Heart Weapon, Sound Feeling, Bird Catalogue
In this 28th Issue, we recommend considering the circulatory system, the “supersensual ear,” and birds.
Recommendation: Addison Rae - “Arcamarine” Remix (New Coachella 2026 Live Mix)
I’m having a generationally busy week at work—Greater New York (MoMA PS1’s quinennial NYC art survey) opened last Wednesday. The institution is also in its 50th anniversary season and we threw a giant block party for 8,000 people last Saturday. I have a show with ear this week (who I wrote about a few months back on 2020MG), and am kicking off rehearsals for a full performance program early next. My nervous system is shot; I’m socially, professionally, and chemically overextended. The dopamine just isn’t there in its natural state. I can feel the tightness of my veins in my neck and wrists. The music I’m recommending this week is a reflection on this perilous but lit state. There’s no grandstanding about music’s utility in moments like this. It’s literally a chemical vector of emotions—a textural component to rouse, insulate, protect, and animate. There’s also no easy listening here; I’ve been reaching for emotionally vibrant, if not incidental, things that are literally shocking my system AED style to negotiate the tension between interiority and exteriority—a mediating force in between obligation, reflection, and glorious interaction.
Alec referred to versions of this style of music consumption last week as potentially falling into a “sensory-meaning vacuum, sealing the collective untruth of music’s projective meaning in with the individual untruth of its cognitive unintelligibility.” I agree with the majority of his analysis last week—on music’s squeezed and compressed state as a consumptive form outside of its integrated social and collective meaning. I also proffer that this kind of negotiation (something I know we’ve both obsessed over thoroughly) is something I’m at peace with and see no unifying correction for in our current society, at least collectively. While tempting to launch into a more essayistic piece on the slight differences I have on this perspective—the chemicals just aren’t there this week. Instead, it’s a matter of just feeling the musical tension, its slippage, and the in media res “umbrella acoustemology” of our confused interaction with the existing chaotic droplets of musical experience. There’s something special about going nonverbal and just watching the rain come down. In fact, I find myself often drawing energy from the untrustworthiness of our experiences with music, and in the precarity of not knowing where our relationality “comes from”—in not being able to directly face the music. Here, we “Feel the rain on your skin / No one else can feel it for you / Only you can let it in / The rest is still unwritten.” That’s just life.
On these terms, I’ve been replaying a short loop of a new live remix of Arca’s already-existing remix of Addison Rae’s “Aquamarine” nonstop. She performed this new version live at Coachella last week alongside some inspired choreography. The track literally makes my already fast-beating, exhausted heart beat even faster—pushing it to the brink. I’m OK with this. Listening to it literally feels like I’m formulating some pact with my circulatory system, swearing fealty that it’ll be able to rest again soon—a Reggaeton strut, a sigil marked somewhere to secure a future, protective energy field that will help sustain its pulse.
Deleuze and Guattari often wrote the phrase “flee, but while fleeing, pick up a weapon” (French: Fuir, mais en fuyant, chercher une arme), adapted from a letter from Black Panther activist George Jackson. It is at once a call to action and immanent movement that emphasizes their concept of lines of flight—multiplicity as being defined by the outside, and the process of reaching toward that outside on the plane of consistency. Throughout this process, a weapon is grasped in the sheer action of fleeing toward the boundary, as the line of flight marks the reality of a finite number of dimensions within that multiplicity. There is music and relationality here.
That’s all I’ve got this week. Supposedly 10,000 heartbeats lasts approximately 1.5 to 2.5 hours. It depends on whether you have that resting rate of, say, 50 bpm, or an amped up heart rate of 100 bpm. The great Milford Graves talked about heartbeats and the parasympathetic nervous system as a current that ran through his work and percussion practice (maybe a topic for another week). Today, it’s a 100 bpm week—with much flight and many weapons.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Jeune Morty – Ivoire Feeling
Patricia Lockwood has a great essay about Willa Cather in a recent issue of the LRB, titled “Supersensual Ear.” She paraphrases a scene from Death Comes for the Archbishop, set in a cave:
Latour feels a marked unease in this place, which is both sacred and secret; he begins to perceive an ‘extraordinary vibration’. Jacinto tells him to lay his ear to the ground: ‘What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock.’ In the night he wakes and observes Jacinto ‘standing on some invisible foothold, his arms outstretched against the rock, his body flattened against it, his ear over that patch of fresh mud, listening; listening with supersensual ear, it seemed, and he looked to be supported against the rock by the intensity of his solicitude.’ The text grants us, for a moment, the gift of this supersensual ear. The substance rushes deep within the earth.
This passage has haunted my relationship with sound for the past few weeks. The listener positioned just above the earth’s crust, at the lower limit of terrestrial life – the threshold of the earthly milieu – attuned to something “far below.” The bottom of a cave occasioning both connective permeability and lithic separation. This sense of being both places at once, really. Without the ear, one would need a sledgehammer to make their way across.
I have not listened to music with a supersensual ear this week. I haven’t had time to listen intently. Nonetheless, something that I have enjoyed, which has afforded fleeting moments of substantive listening: Ivorian French rapper Jeune Morty’s Jeune Morty Vol.1, hosted by Crystallmess. “Ivoire Feeling” is polychromatic and effervescent and airy. There’s an elegant durational consistency to it. I recommend it. It inspires a sense of spirit.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommandation: Birds, Olivier Messiaen - “Catalogue D’Oiseaux”
I enjoy birds. There are some beautiful regulars in my yard. The nice pair of mourning doves that come every year (I think it’s the same two) waddle around in the garden beds, and don’t seem too threatened by my sitting in the lawn chair nearby. The blue jay, the robin, and the cardinals are also very active in the allotment. I’m going to talk about sound and birds, but the spatiality of birds is really my main subject here. To find them on or near the ground has an unstated mystery, imbued with a kind of foreignness and poetry. These guys fly. They travel tremendous distances, they talk to each other, and they come to the city, to the yard, defecate on the chairs, create nests and have families. Sometimes they die here, and I bury them in my unplanned graveyard, or leave them for the local predators to carry off and consume.
Last week I wrote about acoustemology - Steven Feld’s concept for an epistemology within and through sound itself: the layered experiences of time, space, memory, action, acoustics, and really, the texture of human life and language within our environments. Birds are fascinating sonic figures in this construction of sound and knowing, as even in the city, they impose a continual, high descant above the cacophony of cars, and the loud ambient hum of nearby trucking routes, industrial facilities, endless airplane traffic, etc. They alone occupy this specific, high-middle register of our sonic consciousness. Something that is, sort of, attentionally stable, because almost nothing competes with the arrhythmic cadence, the percussion and spectral melodisms of the bird song.
This past weekend, I slept outside in rural Connecticut on my friend’s property. Sleeping under the open sky has a rhyme in the unconscious mind for me, that fits in with the way bird songs occupy the periphery of the conscious mind. The ceiling gets raised. And there’s a dynamic acoustics to the tones and resonances of day and night, which shifts with the atmosphere, the humidity. A high and dry resonance at dusk, a wetter resonance in the morning, as the air creates a spacious kind of sonic containment.
Still basically asleep on Sunday, I heard two cardinals high above me and a good way to my left and my right, with a piercing call and response. Off to their left and their right: another chorus of these calls and more across the canopy, over the hills. Their distance from my ears (laying on a wood plank, a couple feet off the ground, next to a giant bush of yellow flowers) formed some interiority in the empty space between me and them. I listened for a good while, slowly becoming more awake. Laying still - bundled up and unseen - a rush of multiple humming birds zoomed over my head toward and around the yellow bush: buzzing next to my ears, shooting off, panning forward and back, closer, further. It was a stunning experience of sound and circumstance, and something I generally forget is possible within the flow of my normal routines. It’s a kind of listening that can not be recreated, or fully recalled, except in some unique form of sense memory, anchored in its place and time. It’s nice to simply share that this happened, and that it was a special moment, but my recommendation this week comes from a personal exercise I’ve been trying to engage in since. I want to practice some greater sensitivity to the space in which listening is happening, and also to the range of listening that can be had beyond (but not against) the containment of speakers, instruments, AirPods, or designated venues for listening. I think it’s possible that we can listen to music and sound more fully, experience it within a bigger boundary of meaning, and invite a sort of relational sensitivity to, beyond (but not against) its immediate emotional, personal, social utility. It feels like a good idea to try this out more regularly, and without anticipating or forcing any particular hierarchies of significance. Just observing and exploring an extension of what our ears might do when regarded not just as receivers of the world’s natural sonic “avant-garde,” but as situated co-creators of its clarities and intensities. There are some interesting practices and practitioners of this “deep listening” that maybe I’ll explore in detail later.
And, sort of adjacent to this way of thinking: here is some bird inspired music by the French, Catholic iconoclast composer Olivier Messiaen. It’s a cool and challenging collection that exercises a tension between the atmospheric, mystifying experience of actual bird songs, and the abstract musical imagination of the features and forms of those sounds, as mediated through the keyboard. I’d like to write more about these pieces, but for now, I’ll leave them here. Something else to listen to and think about (that I recommend).
Olivier Messiaen - “Catalogue D’Oiseaux”
—Alec Sturgis