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

Before we depart for our holidays, we offer recommendations in the form of a close reading of a new dance pop single, a summary of post-aughts musical embarrassment and a gift-box selection of obscure tracks.

Recommendation: Danny L Harle, Oklou, MNEK - “Crystallise My Tears”

Let’s follow along with Oklou’s first verse, chorus, and second verse.

Last night, I was crying
Did you hear?
Oh, was it all for nothing?
Crystallise my tears (My tears)

You have the strangest power (The strangest power)
Over me (Over me)
Give meaning to my sadness
Crystallise my tears (Tears, my tears)

Last night, I was dancing
Did you see?
Oh, was it all for nothing?
Crystallise my tears (Tears)

These stanzas pair lines which immediately explain themselves (“Last night, I was crying”) with lines that don’t (“Did you hear?”). Oklou’s question in the first verse suggests listening across distance, and the possibility of one person not hearing another. There are two people with different ideas about listening. The following line (“Oh, was it all for nothing?”) indicates that the act of audition failed to occur.

It becomes easier to interpret the line “Crystallise my tears” the second time you hear it, because it rephrases the preceding line in the chorus, “Give meaning to my sadness.” This is a request for the kind of semiotic production that cannot be undertaken alone. Here, sadness is isolated at a distance from the other, unable to find itself caught up in collaborative narrativizing mechanisms. Sadness is thus insufficiently meaningful, which makes it more sad.

We can continue to MNEK’s verse.

Tell me how a heart
Could be so cold
To plant the seeds of a thousand gardens
And never let them grow?

This imagery, along with the single’s artwork, evokes a sottobosco atmosphere, an Italian term meaning “undergrowth” that refers to a genre of 17th century Dutch still life painting depicting the forest floor. Think shadows, moss, mushrooms, and snails. The muted palette of Harle’s dexterous production underscores this sensibility, until flashes of crystallization energize the picture.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Doing The Shadow Work on Embarrassment in the 2000s

Throughout the 2000s, a spectre was haunting America—the spectre of embarrassment. It’s encoded within the era’s music. The strident voices of pop punk, emo, and hardcore. The whooping and stomping throughout indie music: ukulele, accordion, glockenspiel. The emphasis on “unconventional” vocals—but also flamboyant electroclash, bespokeness, and caricatured sounds and performances. Embarrassment as a musical engine is not specific to the aughts era; but, it reached heights in the emergent digital mediatization of youth culture, and the ensuing self-consciousness of our sparring individualities and reactions to putting it out there. Performing an unrehearsed acoustic guitar performance of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” as a fifteen year old at a church open mic was not an absurd play in the playbook of the times. The pretense of uniqueness, and the resulting disappointments of the average, created circumstances for embarrassment to thrive and cipher thoroughly into our identities.

The recent resurgence of aughts musical style in 2025 has provoked me to do some shadow work in auditing how embarrassment became so imbued into the American millennial identity. Much of the recent music in 2025 that references and interpolates 2000s music often attempts to extract embarrassment out of the criterion. Throughout the 2010s, obfuscation became a primary tactic to overcome these latent musical embarrassments. Now, and in much of this year’s emergent music, a synthesis between embarrassment and obfuscation has arrived as a unique affect, combining to create an aesthetic of musical effortlessness. The pace of various tools, technologies, and efficiencies in and around music have allowed opportunities for embarrassment to diminish, or at least be more easily forgotten.

Plenty of music is still certainly embarrassing in 2025. But, its streamlining has allowed for embarrassment to become less existential, less centered around totalizing embarrassing moments. Rather, embarrassment has become a more casual transaction (as so many things have)—a coin of the realm in our navigation of music and culture. The tinge of the possibility of embarrassment, and the shadow of its lack, provides a scaffolding for today’s aughts-influenced music. The recent Gen Z continuum of this emerging music is wry but not overtly ironic, adept but not explicitly revealing, keyed-in but not bespoke. Clearly, clashing digital experiences have influenced the way embarrassment has been generationally handled—the 2000s experience of becoming online vs. the 2010s of existing online, and plenty of other media differences and conditions. Anyway, this kind of generational comparative discourse has become a bit overdetermined—also always hiding in the shadows of our current media conversations. Youth on TikTok refer to the aughts era as “millenial optimism,” a brightness seen again from the perspective of a more enshrouded now.

Continuing with shadows and twilight as metaphors for the cultural conditions around music in 2025, I’d like to bookmark and make a crass comparison with Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s aesthetics essay In Praise of Shadows, and his expanded comparison between Japanese and Western toilets. The harsh brilliance of millennial embarrassment is the gleaming, tiled, porcelain Western toilet, starkly contrasted with the worn, weathered, dimly lit, and “spiritual repose” of the Japanese toilet. Within the radiance of the great American bathroom, millennial embarrassment, and aughts music in general, simply had no place to hide in the shadows. Everyone was really putting it all out there 💩.

Alec wrote about some of these themes in the context of Screamo music and Lyotard’s writings on stridency. His example of screamo specifically rends a bifurcation of being humiliated and doing the humiliating as a complex operation within the “social contract of conformity.” Alex’s recent writing on Audrey Hobert Who’s The Clown? reveals a younger artist turning to embarrassing millennial tropes in her songform and lyricism, to thrilling effect in today’s culture. I recently wrote about the band ear’s album The Most Dear and The Future, a work which suffuses aughts’ sounds into a beautiful ombre of the era’s influence. Overall, the general status of brilliant embarrassment giving way to enshrouded embarrassment feels unresolved. But, even when the arrows blot out the sun, there are those who will still fight in the shade.

This is all stuff a lot of people seem to be dealing with at the moment, and I recommend that we keep doing the shadow work. With embarrassment as an internalized lexicon, compass, and resultant condition for people who grew up in the 2000s, I also think it can be a kind of psychological superpower. I am feeling a lack of totalizing embarrassment, and also reflecting on new feelings of doubt in its absence as we sit in the shadows cast at the end of 2025. I hope to have more to say along this line of thought in 2026.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Brenda Cay’s “X & Y,” MellowGuitarSounds’ “Mellow Guitar Sounds,” ddsdan’s “Get Some”

This past weekend, returning home at 2:00 AM from a friend’s Christmas party, I realized that my upstairs neighbor’s big holiday celebration was still in full swing. Beneath the spirited cackles and stomping feet, I accepted the impossibility of sleep and I determined that my best course was to don my nightshirt, hit the penjamin, and settle in for a long winter’s night of listening to interesting music. In the holiday spirit of the stocking stuffer, this week I recommend three very special artists, two new and another that I dug out of the vault..

Brenda Cay’s country breakup tune “X & Y” is really what set me off on that festive evening. I found a clip of Brenda’s music video for the song and was immediately obsessed with the chorus, listening to the section probably 20 times on repeat before I ventured deeper into the Brenda Cay universe. As I’ve written about in a previous week, I seek out a wide array of strange, experimental, or otherwise relatively unheard independent music on Youtube, Instagram, Spotify, and so on out of a genuine curiosity and desire to learn about and celebrate music at the margins of digital mass distribution. Brenda’s expressive, nasal, highly compressed vocal performance (with a conspicuous central southern twang) read at first as a kind of hyper local, slightly naive songwriting effort, the likes of which I’ve seen all over my various feeds. The DIY music video features Brenda walking around and singing along the boulevard of the small Georgian Tennessee border town of Ringgold. In a panoramic shot at the homely intersection of Lafayette and Tennessee St, across from the Grocery Outlet and beside the historical society marker for the Battle of Chickamauga, Brenda sings an empowered and cleverly harmonized country anthem about a rear-view relationship. Despite its homespun quirks, I find the songwriting incredibly solid and, in glimpses, sophisticated - so much so that I was inspired (probably for the first time since college) to sit down and write out the progression of the chorus (I-IV-I-ii I-IV-V7-VII-I-V). Nothing too crazy, but in this milieu of self-released singer-songwriter music, a secondary dominant cadence snuck into the tail end of a chorus like that is rare and compelling. Listen to the song and you’ll hear it. There’s plenty more to say, but this week I’m going to let Brenda’s music speak for itself. In short, I think it’s special.

Here’s an amuse bouche for you - a Ferraro Rocher from the stocking: “Mellow Guitar Sounds” by MellowGuitarSounds. I’ve had an ongoing interest in the publication of isolated, bespoke sample pack recordings like this as they form their own sort of liminal music flotillas in the uncharted waters of music distribution. I came across this one and loved the direct-in digital distortion of the guitar tone, the surfy inflection and the loud, uncanny digital drum kit. I felt moved by the matter of fact 38 seconds, by the simplicity of its incidental poetry: of a loop that never repeats - infinity unrealized, and only implied.

ddsdan is probably an all-time backburner obsession for me. I think it was my dear friend David Grubba who first discovered his absolutely bombed and clipped the fuck out Jersey Club track “Get Some.” This is hall of fame stuff. The ddsdan channel contains numerous, nearly 20 year old, pre-smart phone videos of young Jersey kids dancing in the street and in empty rooms. It’s so good. Released on Youtube 17 years ago, the magnum opus “Get Some” is accompanied by a super pixelated image of the teenaged ddsdan (formerly DJD) in a Blingee flame panelled template (with Blingee logo emblazoned at the bottom). The track contains all the normal conventions of Jersey Club, except it’s imbued with an incredible low-fi quality: ddsdan’s vocal sample is stretched and broken like his pixelated face across the triplet beat, de-pitching and decaying as the final kick in the pattern sustains over into the repetition of its harsh, liberatory queasiness. Half way through the track, along with the substitution of Lil Jon’s iconic “WHAT,” for his “get some” refrain, the accompanying image flips to a photo of the young DJ absolutely flexing on us in posterity, in what appears to be some kind of unfinished basement utility room. Budweiser cans rest discreetly in the back, and a digital camera’s signature in the corner flashes the date in big yellow numbers: 01/01/2005. Happy New Year.

—Alec Sturgis

In this eleventh issue, we recommend a cultural analysis of American revolutionary war and traditional music, a musical paradox contained within the work of Boulez, and the anticipated Part II of a inquiry into the commercial and aesthetic stakes of AI.

Recommendation: “Yankee Doodle,” John Cage’s Thirteen Harmonies (Selections from 44 Harmonies From Apartment House 1776), as performed by Cop Tears

This past week I crushed Ken Burns’ The American Revolution documentary series. Also in the spirit of ‘76, I’ve been revisiting my favorite John Cage piece Thirteen Harmonies (Selections from 44 Harmonies From Apartment House 1776) in preparation for a forthcoming recommendation on Derek Baron’s new album The Holy Restaurant (Derek’s Cop Tears ensemble released my favorite recording of the Cage work on their Reading Group label). The Harmonies is a beautiful, spare arrangement of the inner voicings of psalms and hymns from the 18th century American choral tradition (mostly William Billings). Omitting the original melodies altogether, hollow voice-leadings drift along in incidental counterpoint and new harmonic permutations. Cage’s chance procedure situates these metamelodic forms into new interactions, where the dressings of modal harmony graze alongside each other in an uncanny valley, quietly reforming the disparate characters into a novel and permeable unity. Beneath Cage’s interventions, the work is in large part so incredible because the source material remains historically transcendent, uncorrupted and fossilized in its propositions.

This general curiosity about the early American period has inspired me to listen to revolutionary era jigs, hymns and marches more broadly. Many have an addictive draw to them. The propulsive circularity of the melodies, mirrored in the rhythmic suspension of dotted note syncopations and the hammering of rising fifths and fourths lock in with a fluctuating consistency that feels infinitely repeatable. Walking to the grocery listening to the tune “Jefferson and Liberty,” I was genuinely fired up; and, I was compelled to imagine how and why these dances circulated with global popularity centuries before music technology began to extract the resources of sub-bass and refine the mid-range of the fiddle with compression.

Cage’s study of material from this tradition as a permeable and combinatory set grasps its special, engineered qualities of durability and adaptable - almost universal - functionality. The same tunes were deployed in taverns and military marches by populations and forces with directly opposed political interests. If I may invoke for you a bit of 6th grade social studies: the iconic “Yankee Doodle,” was a tune sung by British occupying forces to mock the backwater American colonists, before they reinterpolated the mockery as a proud expression of collective identity, and later developed myriad other American heroic ballads over the melody. Well before any of that, the tune was known as a swashbuckling jig, “All the Way to Galway,” sung by Irish sailors:

“I swept a few grogs at Monroe’s Inn

(All the way to Galway, aye)

Then I took a piss at the gutter stones

(All the way to Galway, aye)

But I got a whack in my drunken head

(All the way to Galway, aye)”

There is a deeper cultural and psychological formality that resonates behind this evident structure of popular culture. In the Burns documentary, I was struck by many strangely whimsical and contemplative soldiers’ accounts of brutal and disturbing circumstances. One which stuck with me, was an American militiaman recounting total defeat and near death in a battle around New York City: amidst a wild bombardment of canons, disembowelments and decapitations of his friends, he said, “I made a frog’s leap into a ditch, where I stayed as still as I could be and wondered which part of my carcass would go first.” This wry matter-of-factness – awaiting annihilation, but evoking the folksy natural imagery of a frog’s leap away from danger – invites a couple of interpretations. He is either so familiar with a general condition of violence, that even his own humble destruction contains an endearing and disturbing element of whimsy; or, the conventions of “common people’s” speech and literacy are so relatively new, that the images of oral folktales and provincial life come to cohabitate with descriptions of global-scaled atrocity, moral and religious conviction and high-minded, new formations of the common political imaginary. I can only guess here, but both seem plausible.

This cultural signature is found across the literature. “Success to America Says Granuille” (presumably a reference to the Irish pirate-queen Grace O’Malley, but also ironically, perhaps another frog reference) is a jolly song in which 500 die of their wounds, and the British come ”...to spill my Guinness and my children’s blood.” It feels too easy to understate or ignore how psychedelic this combination is of formalized humor, normality of mass death and emergent social dimensions of political idealism and nationalistic heroism. There’s a type of corporeal investedness, grand historical scale and an existential smallness that is hard to relate to, I think, from within the standpoint of America’s last couple centuries of global imperial success.

I plan to further explore and problematize some of these historical and cultural queries in future recommendations, but for now, I’ll return to John Cage’s perceptive musical reckoning with the problems and vitalities of American identity. As Thomas Paine wrote of the revolutionary epoch, reflecting on the “precariousness of human affairs:” “it is wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own [...], than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance.” The “time and chance” of the American revolution folded over into ever more complex layers of imperialism, and likewise, the complicated “time and chance” of music has similarly altered, adapted and reformed the basic social constructions on which its expressions depend. I recommend Cage’s particular “constitution” in Thirteen Harmonies as both culturally instructive in the analogies of radical American musical and social forms, and as a more abstract and perhaps spiritual codex from which we can connect to our own whimsical, existential humility.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Pierre Boulez: Music Lessons, The Collège de France Lectures

A few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Music Lessons, the first English translation of Pierre Boulez’s Collège de France lectures, written while he was teaching between 1976 and 1995. Boulez is perennially on my mind through his demanding, often contradictory worldview. Philosophical inconsistency is a meaningful aspect of his great musical thought—almost running parallel to my favorite pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus—an inconsistency centered around how a deep structure (Logos) underlies extreme change and variability. Music is forgotten, remembered, and in Boulez’ hope, interpreted and reinvented through structural modification. Throughout his lectures, Music is at once an object, a text, and a physics. Boulez was known to disavow his own work, revise his positions while staking incendiary claims, taking up the whole of music as a material to be worked with in all its discrepancies.

I admire Boulez’ seeming hypocrisies as essential to an authentic musical thinking. Boulez famously called for opera houses to be blown up, while simultaneously conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and BBC Symphony, founding IRCAM, amongst innumerable other accolades—an anti-institutionalist working starkly within institutions. He advocated for controlled aleatoricism in music, while also striking up anti-chance positions in the post-war musical landscape documented in The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. He spoke of modernism as an ethical obligation, while offering strained outlines for avant-garde values often at odds with themselves—attempting to liberate music from tradition, but also to bind it into strict musical order. He was both a polemicist and an architect. I find all these contradictions to be what music is all about.

I remember discussing Boulez with Jack Callahan at length in the late 2010s, around the same time I was writing an essay Against Worldbuilding for Tiny Mix Tapes—swapping texts and PDFs of Wagner, Boulez, and Feldman as we were contending with various conceits of electronic music during that particular moment of music culture. That essay also contained a lot of contradictions, but ones that felt like footholds to theorize music for me. Against Worldbuilding also sought to emphasize musical inconsistency colliding with various attempts to build internal consistency through systemization and notation, recording, particular spatialization, or certain symbolic or social efficacy. Despite these attempts at consistency, style, aesthetic appreciation, and the technological production and social consumption of sound all incongruently condition our reception, ideas, and agency for listening. Throughout Boulez’ lectures, we see a profound reckoning with this.

Flipping through Boulez’s writings, I was pulled into a passage from his 1988 lectures on “Memory and Creation.” Many of his writings in this particular era are concerned with the act of composing music, referencing the complications of the immutability of the “text” of music in contrast to its performative mutability. On this point, Boulez lectured:

“Shall I once again sing the praises of amnesia? One feels that in the midst of an era ever more imbued with memory, to forget becomes so urgent … and yet not only do we not forget, but we gild all the libraries in all the Alexandrias—reference being integral to discovery, and the source of the only kind of renewal still possible. The era of avant-gardes and exploration being definitively over, what follows is the era of perpetual return, consolidation, citation.”

I’m drawn to this at the close of 2025. So much of my own musical listening has been operating within a tension between musical memory and a quest for amnesia. Particularly having spent this past Fall writing about music again, I’ve been thinking about musical activism and passivity—and in a way 2020MG has become a space for chronicling a cadence between active and passive stances in musical experience. As Boulez lectured, musical memory’s gravity over the present, and any musical gesture, is pervasive. To pay attention to music, and develop active processes for our reflection on music, also reveals music’s latent beginning and disappearing, forgetting and remembering. Boulez shows us this kind of implicit musical paradox: active amnesia, passive amnesia, active memory, passive memory—all postures hiding within the medium of musical time, and musical text.

Ultimately, Boulez’s praise of amnesia reads as a kind of consolation and acknowledgement in the failure of the avant-garde, much of which he tried to spur onward. His use of the term “perpetual return,” a nod to the Nietzschean “eternal return,” shows that he’s trying to conjure an existential affirmation within the memory and amnesia that enframes our work with music.

In this spirit, and as the great interpreter of musical systems he is, Boulez finds again his active form within the “fragment” of music. He pops off in his final 1995 lectures on “Memory, Writing, and Form”:

“One can now, after all one’s experiences of the twentieth century, arrive at this completely provisional and doubt-filled conclusion: the work can be only a fragment of an imaginary whole. The work thought of as a whole is never more than a convenient illusion, but as with light through a prism, it deconstructs into fragmentary components, which when given a temporal continuity regain the appearance of a whole [...] In other words, and provisionally to complete my remarks: having no reality but the fragment, the whole is nothing but an endless renewed, endlessly sought-after illusion.”

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy [Episode 430] - The Chainsmokers

Last week, we recommended an interview with the Chainsmokers on the Invest Like the Best podcast, in which they discuss their artistic practice and experience running a VC firm. There was one passage in particular that we focused on, spoken by bandmember Drew Taggart:

How do you define success in an age of abundance of art? How do you define success with us, where we’ve had a bunch of songs [with] over a billion streams, we’ve had chart-topping songs, but what is the one thing that we do that no one else can do? Can that even be replicated by AI? Can that be replicated by another person? Because when that person does it, it will be them doing it, and it’ll be at a different time, and it’ll look different, and it will feel different.

When you think about AI, you can’t be scared of it, because it’s just gonna hit different, for better or for worse at some point. We just gotta focus on being the most Chainsmokers as possible.

In order to understand what’s going on here – I mean this in a very general sense – it would be useful to situate Taggart’s thoughts in the context of current debates within AI research in order to evoke a small slice of the conceptual and technical milieu in which his statement operates.

We can begin with the questions of the definition and replication of intelligence, and refer to a recent conversation between the computer scientist Richard Sutton and the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. Sutton is one of the founders of reinforcement learning (RL), a branch of machine learning concerned with how a computational agent learns to make decisions in order to maximize reward signals. RL is generally used in contemporary AI products to fine-tune LLMs after their initial training, functioning as a refinement layer on top of their core next-token prediction mechanism.

Sutton is also known for his influential 2019 essay “The Bitter Lesson,” in which he argues that “[AI researchers] have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run.” Citing examples of research progress in the fields of computer chess, speech recognition, and computer vision, he makes the following assessment:

The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning. The eventual success is tinged with bitterness, and often incompletely digested, because it is success over a favored, human-centric approach.

Patel and Sutton disagree about the basic nature of intelligence, and how it might be constructed through computational means:

Patel: We’re trying to replicate intelligence. If you want to understand what it is that enables humans to go to the moon or to build semiconductors, I think the thing we want to understand is what makes that happen. No animal can go to the moon or make semiconductors. We want to understand what makes humans special.

Sutton: I like the way you consider that obvious, because I consider the opposite obvious. We have to understand how we are animals. If we understood a squirrel, I think we’d be almost all the way there to understanding human intelligence.

This is an interesting claim, and it is taken up in a response essay written by another influential AI researcher, Andrej Karpathy, who is known for his work as a founding member of OpenAI and as the former Director of AI at Tesla. In “Animals vs Ghosts,” Karpathy offers the following assessment of whether LLMs are sufficiently “bitter lesson-pilled”:

Frontier LLMs are now highly complex artifacts with a lot of humanness involved at all the stages - the foundation (the pretraining data) is all human text, the finetuning data is human and curated, the reinforcement learning environment mixture is tuned by human engineers.

The implications of Sutton’s “Bitter Lesson” are quite psychedelic, and Karpathy directly draws them out. He goes on to address Sutton’s claim that “If we understood a squirrel, I think we’d be almost all the way there”:

I still think it is worth to be inspired by animals [sic]. I think there are multiple powerful ideas that LLM agents are algorithmically missing that can still be adapted from animal intelligence … Stated plainly, today’s frontier LLM research is not about building animals. It is about summoning ghosts. You can think of ghosts as a fundamentally different kind of point in the space of possible intelligences. They are muddled by humanity. Thoroughly engineered by it. They are these imperfect replicas, a kind of statistical distillation of humanity’s documents with some sprinkle on top.

For the moment, let’s bracket the question of whether LLMs genuinely “summon ghosts,” and consider the terms and implications of the disagreement between these two researchers, focusing on the level of signification. Returning to the Chainsmokers quote with this discipline-specific conceptual scaffolding in mind, let’s simply consider the proposal that on some level Taggart is talking about spirits. That he is implicitly telling a ghost story, thinking across many different times and places, and that it is in the milieu of spirits that we consider the question of being the most Chainsmokers as possible. What should we make of this?

—Alexander Iadarola

Good day. In this tenth issue, we recommend a critical survey of Pop music, considerations of commercial music optimization, and a polemic on the signification of classical music online.

Recommendation: Mikey Enwright - “POP EDITS”

For whatever reason, I haven’t really been in the pop music mood recently. I usually have a pretty high appetite for it. I visit the charts and “most streamed” sections of various platforms more often than record stores and SoundCloud pages. I enjoy calculating what’s a hit and what’s not—and the clarifying terms that pop music uses to dictate various technological, structural, and cultural shifts. I use listening to pop music readily as a specific annexing of my own emotions and ideas.

The constant cycle of new pop music has its own teleology. It streamlines convention and intrigue along core musical premises: production, melody, rhythm, narrative, and visual culture’s relationship to the sonorous. It’s beautiful that our society has created such an illuminating artform as a mirror to our culture. If Jacques Attali theorized that noise has served an “annunciatory” or prophetic function within society, foreshadowing major political and economic shifts (debatable); then, pop music forgoes prophecy for the Boeotian Narcissus staring at his own reflection from a dark pool. I firmly believe that pop music plays this reflective role very efficiently, even if we might not like what we see.

All this said, I haven’t really wanted to listen to much of it as of late. I slid off the beat for a few months after the new Addison Rae and Sabrina Carpenter albums last summer. I can easily see “poptimist music criticism” first up on the “out” column on everyone’s “in and out for 2026” lists in a few weeks. My thinking kind of paused after 2020MG colleague Alexander Iadarola published a wonderful essay on Rae and Playboi Carti, which summed up a lot of salient threads of popular music analysis for me. The previous decade, and century, really, have concretized the promise of pop music; subculture and pop culture have often collided and found value within each other, bonding into a current of vibes, adjacency, and influence. Like the image reflected in Narcissus’ mirror: it just is what it is.

I discovered Mikey Enwright’s music through commissioning a mixtape from the artist Embaci for ISSUE Project Room in 2020. She included one of his tracks “O Emmanuel” on the tape and I was hooked from there. Enwright is an extremely prolific producer, publishing tracks frequently on his SoundCloud and Nina Protocol pages. The tracks are buoyant and radiant. At first, they reminded me of D’Eon’s oeuvre and expanded series “Music for Keyboards,” a few volumes of which were released on Hippos In Tanks almost twelve years ago. I always loved that series, but Enwright takes this harpsichordian approach and baroque sentiment and softens the attack overall, giving his tracks subtlety and concision—as synths percolate and pop with a spherical shape and velvet texture. It’s addicting, impactful, brilliant music.

Amongst Enwright’s archive, I found a link to a Google Drive (since removed) entitled “POP EDITS,” which I’ll link here for posterity. The folder contains edits and renditions of pop songs: Justin Bieber’s “Changes,” Charli xcx’s “Constant Repeat,” Gunna & Lil Baby’s “Drip Too Hard,” The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” Rihanna’s “Work,” and more. Each track is beautifully interpolated into Enwright’s production vocabulary, reconstructing the tracks wholesale, but leaving acapellas that are filtered into sweeping arcs and aligned to his ascension-oriented progressions. He lets these tracks’ best moments repeat and churn into euphoria. There’s a stunning edit of Taylor Swift’s “…Ready for It?,” a track that on its own is pretty bad— appropriating half-hearted Yeezusian distorted kicks and swagger, but containing a luminous core melody that’s kind of lost within the original track’s architecture. Enwright’s version extracts that moment—one that I would often skip to as one of the lone shining moments on Swift’s Reputation album—and gives it a proper moment to breathe. There’s also a rendition of Post Malone & Swae Lee’s “Sunflower,” a hit that broke out as the lead song from an animated Spiderman movie in 2018. Enwright’s edit features a jaunty, Graceland style bounce that opens up into a jazz piano breakdown inflected with bends of fretless bass. The Google Drive link is a treasure trove of these kinds of special moments, all containing genuine musical insight and creativity. I highly recommend that you listen to each and every one.

Underpinning a lot of Enwright’s music is a kind of “sacred” subtext that simultaneously enshrouds and uplights his work. This character exists across his many published tracks, and expresses itself throughout “POP EDITS.” On “Eternal,” he repeats the line “I wanna feel eternal light,” a short lyric from Oklou’s track “God’s Chariot”; or, his version of Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” has a generosity that exaggerates its sweeping chorus: boom, badoom, boom, boom, badoom, boom, bass becomes a kind of Agnus Dei. The holiness emphasized within Enwright’s music, a kind of studious religiosity that finds a new valence when infused into the pop vertebral structures he’s exploring, has brought me back to the promise of pop music.

In Justin Bieber’s words on “Changes”: “People change, circumstances change, but god always remains the same.” Mikey’s music, and these pop edits, make me feel that way about pop music—and I am drawn back into its liturgy.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy [Episode 430] - The Chainsmokers

The title of this podcast is “The Chainsmokers - Music & Markets,” and, to be honest, it’s extremely accurate. The electronic duo is known for such hits as “Closer” and “Something Like This,” but they also co-founded the Mantis VC firm, which manages a portfolio of investments spanning AI, cybersecurity, and healthcare. In this interview, the Chainsmokers discuss their artistic process and investment strategies in equal measure. We learn that Alex Pall and Drew Taggart kickstarted their career by synchronizing their artistic output with trends identified through the Hype Machine blog aggregator, and that their early stage investment in the soda company Poppi has 30x’d in value. It’s pretty interesting. As a side note, I really liked a song they released this summer called “White Wine & Adderall.”

About 16 minutes into the podcast, Taggart brings up AI in a compelling passage:

How do you define success in an age of abundance of art? How do you define success with us, where we’ve had a bunch of songs [with] over a billion streams, we’ve had chart-topping songs, but what is the one thing that we do that no one else can do? Can that even be replicated by AI? Can that be replicated by another person? Because when that person does it, it will be them doing it, and it’ll be at a different time, and it’ll look different, and it will feel different.

When you think about AI, you can’t be scared of it, because it’s just gonna hit different, for better or for worse at some point. We just gotta focus on being the most Chainsmokers as possible.

I don’t really know what every bit of this means, but it’s sort of stuck in my head. I suppose it comes down to two core ideas: whether it is possible to replicate something singular, and the notion of being the most Chainsmokers as possible. I will leave you with this for now and see if I have more to say in another week.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Critique of dark academia and classical music’s optimization

Over the past month, a theme has been percolating in some of my recommendations about the algorithmic circulation of music content and, in particular, the way that the figure of “the composer” and composition is deployed and signified in these channels. I recently wrote about a young easy listening composer named Rue Jacobs, whose style of production and self-promotion I appreciated for its conscientious laziness. His young composerly oeuvre falls in nicely with the contemporary paradigm of beauty and derangement (which I explored in my writing last week about Charles Ives), where the iconoclast and autodidact have new and incredible resources for musical production. This week, I’m exploring a counterpoint to that more optimistic view.

Jack Callahan sent me some instagram videos of Joshua Kyan Aalampour: a 24 year old “self-taught classical composer and pianist. Self-studying math, physics and art” with 1.3 million followers. His account is a mixture of “dark academia” interiors, bespoke and laboriously stylized hand-written scores, clips of Joshua throwing back his tailcoat over the piano bench to offer melodramatic eight bar phrases of simple classical harmonic progressions.

He introduces each video excerpt with soy-faced glee: “I just composed this melody and it’s stuck in my head now!” he exclaims before doing a hammed-up Bernstein vocalization and then pounding away at his octave-doubled melody over what is essentially the Succession theme song progression. Sprinkled into the young polymath’s feed are videos of him speed-talking in a 20 second reel about his proprietary stock trading neural net – graphs and figures flying off and on the screen: “I built a trading algorithm using algebraic topology. It was consistently profitable for the last five years even when the market was bleeding in 2022. The way it works is I modeled the market as a weighted graph of stocks, ran a laplacian diffusion on recent returns, I took residuals to estimate local mispricings…,” and so on. I don’t know what that means – in part because of my ignorance about the subject, but more significantly, because of the impossible pacing of his presentation, such that the content and purported value of the information is clearly secondary to its function in illustrating the excellence of its author: the self-taught, the virtuoso.

For me, this evokes a musical nightmare consistent with depictions in the movie Tar, which follows the self-destruction of the maestro in her elitist hubris – where the brutal virtues of modern mastery are the very same characteristics that perpetuate her disgrace and fall to the lower rungs, where her only recourse is conducting symphonic concerts of the Monster Hunter OST. From within such implosions of aesthetic and institutional authority, I imagine a sequel, with a figure like Joshua, emerging from the shambles as a euphoric and unknowing vulture, descending on the still-living corpse of classical music to poach its tusks and practice his whittling. Anyway, I strongly believe in using all parts of the animal.

Despite my polemic, I have no beef with his kind of classical exercise from a musical standpoint, in fact I think it’s valuable and nice (it’s exactly what music department students are asked to do in the Harmony course curriculum to experience the basic rules of western harmony - not that this is a metric of musical virtue in-itself), but Joshua’s striking promotional affect forces an absorption of this music in the broader milieu of content optimization and cynical professionalization. Auto-playing his many compositions, the pieces are pretty and inoffensive, but trade in the most culturally perverse aspects of classical music: the conceit of superiority and a melancholic value proposition, that even the worst “classical music” is more enriching than the best Pop music. Critique of this orientation is made more complicated as Joshua’s boundless self-importance and intimation of discovery, invention, reclamation and excellence appear entirely and innocently authentic, despite these banal transgressions.

Returning for the second week to a quote from Charles Ives:

“Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently—possibly almost invariably—analytical and impersonal tests will show that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.”

Joshua’s rote romanticism reminds me of the OpenAI trend of Studio Ghiblifying camera roll images into warm Miyazaki-like renderings. And I think Joshua’s music owes a lot to the incredible, classically styled soundtracks of Joe Hisaishi. But the open-ended question of this music, its signification of “the composer” and methods of algorithmic optimization leave a frayed and uncanny picture of the role of any sort of literate craftsmanship in the reappearance and recirculation of historically-minded aesthetic discourses. The ear deserves a good sleep, and the “easy chair” of beautiful music is a fine place to nap, but if the future for autodidacts like Joshua is bound to this form of smooth-brained cognition, there’s good reason to fear increasingly REM-less, dreamless nights for music.

Invoking a more hopeful influencer, deshaunmcole (a “very kind person who predicts anything that will happen in the future,” with video hits including “A normal size amount of MONEY is coming your way,” counting from 1-40, and “the Philadelphia Museum of Art will become a college in the near future”), the musical and literary form of development, so central to classical music, depends on a dialectic that asserts the theme as first, a static prediction of the character of the idea, followed by a series of re-contextualizations that in essence disprove, and perhaps synthesize that initial theme. Expanding on this formal principle, the vitality of western music and its epistemologies is rendered moot when the output is simply a reflection of a predictively stable group of premises. Development depends on the ability to shape “wrong predictions” into a whole, textured subject of its own order, without becoming determinative. With that said, I recommend exploring such earnest development. Beethoven spent his entire life repeating the procedure: this, not “this:” Amen.

—Alec Sturgis

Happy Thanksgiving from 2020 Music Group. Issue nine contains recommendations of two NY musical experiences, a visit with early American musical modernism and a reflection on the aesthetics of rigor and leisure in Jazz.

Recommendation: Beta Librae playing ‘Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry” at Kismet

This past Friday I went with my friend Rachel to see the Bruce Springsteen Nebraska biopic at MoMA. I am not a huge fan of Springsteen’s but I love that album. The film featured a couple interesting treatments of the record’s technical construction, and a scene depicting Jeremy Allen White laying on the floor listening to Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop.” Springsteen was a surprise guest at the subsequent panel discussion, alongside his longtime manager and the film’s director. The screening took place in the museum’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1. It’s a beautiful room, projecting a controlled sense of open space through stark, simplified geometric forms. The shadowplay created by the recessed waves running along the ceiling is especially nice. It was kind of weird that Bruce Springsteen was there, but it was interesting to be in the same room as him.

Rachel suggested we go to an ambient show in a Greenpoint basement afterwards so we took the train over. We descended a narrow set of stairs, made our way through two doorways, and took a moment to adjust to the environment. It was red and purple with columns and pillows, and the ceiling was low. We sat on the floor. There was a digital meter measuring the decibels emanating from the pyramid-shaped speakers. I used to see DJs frequently but it has become a rarer intentional occasion in recent years – I forget what it’s really like sometimes. The music was somewhat downtempo, immersive, and heavy on gravitational negative space. When a gestural synth lead entered the mix, you actually noticed the ways its timbre pushed and pulled. Beta Librae played this beautiful ‘Til Tuesday song in the middle of her set and the rushing images and spaces and feelings from the last few hours became sharper, more lucid. This was a patient engagement with the dialectic of form and formlessness. Aimee Mann’s voice and story focused the ear’s aperture for a few minutes, constructing a focal point that suddenly appeared in an interlaced structure with everything on either side of it, and then things opened up again.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Charles Ives, Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord Sonata)

A couple of weeks ago, after playing some tennis with Jeff Witscher and Daren Ho in Harlem, we swung by the American Academy of Arts & Letters to visit their recreation of Charles Ives’ Redding, CT home studio. Jeff made an appointment and upon arrival we were escorted by a friendly security guard through some back corridors to arrive at a small gallery, which contained the even smaller replica of The Great Man’s office. Peering over a velvet rope into the dimly lit setting, we attendees were invited to view such things as Ives’ hat. Around the short gallery hall, featuring photos, scores and sketches, another view was available of the piano and a copy of Ive’s First Sonata for piano. I’ve seen photos of this exhibit before, and it was cool to see first hand. Some interesting quotes were printed boldly on the wall: e.g. “Sent some copies out of 114 Songs – gives offense to several musical pussies.” (Charles Ives diary entry, April 1923). Really, there wasn’t all that much to see, which only enhanced the hilarious pomp of the appointment protocol, and security escort to stand around in a closet of Ives’ ephemera.

It caused me to think about a sort of discrepancy between the availability of this experience, the ever increasing performances and recordings of his music and the relative lack of interest in what his music is and does. Even in the long duration of his own lifetime, he was considered by all but a few contemporaries (like Schönberg) to be a strange iconoclast – out of step with both the new emergent American musical canon and with the European avant-garde (with which a large part of his work shares expressionist features of cacophony, polytonality, modernist literary reference, and so on).

As the modest museum collection suggests, Ives is celebrated; but from my vantage point as a lifelong participant in both classical music institutions and iconoclastic American music, it feels like Ives was in some way the first and last - the only - member in a class of composers to be “re-discovered” on his way to a lifeless archive. My purpose in revisiting his legacy here, is to recommend that it still has a lot to offer, and that in a way it has been made somewhat culturally inaccessible by its domestication in the “classical” canon. Too old and idiomatic to be a part of the Cagean paradigm’s long life into the practices of 21st century experimentalism; too “American” and deranged to really fit neatly within the conceptual disciplines of European modernism and the accompanying compositional pedagogy that persists still in conservatories.

This is a pretty standard take for anyone that studies or simply enjoys Ives. But as I alluded to in my writing last week about Screamo and a sort of musical “stridency,” my recommendation is not simply for people-who-like-Ives to listen to him more, but is for those who haven’t listened to him, or who have, but didn’t enjoy or feel as if they understood it, to look at it more closely. My Dad emailed me two Ives quotes, which I wish I had included last week, but am glad to share now:

“Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently—possibly almost invariably—analytical and impersonal tests will show that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.”

“The word ‘beauty’ is as easy to use as the word ‘degenerate.’ Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you.”

As a young aspiring composer, I studied Ives’ Piano Sonata No. 2, commonly known as the Concord Sonata (published in 1920, but developed over the course of the previous 15 or so years). The piece is built on formal references to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with movements titled after American transcendentalist writers, and is composed of highly cacophonous passages interspersed with intense melodic development and some of the earliest instances of full chromatic cluster chords. After leaving the Arts & Letters exhibit, Daren and I listened to the piece on the way back into Brooklyn. Cruising down 3rd avenue in the brutal evening traffic, absorbing the lights of pub windows, the art deco facades, the honking and weaving of delivery drivers and angry commuters, I felt represented by the crazed lyricism of the solo piano – degenerate, beautiful: easy.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: The Music of Bill Evans

I’m in Los Angeles right now and thinking about New York City. It’s usually like this whenever I’m out here. Talking with people, there’s a tacit curiosity that invites conversational contemplation and comparisons between the two cities. LA and NYC are extremely different—with unique issues—but I also appreciate hearing how people are navigating contemporary life within their distinct contours. The differential ratio between these two lifestyles of urban America seems to be enthralling to people, bounded by a sheer commitment to live in such cities. It’s also nice to understand that I have my own problems, and by extension my own city’s problems, and that many of LA’s problems are not mine. I was in a health food store in Los Feliz the other day looking around at all the bizarre offerings and felt a sense of peace thinking “this shit is none of my business.” Regardless, it’s been nice to drive around visiting various strip malls and neighborhoods in the good LA weather.

I’ve been listening to American jazz pianist Bill Evans the entire time I’ve been out here. I picked up his biography Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings at Vroman’s bookstore in Pasadena and have been thumbing through the pages this week. I’ve had his music on autoplay, playing out of my pocketed phone, or various Bluetooth speakers, as I’m hanging out with family. Bill Evans is perfect Thanksgiving week music—on some Charlie Brown shit—the kind of music that coffee shops, bookstores, boutiques, etc. play to invite an ambient comfort that this holiday corridor insists upon. Admittedly, I’ve not been paying close attention to the details of particular recordings or albums by Evans. In 2025, his music often asserts itself as “for the vibes,” in the way that a lot of modal, cool jazz has been established within the paradigm of easy listening and overall “feel good” music. The sound affirms a gestalt of affability and positivity; but, the coziness enshrouds its absolute rigor of practice and performance. Throughout, I’m baited into the relaxing “soundscape” of jazz but then quickly pitted into the intense cognitive labor of actually listening to the music. The way Evans reinterprets standards, reharmonizing and uncovering melodic possibilities—quartal voicings, counterpoint in the southpaw piano hand, his various classical influences (Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky) finding their way into floating time and long-line improvisation. Keying into the music, I’m sitting on the couch behaving like the recently viral polyphonic perception TikTok video—”can you believe the notes as well as the space between the notes!” I think comfort’s descent into rigorous reflection is a unique feeling the holidays can provide us.

It’s also a time to reflect upon your life. Flipping through Bill’s biography, it’s cool to read about his personal trajectory into becoming a jazz legend. Born in New Jersey, Evans eventually studied classical music at Southeastern Louisiana College and then the Mannes School of Music, in New York City, majoring in composition. Before jazz, he was a wedding pianist in Jersey performing polka music for $1 an hour, or Beethoven at Tuxedo clubs, was a founding member of a Delta Omega chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia (a fraternity dedicated to music) in Louisiana, played quarterback on the football team, and was drafted into the army for three years, where he played flute in the company band. He then moved back to New York City to subsequently work with bandleader and theorist George Russell (author of Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization), played with Mingus, Monk, and virtually every other major name in NYC jazz, and then released his first solo recording—entitled New Jazz Conceptions—great title. It was a commercial failure, but then in 1958, Evans joined Miles Davis’s sextet and recorded Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album of all time. This is the kind of personal history that really only exists in that particular era of the 20th century—and one that led to his ultimate jazz epithet, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, also the title of his next solo record released in 1959. Emblazoned on the LP sleeve are various tribute quotes, one from Miles Davis: “He plays the piano the way it should be played.”

Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I end up thinking about and listening to whenever I’m in Los Angeles. There’s something about the city that kind of pulls out this composerly excellence factor (there’s the classic photo of an expat Schönberg watering his Brentwood lawn in the 1940s)—a psychogeography where genius and relaxation coexist after some insane arc in Europe or New York City. While I’ve been out here, I visited an antique store that contained stunning prints of Warhol and Man Ray, an expertly designed Devo concert poster live at Irving Plaza, and some framed original posters of an Abercrombie advertisement and of the film Anchorman—all pretty exacting stuff that was inspiring to see amidst all the midcentury furniture for sale.

Contemplating the rigor and leisure of the city, I’m hoping I can model some kind of balance between the two when I’m back—taking in a contemplative mood dredged up by the holiday and this kind of NYC<>LA dialectic. I’ll probably keep the coffee shop glow and intense discipline of Bill Evans’ music playing as I walk through the last of the New York autumn leaves.

—Nick James Scavo

Welcome and thank you for reading this, the eighth issue of 2020 Music Group. Here we recommend two new albums and a philosophical detour into Screamo.

Recommendation: ear - The Most Dear and The Future

I stumbled upon ear’s new album The Most Dear and The Future on the Nina Protocol front page. Despite participating in the platform since its first days, I’ve never actually used Nina to find or listen to new music. First try—instant jackpot. Respect.

ear is the Upstate NY/London-based electronic duo of Yaelle Avtan and Jonah Paz. They broke out with their single “Nerves,” revealing a production style that sutures together many strands of emergent feed-driven musical moods. There are dexterously cropped and closely panned blips that embed themselves into breakbeats and breakdowns—some percussive hits containing their own woody reverb, some directly etched into the space of the headphone cans. And, most strikingly, there are explosive raw bass synthesis moments often presented “as is”—without much treatment—given the entire room of the mix-field to assert themselves. Their sound contains both a light touch and careful consideredness, toiled over and simultaneously allowed to rest.

The Most Dear and The Future’s overall bedroom, bloghaus sound contains a pathos that’s helped to invigorate my millennial malaise into a musically-induced optimism I haven’t felt since “peak indie” in 2009. At that moment, I remember feeling like we were on the precipice of something that would define my ensuing life. That’s kind of what happened. That “mass indie moment” certainly did influence the ensuing decade and its various achievements, platitudes, and deconstructions. Looking back at the wreckage, it’s fascinating to remember how things arrived, how things disappear—what’s been left behind, and what remains. I’m kind of on my Eat, Pray, Love shit while listening to The Most Dear and The Future. Brother is healing.

I’m recommending this album to also consolidate a current of thought that’s run through a few contributions in past 2020MG issues: “Adolescent Listening” and the music of Julia Wolf, a recent experience seeing 2hollis live, and re-listening to The Books. These artists—and perhaps most completely ear—express themselves directly and uncomplicatedly. Through them, I’ve experienced a transparency of sentiment and its engineering. I’ve been able to reindulge in a cognitive utility of music supported by melody, production, and emotion. I guess this is all really basic stuff—I’m ultimately just saying “I like listening to this music”—but given a compulsive drive to theorize music, and the at-times unpleasant effects of that exhaustive theorization, I’ve kind of found myself needing to rebuild how I’m listening to music. The immediacy of ear’s music sums up this project of reconstitution. Through it, I’ve felt regenerated.

It’s easy to hear a deep referentiality evident on The Most Dear and The Future—Postal Service’s “Brand New Colony,” The xx’s “VCR,” Phoenix’s “1901”—and yet it doesn’t really matter. ear seems to wholly understand the synthetic nature of reference, presenting their music confidently and ambivalent to any trickery in how the mechanics of such novelty are employed. In this way, the music feels complete, of the moment, and new. The tracks can be ahead of themselves, with incoming moments anticipating their arrival not unlike Chanel Beads. However, unlike that band, the tracks are spherical and whole. Their architecture doesn’t bottom out and the foundation is solid, not wispy or fading in linear runs. On “Give Way,” we hear field recording fidelity, birdsong, and whispers erupt into a synth run dripping with swagger—pushing towards a breakdown that displays the full extent of their producer-powers. I recommend listening to it.

The most direct comparison to ear is the band NEW YORK, the duo of Gretchen Lawrence and Coumba Samba, one of my favorite bands of the last few years (listen here to an interview Max Ludlow, Kari Rittenbach, and I did with them on Montez Press Radio). This is most clearly heard on the album’s eponymous track, as well as “Dogs,” in its hushed vocals, general style, and shared production vocabulary. However, the swag doesn’t feel like it’s being copped. Instead, with both ear and NEW YORK, we hear the sound of what’s been formulating now fully arriving—a beautiful thing.

It is our great opportunity in 2025 that so much is not needed at the moment. Internalizing that thought, I think I need this music.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Audrey Hobert - Who’s the Clown?

This album accomplishes a few things that turn out to be mutually complementary in unexpected ways. First of all, the songwriting is incredibly good. The lead single is called “Sue me,” and the chorus goes: “Sue me, I wanna be wanted.” A reckoning with the admonishment of one’s desires – a litigation – but where does the reproach come from, who is the prosecutor? A sense of right and wrong, the murmurings of one’s friends and family, an intrusive thought detailing shameful accusations, or a rational inner voice? The articulation is more resonant for the way it side-steps self-seriousness, indicating balanced realism about the messiness of things; after all, the album is called Who’s the Clown? In an interview with People magazine, Hobert offers: “I feel pretty bad sometimes late at night, but not really besides that.”

At the level of production and arrangement, the album frequently turns to millennial indie pop conventions. Yet it moves beyond a certain cliched template familiar from the pages of Pitchfork twelve or thirteen years ago. Although the lyrics are frequently lighthearted, this is intense, almost unrelenting music. Rhythmic dynamism and an insistent use of the refrain align in such a way that the density of musical information recalls nightcore, speed garage, or even PC Music; on several songs, Hobert essentially treats her own voice as a sort of Splice sample, copying and pasting along the grid. It is affectively persuasive to hear this formal approach adapted to an instrumental that sort of sounds like a Taylor Swift song.

Among the record’s most persistent themes is the desire to get away. This is in response to a psychic and social milieu wherein one feels inadequate and out of place while also craving attention and a sense of belonging. One of the record’s strongest songs is “Phoebe,” where binge-watching the show Friends provides the relief of parasocial escape and a mediating screen through which to negotiate some sort of truce between aloneness and relation. “Drive” is also great, and more straightforward. It’s “another disappointing night,” so Hobert grabs her car keys and makes an escape, uninterested in picking problems apart at five in the morning.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: The Blood Brothers (live) at Locust House, San Diego, 2002

This week I was obsessively watching early 2000’s screamo and post-hardcore house show footage. This has always been a huge blind-spot for me historically, and I’ve been curious to learn more. Growing up with a classical musician Dad, my “Dad-rock” obsessions were with Bach and Coltrane rather than AC/DC (yeah, yeah…); and so, my adolescent meanderings in transgressive music were oriented to the north star of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Charles Ives and so on, more than any iteration of punk or hardcore. The closest exposure I had was hanging around block parties with the older brothers of friends out in Fuquay-Varina where there was some kind of emo scene, in peak Warp Tour years. I burned CDs of Between the Buried and Me, but as compelling as that was, I spent my prime angst years studying the cluster chords of the Concord Sonata. It wasn’t until after I realized how brutal and sort of impossible it felt to pursue composition for classical ensembles in 2012 that I retreated into Noise, computer music and free improvisation, and in some way completed the horse-shoe effect of my radicalization. Me and my young colleagues terrorized coffee shops and bar and grills, spamming granulated Bobby McFerrin samples on midi guitar and playing dumbass clean telecaster and clarinet sets through a volume pedal and lone subwoofer. Looking now from this vista of my particular, insane music behavior, I can’t help but look across the valley at the DIY twin peak of hardcore music, and wonder: what’s going on there? With the eager and humble curiosity of a total n00b, I will reflect on that question here, and make a recommendation to you:

I happened upon a performance of The Blood Brothers playing “Set Fire to the Face on Fire” on the Henry Rollins Show (which aired on IFC between 2006-2007). Two squealing vocalists with a consciously snotty, girlish affect singing a manic anthemic pastiche, a single trebled-out, exposed guitar part, aggressive repetitive, detuning distorted bass, drumming that practically speeds out of phase with the band, and a funny, clipping keyboard part playing a dembow rhythm to close the song. I recommend following that link. It immediately scratched an itch from memories of my 12 year old, screamo-curious brain. In my present mind, the raw performative intensity and high degree of stylization captures my imagination in a way that’s more consistent with my own experimental music inclination.

There’s a connection here that really fuses my enjoyment and fascination. The performance has a very acute, specific sensibility that I only sometimes observe in conceptually and sonically aggressive music. It contains a rarified element in the periodic table of fuck you-related aesthetics that isn’t in any way a product of noise, dissonance, density, or the other basic elements. This is a form of a deeply felt, lived attitude, expressed in the mechanizations of style, and which becomes almost a musical metaphor for the decimation of identity itself through its mediatization. This stylish meltdown is not triggered by force, but by a more advanced kind of existential nuclear chemistry.

In his short but incredible essay Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics, Jean-François Lyotard describes both the physical sound and metaphorical quality of “stridency:”

“Along with [the] nightmare that causes listening to writhe, when the entry of death into the life of understanding is imminent, a fear that is essential to the ego is suddenly touched off: the fear of being violated. Stridency awakens a latent repulsion, that dozes within hearing, at a scream that might penetrate it – an exorbitant scream, incommensurable with its faculty, indecorous. The sarcastic screeching rails at the ear’s misfortune at being tethered to the sonorous world in which anatomico-physiological chance determined its destiny. And in doing so it nearly rends it. Overcome as much by suffering as by humiliation, corporeal identity in its entirety trembles at and for its finitude.”

I love how demented this passage is, as it reaches for an explanation of, I believe, the same type of cursed cultural and corporeal embodiment that The Blood Brothers seem to apprehend within their music. This stridency completely subsumes the meaning-makings of genre and history, chewing them up and spitting them back out repeatedly with a deafening “silence of redundancies” (as Lyotard later says). The energy of this performance (and by other artists in this style) is only further enhanced by how strikingly “normal” the guys look – reflecting the same musical principle of stridency in visual form, where no element of culture can even begin to represent the feeling or sense. In turn, the music “scene” becomes a shared stage for the aestheticized abuse of the social contract of conformity in-itself: embracing what Lyotard suggests as a natural trajectory toward “humiliation,” but where humiliation and humiliated blur together in the speed of the transaction, and disappear when the music stops.

—Alec Sturgis

Welcome again, and thank you for reading our seventh issue. This week we recommend a concert of Anthony Braxton’s work, a young easy listening maestro and a reckoning with the recent Charli xcx / John Cale collaboration. We hope you enjoy.

Recommendation: The Music of Anthony Braxton: Concert and Reflections, with Mary Halvorson and George Lewis, live at Roulette

Roulette is currently presenting a four-part series honoring Anthony Braxton in his 80th year on earth. On Wednesday, I went to see a program entitled “Concert and Reflections, with Mary Halvorson and George Lewis.” I was especially eager to go because a friend of mine took a class with Braxton in the aughts, and hasn’t said a single uninteresting thing about it: “Braxton argued that Tom Petty was a great American formalist and told us to go buy his CD box set” … “I’m pretty sure Alien is his favorite movie.” The program in downtown Brooklyn began with an open-ended conversation between the three artists. To adequately capture its energy and dynamism would require transcribing the whole thing.

Lewis spoke about his decades-long friendship with Braxton, and their time touring and collaborating. Halvorson described abandoning her dedicated interest in biology and committing entirely to composition after taking a class with the artist. Braxton communicated a number of axioms that I won’t soon forget: “I’m not interested in arriving; my system is about becoming.” … “Part of what I’m looking for is ‘nothing.’ I’m not interested in nothing, and I’m not interested in something. I’m just interested.” He also discussed the arrival of aliens in our galaxy, artificial intelligence, and money.

The music that followed was extremely good. A program of two pieces by Halvorson was followed by a brief intermission, then three pieces by Braxton. It was performed by a total of ten musicians from the International Contemporary Ensemble. What did it sound like? Pulsions vibrating through a field animated by a number of dimensions that certainly exceeded three. Boundaries between singularity and multiplicity dissolved: things were in motion across the ensemble and all of its voices. I’m not sure I’m going to provide any further detail. I frankly hesitated to write about Wednesday’s program at all – revisiting memories in order to transcribe them tends to overwrite their initial imprint. Some things you need to keep for yourself. The event left a great impression on me.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: Rue Jacobs, Tormented By Love

This week I stumbled upon a young LA-based composer/producer of easy listening music named Rue Jacobs. In the midst of general algorithmic slop, which often pops with cringe gearhead gimmicks, guilty shred content, incredible gospel clips or dubious, low-cal music theory, the reel of Jacobs performing laid back, saccharine music stopped my scroll. His self-aware, deadpan affect, diffused into many bemusingly quick edits of him performing every instrument of slow and somewhat disinterested romantic vamps, induced a real curiosity in me about how a gen-Z musician finds their way into this very specific stylistically cultivated affinity.

Having recently recorded a Flavortone podcast about TikTok music and the reduction of many idioms and stylistic signifiers within increasingly compressed, replicated versions, the creative dispositions of younger musicians/content creators regarding style and media circulation has been on my mind. And having experienced the rise and fall of Vapor Wave, the reinvigoration of City Pop record collection and Tubmlr taste-making, the RVNG-adjacent romanticization of west coast archival electronic music and other similar appropriations and re-inhabitations of foreclosed, slightly cursed late-capitalist music styles, the presence of easy listening is not in the least bit remarkable. But the quality that hooked me about Jacobs’ music and compelled my digging, was a very specific and recognizable type of sure-handed, lazy competence on display, that I believe only accompanies a sense of “earned” confidence in one’s total absorption of the literature in question.

I want to emphasize how much I enjoy seeing this quality and find it admirable. Why? I think it reflects a distinctly youthful experience of ingenuity: a calmly authoritative and perceptive grasp of detail, contained in a moment where the unsustainability of certain aesthetic idealisms has yet to capsize and invert in the form of some crisis about more fundamental aspects of practice. (Apologies to Jacobs and his music for being placed in the cross-hairs of an Unc’s dark musings). I recognize this from me and my friends’ earlier days as quirked-up experimentalists with particular ideas about our own aesthetic agendas and interpretive senses for the history of our own music interests. Projections aside, it’s evident that Jacobs’ style of competence goes beyond the capacity for a mere genre specialization. He appears committed and prolific, with multiple albums, EPs and a smooth music sample pack for sale, as well as a 2022 album of smooth but sort of lit house music tracks.

The full length album Tormented By Love is musically solid, stylistically insightful and with an authentic and patient touch for the genre that transcends pastiche and suggests a wider set of musical tastes and ideas. I recommend lighting your candle and listening to it.

—Alec Sturgis

Recommendation: Charli xcx & John Cale - “House” (Wuthering Heights OST)

“Can I speak to you privately for a moment? I just want to explain. Explain the circumstances. I find myself in,” whispers John Cale in an audiobook rasp on “House,” a new track alongside Charli xcx as part of the OST of a new adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” starring Margot Robbie. His voice is aged but it’s the same voice that recounted Lou Reed’s short story “The Gift“ on The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat in 1968. His signature viola wisps bow onward, in a style heard on “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” or electrified, honed, and carefully tuned alongside La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and Tony Conrad in The Theatre of Eternal Music in 1964, or “The Dream Syndicate,” as Cale and Conrad defiantly renamed themselves after feuding with Young. I similarly want to explain the circumstances I find myself in, recommending this music. “House” is slightly claustrophobic and haunted by the lineages of cinema and sound that have brought it into existence. My feed, also tuned somehow, is blowing up with the track’s accompanying video and proclamations of Charli’s new “gothic” era. Charli drips wax and runs through forests—Cale broods—exploring a derelict house and the “brutal and elegant” quality that Cale has described in his work with The Velvet Underground, a dictum that seemed to resonate with Charli.

I feel aloof in recommending this track, but also compelled to write a bit about the music, especially having spent a lot of time listening to both artists. Throughout listening to “House,” I’m overwhelmed by its surplus personal context. I milled the downtown lineage Cale was steeped in, having lived on Ludlow Street for years just a few apartments down from the legendary 56 Ludlow tenement Cale lived in alongside Conrad, as well as artist and filmmaker Jack Smith. I devoured Branden Joseph’s book Beyond the Dream Syndicate which explored Cale and Conrad and “minor histories” of American minimalism, as well as Benjamin Piekut’s book Experimentalism Otherwise: NY Avant-Garde & Its Limits. I also was obsessed with Charli’s music around this time, peaking at the release of her album Pop 2, sneaking into a nearby luxury hotel on Bowery with Tommy McCutcheon and Lawrence Kumpf—also studious scholars of New York avant-garde culture—to catch her singing maybe five songs in the hotel ballroom. Kari Rittenbach and I booked Finn Keane (known as PC Music’s Easyfun) for Warm Up in 2024, the architect of Charli’s Brat during “Brat summer,” and also the uncanny producer of this track “House.” I could hear his touch on the song immediately—the way the sub was layered over blasts of electricity in Treznor-Zimmerian style—somehow both carefully manicured and designed to scrawl away quite beautifully. Anyway, this is all to say, I do care about this track.

Despite enjoying it in moments, I can’t say I was a real fan of Brat. Some of the magic of PC Music and Charli throughout the 2010s kind of bottomed out with all that. This said, I respect its importance as an inflection point of some kind, of 2020’s pop culture at least, and maybe some loose strands of electronic music. My aloofness to “House” has more to do with my feelings about cinema in 2025 rather than Charli. In my early twenties, I remember often saying that “I like every movie”—a hyperbolic statement that was meant to convey an overall uncritical position (in contrast to a hyper-critical perspective on music) that I felt was phenomenologically real to me, suspended during the flow of sound and image. This completely changed in the mid-2010s, when a new type of cinematic style emerged. I was having a different cinematic experience—maybe most viscerally within the proliferation of A24 films and a generally suspended, boutique horror aesthetic that felt more like reading a magazine, or some other kind of content, than watching a movie. Pendericki-inspired dissonant string clusters and cello pizzicato, Haxan Cloak scored drones; I began to notice things like cuts and camera angles that I would never register previously. I truly did not enjoy these films.

“House” is steeped in these aesthetics, but it feels important as a moment of acceptance. This kind of thing—A24, Brat Summer, and things like it—are here to stay. Charli and John Cale uniting isn’t really surprising. Vroom Vroom with SOPHIE was released almost 10 years ago. More than Nosferatu, the track reminds me of when Swans’ The Seer or Scott Walker’s Bisch Bosch were released—an auteurish “dark” music revitalized in twilighted career moments that I couldn’t get enough of at the time. I still can’t seem to get enough. The track goes beyond its novelty, its fake darkness. In it, I feel real darkness. The highlight of “House” is also its cheapest moment. The track’s mock catharsis, basic beat, and forced screams all work for me—but I also know how artificial it all feels—and I love it. In Cale’s words: “brutal and elegant.” I’ve revisited a specific moment on the track probably 30 times this week, when Charli sings “I think I’m gonna die in this house” for precisely the third time. In this moment, her autotune warbles in a faulty and vulnerable way that’s just great. I can imagine not liking the film Wuthering Heights. The moodboard table settings and forest scenes that will surely be displayed. Some blue candles framing carefully arranged porcelain and lace. The Mirror Palais outfits. “House” distills the claustrophobia of a physical space as well as social stricture, knowing its role as film music interpreting Emily Brontë’s text, a true product of its surplus context.

In early 2020, I made a mix for Cashmere Radio in Berlin that kind of flippantly mixed a live recording of Henry Flynt’s “Everlovin’” over Yung Lean’s “Kyoto.” Cale and Charli uniting reminded me of that mix. Just a month later, I ended up being stuck in my House. Covid hit. Our neighborhood bordering Chinatown had emptied out weeks before the “big moment.” I was stuck in that same house on Ludlow, a few doors down from Cale’s old place. We didn’t see anyone for months, rearranging glasses on the counter, pacing around in a tiny tenement, cooking a roast in a toaster. Kind of losing our minds. Shit can be scary and sad. Shit can get menacing, frightening. I watched a video of Cale revisiting his apartment in 2013. The interviewer asks him how he feels. He responds, “confusion … you can’t recreate that.” Back in 2020, from the second floor, peering down on completely empty Ludlow street, we watched an older person pulled out in a body bag, ambulances all around, ghosts everywhere.

Can I speak to you privately for a moment? I just want to explain. Explain the circumstances I find myself in. What and who I really am. I’m a prisoner. To live for eternity. I was thinking, “What is this place?” I thought it would be perfect. I thought. “I want it to be perfect.” Please, Let it be perfect. Am I living in another world? Another world I created. For what? If it’s beauty, Do you see beauty? If there’s beauty. Say it’s enough. I think I’m gonna die in this house. — John Cale

—Nick James Scavo

This is issue number six. Here, we recommend a group of archival recordings, a chopped millennial album and a home economics conspiracy. Thank you for joining us and, we hope you enjoy.

Recommendation: The League of Automatic Music Composers – Archive: 1978-1981

I like to read a few things at once. I am on vacation in Spain, and have put what I was reading in New York on hold in order to kick off a couple new books. I am adjusting my mentality for vacation. I am adding complexity to my own life. I am going back and forth between Dwarkesh Patel’s The Scaling Era, a book of technical interviews with leading AI research lab figureheads, and a new translation of Françoise Dolto’s Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent, a remarkable psychoanalytic case study originally published in 1971. I am enjoying my time on vacation. I am writing this on a train. I am drinking a Nescafé espresso out of a paper cup. But this is not a travelogue: I am suspending the total immersion of my amazing travels to use my phone to write about music.

Earlier, I was listening to DJ Moortje’s “Donna,” but now I am listening to the League of Automatic Music Composers. They were active in the Bay Area between 1977 and 1983. Roc Jiménez de Cisneros released a large selection of their recordings in 2009. Roc is half of EVOL, one of the great computer music projects of the millennium. I recommend familiarizing yourself with his work if you haven’t already.

I am listening closely to “Ear Benefit Rehearsal - Martian Folk Music” and “Ear Benefit Rehearsal - Pedal With Twitter.” The LOAMC utilized microcomputers in live performance, which was a novelty at the time. Each player set up a station, and it fed into the others. Look into how they did it, and what they were thinking about.

These works direct our attention to the place of things. There are few silences. We can hear currents of electricity. There is the sense of a kite being flown. If you haven’t flown a kite recently, I recommend giving it a go. Flying a kite is not like throwing a baseball. The air is either moving or it is not. The kite does not fly if the air does not move. A baseball moves because you throw it, or because of gravity. The kite-pilot must adjust their approach to currents which are far from them, up in the sky, out of reach. (See Deleuze on surfing in his famous control society essay.) Air nearby possesses less unfamiliarity: you can breathe it. Up there, air moves another way, guiding or being guided by a slightly different set of atmospheric conditions.

One gets the sense from listening to these recordings that changing the way things sound is not so easy. A number of variables must be corralled. This is an intuition, though, and it could be wrong: the sound might be incredibly easy to change in a sudden fashion. The increments and frequencies might be tremendously malleable. We do sense sustained focus, fatiguing focus. Autechre didn’t seem tired at all when I saw them perform last weekend. They seemed calm. How hard can it be to fly a kite? It depends on the atmosphere, the ways that energy moves through the environment.

—Alexander Iadarola

Recommendation: The Books - Lost and Safe

I haven’t listened to The Books since maybe 2009. It’s likely that I may not have listened to them ever again. My memory of their sound is particularly repressed, almost erased. A lot of bands from this particular moment in independent music are straight up buried. Even then, as a high schooler in the 2000s, something felt kind of nerdy and embarrassing about the music—the name “The Books,” was too uncanny, overly familiar, not cool. Typing out the duo’s names now—guitarist and vocalist Nick Zammuto, cellist Paul de Jong—does not spark joy. Under these tentative circumstances, I find myself recommending their 2005 album Lost and Safe—a testament to a particular sound that I don’t think could be produced today. Similar to a proprietary union style of brick laying, or forgotten cathedral-building technique, some kind of knowledge was lost from this particular moment of indie sentiment and craft—two things that I generally do not enjoy. I’m allergic to a lot of musical narrative in the form of songwriting—and generally favor the “track” over the “song” almost every time. The ways in which the music of Lost and Safe is carefully considered, perhaps over-intentioned, and the blatant, hushed earnestness of the vocals, the bargain bin quality of the sampled material, would usually cause me to crash out. It’s a bit of a poisoned well for me—culturally and musically. Yet, Lost and Safe contains a track-ness over song-ness. Samples are woven between hyperemotional cello sweeps and knobby kitchen-sink percussion, the velocity of each hit marking the inflection of a vocal cadence or run. The Wire Magazine named it the best album of 2005, a prototype for how accessible bedroom experimentalism might become in the ensuing decade. The music is maybe more Girl Talk than Feist. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

The obsolescence of The Books’ sound—particularly the sampling and layering techniques—are the lost art here. I can hear the cuts of the samples clearly and precisely. They are “hand stitched.” The project combines electronic and acoustic music—something that isn’t particularly novel even at that time within the wave of the Folktronica movement. But, The Books have a “touch” that goes beyond a general found-sound-folk-pop-collage style. With Lost and Safe, and really their entire catalog, they’ve found a knack that I think could teach us something about producing electronic music with samples today. The album’s snippets of audio from “obscure” sources like bargain records, thrift store finds, and old home videos are the obsolescent aspect. Sampling from the internet has made this IRL scavenger hunt style not necessary. Or, if one were to do it, you’d really have to go for it—embark on excursions to collect tapes and records, scouring through them to find some preacher giving a wild monologue or high school teacher yelling at their students. You’d have to splice the emotional resonance of these finds into some kind of form, maybe add some banjo plucks, run your voice through a vocoder with a ring modulator, and then pontificate your feelings into some strange songcraft. Just ten years ago this didn’t seem like such a fruitless pain in the ass.

The Books feel like a time capsule containing the rudimentary circuits of a media space that’s fully expanded now. Something is emerging on Lost and Safe, appearing in a half-light of generational and technological change—all brimming with sentiments we still possess but that have mutated. The chord progressions feel like they could chorus an emotional breakdown on Grey’s Anatomy. The music is “chopped” in the material sense and in the slang sense—weird and “over.” The way these sampling techniques intersect with a conservatory musicality is a bit rank—containing a Star Trekkie awkwardness—but maybe that’s why I like it. The awkwardness of the music gives way to something tangible for me. The interiority of the record feels flattened, muted. It’s music that I would usually consider overwrought, but the intention of its introspection and empathy open up—both in the transitional nature of its technological moment, and its emotional candor. Everything has the quality of being slightly anonymous.

On an autumn post-work commute, I listen to the sample from the track “Venice.” A painter (“Maestro”) throws paint on a canvas. A narrator/journalist states “Maestro has just thrown a bunch of gold paint … which has not only hit me in the face … but has gone across the canvas to the applause of the crowd below.” It’s apparently an homage to the Lion of St. Marks. Kalimba and fretless bass shred on—the maestro, unknown.

—Nick James Scavo

Recommendation: Stock your pantry

I’ve made an effort recently to prepare food and ingredients that I can eat throughout the week. The first order of business has been to stock up with batch production of dips, sides and sauces: baba ghanoush, salsa (made from the last, tasteless tomatoes in my garden bed), a green herb sauce, and kimchi. These are intended to compliment a twice-weekly cadence of main dishes: roasted chicken, fried cutlets, big tray chicken, coq au vin, (mostly chicken I guess) and whatever else the case may be. Nice. Some good structure to aimless hours of indoor time that have accompanied the cold weather. Some honest projects going in the background. And while I do basically endorse this sort of general meal planning, my recommendation here is really about developing a conspiratorial operation with your future self. I want to open the fridge, having produced and forgotten the array of offerings, and select a delicacy from my ample stores - as if raiding a stranger’s pantry.

Conspiracy is a very dramatic way to describe what is essentially a staple of the home economics curriculum. But for my purposes, there’s an important dimension of contingency – and in a manner of speaking, secrecy – that I want to emphasize in making preparations of any kind. You don’t exactly know how good, how useful, or how substantive these preparations will prove to be. For example, I’m working on learning my friend Peter Horses’ songs at the moment, in order to accompany him at a show. I’m preparing; I’ve got my particular way of learning and interpreting. We’ll see where those preparations land. The anticipatory leap that the preparer makes is in imagining the conditions of a future circumstance that are in many ways beyond control and subject to change. Preparation signifies a pragmatic comprehension and projection of future needs, but can’t predict or account for the aesthetic contingencies of that future. “I believe I will not only eat, but will enjoy eating 2 quarts of home-made Kimchi this month.” We’ll see about that boss man.

It’s within this aesthetic contingency that I’m suggesting the element of secrecy or inscrutability that affords, in my recommendation, a conspiracy with oneself. Most of my favorite musicians and artists operate with this air – knowingly exposing, with varying results, the sheer affect of a preparation that is becoming extruded and transposed from some theoretically sound premise into a raw, actual, conflictual and generative media application. Conspiracy depends on some covert coordination within the margins of a system, such that the system itself and its functionaries (including you, the artist, the home chef), may not fully grasp the machinations, meanings and implications of those actions.

In reflecting on this kind of “based” barefoot contessa proposition, I found myself doing some freestyle etymology: contessa (Ina Garten, or, [in Italian] “the wife of the count”) shares its root with contessere. It literally means, “to contract a friendship using tokens.” Whether conspiring in the future of some unknowable, unforeseeable sandwich concept, or a musical/improvisatory capacity that becomes pulled from the pantry shelf of practice, there’s a valuable and practically mysterious dimension of creativity to be cultivated in preparing tokens for someone (probably yourself). These tokens appear, are consumed, perhaps questioned, combined, iterated upon, but most significantly they are accepted and deployed as a fulfillment of the inscrutable agreements we’ve made with this particular future.

—Alec Sturgis