Hyperslop Rebuttal, Lovely Walk, Speaker Ecology
This will be Issue 19. This time, we recommend some additions to, and correction of, recent hyperpop discourse, a new track from Hackney’s alternative pop / nü-jazz scene, and a concentration on music’s healing psychedelia, via Disco and David Mancuso’s enduring legacy.
Recommendation: PC Music x DISown Radio ft. A. G. Cook, GFOTY, Danny L Harle, Lil Data, Nu New Edition and Kane West
Last week, X-formerly-twitter dot com erupted into a series of reflections, provocations, and discursive miscellany around the intentions and origins of “hyperpop.” The conversation surfaced as a reconnaissance toward how the genre—its vernacular use being highly contested, but not without categorical utility—has emerged and developed over the last 15 years. This was all largely churned-up as a response to Jesse Dorris’ review of Danny L Harle’s Cerulean on Pitchfork, which stated that “Whatever else hyperpop was—rambunctious, pleasure-forward, sonically inventive in tech and tempo, buzzy in all senses—it was never earnest.”
I’ll block quote the rest of the paragraph for full context, Dorris writes:
“Danny L Harle and the rest of the PC Music org folded post-electroclash, Adbusters-style culture jamming with 4chan-y shitpost nihilism to a gabba beat. Clenched with irony, hyperpop chomped its bubblegum until the bubble burst. Behind production boards, its agents worked with geniuses like Charli XCX to remake pop in her own image. But in their own work, they went hyperprog. SOPHIE released a sprawling double album of shapeshifting anthems and transgenre experiments, followed by a posthumous one that largely failed to realize even loftier socio-political-rave ambitions. A.G. Cook and Arca released triple-plus albums accessorized by coding, fashion collabs, video art, re-dos. Anything, it sometimes felt like, instead of being vulnerable enough to risk failing at making something someone might truly, deeply love.”
This position is just incredibly wrong. Even spiteful. To me, Dorris reflects a rockist bias (i.e. “vulnerable enough to risk failing at making something someone might truly deeply love”) that I would have hoped had muzzled itself at this point in 2026—especially in its uncomplex evocation of a trite irony vs. sincerity dialectic. It’d be better practice to simply say the music is bad and give reasons for why it’s bad, instead of offering such a stilted and altogether revisionist sketch of a complex history of digital technological emergence and one of its resultant musical styles. For me, I think so much of the generalization of “hyperpop” has largely led to a proliferation of plenty of shit-ass music and production-platitudes within DAW practices and sound palettes. This is one-and-the-same with any genre saturation that occurs when an appreciating audience begins to occupy a depreciating sound rather than simply compose and produce music with ideas. Personally, I’ve grown to not really enjoy quirked up random sounds glooped onto a DAW. After the progeny of some of the artists listed by Dorris above, we heard a ubiquity of high fidelity sounds that indulged in the sheer novelty of just slapping shit on the grid, which to my ears resulted in plenty of annoying music.
I have my own negative opinions about the later years of PC Music (especially the total Charli-fication of its legacy; I also didn’t really get through 7G and Apple), and even worse opinions of music they’ve indirectly influenced; but, those early formative years couldn’t be more earnest in what they clearly set out to compose. It was called Personal Computer Music. These artists, overcast by their influence, shouldn’t be held responsible for the resultant whack music made in their wake. A.G. Cook and PC Music became influential by basically updating the concept of the “player piano” into Ableton Live, with a pretty light hand, adjusting basic parameters to make sure the MIDI was sounding concise, and fitting into formal pop structures. In an interview before their “POP CUBE” performance in 2015, Cook was quoted as saying that “98% of his music is ripped off from the great 20th century american composer Conlon Nancarrow,” see “Study for Player Piano No.41a,” which reveals a parallel history of MIDI music and automation that conceptually unites with their early automation/intervention musical project. The musician d’Eon recently tweeted “so many [early PC Music] tunes hovered around III, IV, V, VI chords; using the III instead of resolving to the tonic has a weird optimistic tension and nothing else in the 2010s underground used that harmonic language. I used to tell people I thought PC Music sounded like Handel.”
More, the PC Music x DISown radio mix from 2014 was a massive impact event for this resultant sound, emerging as a part of the DISown exhibition at Red Bull Studios in NYC, which also featured an exhibition with visual artists Lizzie Fitch & Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, Bjarne Melgaard, Jon Rafman, Dora Budor, Jogging, K-HOLE, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Nick DeMarco, Shanzhai Biennial, Timur Si Qin, Katja Novitskova, Telfar, HBA, DIS, and more. The union between DIS and PC Music was explicitly focused on examining taste and consumerism—still two areas that are the center of our bottomed out tech-adjacent aesthetic discourse in 2026. The fact that this was all sponsored by Red Bull directly resulted in QT. They did this extremely earnestly, as an art project, and a serious music project. Even the term “hyperpop,” used by writers on Tiny Mix Tapes as a critical genre term as early as 2006, was applying critical tools from a speculative realism/accelerationism background—as it was also used by the CCRU crew in the 90s as an offshoot of their hyperstition concept. The entirety of any kind of theoretical thought process behind “hyperpop” has become swallowed up into its replication as a genre, which is a shame. Or not. Given that this sound is clearly here to stay, especially as it’s trickled up to actual pop stars, let’s not get it twisted that there were once actual ideas here.
For me, PC Music x DISown Radio stands as the definitive statement of the PC Music oeuvre and a masterclass in the collective MIDI sound that was proselytized widely and still very much in vogue today. It also helped popularize the mix as a new kind of album, one that audaciously premiered and distributed completely original new music and “exclusive content” with an effortless surplus value. This was all extremely novel at the time. No one really cares about these gestures anymore—as this is all par for the course—and that’s OK. The mix has savant-level composition, it has swing. It has an insane remix of Burial’s “Archangel” by Kane West. Most importantly, it has ambition. PC Music went on to sign a deal with Columbia, Danny L Harle went on to produce for Carly Rae Jepsen and Dua Lipa, and of course, Cook produced the majority of Charli’s albums from Number 1 Angel onward. At its start, the mix proclaims: A. G. Cook is 23 years old. That lit a fire under my ass as a 22-year-old when I first heard the mix in 2014.
In a recent interview in Cultured Magazine, A.G. Cook takes up a version of my suddenly-relevant-again position and rallies “Against Worldbuilding.” He was asked: Why do you say you’re resistant to the word “world-building”?
He responds: “The world building I don’t like is media that overexplains. But I really appreciate this sort of dream logic; that’s what makes it feel larger than life. When doing these zoomed-out projects, I just don’t want the audience to take away something literal from it. I want them to be able to feel it and then dig deeper. It somehow makes it more lifelike rather than giving someone a key and barraging them with detail.”
Unfortunately, with both the legions of hyperslop producers ruining many a club night, or this Pitchfork writer trying to vapidly historicize his earnestness, this might be a bit too much to ask.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Leto Grand, “Lovely Walk”
“Hello Grand audience… Exciting times!” — the tagline (and, this week, a sentiment I share) of the mysterious British singer-songwriter and saxophonist, Leto Grand. He delivers it in a Michael Caine–like Hackney baritone fry at the start of every promo video for gigs at bars, clubs, local festivals and backyards, from London to the Channel shore in Hastings. I encountered Leto’s music, due to his promotional efforts online, advertising his new single “Lovely Walk,” and an EP of the same name (featuring four remixes and an alternate, extended version of the tune). I have not heard anything quite like “Lovely Walk.” Knowing nothing about Leto or his music, the track’s minimalist drum groove, supporting a spare mix of crunched, dry synth bass, full staccato sax chord hits, and the strikingly crispy, sibilant, bassy condenser mic whisper of Leto’s vocal delivery impressed me in its strange and swaggering idiosyncrasies. It’s agnostic disco energy recalled for me the prestige conceptual “live band” grooves of Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra, and the home brewed sound of its production and mix, infused with Leto’s (I suppose) north London affect engendered in me an instant curiosity about the music and its creator.
“Lovely Walk” opens with a skit in which Leto introduces himself to the lovely walker (I recommending listening, now):
“Hi.” “Hello.” “Excuse me, uh.. excuse me… what’s your name?” “Grace….” [echo effect, repetition of the name, laugh] “‘course it is.” “...but my friends call me Amazing Grace, go figure.” “I’ll bet they do.”
Seeking additional context beyond the new release and its many variations, I found a “documentary” on Leto’s YouTube account, that I recommend viewing for an additional, textured view of the man behind the music. Basically, (if you check out the video, perhaps you’ll agree) Leto seems very cool. The “aura” presented in his musical persona is well grounded in his general bearing in the behind-the-scenes footage of he and his 7-piece band’s performance in a Hackney backyard party. Tinted sunglasses at dusk, alto sax hanging at his neck, relaxed hand signals to the horn trio at his right, generous introductions and interviews of what seem to be longtime collaborators in his band. For me, beautiful stuff: the stuff of someone who loves and feels music at his core, loves making it, and loves performing it with respected colleagues.
As I attempted to peel back layers in the myth of Leto, I wanted to also gain some perspective on the type of scene he is involved in. What are these shows like? Who else is on the bill? What does their music sound like? And, frankly, what is this style of music? While I’ve made personal associations about it, I really have no clue as to the intent and influences that are behind it. I’ll resist projecting more of my interpretations on this particular front, but will relay just a bit more context.
For their recent New Years Eve bill, Leto shared the bill from The Star in Shoreditch (simple black text on white 8.5x11): Doors, 6:00 PM; Leto Grand, 6:30-7:00; Hazlo, 7:15-7:45; Arianna, 8:00-8:30; Secret Love Orchestra, 8:45-9:15; JNVO, 9:30-10:00; Curfew, 10PM. A tight group for the pre-count-down hours. More may be said about each individual act, but the gestalt of the evening was somewhere in the neighborhood of an alt-pop, jazz, funk, ska, and, (as JNVO self-describes) “Nü Jazz,” persuasion. Further contextual digging revealed these acts as a pleasant mix of serious, yet green, amateur groups, ostensible professionals, and those in between like, I suspect, Leto Grand: aged - like the 6 year germination of “Lovely Walk” (as indicated on Bandcamp) - to a fine vintage, where mysterious aesthetic refinements and community ferment in situ. We could all hope to be so chuffed.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Nick Straker Band - “A Little Bit of Jazz”
The historical significance of the Loft is formidable and well-documented – many of our readers will be familiar with Tim Lawrence’s Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979. If not, you are encouraged to seek it out.
I went to the disco party for the first time this past weekend, on the occasion of its 56th anniversary. Though I was excited to go, I made an effort to do as little conscious expectation setting as possible. It wasn’t that I wanted to be surprised, but that I sought to be open and present. Some experiences are diminished by too-active tabulation and comparison of mental notes.
I have been intermittently rereading Love Saves the Day the past few months, and picked it up the night before. This supplied a couple generative frameworks. The first was the concept of the Bardo, which founding Loft organizer David Mancuso describes adapting from Timothy Leary:
Leary wrote that there were three stages, or three Bardos, in a trip, and I found myself using the same structure. The first Bardo would be very smooth, perfect, calm. The second Bardo would be like a circus. And the third Bardo was about re-entry, so people would go back into the outside world relatively smoothly.
In another passage, Lawrence writes that Mancuso sought to make his audio system “sound as real or live as possible,” and relays a moment that inspired the project:
‘There was this little stream that went into a quarry,’ said Mancuso. ‘It was maybe a few feet wide, and there were these little whirlpools that looked like speakers, so I leaned over and got as close to them as possible without getting wet. The sound was incredible. It was the cleanest sound I had ever heard, and there was all this information. It was almost as if I could hear the history of life, not in words but in music.’ The experience raised Mancuso’s life energy. ‘It made me happy. I knew it was correct. It was constantly giving birth. It wasn’t repetitive. It was as organic as you could get. It was coming directly from the source. And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could record this correctly so that when you played it back it would be accurate enough for you to empathize with the original moment? I wanted to be able to hear the spirit of the babbling brook in my room.’
This is an incredible quote – there’s so much there, and we want to make sure we track the key parts.
Let’s begin with whirlpools that look like speakers: two kinds of ecologies, an ecology of ecologies. A speaker transmits and amplifies but does not create sound, while whirlpools are the result of gravity, water, and geology. Does a whirlpool transmit sound, or create it? For Mancuso, they resemble each other visually and also functionally, in the moment of audition. He is bringing different types of signals to our attention, underscoring their commonality. We are thinking about energy.
Mancuso leans over and hears an abundance of information. He hears the history of life, not in words, but in music. (Music seems to be positioned as a better communicative medium than language. How can we conceptualize the relationship between musical and linguistic capacities? I need to revisit Gary Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music.)
Let’s put special emphasis on the figuration of history here: it’s one thing to listen to a whirlpool and be immersed in the present moment, but it’s another to listen and hear history. Mancuso hears this information that is constantly giving birth, generated directly from the source. It is correct. He wants to record it accurately in order to play it back and hear the spirit.
During the second Bardo, the circus Bardo, I ran into Jack and Brittany. Nick Straker Band’s “A Little Bit of Jazz” played and it was possible to hear the spirit.
—Alexander Iadarola