year, and a view into the mysterious syntax of Katy Perry.

Recommendation: Krzyszstof Penderecki’s String Quartet No. 2

After a minor crash out last week in my close roasting of Domink Sustek’s viral avant-garde catholic offering,“Hören...Verstummen” - Messe basse für Sopran, Orgel und Schlagzeug (ad lib.), I want to synthesize a few ideas in the background of that compositional style that are more hopeful and that also offer some form of answer to the question I posed: why is this still happening?

I started revisiting the career of mid-century Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. As I mentioned to in my writing last week, his work represents a transition between the early 20th century’s secular, formalist avant-garde and an aesthetic movement towards some more naturalistic iteration of the tradition (and includes the type of conflicted post-war spirituality that I critiqued in Sustek’s piece). There are parallels of this “sonorist” move in Morton Feldman and others, but Penderecki (along with many eastern european contemporaries) are really distinct in the romantic, expressionist orientation of their work (like pious, orthodox cousins to Feldman, Cage, Stockhausen, etc).

In his own words: “My art stems from profoundly Christian roots and aims at reconstructing a human metaphysical universe shattered by the cataclysms of the 20th century. The restoration of the sacred dimension of reality is the only way to save humanity. Art should be the source of difficult hope.”

From a contemporary musical standpoint, the magnitude of this kind of statement comes across as alien, maybe a bit ridiculous. Are these really the stakes of art? It’s powerful to imagine that they might be. Whether or not we agree, it’s devastating and worthy of attention to imagine the frame of mind in which a generation of composers would be compelled to act creatively in accordance with this belief.

Sustek’s work reveals that this style of thinking is still very much alive. And, in listening to his music (or, as I recommend, Penderecki’s), it feels important to ask: why, of all things, is the aesthetic register of cataclysmic sounds employed in service to “restoring the sacred dimension of reality?” Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (an early, and probably the most famous, work by Penderecki), is about as clear in its musical and moral gesture as it could be. It offers nothing less than a terrifying sonorous image of a real, historical moment of mass death. I suppose cataclysm is so well-represented in the aim to revive a spiritual reality because it’s so difficult, painful and mysterious to accept it as a part of mortal reality.

But not all proponents of this kind of spiritual art (nor all of Penderecki’s compositions) are so mournful or intent on producing a mirror to calamity. There are countless orthodoxies layered into how we express music - not just as a channel of thoughts and feelings, but as a way of knowing and embodying certain forms of information that lack expression otherwise.

As I’ve sought repentance for my roast of Sustek this past week (and endeavored to forgive him his musical sins), I traced his thinking through Penderecki’s String Quartet No. 2, (the traditional chamber music form felt like a good, sterile environment in which to dissect the concepts). In the quartet, I find a more vital instance of this dark, cosmic exploration. While still containing a sonic character of brutality, the pieces are curious, activated and seem in touch with more than just the element of violence. The screeching sonorities and percussive string techniques of Threnody are present, but produce a raw, unmoral observation of a physical phenomenology - accepting its vitality in a spirit of both awe and fear. The same basic materials and means of producing the bomb in Threnody are here, doing new things and interacting in totally different ways. I’ve listened to Penderecki for a long time, but never thought about how significant it seems for his musical cosmology that the basis of these sounds and their significations are embedded across many distinct and formally unrelated affects.

It gives me a “barbenheimer”-like feeling: which do I look into first? something about the spirituality of destruction, or, the devastations which accompany and perpetuate creation? In either case, this variability suggests something hopeful - that there are possible and existing manifestations of raw energetic intensities that appear organized, free, dialogical, peaceful.

There is an incredible mystery in how music contains such a high compression of information and feeling. I agree with Penderecki that we should be very careful not to lose this way of knowing, as there are experiences and aspects of “the human metaphysical universe,” and its “difficulty hopes,” that we need access to, and that only resonate here.

Listen to this:

Beethoven, String Quartet 15 In A Minor, Op. 132, “Heiliger Dankgesang” - 3. Molto Adagio

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: DJ Nick Jersey - “Bite Thru (NFJ Melody)” / Nate Sib - “Secret” / Kidd G - “Down The Road”

It’s only mid-January and my season is over. My favorite football team lost in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs after an unforgettable run. The lights went out, and what’s left is brutal 10° weather and salt-strewn asphalt. Dry and chapped feelings. Sinus pressure. Somehow, street construction and repaving is still happening in this weather; pitch, tar, and loose bits of gravel crack into leftover shards of black ice at the intersection. I’m still drinking iced coffee in this environment—a stubborn, lazy habit that’s extended into the dead of January. Together with the wind, the chill of the iced drink cuts through my gloves. I’m trying not to be dramatic here, but can’t help it. Taking the L is a special sort of pensive emotion, especially so early in the year.

Brutality in stride, this week I’ll offer a selection of three artists who give strange inspiration within the coldness of this particular week in January, 2026: DJ Nick Jersey, Nate Sib, and Kidd G. Wholly unrelated, together, I appreciate their collective temperature.

DJ Nick Jersey is a producer and DJ I came across in a fleeting moment on social media, drawn in by a heaving beat that broke through my phone speaker, nearly snapping it right out of my hand. The track “Bite Thru (NFJ Melody)” is a perfect example of a concise, nouveau strand of ice-burnt techno/trance electronica that’s floor-ready—precisely the kind of music being sought after by DJs spinning at a midwinter clubnight. It’s Bloodborne-sygil rave flyer ready music. I’ve never been a four-on-the-floor or techno enthusiast, but this track has a dimensional bass swell and fried Rage undercurrent that wins me over. I can hear an adjacency to the music of Emma DJ, one of my favorite producers working right now, or even Container, and appreciate the sustained malevolence throughout. The beat’s snap starts pushing against itself beautifully midway through—as a frostworn high synth begins to shimmer above the wreckage. This is highly functional, highly stylized dancefloor music that’s produced perfectly. Cold music for a cold time, biting through.

Nate Sib is an artist I saw open for 2hollis back in October. You can read about that experience here in a previous 2020MG issue, but I didn’t talk about Sib’s music specifically. His track “Secret” from the EP “For Us,” follows through on a lot of the production tropes that have made 2hollis ascendent and—dare I say—great. They’re “best buds” by all accounts, and Sib’s opening set and collaboration with 2hollis on “Back & Forth” demonstrate that there’s a progeny for this type of music, a dynasty even, depending on how long everyone can stomach it. The core of “Secret” is a floating Kid A-style synthesis motif that encircles a more traditional High School Musical vocality. Sib’s voice is raw and acrobatic, containing a wired headphone mic fidelity that contrasts the depth of the beat production. Produced by South Korean “Dariacore” artist kimj (a genre emerging from the mashup productions of Jane Remover side project Leroy), Sib’s primary contribution to this emerging sound culture is by providing a Bieber-like vocal affect and melodic sensibly, recalling Bieber’s Skrillex directed and produced record “Purpose.” It’s a “god forbid a white boy get a little motion” style music—and I tell you what—I need some of that motion here in mid-January.

Lastly, I’d like to reintroduce and recommend the music of Kidd G. In 2020, the then 17-year-old country emo-rap star broke out with “Down The Road” and “Down Home Boy,” tracks that immediately stank like a Decatur County locker room. Alec and I even recorded an entire two hour podcast about him back in 2021, drawn in by the music’s trans-american rural aesthetics, reciprocities of youth and aging, and postmodern synthesis of “country-rap” as it reminded us of Harmony Korine, Ryan Trecartin, and our own experiences with weird suburbianisms in contemporary life. In 2026, Kidd G is now married and has a kid at only 22 years old. His music output has clearly stalled out a bit; he ain’t 17 anymore. Perhaps his newer music just can’t live up to the potential of those early singles—giving his sound a “peaked in high school” effect that actually secures the original suburban youth culture of his music. I’m revisiting “Down The Road,” and it hasn’t lost any of its power and presence. Maybe I’ve been watching too much football; but, the sentiments contained in Kidd G’s music—“down the road where the blacktop ends, you can find me with all my friends”—loops as a kind of proverbial promise of drinking beer at the end of the road, reunited with friends with everything to look forward to. That feeling is only sharpened when that promise also contains the possibility of stalling out, crashing out, drifting apart, your season ending. The moment of reunion becomes all the more poignant.

I’m Januarymaxxing with these music recommendations. This is all cold music for a cold time. Hands cold, heart cold—in the snow, with all my woes.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Katy Perry - “Firework”

Imagine someone asking you if you ever feel like a plastic bag. For this exercise, assume the context involves some mutually agreed-upon consideration of shared experiences, shared sentiments.

Now, imagine that they continue addressing you, describing their position in hopes that you might understand and even relate to it. This is emotionally loaded communication. At the fever pitch of their address, they say that you are a firework. What would you make of this?

Imagine another person telling you that you are their favorite movie, that they could watch the movie for a lifetime. They go on to say that you are their cinema, revising their initial claim. (Benny Benassi ft. Gary Go - “Cinema.”) Now, there’s another person telling you that they crashed their car into the bridge, but they don’t care, they love it. (Icona Pop ft - “I Love It (feat. Charli XCX).”)

It’s odd to imagine these things, to imagine being addressed in these ways. But we experienced it. This was simply the procedure of listening to a major narrative mode of popular music in the early 2010s. Next week we will consider this more in depth.

—Alexander Iadarola

Hello and thank you for joining us for our fourteenth Issue. Today, as on all other days, we offer a few recommendations: a master improvisor’s perspective on Flamenco, a forlorn description of contemporary liturgical avant-garde music, and a therapeutic reflection on resonance.

Recommendation: Derek Bailey on Flamenco in Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music

A lot of my recent music listening is aspirational—trying to elevate moods or reach toward ideas, searching, escaping, rising up. Or reaching back, in memory, to find some previous strength. This past week though, it’s been more about survival and sustenance, protecting peace. I’ve been revisiting the music of guitarist Derek Bailey, specifically Pieces for Guitar (2002), Solo Guitar (1971), and Music and Dance (1980), the last of which is a recording of his accompaniment collaboration with Japanese dancer Min Tanaka on a Parisian rooftop. Although Bailey’s free playing covers a lot of ground, the records I’ve been listening to contain a lot of vulnerable, at times harrowing music. Guitar notes are picked tautly, with faint resonance drifting in miniature pulses before withering away. I’ve caught myself laughing at the mood of desperation the music provides, Bailey’s playing privately soundtracking the most merciless MTA commute possible. Beneath the brutal ice flow of its mood, and within the space afforded in Bailey’s playing, I feel rigor and warmth. I feel free through the music’s freedom.

I picked up a copy of Bailey’s book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music years ago, and have been reading it while also revisiting Bailey’s music. It’s a concise but also deep text, examining the nature of improvisation spanning Indian music, flamenco, baroque, organ music, rock, jazz, contemporary, and “free” music. This week, I’m honing in specifically on his writing on flamenco music—although maybe in some future issues I’d love to write more on the chapters on baroque and organ music, specifically. Within flamenco, Bailey insists on his surprise by “an almost total absence of any literature, reliable or otherwise, concerning [the documentary material] of flamenco,” instead relying on his conversations with Spanish composer and guitarist Paco Peña. To him, even the small amount of documentary evidence he could uncover resembled very little to what he could accurately recognize from his experiences of and conversations about the music of flamenco.

Peña, born in Cordoba, accompanied numerous dance troupes before starting his own Flamenco Puro group in 1972. He also gave accounts to Bailey of the ethnographic origins of flamenco in Andalucia and Catalonia—and how nomadic groups in the 1400s mingled in Cordoba (the then capital of the Western Islamic world) with Andalucian folklore. It wasn’t until a period between 1860 and 1910 where an era of “Cafe Cantantes” emerged—special “tablaos” were dedicated wholly to flamenco music, while many participants “kept the music for themselves and never performed outside their communities.” For Peña, a complete flamenco performance is a group performance with singing, dancing, and instrumental music, containing possibilities for improvisation by all participants. The role of the guitarist is to help the singer or dancer to bring out the best of their talent. However, when the guitarist performs solo, they must also convey the whole atmosphere of flamenco.

Bailey then goes into an analysis of the rhythmic and harmonic structure of flamenco, and how improvisation is interwoven into its form. I’m almost tempted to just transcribe the entirety of that here, but I suppose that’s the point of a recommendation; I recommend reading Bailey’s analysis of the rhythmic unit of the compas, the variability of harmony, its construction of basic chords, tonic, dominant, and sub-dominant, the Phrygian mode used as “passing chords,” as well as falsetas, or melodic fragments which constitute the only predetermined melodic material used. It all makes me want to pick up the guitar once again and try to find a flamenco master to study with.

Bailey asks Peña if he would ever play something that interested him but was not characteristically flamenco. Peña responded:

“It would be a failure, but not a very unhappy failure. You see it as a failure because I should really be able to resolve what I want to do within the idiom of flamenco.”

Bailey then writes:

“No idiomatic improviser is concerned with improvisation as some sort of separate, isolated activity. What they are absolutely concerned about is the idiom; for them improvisation serves the idiom and is the expression of that idiom. But it still remains that one of the main effects of improvisation is on the performer, providing them with a creative involvement and maintenance of their commitment. So, in these two functions, improvisation supplies a way of guaranteeing the authenticity of the idiom, which also, avoiding the stranglehold of academic authority, provides the motor for change and continuous development.”

I’m struck by Bailey’s dialogue with flamenco within the context of how “out” his own guitar playing is. Here, wrapped in the idiomatic austerity of Bailey’s improvisations alongside the abstract movement of Min Tanaka’s “Body Weather” practice, I also hear a bit of Peña—the pulse of flamenco rousing behind Bailey’s gnarled notes—an utterly committed zapateado footwork, stomping toward its absolute limit.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: “Hören...Verstummen” - Messe basse für Sopran, Orgel und Schlagzeug (ad lib.), Dominik Susteck

This week I’m looking at another strange piece of music that came across the desk. The instagram account @CatholicCheck posted a clip of an Ash Wednesday service in Cologne, Germany of a performance for vocalist and organ with the heading: “Worst Catholic Liturgical Music Ever Heard.” The excerpt is hilariously “out,” with a jazzed-up, atonal vocal cadenza floating across a cacophony of improvised organ playing. It’s pretty striking in juxtaposition to the clip’s panning shots of a beautiful gothic cathedral - the priest’s eyes shut tight, hands gripping at his vestments in a contemplative grimace, sitting in a sort of a priestly cuck chair behind the vocalist at the pulpit, who presides over an elderly German congregation (we can’t see their faces, but it’s not hard to imagine that they may prefer something nicer on the ears). Amidst a dogpile in the comments, some defenders of the avant-garde suggested one source of the clip, attributing it in part to organist/composer Dominik Susteck. It appears this particular excerpt may in fact be an improvisation between the vocalist and Susteck, and I have not been able to confirm this, so I’ve chosen to explore here an available work by Susteck “Hören...Verstummen” - Messe basse für Sopran, Orgel und Schlagzeug (ad lib.), to pry a bit into the world behind the reel. While I am going to both describe and razz this composition on a musical level, I’m fascinated by the persistence of a relationship like this between the church, its presumed musical audience, and the old postures of a European avant-garde.

While the title of the piece (translating to “Hearing… Falling Silent”) is an allusion to a phrase often found in post-war literary reckonings with the Holocaust, the composition is, at least formally, structured around an abridged, traditional latin Mass: Introitus, Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei. It begins with a George Crumb-like atmosphere of mystery - lovely dissonant chords in the organ and soft, dynamic syllabic hissing from the Soprano. All was well for me until the percussion began a periodic rattling of papers - first in piano and then finally in forte: ultimately announcing a quintuple-forte (fortississississimo, for the Italian speakers) tritone chord in the organ. This wouldn’t strike me as so distracting in its compulsive, extended technique if it felt like the composer’s introduction of the sonic world was a little bit deserving of this type of expedient textural complication. The Kyrie proceeded in a harmless fashion, chewing on little atonal motifs that were traded between the vocalist and the organ (Lord, have mercy). The performances are expressive and expert and certain moments of striking dynamic and harmonic convergence transcend what feels like a syntactical pointlessness in the composition. The Sanctus is maybe my favorite of these movements as it ventures beyond the anchorage of tritone harmony and simplistic “very soft, now very loud” types of gestures. There’s a core strength to the musical ideas which emerges, however for no apparent reason, except maybe the necessity to account for the Sanctus’ longer textual passage. The Agnus Dei returns to the mysterioso of the Introitus - this time with vocal glissandi (no more rattling papers, but there is a direction to “scratch with shoes”). For the first and only time, the composition settles in itself and allows space for the absorption of its quite beautiful sonority here. A compelling and ominous call and response takes place between a soft staccato organ and the vocalist’s return to articulated “S” sounds, before a bit of Messianic foolishness ensues: a whistle, a cluster chord and that’s the Lamb of God, volks.

I’m not going to contextualize the history of this kind of avant-garde musical rhetoric here, except to note the long institutional history that is shared between the church and the European musical elite (Krzysztof Penderecki, Olivier Messiaen, and so on back to J.S. Bach et al). Coming across this contemporary German catholic work has brought up an earnest and non-rhetorical question for me: why is this still happening?

Throughout the 20th century, transgressive, modernist christian music felt poetically mirrored within a challenged, but still-sacredly grounded cultural paradigm - where the disruption and redeployment of christian symbolism in avant-grade forms resonated alongside post-war disruptions of European political idealism. Mid-century philosophical questions about the social and psychological structures of modernity sought to complete the erosion of those presumed certitudes as they perpetuated the long story of atrocities and political implosion in the western old world, replacing them with exercises in revolution and poetics seeking an account of contingent, rather than necessary truths. It’s easy to follow this short-hand into a plain inquiry about the decline of both elite religious and musical institutions, but my query is focused on the persistence in the 21st century of some aesthetic alliance between the stunting of avant-garde gesture and some version of Catholicism. It feels clear that christian religious orthodoxy has lost a lot of its purchase on the aesthetics of the profound, and the old avant-grade has become fairly toothless from gnawing on an ancient bone. Despite the sense of humor around this music recommendation, my close reading of Susteck’s work here is compelled by a concern with what this deeper misalignment of art and ritual may suggest about the basic dignity of interpreting and consecrating a story, a belief, or a musical gesture with meaning.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Therapeutic humming

I’m supposed to be humming an hour a day. I like being supposed to do this. My friend recommended it when I complained about stubborn and persistent sinus issues. She researches the subject intensively and keeps a comprehensive spreadsheet of remediation strategies, both anecdotal and scientific.

I thought I was better this past weekend so I went to pilates and the amazing core workout ended up prompting a rebound. So it is more important than ever that I hum.

I sit and wonder: What should I hum? I try to remember melodies from Russian orthodox choral music. I can’t, so I try the Halo theme song but forget how it goes, though I remember how it makes me feel, vividly.

I am also meant to sit in shower steam for 10-15 minutes, twice a day, so I combine the practices. I find my shower’s resonant frequency, or room tone. I guess that means a shower is a room. I settle on a portentous glissando refrain, landing a perfect forth below the tone. My skull and nasal passages vibrate. Humming causes the airflow to oscillate, significantly increasing nasal nitric oxide.

In different rooms in different places with different HVAC infrastructures, my sinuses morph and retaliate. The cavities expand and contract. The two rooms in my face. I cannot see them but they are right there. What are their resonant frequencies. I think about the millions of cilia performing coordinated mucociliary clearance.

An article in the American Journal of Rhinology & Allergy describes their bending and beating beautifully:

In a manner that is incompletely understood, normal cilia remarkably coordinate this bending motion synchronously with surrounding cilia on nearby cells and metachronously with progressively more distant groups of cilia, to generate an elegant and unified fluent motion that transports the mucus blanket out of each paranasal sinus in a reproducible pattern.

—Alexander Iadarola

Happy 2026 to all! We’re pleased to return from our holidays with recommendations in the form of a revisiting of Interpol, a consideration of Brazilian music aesthetics and a sound bath experience.

Recommendation: Interpol - “Obstacle 2”

Going home for the holidays can make us inclined to revisit memories. I bought this album on vinyl at Amoeba Hollywood in high school.

I feel like love is in the kitchen with a culinary eye / I think he’s making something special and I’m smart enough to try

How often are Interpol lyrics interpreted in good faith, engaged with as if they ought to be taken totally seriously? This is more of a comment than a question. It probably happens frequently, given Interpol’s multi-decade popularity, but I do not know anyone in this interpretive community and I do not recollect encountering this analysis anywhere. I have talked to a lot of people in the past ~20 years about Interpol lyrics and nobody has ever even tried to make a cogent argument regarding what Paul Banks sings about. We simply agree that his songwriting is strange, and that the lyrics can benefit from their strangeness.

Pitchfork published an interview with the band in 2012, discussing the making of Turn On The Bright Lights for its ten-year anniversary. Banks weighs in on his frame of mind at the turn of the millenium, addressing the lyrics of the song “NYC”:

I was into these notions of chaos and fascinated by the interactions of species and the idea that people perceive a harmony in the world. But in reality, if you look at all the ways that species are parasitic and codependent, it’s almost like they have this arbitrary interconnectedness. It’s just total fucking chaos.

[Regarding the line “the subway, she is a porno,”] I was in that weird, college-age headspace, and that was one of those ways to make a heavy-handed generalization about an aspect of culture. But explaining these kind of things ruins it, because the point with a lot of them is for listeners to go: “What the fuck does he mean?”

I don’t really follow everything that he’s saying here. TOTBL is a great album. I recommend it.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: DJ ARANA, MC CAROL 011, YURI REDICOPA, MC LC KAIIQUE - “O PACTO”

It’s the dawn of 2026, and I am seeking out blank slate music to kick off the new year. I came across “O PACTO” a few years back on a Discord channel, accompanied by the message “music has been perfected in Brazil.” I like hyperbolic statements like this. The epithet enframed my first listening of the music as a perfect music, and a Brazilian music. The opening of 2026 has also seen many rediscovering Tati Quebra Barraco, Brazilian funk MC and pioneer of funk carioca/baile funk, the now widespread genre emerging from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in the 1980s as a singular blend of Miami bass, hip-hop, and afrobeat. Barraco’s track “Boladona” resurfaced and went viral over the past couple of weeks. It’s a banger that distinctly samples Layo & Bushwacka!’s iconic track “Love Story,” and has given my brutal back-to-work train commutes some intrigue and character over the past week.

I love Brazilian music and have always wanted to go to Brazil. If a TikToker flagged me down on the street and asked me who my favorite musician was, I would probably say João Gilberto. I went through a phase some years ago where I almost exclusively listened to golden-era 1960s Bossanova from a bluetooth speaker shoved behind a couch pillow—halfway muffling the speaker—giving the sound a liminal proximity that sounded great. I suppose this was an attempt to spatialize the articulate, sunlit atmosphere of stereo Bossanova recordings into a more muted zone where the music resonated in a discrete, peaceful half-light.

This odd behavior calls attention to what I think is the most prized musical figure: spatialization. More than any other musical figuration, concept, theory, or device, spatialization in both stereo recording and in live, natural, or acousmatic environments ends up being the difference-maker for so much music. The intentional spatialization of music can exploit the localization of sound sources in both physical or virtual space—figuring sound’s spatial movement in thrilling ways. This has been present in Western music from biblical times in the form of the antiphon (the call and response in ambrosian and gregorian chanting music and more), and since the dawn of time and space naturally through the organic spatialization of waveforms and sound sources. It also exists as a highly intentional practice in the various theories and practices of 20th century experimental and electroacoustic music. More, it’s the basic premise of mixing sound in recording contexts.

“O PACTO” is a spatial anomaly within the context of stereo recordings, and is Brazilian music wholly different from Tati Quebra Barraco or João. It’s an absolute mindfuck of a track that feels like a factory reset through its treatment of space, and its unusual choices in production overall. From its start, wide trails of reverb drift in huge billows, evaporating at the horizon line of musical utterance. The track’s bass rhythm compresses everything in deep undercurrents, sucking the baille funk vocalizations asunder, as sine-wave arpeggiations or detuned sawtooth trance waveforms cut through the mid and high frequency ranges. It’s rare to hear such a destabilizing whirlpool of a composition. MC CAROL 011’s vocals are cut around the two minute mark in a way that’s demented, shaped into a repetitive, resonant squawk. Overall, the sweeping nature of the track feels like brushing the slate clean. It’s the kind of track that invites you to open everything up—insert silence into the DAW, delete the extra stuff—cut, copy, paste, repeat, and let the silence of the speaker cone become filled with sound, only to drift away again.

The production decisions made on “O PACTO” are a bit hard to pin down. The track fits into some of the same phenotypes as the “Wonky” or “Deconstructed” music that emerged in the 2010s, genre descriptors that were used to signal at odd or surprising choices made in the production of electronic music (this can be heard, for example, in TNGHT’s 2012 track Bugg’n). These subgenres encoded an overall value system in its listeners. Occasionally, at least, it’d be nice to be blown away or beguiled by the mixing and production of electronic music.

Afterall, it’s 2026. I want to hear exaggerated musical tracings of the spatial and linear forms of music. I want to hear sound arising and descending back to and from a horizon line, a degree zero—a blank slate, tabularasa.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Breathwork, Non-Musical Sound

I became a ClassPass member more or less by accident a few months ago. I wasn’t trying to overhaul my routine or get seriously into Pilates. The idea was to check out a few local sound baths, write about them, and cancel before the month ended. Instead, I got sort of hooked. The wellness offerings accumulated, the writing didn’t happen, and the subscription stuck around longer than planned. Following up on my sound bath resolution, I finally got in the sonic tub, and it feels fitting to begin 2026 with this contemplative experience.

I entered my local yoga studio for the Kundalini Sound Bath offering, found a mat toward the front of the room for maximum gong exposure and stretched out to wait for the instructor’s direction. I’ve been getting into yoga recently, but my only association with Kundalini had something to do with Sting’s tantric sex life. Turns out it’s about awakening dormant spiritual energy through cultivated breathwork, postures and chanting - a slow, relatively interior practice compared to some of the “hot,” more movement/flow oriented styles. Waiting to begin, I was very much creeped out by the devotional mantra music playing in the space: melancholy chant over a new age christian style minor chord progression and an expressive vocal inflection that grated against my expectation of something austere and less distractingly woo. All good though. It’s been interesting participating in this uncannily sober gathering of local millennials. Collective quietude and contemplation outside the matrix of performative channels are not hallmarks of the generational culture as I’ve experienced it.

The class began with a chant, then a set of long durational postures, which served as the foundation for a series of intense breathwork exercises (serious stuff: I started sweating early on, sitting completely still with my arms stretched out). The weird mantra folk still played in the background, but thankfully receded in my consciousness behind the cadence of breathwork sets, as they became the central figure of the practice. Things got deep as the more circular breathing turned into long cycles of holding breath - miniature deaths before long drawn out inhalations. It really felt awesome and I was frankly surprised and impressed by the degree of physical and cognitive immersion that accompanied the practice. The “sound bath” was structured at the end of the class (the last quarter or so), as clearly, an intentional vibrational cleansing experience (my understanding being that the breathwork is directed at moving internal energy and the sound bath sort of shakes out and resets errant vibes from the outside).

We all laid down and the teacher began about a 15 minute sequence of sounds with the gong, chimes and powerful sine-waves from the speakers. I haven’t heard a “set” like that in a while, and certainly not after 45 minutes of intensive yoga. Drifting through my mind as the broad harmonic spectrum of the gong washed over me, I was considering the ways this experience differs from much of the experimental music I’ve seen and participated in. There’s a common gestural space between the two rooted in an acceptance of the radical sonic potential of instruments to affect the physicality of a space and of the people therein. But, as in my reflection about the rare sense of millennial quietude, this lacked any of the performative meaningfulness of the experimental. The sound simply affected me, rather than being intercepted by my compulsive, analytic mind as a music listener. I was refreshed by the way this afforded me an opportunity to experience myself within a sonic context where the organization and integration of perceptions felt completely secondary - perhaps totally unnecessary - to its “non-musical” functionality.

My music-analytic mind feels sluggish at the start of the year, and I don’t mind that. This experience left me with a set of questions to return to—about experimental music’s often-invoked yogic lineage, about its practical psychologies, about what it might mean to encounter sound not as an object of critique but as a technology of recalibration. That’ll do for right now.

—Alec Sturgis