Martini Yogini, Telephonic Communication, Dido Mereology
Good morning from 2020MG. We recommend three things, as we always do: the yoga and downtempo music of Wah!, a consideration of code logics in sound and media, and a look at protagonism in Dido.
Recommendation: Wah! “Kal Akal” from The Early Years
I was cycling through some pretty serious topics to write about this week: an in-depth album review of a friend’s work that I haven’t quite been able to land the plane on yet, a look at the pre-revolutionary Iranian rock of the incredible Kouroush Yaghmaei. I’ll get to these, but I’m a bit tired. This week I want to recommend another recording that I’ve been obsessed with for years: “Kal Akal” by the L.A.-based yoga musician, Wah!.
I love the way this recording sounds. The understated walking bass line, e. piano major 7th chords staggered lazily within the thin texture of the band, super chill swinging drum kit with only a jazzy hi-hat and kick drum to speak of (no intermediate drums to be found), and the gentle, easy, but piercing resonance of Wah!’s Wah Devi repeating the simple mantra of “Kal Akal” for literally 30 minutes without variation or interruption.
There is a ton of contemporary yoga-adjacent music out there, and it runs the gamut from north-Indian classical and Carnatic influences, tranced-out mantra EDM, Didjeridoo beatbox core, euro-primativism and tribal song, hardcore synth drone, chakra frequency attunements, meditation and relaxation music, turnt Hare Krishna folk, and so on; but I’ve never encountered anything like Wah!’s The Early Years recordings, and “Kal Akal.” It’s sort of a perfect, inscrutable document for me of some hyper-localized, west-coast cosmopolitan mantra style. Beyond its overt references to yoga, the music leans heavily, for me, into the aesthetic domain of Arthur Russell’s “Tower of Meaning” or “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s Trust in Rock recordings with Peter Gordon and company. Given Russell’s “bubblegum buddhist” ethos and Tyranny and Gordon’s respective esoteric alchemies with the elements of high-conceptual propositions and popular forms, it’s very easy to superimpose the intellectual stakes of these experimentalist projects onto a shared formal and stylistic plane with Wah!. Beyond the obvious processes of repetition that these all share, there is also an omnivorous cultural sensibility that accepts popular music genre signifiers and amateur aesthetics as natural - and even galvanizing - contributors to some larger progressive late-20th century American transcendental milieu.
Looking into Wah!’s background, this sort of intellectual/cultural resonance seems unlikely as a mere coincidence. She attended Oberlin Conservatory, studied African dance and music at the University of Ghana (before a coup cut her studies short), danced/choreographed in New York for the Angela Caponigro Dance Company, joined and left a number of Ashrams and spiritual communities (including that of the disgraced Yogi Bhajan in New Mexico), and finally settled in Los Angeles, where she began her recording career in earnest, and opened for Hole (Courtney Love’s band) in the late 90’s, in addition to producing successful albums in the alternative pop and yoga space. A pretty solid CV, that gives me greater confidence in the non-coincidence of her subtle stylistically charged idiosyncrasies as existing within the large pool of American vernacular avant-garde activity.
I want to recommend a counterpart to this early recording of Wah! for context. “Girl in the Video” has the sonic markers of the world beat and eastern music styles, but is a more secular expression of typical Wah! themes. I really like the track, with its Zero 7 pop fusion, Sade-like vocal affect and Michael Franks-ian high-minded, but simple, lyrical overtness. Over wah-pedal guitar, Wah! sings about the complicated search for divine feminine love in the mediatized life of aughts-modernity.
“She stands in the smoky light show
Lights, smoke and mirrors is all she’s ever known
She stands without reverence and takes on the audience
She’s the girl in the video”
It’s nice for me - after really only listening to The Early Years, for years - to hear Wah! on such worldly and existential terms. The Early Years recordings offer what is essentially an “aura photograph” of the electromagnetic resonance behind the trappings of this later funky downtempo. It brings to mind the mantra she sings in “Kal Akal:”
“Death, Undying, Great Death, Undying, Undying Image of God, Wondrous Teacher.”
The channels may change for the girl in the video, but the undying image remains in continual re-emergence.
— Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Héctor “El Father” feat. Wisin & Yandel - “El Teléfono”
I complimented a friend on her nails. Previously burgundy, now muted pearl. Asked the name of the color, she said “A120.” I hadn’t heard of that color before. Last week I learned about a genre called “cosmic phonk,” this week I learned about A120. It’s good to learn.
In Reformer Pilates they say: “For this one, let’s do one yellow and one red. If you want a challenge, do one blue and one red.” Five color-coded springs undergird the machine, tuned to different measures of resistance. The Reformer is composed of a series of interlocking multi-purpose apparatuses. One instructor tells us to imagine breaking it apart with each exercise. Listening to cosmic phonk, freshly aware of the gel color A120, vertebrae unencumbered because of one yellow and one red and breathing a certain way.
Where are we headed with this? Toward the telephone, and the touch-tone dialing system. When you tap a number on the telephone keypad, you hear a tone. Landlines used to do this, computer phones carry the convention forward. Different numbers have different tones. You use the numbered tones to initiate the process of sending a signal through the air. Cellularly. Different springs at different resistances have different colors. We are thinking about codes and information processing.
Can you remember the precise relationship between number and pitch on the keypad? I can’t. They don’t ascend in tandem, do they? The code’s logic communicates functionality and aesthetic incidentality. One imagines the engineers saying that it ought not to be too expressive. Wikipedia: “The [Dual-tone multi-frequency] telephone keypad is laid out as a matrix of push buttons in which each row represents the low-frequency component and each column represents the high-frequency component of the DTMF signal.” Low tone from 697 to 941 Hz, high tone from 1209 to 1477 Hz.
Three songs that utilize telephonic tone-codes with ingenuity: Héctor “El Father” feat. Wisin & Yandel’s “El Teléfono,” La Materialista’s “La Chapa Que Vibran,” and Fabolous’ “Young’n.” The first utilizes the touch-tone dialing system as a melodic element, the second samples a phone receiving a message on vibrate mode, and the third samples a two-way alert.
— Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Dido - “Here With Me”
Fresh off my first readings of the I Ching last week, I’ve had a bit of what Bachelard and Althusser call a “Rupture épistémologique,” an event where mental obstacles—unthought or unconscious structures that were immanent to experience—get busted down. They spoke about this in relation to the history of science or dialectical materialism/Marxism, the falling away of old knowns as things become further known. I’m referencing it as satori. Everyone I’m talking to right now seems quick to acknowledge that we are living in a divinatory moment, called to consult oracles, hedge bets, or make unknown appeals from within and without—from polymarket betting, AI consultation, to the constant casts and speculative asks toward what’s going on, and what’s about to happen. Against the background of a groundless and uncertain state-of-affairs, casual conversations drift into this emergent mysticism, its own epistemic rupture from any economic or materialist analysis of the technologies we’re intertwined with. Althusserian thought falls away to satori-inducing epithets, deference to some mystical pull: year of the fire horse, hexagram 23, planets aligning how they may, UFOs existing within the split of the atom, whatever else.
This week, these conversations have been soundtracked by the music of Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong, or simply “Dido.” I’ve listened to “Here With Me,” the debut single from her 1999 album No Angel, at least a hundred times since last Sunday afternoon. It’s a beautiful, devastating, uplifting song. Dido’s music fits into a catalog of adult contemporary self-help music that many are reaching for in 2026. Its dubby intro feels at home within the slew of recent electronic music that appeals to downtempo conventions—attempting to fit into a cadre of rainy-UK-windowpane music. Ultimately, the thesis of these musical aesthetics, to me, is a fantastical exchange of mediatized optimism and forlornness—a situation where one could afford to have a mental breakdown, walk into the rainy streets (headphones on, trench collar popped), and emerge as their own protagonist on the verge of changing their life. Dido’s music virtually constructs and narrates the musical ascent of the atomized protagonist into an unknowable moment of inspiration. There’s a vague new-ageness to the sound, recalling the global chill-out sound of the Buddha Bar compilation albums which also emerged in 1999, that resonate with this kind of simultaneous self-liquidation and formation of protagonism.
I appreciate Dido as a white-flag-plant for the production of subjectivity that music provides. I enjoy how at any given moment one could simply pop the top off their mental obstacles and become a vessel for the power of music—literally feel it coursing through their veins, chemically induced to emerge as their own protagonist. To at-once problematize and produce selfhood whilst kneeling at the altar of a musical moment, is one of music’s many powers. Here, I’m drawn to the idea of narrative protagonism as a conceptual unit in a spiralling part-whole relationship, dissolved and formed in these kinds of musical, or mystical, moments.
Last weekend, Alex, Alec, our friend Xander, and I all had a pretty insane protracted conversation spanning continental philosophy, AI, and extraterrestrial life. I won’t get into the specifics, but it was one of those types of conversations. It was shortly after that I picked up Dido’s “Here With Me,” discovering that the track had also served as the theme song for the 1999 television series Roswell—a show that presents a timeline where aliens are hiding in plain sight as a trio of American high schoolers.
Listening to the track at sunset as I cruise over the Williamsburg Bridge toward Manhattan, I imagine extraterrestrial life existing at the site of my own atomic structure, itself an emerging protagonist that sits within the frame of my consciousness, hiding in plain sight and mind. Dido’s acoustic guitar kickback chorus sings:
Oh, I am what I am
I’ll do what I want
But I can’t hide
And I won’t go, I won’t sleep
And can’t breathe, until you’re resting here with me
And I won’t leave, and I can’t hide
I cannot be, until you’re resting here...
—Nick James Scavo