Comparative Opera, Adolescent Listening, Ibiza Problems
Welcome to 2020 Music Group (2020MG), a music recommendations initiative by Alexander Iadarola, Nick James Scavo & Alec Sturgis. In 2025, we began meeting up around the city to discuss the state of music writing. For better or worse, music has become a way for us to theorize, structure, and orient the world—and that hasn’t come without psychological consequences. Like many conversations that traversed the 2010s into the 2020s, it was easy for us to discuss high highs and low lows, music’s power and potential, but also its reliable disappointments and diminishing returns. Much of music writing has chronicled the loss of halcyon moments and emergence of new formats, trends, and “discoveries,” driving forward a kind of obsessive state of death and renewal around listening, recounting, prophesying, critiquing, and sharing music. With 2020MG, our conversations began to zero in on the number 2020 as a kind of conceptual boundary for writing about music, providing us with an implicit frame for our inquiries to follow. For us, it became a clear line to draw into our continued passion and preoccupation with music: what was then and what is now? In the words of composer Tony Conrad: “What was music?”
Together, we’ve navigated and contributed to a musical sphere of online music blogs and print magazines, internet labels and composition fronts, podcasts, choirs, bands, and ensembles, self-produced music festivals and DIY spaces, ethnomusicology conferences, and experimental music platforms, institutions, and museums. From writing press releases for obscure saxophonists and big-budget electronic music alike, to features spanning philosophy and conversational roasts—from massive institutional events to basement stagings of classical works. We can’t get enough music.
2020MG issues will drop every week on Fridays with an introductory text followed by three music recommendations, a recommendation from each of us. The frame of the recommendation is one we’re intentionally choosing instead of criticism. It can be enjoyable to recommend music—and to pursue that simple gesture seemed right for this project. Our recommendations will include recent music releases, historic works or recordings, experiences at shows and performances, other ephemeral musical perspectives and content, and more—even just good (or bad) ideas that are worth contending with when listening or thinking about music. They will also include things we do not like. Every other issue will be for subscribers only. Join now for all-access to all 2020MG issues.
We hope you enjoy this new initiative.
—2020MG
Alexander Iadarola, Nick James Scavo & Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Richard Strauss’ Salome and Robert Ashley’s Celestial Excursions
In the last six months I’ve attended two “operas:” Richard Strauss’ Salome (1905), produced by the Metropolitan Opera and Robert Ashley’s Celestial Excursions (2003), under the direction of Ashley collaborator Tom Hamilton. There’s a lot to discuss about either of the performances individually, and much more could be said in a broader historical and musicological comparison of the two works, which premiered nearly 100 years apart, and address very different intellectual communities and cultural circumstances. Foregoing this deep analysis, my focus is on a specific aesthetic quality of transgression that I observed in both realizations, and which I consider to be of fundamental importance to both. This “transgression” resonates with a personal query I’ve maintained about where such types of formalized expression stand in the millennial epoch. Considering the accelerating diffusion of music as a concentrated intellectual medium, the core of this query is essentially: toward what end, or against what would a musician “transgress” these days? Before expanding on this question, I’ll explain what I see as the shared transgressive capacity in both Salome and Celestial Excursions, and then direct that towards contemporary music.
First, for a quick reference to both Salome and Celestial Excursions, I recommend listening to the final four movements of the Strauss, at which point in the opera Salome has achieved a perverse ascendence from the predatory control of her step-father, kissing the recently severed head of the holy man Jochanaan, who has become the object of her existential and erotic obsession – a radical symbolic inversion of her abuse and sexualization. And Ashley’s sequence of “Alcohol” and “Mr. or Ms. or Mrs. N:” a straight up, swaggering intonation of the various chemical, social and psychological features of alcoholism over slap bass and funky greek chorus punctuations from the vocal quartet, followed by an expansive logistical monologue that describes elderly persons’ matriculation from hospice care to death, illustrated through mundane gossip, architectural musing and cosmic speculation.
My interest here is in how each of these deploys its respective tonality and instrumentation to engender sonic contradictions of otherwise simplistic narratives: Salome achieves empowerment through revenge, and the elderly find peaceful acceptance of death as they revisit the events of their lives. The sonic dimension of these narratives produces an affect that is disturbing, banal, yet profoundly humane. As Salome exacts revenge on her predator and the religious patriarchy at the end of nearly two hours of polytonal cacophony, she sings a gentle, traditionally lyric aria holding a severed head. And while Ashley’s elderly examine the “deepening river” of their lives as they go out to sea, they speak repetitively of vain exploits, meaningless dreams and mystifying traumas, accompanied by a commercial tambura drone of dinky piano and thin, soulful guitar.
The affective similarity lies within how each piece sonically points to the puzzlingly superficial nature of the limitations which accompany a search for transformative meaning. This seeming turn to pessimistic abandonment supports a creative aperture through which contradictions in simple sounds and narratives may refute the more general conditions under which people and music become overly simple in themselves. This is to say, that as musicians we might willingly enter into phase with sounds and narrative artifacts which express and clarify our limitations; and, in transgressively combining these, we may liberate parts of our contemporary experience which only music would express. I’ll look more closely at this notion (in a less grave manner) next week, alongside my recommendation of CS Yeh’s new release, The Anchor.
— Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Julia Wolf - PRESSURE
There’s a certain music listening mode I enter into that I can only describe as “adolescent listening.” It’s an experience that calls to mind listening to Jimi Hendrix in middle school, queuing up “Little Wing” on a CD player with the repeat button on while asleep, hoping that in the morning you’d awake a better guitar player. Or, listening to Frou Frou on the bus on the way to school, trying to time a particular passing scene on the route to sync up with a particular lyric—forcing some kind of “goosebumps” moment in situ. As an expanded listening space, the adolescent listening-mode has entered back into the frame at my current age. Perhaps it’s the Bose QuietComfort headphones on the commute, a noise-cancelled public/private experience that has technologically taken hostage of my consumer-level listening back into a uniquely adolescent space. In 2025, a lot of music matches this headspace, nostalgia-baiting midwestern mathy guitar runs, or a Ben Gibbard-ian style of closely mic’ed cringe vocal delivery. It’s all on the table. It’s vulnerable music that somehow ends up feeling like a psychic defense—twistedly unvulnerable. Is this what it felt like to be an adolescent person? I can’t really remember.
Julia Wolf’s PRESSURE was released last spring, and it’s been on constant repeat as a kind of tome for this listening experience. It encapsulates an entire category of music I don’t exactly understand but somehow have found myself actively consuming: 2hollis, Jane Remover, Ninajirachi, Brackence, countless videos of chunky minor strums and suspended chords from young guitar players, or big technicolor EDM that somehow still has a spindly guitar hammer-on or pinch harmonic to precede the drop. All of this music is wrapped in a general TikTok aesthetic that celebrates a kind of fast-fed ambivalence and yet effortless technical ability toward its production and performance. PRESSURE is banger after banger. The viral hit, “In My Room,” has been covered and reconfigured into DJ sets and soft acoustic covers alike—rotating around themes of love lost, stalking yourself on the internet, or that “October will cure me.” Breakbeats and blasts of sub, or scatters of chiptune bits, return back into drum set half-time as squalls of generic “heavy guitar” enfold Wolf’s Gilmore Girls voice. I recommend listening to the music as a confrontation with adolescent memory—or our perpetually adolescent behaviors that overcast our experiences as living adult people. To confront your own adolescence in the present implies an entire listening-logistics that mirrors the rank cultural embarrassment and emotionality of 2025: why am I listening to this music? Wolf’s “Sunshine State,” “Girls,” and “Fingernails” are all at the top of my most-listened tracks at this point in the year. She’s playing Barclays Center later this December and just did a weird mashup track with Drake called “Dog House.” I might go to the show.
I was re-reading the 2014 K-Hole PDF “Youth Mode” in light of some of this thinking. In the section on “The Death of Age,” it mentions that “the likelihood that you and Michelle Obama wish upon the same star is greater than ever.” Seems like an insane thing to say or even think about in 2025—but overall the idea is that “Generational linearity is gone. An ageless youth demands emancipation.” Ageless and emancipated, wishing upon a dark star, Wolf sings in “You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood” … “I prayed for death with a stuffed dog on my bed.”
— Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Mike Posner - I Took a Pill In Ibiza (Seeb Remix)
Why does his voice sound like that? He sounds like a child. Children should not do the kinds of things he’s describing in this song. They also shouldn’t say things like, “All I know are sad songs.” It would be profoundly depressing to hear a child say something like that.
Does Posner inhabit this same vocal register in all of his songs? He doesn’t. There’s a comparable wispiness to his performances on “Cooler Than Me (Single Mix)” and “Please Don’t Go,” but this tune is sung from different parts of the larynx, as if the voice wanted to shift ever higher and take leave of itself. Elsewhere, Posner over-performs melodic closure by hammering down on the tonic and letting it breathe; compared side-by-side with the original, it is clear that Seeb edits the vocal so that such a sense of pronounced resolution is perpetually rushed or cut short.
Really, there are two voices animating this song. The other is the overtly pitch-shifted sample at the heart of the ascending chorus, which repurposes a snippet of Posner’s voice as a MIDI instrument. (This vocal splice-as-instrument effect is familiar from “Turn Down For What,” “Lean On,” and several other key songs from the era – we will return to it in later issues for further discussion.) This synthetic voice-instrument commands our attention because it vacillates back and forth between sounding like a person and sounding like something else entirely.
Listening to the chugging dopamine output of this unnaturally high-pitched vocal-synth, we are reminded of the technical construction of the Beach Boys’ “Caroline No.” In Nick Kent’s terrific profile of Brian Wilson, he reports that Wilson’s father “commandeered the final track and [sped] it up from the key of G to the key of A ‘in order to make Brian sound younger.’” (Wilson had a famously troubled relationship with his father). There are implicit themes of some lost innocence, and by extension, a sense of the ludic. Here is Jameson on Freud, from his lectures on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory:
As Freud says… ‘the opposite of play is not serious occupation but – reality.’ The child at play rearranges the things in his world and orders them in a new way that pleases him better. The child uses the visible, tangible elements of reality and restructures them towards the fulfillment of his long wish, which is that of being an adult. The adult phantasy or daydreaming is seen as a substitution for, and continuation of, childhood play.
If you listen closely, the central vocal melody of “I Took A Pill in Ibiza” is quite similar to a Radio Disney classic, “The HamsterDance Song,” transposed to a minor key. This remix is released in 2015, and youthful EDM excess is on the wane. It’s all a little too on the nose.
— Alexander Iadarola