Hearing Loss, Celebrity 2001, Wrong Planet
We return for issue number five. One new album from 2025, one song from the beginning of the millennium, and one unfortunate experience in an ice bath. That makes three recommendations.
—2020MG
Alexander Iadarola, Nick James Scavo & Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Meditation On Losing My Headphones
I recently plunged my head into an ice-bath while wearing my AirPods. The speaker cones screamed out with the finality of my blunder in a thin crackle of NFL podcast banter. Quinshon Judkins, “Bill” Crosky-Merritt; Nevermore. How does one confront the loss of an appendage? This wouldn’t have been the first time I’d dunked, entered the shower, sensed my phantom ear and stopped to ask myself: am I wearing my headphones? All things pass.
There’s a sad quietude in the death of an inanimate technological companion: its embodied extension of routines, and its association with the content it mediates becomes imbued as an accessory to the identity of the consumer. Countless, comforting hours of passive listening at work, the gym, the train, the beach. “You will have many more pairs of headphones,” some will say. And I agree, but do I just put these in the trash? We just took a great vacation. I should’ve cleaned them more when I had the chance. I have had previous headphones, of course. Where are they now?
I admit, I am a sentimental man. Music is beautiful, but maybe I’ve neglected my natural devices – lulled by the constant accessibility of the track, the playlist, the shallow pontifications of goofballs and analysts – lost in my cochlear embrace of Apple’s ergonomic design. Am I so at odds with the sounds of my own bathroom that I can’t go in there without musical accompaniment? This is really going to affect me. And I realize I need to make some changes.
In Roland Barthes’ analysis of absence, he deconstructs it as an eightfold figure. Among other things, he describes the oscillation between normalization (the endurance of absence as a melancholy, exhausted “intermittent forgetfulness and unfaithfulness”) and, on the other extreme: a cadence of frantic, reconstitutive distortions of the absent as present, by virtue of its continual re-staging in the mind, in language and memory, therefore arresting its transition from absent to lost. I kind of felt that way about my headphones when I got them wet.
To illustrate my loss, I’ve taken the liberty of adapting a passage from Barthes:
I take a seat, alone, in a café; the music sounds pretty good. But my headphones are absent; I invoke them inwardly to keep me on the brink of this mundane complacency, a temptation to listen to my own music. I appeal to the “truth” of the barista’s playlist against the hysteria of seduction into which I feel myself slipping. I’ve never enjoyed The Smiths, but maybe there’s something to it afterall. I make my headphone’s absence responsible for this, my worldliness: I invoke my headphone’s protection, their return: let my headphones appear, take me away, like a mother who comes looking for her child, from this worldly brilliance, from this infatuation, let my headphones restore to me ‘the religious intimacy, the gravity’ of my own headphone listening world.
Anyway, how do we amend our understanding of the future and past once unforeseen forces transform the terrain on which we ground and maintain our habits, and lose traction in the presupposition that these would remain as we knew them? I don’t know. I may indeed purchase another pair of headphones. When I do, maybe I’ll also listen to The Smiths in some new way that’s personal and as of now undefined to me. I recommend contemplating such things.
The master holds the head of the disciple underwater for a long time; gradually the bubbles become fewer; at the last moment, the master pulls the disciple out and revives him: when you have craved truth as you crave air, then you will know what truth is. (Buddhist Koan)
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: NSYNC - “Girlfriend”
The year is 2001. This was the final single released off of NSYNC’s fourth and final studio album, Celebrity. “Girlfriend” was produced by the Neptunes, the same year they put their stamp on Fabolous’ “Young’n (Holla Back),” Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” Ludacris’ “Southern Hospitality,” Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U,” and N.O.R.E.’s “Nothin.” A remarkable run if ever there was one.
We encounter very precise, crystalline structures here. The harpsichord figure is the skeleton, but it does relatively little. Most of its movement transpires through syncopated amplitude variations. Its melody would not stand on its own: it sounds like noodling, two digits meandering across the keyboard. In the context of the larger arrangement, though, this rhythmelodic figure is exemplary. Timbral contrasts bring the song to life: we locate the skeleton’s formal counterpoint in the doubled, shelf EQ’d, and delayed diphthongs in the pre-chorus.
Meanwhile, if you lock in to the granular beatboxing – it’s easy to miss if you’re in background listening mode – it almost feels like you’re listening to Ryoji Ikeda. The restraint governing the economy of space affords heightened impactfulness to elements whose impact might be more modest in a busier arrangement. This allows things to remain ever so slightly off-balance so as to hold interest. This dynamic foregrounds what makes me return to this song again and again: its intimations of endlessness. Elements establish themselves, repeat or vary, then things move around. Eventually it ends, at which point I listen again.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Gatekeeper - Wrong Planet
Gatekeeper is one of my favorite bands. The duo of Aaron David Ross (ADR) and Matthew Arkell returned this week with Wrong Planet, their second album and first proper release (excluding fashion, DJ, and radio mixes) since Young Chronos, released on Presto!? in 2013—twelve years ago. A lot has changed in this Decade+. For one, the collaborative matrix the duo has operated within—one spanning soundtracking fashion runways for LUAR, contributing to OSTs including Uncut Gems, or ADR’s collaborations with Ryan Trecartin, Ashland Mines, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Telfar, DIS Magazine, and more—is a cultural architecture that certainly still exists, with a clear and significant impact, but one perhaps left wondering what remains in the wake of its influence. Without jumping into a total post-op analysis of 2010s culture, I’d like to posit the return of Gatekeeper as something more eternal than the cultural conditions it has operated within. The project has celebrated sign-dance—exploring horror, Imax, fantasy, fashion. Throughout their work, a fealty has been sworn to musical impact, to the portrayal of genre, and to engineering the material of sound as well as the apparition of its cultural “mist” into sheer music. Gatekeeper’s skill is an ability to weld the molten core of a genre-specific experience into special forms—a rarefied metallurgy, an artisanal obsidian-craft. They are true genre machinists.
Gatekeeper was a core musical experience throughout my youth—and with the release of Wrong Planet—I’ve been asking myself why. I think it has to do with the audacity of the music itself. When you play a Gatekeeper track, an immediate severity of style runs in parallel to a twisted sense of humor, one that can provoke the listener to feel like a joke is being played on them. Relishing in this tension, the project stews in the contrivances of genre and culture, to the point where it doesn’t matter if you’re in on the joke or not. A new affect appears—the power of music. Their 2012 album EXO and 2013 EP Young Chronos have two of my favorite tracks of the 2010s—”Encarta” and “Imperatrix,” respectively. These tracks assert themselves by being truly over the top in their expressivity of synthesis and flagrant dramatics. They are using every dynamic tool possible to extract a shiverous reaction; and, they are pure bangers. If you take them at face value, they represent an unmistakably 2010s spirit—a total righteous abandon in executing an idea to the point where a subject begins to rip itself apart. And what’s the idea here? Again, I believe it to be the power of music. As a media experience, a musical experience, to feel powerful when beholding sound—with a sorcerous manipulation of synthesis and control of an available technology—is the dream. I find the pure unrestraint of these tracks to be especially admirable now.
Wrong Planet picks up where these tracks left off, incorporating the style of their breakout and most remembered EP Giza in its visual iconography and focus on pure synthesis. Alongside the album, they’ve released a bespoke website experience “wrong-planet.com,” that itself harkens back to 2010s web experiments. The site features a winamp style player—the kind where you could load in custom skins—with EQ presets, downloadable assets, github documentation, and a viewer that casually displays full music videos for each of the tracks. Wrong Planet distills the Gatekeeper experience into a clean thirteen tracks—a fidelity masterclass that foregrounds the duo’s particular atmospheric malice and forceful production. In 2025, the music almost comes across as baroque in the detail of its synthesis. The album focuses on the vibrant, morphic core of synthesis modulating over the vertebrae of rhythm underneath—cascascading arpeggiation (“Gross Excelations,” “Bone Window”). The sequencing of the album’s many, many arpeggios forces an inquiry into the form of the technique: sequences of notes from a single chord that are played one after another, instead of simultaneously, a “broken chord.” Coming from the Italian word arpeggiare, meaning “to play on a harp,” the technique also emphasizes the rhythmic gaps between the notes in the sequence. This gives the album, and Gatekeeper’s overall compositional technique, a “pocket presence,” to how the arpeggiations line up with percussive hits and breaks. It’s extremely musical in this syncopation—and even amusing still in the rhythmic buoyancy these tracks provide (“Crusted Aucklet,” “Breadmaker”). The result is funny in the way I described the duo’s tracks from the early 2010s—but perhaps more materially on Wrong Planet.
The aesthetics of the album itself—jeweled chalices, static filtered dungeon keys and passageways, hourglasses, skeletal figures, mirrored portals, and the like—of course all inform the mood of Wrong Planet. They secure the devotion to the genrework happening. Their presence and an aggro-tech, industrial, progressive synth palette, flow as a stylistic way of life. Gatekeeper could generate hundreds of these types of tracks and images seemingly into the horizon line; yet, it’s through a plane of consistency that the album and project are able to come across as a worldview, beyond the sum of its parts. To assemble a phalanx of musical and visual aesthetics—a practice that establishes Gatekeeper as an archive of itself—allows the iconography to fall away into something deeper. The duo wants sorcery, and they find it in the music, in its conjuring.
I’ve walked around FiDI with ADR a few times over the past year and always leave the interaction kind of blown away. Ideas and projects flow like vapor throughout the city. In the maw of capital, speculating various demises and ascents—he brings up projects like a political buzzword filter and visualizer, or an app that could instantly generate conspiracy videos on any given topic on demand, or working with countless artists throughout the world, or his next recording project. As the blades of music become dull, Aaron and Matthew keep them sharp. As we walk past the Oculus World Trade Center, he points out a gargoyle above that sneers down at the alley below. A crow takes roost on the parapet.
—Nick James Scavo