Braxton Mentality, Mr. Longsleeves, Stream Syndicate
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