Making Work, Funk Xenoglossy, ABCD Villager
Good afternoon. It is with sincere, yet proportionate, contrition [sorry, readers, for the delay in publication!] that we recommend thinking about the psycho-creative bleed between visual and sonic experience, another exposition on Brazilian “Funk,” and a meditation on early-music social-linguistics.
Recommendation: Slipknot - “Everything Ends”
I really like Kelsey Isaacs’ paintings. About a year ago, her husband Nicholas Bermeo – also a great painter – told me that she had been listening to a Slipknot song on repeat while making work. This was interesting to me.
Take a look at Kelsey’s paintings and this will be interesting to you, too. Teeming arrays of reflective surfaces propagate across the picture plane, where an individual array is often composed according to a loop or multiplication principle. There are various methods of image generation and reproduction at work in each array, and the eye races in particular toward disjunctures or frictions between and among arrays. Minute synthetic objects serialize themselves into aggregated mass-surfaces, bouncing light back at the viewer from a constellation of points too informationally rich to permit casual optical-spatial integration, due either to number or intensity. Something happens to our experience of depth in particular, which reconfigures our orientation. There are grids, consumer packaged goods, materials for making things, materials for measuring things, materials for changing how things look. These works depict things I am not sure I am supposed to see, or perhaps I am not sure how to see them. The eye attempts to trace distributions of energy and activity.
Now, whenever I see Kelsey, I ask what she has been listening to. Her most recent response: “A high-pitched noise in my own head. Something is wrong with me. I’m not really listening to music right now.” This helped me understand that the body, mind, nervous system, genomic data, umwelt, and whatever else all come together to form an instrument. This is an instrument that can play itself. I asked what the Slipknot song was a year ago, and she thinks it was “Iowa.” She also recommended “Everything Ends.”
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: B0YG1RL / Novagang: EXIT 2B
Back in January, in the first 2020MG of 2026, I wrote about an epithet I had encountered: that “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 saw 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 in early 2026 and went viral on various feeds. It’s a banger that distinctly samples Layo & Bushwacka!’s iconic track “Love Story,” showcasing an origin point and overall resurgence and evolution of the genre at our current moment.
It was also a big week at my day job (and night job, and morning job, midnight job, etc.) at MoMA PS1. We announced Warm Up 2026, the series I organize with my colleagues Kari Rittenbach and Sheldon Gooch, which this year especially features musicians from Brazil. Although we couldn’t land Tati, the line up features RHR (São Paulo), BADSISTA (São Paulo), DJ Working Class (São Paulo), and DJ Anderson do Paraíso (Belo Horizonte)—the latter of which I first heard at the recommendation of Alex Iadarola, perhaps in one of our earliest pre-2020MG ideation meet ups a few years ago. He showed Alec and I Anderson’s Nyege Nyege Tapes record Queridão. I remember us sitting there in complete silence, stunned at the artist’s dark, architectural arrangements—where a haunting, lone trombone sound could carry the weight of a full frequency bass blast.
In this context, this week, I’m recommending Miami duo’s B0YG1RL & Novagang new Surf Gang-released record EXIT 2B, a combination of baile funk, Haitian kompa, rage, underground, reggaeton, and digicore. I absolutely love it—unifying at least a few experiences I’ve had at recent Terminal 5 shows, seeing 2hollis and Nettspend, with Funk’s infiltrating rhythmic force in 2026. In previous 2020MG writing on funk (“Funk Tabularasa”), I tried to draw out spatialization as the primary engine of DJ ARANA, MC CAROL 011, YURI REDICOPA, MC LC KAIIQUE’s stunning track “O PACTO,” exploiting the perceived localization of sound sources in virtual space—figuring sound’s spatial movement across the receding horizon of silence. Instead, EXIT 2B is flat, compressed music, stacked like sediment in the style of recent underground and rage rap. More, I love the way the vocals are cut, stitched, splayed out, flattened—a testament to how recordings of the human voice are as ubiquitous and manipulatable as they’ve ever been in human history. I’ve only just recently started recording voice notes myself; files that are charged up, locked in time, infused with emotion and the weather of the moment. Each vocal cut on EXIT 2B feels this way, VNs flying around the tracks as an orchestra of fanning, spiralling files.
I’m thrilled enough by EXIT 2B to not necessarily want to describe it more or talk about it too much more. It feels like a language that I can understand without ever having learned it by natural means. It was transmitted in a different way.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Josquin des Prez - Faulte d’argent
I’ve been in a sort of medieval villager mindset the last few weeks, I realized today. The conditions of work, material life, and alternately rushing and milling around in Ridgewood without interruption have created a bit of a flat mental terrain. Not necessarily a bad thing in this case, but I’ve found myself seeking elevation through renaissance motets and chansons. I guess that’s what supplied this realization. I’ve been deeply worried about what the bishop will think if I fail to sow the necessary crops on the Abbot’s allotment. But there is no bishop, really. Or there are many bishops. Or I’m the bishop.
In any case, I was playing guitar the other day in a manner consistent with the harmonic conventions of the 15th century. I was being pretty lackadaisical about it - not precious with the progression or voice-leading. It sounded good to me in a flat but emotive way that reflected my workmanlike state of mind. ABCDEFG. All very beautiful. Major, minor, nice. My only conceptual interaction was with broad syncopations in the rhythm to keep up some general early-music stylistic coherence within the harmonic meandering.
I’m considering this exercise as a kind of analogy in the arrangement of basic organizational efforts in time. In pre-“functional” harmony, it’s all pretty acceptable. And historically, conceptually and functionally, the rules of harmony emerged not from the sense of correct progression in the vertical sense that things must move teleological into alignment per se, but from the way in which independent voices lead to, from and between moments of physical and metaphorical stability. The “verticality” evoked is architectural - an always-already coherent material space - in which the negotiation between particularly resonant moments in time becomes the object of meditation. Sonic frankincense, or, the alphabet.
We can play any chord we like. They all sound good. None of them will offer some particular or special elevation. But there is a lot of headroom in practice - a lot to listen to and for. I recommend choosing some things and practicing the way you move between them.
—Alec Sturgis