Indie Evaluation, Real People, First Principles
Thank you for joining us again for our second edition of recommendations. This week, we each addressed some specific dynamics of insufficiency within the cultural construction, consumption, theorization and creative imagination of music. Drawing on a shared perspective about contemporary aesthetic contradictions, mass-cultural sinkage, and theory’s stalled-out role in creative production, Alex, Alec, and Nick offer case-studies of emergent limitations in musical media and the instances of failure and invention therein that we find compelling.
—2020MG
Alexander Iadarola, Nick James Scavo & Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: A Good Year — Dealerz with Quiet light & Late Verlane
Is this indie pop? In its original moment, “indie” declares itself an antithesis to mass culture as exemplified by major labels. Indie means “independent.”
If we make our evaluation according to the music’s means of distribution, we might say: Yes, it is true that this is not on a major label.
If we turn to timbre, instrumentation, and arrangement: Yes, it sounds pretty DIY, all things considered. Care and attention went into it but the edges are just a bit rough, and allegiance is kept to the aesthetic markers of deprofessionalized craft.
If we are concerned with expressive register: Yes, we identify the narrative disclosure of some set of humanist, personal concerns. Rumination, catharsis, etc. (This is music decidedly from the point of view of an individual subject. I feel big feelings about something or other. A straightforward contrast for purposes of illustration: James Tenney’s “For Ann (rising)”. Impersonal, an experiment in a laboratory, fixated on some generalized set of parameters constituting audition. There is a time and a place for both modes.)
I like listening to this, and similar things that I learn about through Organ Tapes’ NTS show, which I really value. The song checks boxes. It seems to know what I’m looking for, and locates it directly. Pop songwriting is not easy to do, and I do feel something when I listen to this, or, more precisely, I sense the outlines of a feeling I have felt. Something comes back to me. On some concrete level, we are talking about functionality.
Lots of this revivalist or revival-adjacent DAW (digital audio workstation) guitar music that emerged after the pandemic initially struck me as viscerally strange for the way that it seems to enunciate its internal contradictions. Pop music for the internet: a banal idea on the surface but odd when you spend time with it, noting how its meaning changes over the years. I got a drink with the art historian Molly Nesbit over the summer, and something she said in passing stuck with me: “Everything aspires to be mass culture now.” For a range of economic and technical reasons, we understand that this is a structural condition, which is to say, one that is always reckoned with, purposefully or otherwise.
I don’t get the sense that anyone is calling this “indie” even though it sounds like “indie.” I could be talking about a large number of contemporary projects, A Good Year is just one of them. I like this for the way it sounds, but I bristle at some element of its form. Something to do with the specific way it aligns with the surfaces of the DAW’s grid. It is clear and very precise. Sonic Youth “sold out” 35 years ago, and I am not complaining about quantization: the metronome is 200 years old. I suppose I’m looking for some irreducible remainder that sticks around after the collision between a popular form – an industrialized form – and a niche sound circulating within a self-selecting community of music enthusiasts. I want a song to ask more of me.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: C.S. Yeh’s The Anchor
“Real People Art” is a term I’ve often heard C. Spencer Yeh use to describe his notion of a genre-less, indeterminate expression of vulnerability in contemporary music. It’s something that emerges where the musician’s “real people-ness” – a digital echo of creative intentions, cultural significations, failure, and incidental invention – is exposed and amplified as a new object, resulting from aesthetic incongruities within medium, style and the bare musicality of what things actually sound like. This idea is in obvious contrast to the dominant historical perspective on the musician as someone who is supposed to have clear control of the vision, execution and affect of their work. It feels a bit silly to point this out given all of the intellectual efforts of cultural theory, experimental music, and so on, committed to challenging this notion. However, much of that discourse appears on the extremities: focused on work that either problematically embodies that principle of control, or explicitly challenges its primacy as a matter of form, in a direct, dialectical fashion. The huge, under-articulated middle space of “Real People” – where the challenge to musical truth-value is incidental and therefore, opaquely and magically cogent – is where Spencer’s diverse catalogue of projects, and the C.S. Yeh moniker in particular, resonates for me (such that I recommend it).
The Anchor (self-released on Yeh’s What The…? Records) is a five-song EP in the world of his previous 2012 full-length collection of songs, Transitions (De Stijl). Both feature catchy pop tunes which foreground Yeh’s unmistakable baritone in an exposed, swinging juxtaposition with the flat, grid-like evocation of a liberated band-in-a-box. The lyrics deliver gothic one-liners with an enlightened pessimism, diaristic mantras and deadpan relationship autofiction:
“Margaritas in the Village baby I was 60-minutes late.
Oh then we dined at your favorite restaurant
It was second rate doesn’t matter anyway”
The Anchor’s first track is a surf rock adaptation of the Italian prog group Goblin’s “Suspiria.” This, combined with the melancholy anthem that follows (“The Anchor Sinks Alone”) recalls a sort of Platonic expression of pop music, like in Brian Eno’s song-based records. Yeh’s own omnivorous fandom comes through in layered details like this, that form their own minor iconic moments - interjecting playful suspense within these referential, off-the-shelf song forms. “Once An Entertainer” mirrors a weary ballad (“In my past life as a trumpet…”) with simplistic piano, eliciting a devastating remembrance of childhood piano noodling in the mind of the archetypal defeated artist. These instances of fleeting referentiality continually implode and reform on the steady emotional core of Yeh’s vocal performance and lyrical disclosure. The brief and dynamic EP races over a cliff with the final track: an upbeat and dissonant rock pastiche that culminates emotional insights in a final address, speaking to analogies of “the system,” “justice,” and “wage” – a final disappearing act, where the contexts of the preceding songs crash and burn in a fire of Springsteen CDs. We can imagine Yeh escaping the blaze.
Spencer is a proven impresario of these lucid complexities. In the course of collaborating on our occasional Montez Press Radio show, THE AMERICAN ANTHOLOGY OF FLAT MUSIC, I’ve witnessed his unique analogical style of thinking about music. He draws from deep cultural and aesthetic expertise, leveraging abstractions of salad composition, feline love, and noodle-spot obsolescence to discuss the dynamics of production in soundalike artists, karaoke politics and the interpretive tensions of performance within the competing ideals and technical conditions of music. In my recommendation last week about Strauss’ and Ashley’s operas, I discussed a form of transgressive embodiment within narrative and musical dynamics. Spencer’s work, and his “Real People” music on The Anchor, brings this gesture to a type of cultural and technological end-node. Instead of gently kissing the disembodied head of a saint (Salome), or slyly exposing the cosmic banality of death (Celestial Excursions), The Anchor performs a true escape-artist routine: handcuffed to the platitudes of genre, hung upside-down by the poverty of digital music production. We can watch with amazement as he opens his arms and bows, and only imagine the hidden key with which he frees himself.
“Well only cowards disbelieve in the promise
When it’s the promise that keeps fear in their hearts.
And I’m the rabbit who believes in the magic
When it’s the magic that keeps me in the dark.”
—“Condo Stress,” C.S. Yeh, Transitions
Keep an eye out for distribution for C.S. Yeh’s The Anchor.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Kieran Daly live at Lava Club, September 17th, 2025 / Kieran Daly’s “Unprompted Trio Movement or Some Timbre Transfer Sequences” released on Tutorial Island
The other week, I attended Lava Club, a new show series run in a Brooklyn apartment organized by Simon Hanes, to see Kieran Daly, C. Spencer Yeh, and Keith Fullerton Whitman perform their music. My recommendation this week focuses on Daly’s performance and his recent release on our friend Jeff Witscher’s new cassette imprint, Tutorial Island. Daly is a Chicago-based musician that, let’s say, has “made waves” in certain circles of improvised, formalist, computer, “non-,” and other “last discourses standing” of contemporary music—employing a “first principles” approach toward a powerful, unified theory of what it actually means to be an experimental musician today.
Kieran has been performing improvised monophonic guitar solos “focused on forms of bending, honking, stepping, and tuning, that reference jazz standards and technique in a way that functionally integrates these forms.” His recent performances can easily elicit both laughter and anger—as well as outright dismissiveness or passionate support—as a kind of confrontation, and open questioning, of the operative framework and confusion that performing solo experimental music publicly often provides. Before attending the show at Lava Club, I opened up some YouTube videos of Kieran performing for a few of my colleagues at MoMA PS1. Just playing the various honks and bends from my office computer speakers was like releasing blood in the water for circling sharks—ears perked up, people walked over, and many laughed, commented, and engaged with the sounds that were coming from my desk. A line of basic questioning was still happening in the setting of a contemporary art museum. It was irresistible in the office environment—like pulling out some stank leftovers from the shared refrigerator. To me, it was a delicacy.
While having little to do with its actual formal approach, Kieran’s solo guitar performances ambivalently extract and annex the errant “meaning making” that happens at shows. Plenty of experimental music has forced audiences to adopt coming up with “on the fly” unique opinions and gut-check responses often due to the music’s groundlessness and function as a purely rhetorical practice. The “solo individual presenting their work at a show” model has become the de facto mode that many musical subcultures have been using for decades. Instead, Kieran performs an actual demonstrative formal exercise—the entire point of a lot of music—yet an approach that has become somewhat rare or novel to contemporary audiences. Simultaneously, Kieran’s performances also acknowledge how idiomatic improvised music has attempted to cultivate principles of form and practice; and, he finds a way to install these principles in a manner that reinvigorates improvisation out of the virtuosity, audience catharsis, spectacle, or deconstruction that many players have adopted through extended technique and other forms of more socially accepted and celebrated “out” music. In this line of thinking, Sean Tatol posited “If music, like history, repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, Kieran Daly is the farce of modern composition.” Overall, I tend to agree with Tatol’s analysis and response to Kieran’s music, which he outlined in a five-star write up of a performance a few years back. The knowing smirks and consistent chuckling that follow Kieran’s music create a tactical guise that belies his profound attempt to reintegrate musical form within the aforementioned confusion of contemporary music. Kieran presented strings of notes—bent, muted and inflected through the tone knob. He demonstrated that music can indeed become a wholly rhetorical system if it’s not taken on the terms of its harmonic structure. This idea is clearly running along an opposite current from how the vast majority of people in 2025 consume and approach music.
Recently, I’ve come to appreciate Kieran’s music even more because any faux-controversy or scandal around his music, and even aspects that many have deemed to be humorous, are starting to naturally fall away, at least for me. They have become reduced into the discipline, and sheer hopelessness and hopefulness, of engaging with music as a “serious” project. In a way, I’d like to eject Kieran’s project out of any dialectical understanding of the progression of experimental or contemporary music. His performance was, to me, an existential and generative testament—an affirmation of human will. I realize that this philosophical background could be used to affirm basically anything—but here I’m focusing specifically on will as something necessary in parsing through the interpretative abstraction of music in our current society. Within Kieran’s framework, platitudes and disappointments that are common in the practice of experimental music appear as unacceptable within the conditions he’s setting up for his music—something that feels important. The open framework of this specific performance gave way to a cascade of presentational voicings. To my busted and over-exposed ears, it was enthralling to simply take in the presentation of the notes—not dissimilar to experiencing the music of Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, and Alison Knowles performed by master cellist Charles Curtis at Blank Forms a few weeks ago.
I’ve run out of space in this issue to fully analyze the works on the tape he’s released on Tutorial Island, in favor of talking about the performance at Lava Club. Regardless, I recommend checking out the two pieces on the tape—as they obviously elucidate many of the ideas expressed here. Side A is a piece for flute, piano, and violin, that in Kieran’s words “focuses on a quasi-homophonic keyboard texture of primarily major and minor triads underneath a harmonically nebulous melody played in unison with violin.” Side B “primarily uses elevenlabs voice changer as a dynamic timbre transfer tool to supply a compositional morphology from source audio files of monophonic non-speech sounds generated by the composer using digital synthesis and electric guitar.” You can grab a tape from the “Tutorial Island” link above, or talk to Jeff.
After the show, Kieran, Jeff, Spencer, and I went to a bar. We talked about music. I was inspired by the way Kieran spoke about how his music came from a place of simply “needing to hear these sounds”—compelled to record them, compelled to perform them, to produce them and listen back to them as a lifelong cyclical process and project. We joked off-hand: “I ruined my life for this shit.” Me too. And fine by me.
—Nick James Scavo