Electric Current, Vernacular Avant-Garde, Wide Receiver
Thank you for joining us for the third installment of 2020MG. This week, as in previous weeks, we listened to music. In what follows you will find a review of a live concert, a new song, and an older song, such as we recommend them.
—2020MG
Alexander Iadarola, Nick James Scavo & Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Lucy Bedroque - Smackdown
There’s a delirious quality to this song that exerts a certain magnetism. It has to do with the generalized structural homogeneity of loudness, which has to do with compression, which is formally essential to the rage beat style upon which it riffs. Incinerated slabs of continuous sound suffocate the mix. An illustrative comparison can be found in Osamason’s “Habits,” where we find pirouetting claps and snares denied their natural frequency range by similarly brutalist harmonic dynamics, evaporated into mistily degraded artifacts.
This song is much more ethereal than “Habits.” A sustained background chord that wouldn’t be out of place on a trance record establishes the atmosphere. Abrupt volume shifts in the final moments of a measure redirect our attention: after this forced reset, we scan the track like a machine to reacclimate our mental model.
We are clearly having fun here. The greyish, vaguely 80s percussive elements sound like an early commercial for a personal computer. The electric guitar’s power chords supply a glam element. They remind me of how the guitar tone on Mötley Crüe’s “Live Wire” seems to aspire to sound like nothing besides electricity. In his lectures, Alvin Lucier tells us that the frequency of alternating current in America is 60 cycles per second.
The song makes me think about the bodybuilding forum debate about how many days there are in a week. Or simply staring at the wall for an hour for no reason. In a “good” way. This supernormal sound overwhelms the senses, prompting an involuntary declenching of the nervous system. Or maybe that’s not what’s happening at all. Maybe it refashions the tension into a more flexible general equivalent, something more vague, perhaps more electric, exchangeable in a more amenable series of flows.
A recommendation within a recommendation: I learned about this song through Clout Farm’s very enjoyable interview with Hesaitix, so seek that out as well.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: “Bush Fire Dogg,” Snoopsnort Drugs, Jake Snop
I have no clue as to the true identity of Snoopsnort Drugs, Jake Snop, or the intent behind his only published music - the 2 minute and 33 second long track “Bush Fire Dogg” – but I’ve been obsessed with it for about a decade. I recommend listening to it. The piece is formally experimental: stating, restating, up-pitching and then slowly down-pitching and warping dissonant, modal midi string chord clusters, punctuated by intervening, isolated high-hat fills that duck the strings, along with one-second blips of break-beats, and a disjointed appearance of distorted polytonal guitar. These enigmatic events happen over the course of the brief, mercurial Feldman-meets-Hype Williams style composition; the chord clusters de-pitch and the time warp grinds down with an air of knowing crudeness until it ends with the familiar hat-tip of experimental electronic music: it just cuts off.
I discovered Snoopsnort Drugs, Jake Snop through a long-standing habit of abusing Spotify’s search function to dredge the depths of the platform’s catalogue, indulging my particular curiosity about an emerging, somewhat amorphous category of inscrutable and borderline avant-garde self-released music. Jacques Cousteau (type-shit), but for sounds that go boing, composerly midi symphonies with 0 listens, beatbox trance with phone-in-pocket fidelity, and so on. Among the most interesting (and listenable) finds for me are the hyper-prolific ska-infused John Dowland renditions of British musician Nick Lambert and the “Blue” Gene Tyranny-like mantra-folk white yogi music of Wah!. And I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the totally busted and erratic EDM of Lil Stinky. Much of these are in some way, funny, or at least register in a sort of wild bemusement for me. But cryptic titling, categorically low listenership, idiosyncratic production style, ambivalence and scatalogical monikers aside, they capture an acutely alienated sense of contemporary music production, and suggest a truly lonesome use of the channels for independent distribution. I find the commonality of these disparate examples fascinating and potentially instructive for some questions I’ve posed in previous weeks along the lines of transgressive capacities in expressive mediatization.
Some of the curiosity of these pieces can be accounted for within the well-developed discourse relating to “outsider music” collection and fandom, the increasingly popular labels and releases that peddle in archival and field recordings, and many digital anthropology projects that capture and comment on similar pockets of digital ephemera. However, my interest in Snoopsnort Drugs et al, is driven by a specific articulation they contain: situated at the absolute bottom of global music distribution and evidently, knowingly published with zen-like disinterest toward that fact or else with apparent disdain for the designed function of commercially and institutionally significant channels. Does this pronounced ambivalence suggest a sort of re-constituted radical disposition to digital media? Is it popping up from the cracks of countless UX insufficiencies and flashing covert inspiration from within the slow, but encompassing commoditization of the platform-designer’s optimal metric? Is it trading music’s cognitive labor for algorithmic listening? Or, am I (or we), hallucinating these types of aesthetically distilled resistance, as they either don’t exist, or else lack the basis of commonality that we might perceive, or wishfully (and maybe selfishly) ascribe in the name of an imagined community?
In the Afterword to Benjamin Piekut’s monograph, Henry Cow: The World Is A Problem, he summarizes the dynamic intellectual, political and economic commentaries of his British experimentalist interlocutors by locating Henry Cow’s activity within what he calls a “vernacular avant-garde.” Borrowing from Miriam Hansen’s “vernacular modernism” (which she coined to describe the material and cultural effects of localization in popular culture through TV and other mass media, and which Piekut illustrates for musical contexts with the likes of Louis Armstrong, etc), he situates the “vernacular avant-garde” in opposition to traditionally “elite” and historically deterministic formations of the “avant-garde.” He suggests, “an avant-garde that is vernacular would pursue emancipatory transformations, but it would turn away from the universalizing and transcendent model of total revolution in political, social and economic life.” As Piekut points out, the latin derivation of “vernacular,” in “verna,” or home-born slave, gives a poetic, historical resonance to the persistent structural incongruities of people’s expressions in tension with universalizing channels from which they may seek to liberate themselves. Whether or not Snoopsnort Drugs, Jake Snop is one such Sparticus, I can’t say – but his quiet, ambivalent disdain brings me a lot of comfort.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: 2hollis live at Terminal 5, October 8th, 2025 / star
In our first issue of 2020MG, I discussed “Adolescent Listening” with regards to Julia Wolf’s 2025 album PRESSURE—and a collection of artists that celebrate an effortless technical ability toward production and performance. Arcanely lording above this cultural sector, and a lot of the ideas expressed in that earlier issue, is 2hollis. A recent piece by Alphonse Pierre, “In Defense of 2hollis,” really sums up the artist’s biographical background and general profile, as well as the writer’s cultural experience at one of his shows in 2024. In short, 2hollis is the son of the drummer from Tortoise, his mother is a PR executive and co-founder of Skrillex’s label; and, overall, he creates tracks that bring a maelstrom of cultural aesthetics, emotional registers, and production “breakthroughs” to an extreme—all of which have been taking place for way longer than trends are usually welcome. Pierre wrote concisely: “Really, he’s a rapper, producer, and singer who likes getting off pretty-boy photoshoots and making big, sexed-up rave-rap songs. Plus, he’s got a natural and serious relationship to rap that makes even his goofiest songs really earnest.” My experience at 2hollis’ show at Terminal Five last week was maybe one of the better live music experiences I’ve had in recent years. His performance showcased a refreshing reign over a highly pressurized sound palette that has been steadily evolving over the last fifteen years in digital audio production—giving these sounds a relieving end point wrapped in a lowstakes sigma-bravado that felt at-scale with our current moment in 2025.
This sound palette ostensibly begins with the accessibility of digital audio workstations and software that fast-tracked certain sounds into circulation, allowing a mass audience a relatively easy path to produce “high-fidelity” digital sounds. Quickly, there became novel ways to simulate expensive sounding equipment and fidelity cheaply and efficiently; and, this resulted in breakthroughs in “deconstructed” club, internet/SoundCloud rap, hyperpop (the genre now understood as evolving from PC Music in the earlier 2010s), certain sectors of experimental music, and more. I can honestly say, this musical and historical movement is perhaps the one sector of music I’ve been able to witness from its genesis—giving me a particular ear and taste for it. Overall, this witnessing has shaped a set of values that I can’t completely shake, and an overall outlook I’ll plan to develop in future 2020MG issues. I do maintain a generally futurist, optimistic, and contradictory ideology that believes that we’re waiting on the next big musical breakthrough while relishing in the clashing and confused perspectives we hold about and around music today. I can listen to Taylor Swift and Drake without recoiling or feeling like I need to win an award for best poptimist. Overall, I’ve found value in the devaluation in music. I appreciate artifice and its mechanics and tactics in contemporary music. I enjoy the deception laden within the perception of sound—and the process of recounting sound-experiences after-the-fact when music becomes warped and cobbled with weird adjectives, narratives, and opinions. I believe in how sincere irony can be; and, I believe in how ironic sincerity can be. I also often find it annoying to quibble over questions around authenticity.
It’s consistently surprising how this perspective can feel squarely at-odds with most people’s opinions about music—a situation I’m reminded of on a near daily basis through the aesthetic convictions of others. And yet, every once in a while, I can chat it up with some youthful soul and find total common ground about how we love a particular artist—whether it be 2hollis or whatever XYFDKL$C SoundCloud artist, or even some wrecked pop radio moment, and see the belief in their eyes shining through, wholly and beautifully. This is all to say, at least with other people in their 30s, 2hollis has a maligned quality where plenty of people just can’t stomach it. But I can.
At the show I attended at Terminal 5, 2hollis adopted a Siegfried & Roy white suit with a large inflatable white tiger curled behind him. The day after, I saw an IG story from the show reposted by a producer I highly respect quipping: “someone needs to tell 2hollis that tiger looks like shit.” Sure. Nice jab. The sounds and overall aesthetics 2hollis employs are cloying and over-the-top. The synths and beats are brought into the red in a way distinct from the Opium-verse. There is aggressive EQing, distortion, and heavy compression—but the music is more aligned with trance, SOPHIE, or a recent PAN record than the clipping gauze and reverie of OPM BABI. The music’s focus on precision and lowest common denominator choices—easy drops, tight melodies and rap runs, and overall artificial swagger—made it feel like I was opening up my skull and pouring the dopamine straight onto the dome. Thirteen years later, 2hollis’ production makes something like Jam City’s Classical Curves, a beloved record of mine that for many years served as the pinnacle of a certain sector of production, feel like a lo-fi hypnagogic record. 2hollis’ music literally slaps off the speaker cones; and, there is enough dynamic consideration for silence and the cuts of samples and synths that enframe moments in ways that can truly satisfy. The audience was young and suburbanite—reminding me of the food court post-Hot Topic visit at a mall in 2005. A friend of mine DM’ed “unc in the corner” in response to some videos I posted sweeping the audience from the second tier balcony at Terminal 5. It was very fun and I’d recommend catching him live or spinning his cringe, epic opus star, released this past April.
As a football enthusiast, I was joking with our friend Antonio at the show that 2hollis was giving Wide Receiver energy. WRs are often memed as cryptically tweeting about not getting the ball, sulking on the bench, and carving out adversarial relationships with Quarterbacks and coaches while adopting an undeniably “sigma” mindset. Tall, swagged out, dripped out, slightly malevolent, and highly compensated, the Wide Receiver carves out a solitary but celebrated position on the football field. 2hollis had that going for him. Maybe you’re not giving him the ball but he’s still Him.
—Nick James Scavo