Interpol Lyrics, Funk Tabularasa, Kundalini Mindset
Happy 2026 to all! We’re pleased to return from our holidays with recommendations in the form of a revisiting of Interpol, a consideration of Brazilian music aesthetics and a sound bath experience.
Recommendation: Interpol - “Obstacle 2”
Going home for the holidays can make us inclined to revisit memories. I bought this album on vinyl at Amoeba Hollywood in high school.
I feel like love is in the kitchen with a culinary eye / I think he’s making something special and I’m smart enough to try
How often are Interpol lyrics interpreted in good faith, engaged with as if they ought to be taken totally seriously? This is more of a comment than a question. It probably happens frequently, given Interpol’s multi-decade popularity, but I do not know anyone in this interpretive community and I do not recollect encountering this analysis anywhere. I have talked to a lot of people in the past ~20 years about Interpol lyrics and nobody has ever even tried to make a cogent argument regarding what Paul Banks sings about. We simply agree that his songwriting is strange, and that the lyrics can benefit from their strangeness.
Pitchfork published an interview with the band in 2012, discussing the making of Turn On The Bright Lights for its ten-year anniversary. Banks weighs in on his frame of mind at the turn of the millenium, addressing the lyrics of the song “NYC”:
I was into these notions of chaos and fascinated by the interactions of species and the idea that people perceive a harmony in the world. But in reality, if you look at all the ways that species are parasitic and codependent, it’s almost like they have this arbitrary interconnectedness. It’s just total fucking chaos.
[Regarding the line “the subway, she is a porno,”] I was in that weird, college-age headspace, and that was one of those ways to make a heavy-handed generalization about an aspect of culture. But explaining these kind of things ruins it, because the point with a lot of them is for listeners to go: “What the fuck does he mean?”
I don’t really follow everything that he’s saying here. TOTBL is a great album. I recommend it.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: DJ ARANA, MC CAROL 011, YURI REDICOPA, MC LC KAIIQUE - “O PACTO”
It’s the dawn of 2026, and I am seeking out blank slate music to kick off the new year. I came across “O PACTO” a few years back on a Discord channel, accompanied by the message “music has been perfected in Brazil.” I like hyperbolic statements like this. The epithet enframed my first listening of the music as a perfect music, and a Brazilian music. The opening of 2026 has also seen many rediscovering Tati Quebra Barraco, Brazilian funk MC and pioneer of funk carioca/baile funk, the now widespread genre emerging from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in the 1980s as a singular blend of Miami bass, hip-hop, and afrobeat. Barraco’s track “Boladona” resurfaced and went viral over the past couple of weeks. It’s a banger that distinctly samples Layo & Bushwacka!’s iconic track “Love Story,” and has given my brutal back-to-work train commutes some intrigue and character over the past week.
I love Brazilian music and have always wanted to go to Brazil. If a TikToker flagged me down on the street and asked me who my favorite musician was, I would probably say João Gilberto. I went through a phase some years ago where I almost exclusively listened to golden-era 1960s Bossanova from a bluetooth speaker shoved behind a couch pillow—halfway muffling the speaker—giving the sound a liminal proximity that sounded great. I suppose this was an attempt to spatialize the articulate, sunlit atmosphere of stereo Bossanova recordings into a more muted zone where the music resonated in a discrete, peaceful half-light.
This odd behavior calls attention to what I think is the most prized musical figure: spatialization. More than any other musical figuration, concept, theory, or device, spatialization in both stereo recording and in live, natural, or acousmatic environments ends up being the difference-maker for so much music. The intentional spatialization of music can exploit the localization of sound sources in both physical or virtual space—figuring sound’s spatial movement in thrilling ways. This has been present in Western music from biblical times in the form of the antiphon (the call and response in ambrosian and gregorian chanting music and more), and since the dawn of time and space naturally through the organic spatialization of waveforms and sound sources. It also exists as a highly intentional practice in the various theories and practices of 20th century experimental and electroacoustic music. More, it’s the basic premise of mixing sound in recording contexts.
“O PACTO” is a spatial anomaly within the context of stereo recordings, and is Brazilian music wholly different from Tati Quebra Barraco or João. It’s an absolute mindfuck of a track that feels like a factory reset through its treatment of space, and its unusual choices in production overall. From its start, wide trails of reverb drift in huge billows, evaporating at the horizon line of musical utterance. The track’s bass rhythm compresses everything in deep undercurrents, sucking the baille funk vocalizations asunder, as sine-wave arpeggiations or detuned sawtooth trance waveforms cut through the mid and high frequency ranges. It’s rare to hear such a destabilizing whirlpool of a composition. MC CAROL 011’s vocals are cut around the two minute mark in a way that’s demented, shaped into a repetitive, resonant squawk. Overall, the sweeping nature of the track feels like brushing the slate clean. It’s the kind of track that invites you to open everything up—insert silence into the DAW, delete the extra stuff—cut, copy, paste, repeat, and let the silence of the speaker cone become filled with sound, only to drift away again.
The production decisions made on “O PACTO” are a bit hard to pin down. The track fits into some of the same phenotypes as the “Wonky” or “Deconstructed” music that emerged in the 2010s, genre descriptors that were used to signal at odd or surprising choices made in the production of electronic music (this can be heard, for example, in TNGHT’s 2012 track Bugg’n). These subgenres encoded an overall value system in its listeners. Occasionally, at least, it’d be nice to be blown away or beguiled by the mixing and production of electronic music.
Afterall, it’s 2026. I want to hear exaggerated musical tracings of the spatial and linear forms of music. I want to hear sound arising and descending back to and from a horizon line, a degree zero—a blank slate, tabularasa.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Breathwork, Non-Musical Sound
I became a ClassPass member more or less by accident a few months ago. I wasn’t trying to overhaul my routine or get seriously into Pilates. The idea was to check out a few local sound baths, write about them, and cancel before the month ended. Instead, I got sort of hooked. The wellness offerings accumulated, the writing didn’t happen, and the subscription stuck around longer than planned. Following up on my sound bath resolution, I finally got in the sonic tub, and it feels fitting to begin 2026 with this contemplative experience.
I entered my local yoga studio for the Kundalini Sound Bath offering, found a mat toward the front of the room for maximum gong exposure and stretched out to wait for the instructor’s direction. I’ve been getting into yoga recently, but my only association with Kundalini had something to do with Sting’s tantric sex life. Turns out it’s about awakening dormant spiritual energy through cultivated breathwork, postures and chanting - a slow, relatively interior practice compared to some of the “hot,” more movement/flow oriented styles. Waiting to begin, I was very much creeped out by the devotional mantra music playing in the space: melancholy chant over a new age christian style minor chord progression and an expressive vocal inflection that grated against my expectation of something austere and less distractingly woo. All good though. It’s been interesting participating in this uncannily sober gathering of local millennials. Collective quietude and contemplation outside the matrix of performative channels are not hallmarks of the generational culture as I’ve experienced it.
The class began with a chant, then a set of long durational postures, which served as the foundation for a series of intense breathwork exercises (serious stuff: I started sweating early on, sitting completely still with my arms stretched out). The weird mantra folk still played in the background, but thankfully receded in my consciousness behind the cadence of breathwork sets, as they became the central figure of the practice. Things got deep as the more circular breathing turned into long cycles of holding breath - miniature deaths before long drawn out inhalations. It really felt awesome and I was frankly surprised and impressed by the degree of physical and cognitive immersion that accompanied the practice. The “sound bath” was structured at the end of the class (the last quarter or so), as clearly, an intentional vibrational cleansing experience (my understanding being that the breathwork is directed at moving internal energy and the sound bath sort of shakes out and resets errant vibes from the outside).
We all laid down and the teacher began about a 15 minute sequence of sounds with the gong, chimes and powerful sine-waves from the speakers. I haven’t heard a “set” like that in a while, and certainly not after 45 minutes of intensive yoga. Drifting through my mind as the broad harmonic spectrum of the gong washed over me, I was considering the ways this experience differs from much of the experimental music I’ve seen and participated in. There’s a common gestural space between the two rooted in an acceptance of the radical sonic potential of instruments to affect the physicality of a space and of the people therein. But, as in my reflection about the rare sense of millennial quietude, this lacked any of the performative meaningfulness of the experimental. The sound simply affected me, rather than being intercepted by my compulsive, analytic mind as a music listener. I was refreshed by the way this afforded me an opportunity to experience myself within a sonic context where the organization and integration of perceptions felt completely secondary - perhaps totally unnecessary - to its “non-musical” functionality.
My music-analytic mind feels sluggish at the start of the year, and I don’t mind that. This experience left me with a set of questions to return to—about experimental music’s often-invoked yogic lineage, about its practical psychologies, about what it might mean to encounter sound not as an object of critique but as a technology of recalibration. That’ll do for right now.
—Alec Sturgis