Friends, we’re pleased to recommend these selections: on Fan Fiction, electronic music materiality, and a bundle of favorite listens over the past year. We hope you enjoy.
Recommendation: Worldpeace DMT - “On God”
New music sometimes sounds like old music. Sometimes this new-old music closely resembles the old music it models itself upon, and other times it differentiates itself. Why would that be? I wonder if fan fiction could be a useful model for thinking this through. Fan fiction does not operate the same way as pastiche or revivalism, a couple terms frequently used when approaching this question. Fan fiction is something different.
Though I know relatively little about fan fiction beyond what my friend THIRDLOOKintern has told me, I’m drawn to its unofficiality and the self-selecting nature of its readership. Twilight fan fiction will only ever garner so much respect from people outside of the fan fiction community – and it might even be rejected by various factions of that community – to say nothing of the literary powers that be. Outsiders typically regard fan fiction as fringe, silly, or a mere curiosity. People who write it do not hope for a New York Times book review.
Fan fiction authors and readers gather around their subject matter because they presumably like it – do people write fan fiction about things they don’t like? – and want there to be more of it, or want there to be different versions of it. They conjure alternate timelines, canonical inaccuracies, and all manner of illegitimate rewritings. What if things happened differently in the world of this familiar thing? Often a good question.
I listened to the new Worldpeace DMT record – a buzzy new album, for those not familiar – and while I wouldn’t consider it indie pop fan fiction tout court, parts of it feel like it. I don’t have strong feelings about the album one way or another. It definitely sounds contemporary, but it also sounds like stuff I would listen to in high school. The stuff I listened to in high school often sounded like stuff from decades prior, but a little different. If I was asked to muster an argument about the type of pastiche this Worldpeace DMT album enacts, I could do it, but it would feel like a laborious exercise. At the moment, it’s not something I feel particularly moved to do.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Andy Stott - Late Loop
We often discuss and conceptualize sound with material language despite it being immaterial. Waveforms are often described as being carved into, pulled apart, stitched together, spliced, stretched, etc. I love listening to electronic music because I can visualize it through material and visual language, adjacent to the energy of sound. Digital interfaces provide a frame for this language to be represented, seen, and manipulated. Many producers work exclusively in this audio-visual framework. Looking at waveforms. Shaping them with equalizers and effects. Arcs and currents, knobs and rotations. I think the visual atmosphere of production is underrated as a formative component for how we listen to and discuss electronic music.
I listened offhand to Andy Stott’s new album Late Loop the other day and it immediately pulled me into this vocabulary. Back in 2014, I did an interview with Stott for Tiny Mix Tapes (archived here) where he delved into his production process. I was 22 years old then, awake at 5am and nervously phone calling Stott, who was in Manchester at the time. I remember a particular quote of his: “You know it’s right when it feels like it’s pulling the back of your head off.”
Stott’s music feels like a testing ground for how we describe and approach sound’s adjoining materiality. It’s truly producer music. Perhaps drawn into it due to its clarity of fabrication. We can hear, and almost see, how featured vocalist Allison Skidmore’s vocal files are cut up and organized in time—or how a pad is automated to rise out of silence. Its concision invites imagining its visual organization, or summons material language. There’s a mise-en-scène to the vocal samples, the individual percussive hits. It’s all just there as a kind of spatio-temporal sculpture.No funny business. In fact, it’s often extremely serious.
Of course, the material impact of sound also occurs through the matter of the body. With Stott’s music historically, this has happened through raw and highly processed bass frequency. It shakes as an undercurrent beneath debris of percussion and field recordings. With Late Loop, bass is swapped for a study in mid-range, giving it a threadbare (again, a material adjective) almost Burial-like sound. Stott reminded me how the phantom material of sound is such a component to the productive imagination of electronic music. The room shakes enough to where we grasp onto whatever we can.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Bob Marley, Selda Bağcan, The Gentle People
Approaching the end of 2026, I’ve been revisiting some selections that felt salient to me, or which I enjoyed this year. I recommend these.
Bob Marley - “Waiting In Vain - rare acoustic - long”
An older recording I’ve been returning to a lot this year is a nineteen-minute long, 1978 archival recording of Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain,” that I came across on YouTube. The tape features only a couple of electric guitars and bass, with Bob singing and repeating the song probably five times. This has always been one of my favorites from the Marley songbook. The performance is free and easy, including extended vocal improvisations, tags and spare instrumental expositions and bass solos. The reduced texture of the version, its compressed audio quality, and uncomplicated, extensive repetitions create a sort of sonic vacuum within the familiar groove of the well-known tune. It’s pretty obviously interesting to hear live demos and archival recordings that stretch our perception of canonical records. My recommendation here is, really, to enjoy listening to and for “raw” music without overthinking it too much. And, you don’t have to be Bob Marley to rationalize jamming with your friends. A final note of inspiration on this selection: the YouTube comments are incredible, and convey the spirit of the music well. The top contributor says: “I made a proposal to my girlfriend yesterday while Bob jammed in the background. She sais yes and I am the happiest person in the universe right now. Love to everyone! Thank you Bob!”
Selda Bağcan - 40 Yılın 40 Şarkısı (1971-∞)
Easily one of my most-listened-to collections of music this year is this 2xCD box set compilation of the Turkish singer-songwriter Selda Bağcan. Spanning 40 years, and ranging in production style from grainy psychedelic rock (“İnce İnce Bir Kar Yağar”) to digitally polished, cosmopolitan folk (“Duvarda Sazim”), in which the traditional Mey woodwind embodies a saxophonic accompaniment. To say that the combination of Turkish folk idioms and instruments with a rock production style is exciting (it is) feels like a simple and distracting observation; the powerful and, for me, obsessive through-line of this catalogue is Bağcan’s voice. She sings with a unique and mesmerizing swagger. The 1975 song “Yuh Yuh” features the doubled-strings of the bağlama in a cycling microtonal rock pattern, creating an addictive friction with the western-fretted, diatonic electric bass line. Bağcan’s vocal performance lays over this cantering pattern with an easy mastery: relaxed, stylish and commanding. Bağcan’s music extends from a fascinating personal life - spanning decades, political turmoil, periods of imprisonment, etc - and I recommend giving all of it some attention.
The Gentle People - “Soundtracks for the Living”
The Gentle People - a group of British, American and French producers and artists, formed in 1994 - has been interesting to me for years, and remains so in 2026. Their blend of electronic easy listening and ambient techno resonates with much of the sample-based subcultural explorations of the ‘90’s. The Gentle People has a specifically “global” affect (compared to more localized aesthetics of contemporaries in Shabuya-kei, etc), and a seamless quality of ironic refinement that impressively dodges any potential smacks of misanthropy. Their 1997 debut “Soundtracks for the Living” is a sort of psychedelic lounge album. The video for its lead single, “Journey,” opens with a hallucinatory dive into the looking-glass of a bubbling cheese fondue pot, which opens onto a dreamlike, Warholian pastische. I recommend The Gentle People in 2026 because I think it offers a much-needed kind of model for electronic music that - in spite of the rip-currents of commercialization - is sincerely concerned with being fun, and it engages that mission with a high level of consideration. The basis of the conceptually stimulating and culturally salient tracks is an appreciation and open curiosity about source material (whether directly sampled, or else derived in spirit, in a kind of stylistic iteration). Given the accelerating nature of this kind of cultural exploration within the more compressed media ecology of 2026, I think it’s important to keep these examples close at hand.
—Alec Sturgis