Grown-Folks Music, Energetic Experience, Hecker Aporia
Happy Valentine’s weekend from 2020MG. Issue 18 contains recommendations of some contemporary southern soul music, a daily-life meditation on the wide energetic net of music, and a look into Florian Hecker’s new PAN release.
Recommendation: Avail Hollywood “The King of Grown Folks Music” and Jeter Jones “Da Kang of Trailride Blues”
I’ve been fairly obsessed with the music of Avail Hollywood and the broader circuit of southern soul musicians with whom he associates for a decade or more. Across the southern state lines with Jeter Jones, Nellie “Tiger” Travis, Omar Cunningham, J. Red The Nephew, Jefree Charles, et al, there’s a particular “grown and sexy” sound of synthesized horns and band accompaniments, sequenced drums, slow and easy tempo for tailgates and back road rides, and “mature themes.” This style of southern black music, its cultural tradition and deeper, complex history feels important to point to and also defer on (“‘The Chitlin’ Circuit’ And the Road to Rock ‘N’ Roll” by Preston Lauterbach is a place to start). I am, at least, equipped to recommend this music as a fan in describing a few things that I love about it.
Avail’s persona and the themes in his music live in a suspended world of categorically grown people (“25 and up,” in Avail’s estimation) navigating life, partying, meeting, breaking up, and engaging in many forms of adult activity (“Hit Me Up, On Facebook,” “Tung On It,” “Drinking Again”). The music’s atmosphere tends to certain extremes of human experience: celebrations, relationship struggles, sex. His story-telling takes place on a canvas of practically archetypal (and, numerous, taxonomical) adult interactions, but within these he manages to expose depths and details that are often omitted in mainstream treatments of these classic human themes, as in the song “25 and Up.”
“You know my big homie Wendell B was in town the other night, so I went to go check it out. And I knew it was gonna be a special night because… soon as I walked in the building I saw the baddest chick I’ve ever seen in my life. She had to be about 45… hell it had to be her birthday because she had that money print on her shirt. I ain’t gonna lie, I was so nervous, but your boy Hollywood had to go approach her. Well I build up my confidence. Being a young man myself, I went over to her and she told me, she said: ‘I’m officially grown and sexy, and I can see that baby, because I’m officially 45. And I’m looking for a good man, to put that spice in my life…”
“Is you 25 and up? And do you do grown folks stuff?”
There’s a certain journalism to Avail’s lyrics that appears in sync with his life and persona as a channel of the grown folks life and lifestyle, and imbues the music with a sense of confidence, authenticity and place. Photos from his Facebook account show incredibly lit, high production performances of his southern soul music for full venues of mature couples and singles alike - sometimes dining, mostly dancing. The scenes are fun and it’s not difficult to imagine how “The King of Grown Folks Music” continues to find inspiration for his material.
Alongside this setting and venue of the dinner club and the dancehall, there’s “the country” - back roads, the horse trails, the local tailgate party - which also figure large in the themes of this style of southern soul. Another king, Jeter Jones (“Da Kang of Trailride Blues”), offers his own particular set of songs and stories. His are centered, with pride, on expressing the celebratory heights of country folks gathering in trucks, on horses and ATVs, drinks flowing, music playing. There’s a deep country identity that is not only so clearly important to Jeter, but again, seems to reflect and sustain the life of the venue, the party, the music itself.
This is one of the things that I find so special about this music and its style of production and presentation: the music comes from a sense of place with immense pride, takes up its forms, exults musically in a certain clarity of its genre, engages it with artful invention, and provides new stories and new standards for new generations of folks (grown, and soon to be grown, and in remembrance of things grown).
I recommend this music, and I also recommend (if you’re in the Atlanta metropolitan area this valentines season) that you take a special someone down to Jeter Jones’ show at J.R. Crickets on Old Dixie Hwy in Jonesboro, Georgia, Saturday night. (If things are getting serious, I feel confident recommending the Jeter Jones Country Boy Lovin’ Cruise this Fall.) Chicken, steak or salmon? Asparagus on the side. Happy Valentine’s Day.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Kevin Ayers - Religious Experience (feat. Syd Barrett) (Singing a Song in the Morning)
I generally listened to music in a functional manner this week. I listened to it on the Stairmaster, reading a book and occasionally looking up at the television. I listened to it walking around, in-between tasks. It is part of my energetic economy. There were a number of moments when I listened to music closely, but I mostly turned to it as energetic stimulus, creating connective tissue between things.
I went to Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night to see Varèse’s Amériques, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. There was a huge speaker maybe 50 feet above the center of the stage. I had never seen a speaker exactly like that before.
I also listened to this Ayers/Barrett song for the first time in several years. It is like a bright light. I recommend it. These are the lyrics:
Singing a song in the morning, singing it again at night
I don’t even know what I’m singin’ about but it makes me feel I feel alright, yeah yeah
Makes me feel I feel alright
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Florian Hecker - Natural Selection
It’s nice to see a new Florian Hecker CD released on PAN records in the year of our lord 2026. Reflecting on the label a bit, there was a time where I was writing about a new PAN release every month or so—enthusiastically consuming every record in the catalog and writing a series of concept-driven fragment-reviews on M.E.S.H., Bill Kouligas & Amnesia Scanner, ADR, Rashad Becker, Konrad Sprenger, the mono no aware ambient compilation, and more. The Tiny Mix Tapes website keeps crashing (blame Marvin Lin), so I’m not linking to those here, but critically engaging with the label’s progression was a big part of my musical life for many youthful years. Here in 2026, I still avidly keep up with PAN’s catalog and look forward to its output. I’ve noticed shifts in my own interpretation of their releases, and my own willingness to fully engage in its various interests and subject matter; but, this is more a reflection on how my own attention-span and music consumption has changed, how labels have changed, even how PAN has changed—its own evolutionary gradient and omnivorousness being just as admirable as its canon. It’s nice to see PAN ebb and flow through the current of music’s own shifting contexts in both the club, the noise basement, or the Kunsthalle. Simply, I appreciate a 9-track brick of a Florian Hecker album released on CD-ROM format on PAN in February, 2026.
In anticipation of writing on the record, I dusted off my copy of Hecker’s Chimerizations text, published on Primary Information in 2013. I also briefly revisited Resynthese FAVN, a 10-CD box set and publication released through Blank Forms in 2024. The PI text includes contextual essays by Catherine Wood, Stefan Helmreich, and Reza Negarestani, as well as expanded references to his works “Hecker Leckey Voice Text Chimera,” a collaboration with Mark Leckey (with a libretto by Reza). The Blank Forms box set includes contextual essays developed in collaboration with Robin MacKay/Urbanomic, texts from philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, and more. Similar to PAN’s catalog, there was also a time where this philosophical and musical milieu was a deep pool of study and infatuation. Admittedly, about as quickly as I took these tome-ic works off my respective book and record shelves, I just as quickly put them back. I wasn’t really able to go there, and that’s worth exploring here a bit.
Revisiting Hecker’s work has unveiled a series of pretty basic observations and queries on the composition, production, and reception of computer music. More than any specific concept, motif, or compositional gesture, the act of plugging your computer into a soundsystem and presenting sounds to a mildly interested, if not defenseless, audience is one of the more baffling “norms” of musical assembly I can think of. The lack of transparency for presenting this kind of “concrete” computational sound will forever be a subject of fascination for me. Especially without context. We have to ask: What’s going on with these sounds, my friend? Throughout Hecker’s Natural Selection we hear movement—impacts, textures, sonic motions that go upwards and downward, side-to-side. There are brief moments of brushstroke synthesis, intervened with periodic silence, auditory illusions and quadratic sequences. There’s an organizing principle throughout the tracks, the press release for the music notes the album is a “constellation of pieces originating from related investigations [...] these works have been grouped together because they share very specific properties, using correlated modes of synthesis and approaching timbral metamorphosis in a similar way. Pieces that might seem incongruous at first are united not by one concept, but by a cluster of queries that Hecker has been probing diligently for the last few years, ideas related to automated file selection, database-generating sequencing systems and the prospect of synthetic cognition.”
That’s about as far as either the press release, or myself frankly, are willing to go with the work. Overall, I’m somewhat disappointed in myself for not necessarily being able to meet Hecker’s Natural Selection on its own terms, or where “the composer is at” with these pieces. This basic disappointment also recircuits back into the act of presenting computational music. So often, we are never truly able to meet computationally-generated music on its own terms aside from the act of simply listening to it. The details are not revealed, its processes—often wholly opaque. Or, perhaps this is truly its own terms? Which puts it back firmly within the category of “noise music.” We see the sonic result—which is in fact the music—but often without its procedural context. This act has become very familiar in our ChatGPT-fueled society. Here, we are in a mist of after-images and imprints, prompts that beget sequences of text and images. These materia, and in this case, this music, are the thing. Or, is it what produced them (the prompt, the process, the context) that’s actually the thing? I think this basic fundamental query is what drew many to computer music initially, and what provoked many of us to theorize and behold it so enthusiastically in expanding so much extra context around it.
I’ve also got a copy of Ted Gordon’s “The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America” queued up to read. I have a feeling this text would make some prescient observations on these points. For now, I’m mainly just enjoying the act of remembering the utter rabidity that I once had to consume and contextualize this kind of music. Again, via PAN, Natural Selection “doesn’t require any rigorous background study. In fact, it’s one of Hecker’s most playful and approachable sets in years, exhibiting the same balance of intensity, mischief and brain-twisting theory that made albums like Sun Pandämonium and Acid in the Style of David Tudor so enduringly influential.”
Maybe so, maybe so. Natural Selection actually mildly irritated me and made me feel anxious and kind of bad. But I appreciated noticing that.
I recall a series of concerts organized with my friend Eric Frye at ISSUE Project Room years ago that featured his music, alongside legendary composers Curtis Roads and Beatriz Ferreyra. Those shows were life-affirming testaments to cloaked processes giving way to the multi-channel presentation of computational (or in Beatriz’ case organic) sound. I walked away from those shows feeling imbued with energy given from the sounds that had swirled around me. I wonder if computer music could make me feel that way again (as it also did with Acid in the Style of David Tudor, most thrillingly). I’m almost pretty sure that it could, despite maybe not getting there with my listening to Hecker’s new album.
Instead of a Chimerization, in Robin MacKay’s words “integrated bodies that synthesize incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, finding a common ground, or reducing one to the other,” with the recent Hecker I’m drawn instead to the Greek mythological figure of Lethe. Lethe is the personification of oblivion and the underworld’s “river of forgetfulness.” Souls drank from this river to forget their earthly lives—one of the five rivers of Hades contrasting with the river of memory, Mnemosyne. In 2026, as opposed to 2014, computation, and perhaps computational music, might have me drinking from that stream.
—Nick James Scavo