Firework Music, Beatbox Boîte-à-rythmes, Ambient Equanimity
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 ft - “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.
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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