Penderecki Barbenheimer, Cruel Januarymaxxing, Plastic Bag
We hope you are staying warm, and in Issue 15 we recommend: a consideration of art’s cosmic stakes, expressed in the music of Penderecki, a selection of cold tracks for a cold time of year, and a view into the mysterious syntax of Katy Perry.
Recommendation: Krzyszstof Penderecki’s String Quartet No. 2
After a minor crash out last week in my close roasting of Domink Sustek’s viral avant-garde catholic offering,“Hören...Verstummen” - Messe basse für Sopran, Orgel und Schlagzeug (ad lib.), I want to synthesize a few ideas in the background of that compositional style that are more hopeful and that also offer some form of answer to the question I posed: why is this still happening?
I started revisiting the career of mid-century Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. As I mentioned to in my writing last week, his work represents a transition between the early 20th century’s secular, formalist avant-garde and an aesthetic movement towards some more naturalistic iteration of the tradition (and includes the type of conflicted post-war spirituality that I critiqued in Sustek’s piece). There are parallels of this “sonorist” move in Morton Feldman and others, but Penderecki (along with many eastern european contemporaries) are really distinct in the romantic, expressionist orientation of their work (like pious, orthodox cousins to Feldman, Cage, Stockhausen, etc).
In his own words: “My art stems from profoundly Christian roots and aims at reconstructing a human metaphysical universe shattered by the cataclysms of the 20th century. The restoration of the sacred dimension of reality is the only way to save humanity. Art should be the source of difficult hope.”
From a contemporary musical standpoint, the magnitude of this kind of statement comes across as alien, maybe a bit ridiculous. Are these really the stakes of art? It’s powerful to imagine that they might be. Whether or not we agree, it’s devastating and worthy of attention to imagine the frame of mind in which a generation of composers would be compelled to act creatively in accordance with this belief.
Sustek’s work reveals that this style of thinking is still very much alive. And, in listening to his music (or, as I recommend, Penderecki’s), it feels important to ask: why, of all things, is the aesthetic register of cataclysmic sounds employed in service to “restoring the sacred dimension of reality?” Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (an early, and probably the most famous, work by Penderecki), is about as clear in its musical and moral gesture as it could be. It offers nothing less than a terrifying sonorous image of a real, historical moment of mass death. I suppose cataclysm is so well-represented in the aim to revive a spiritual reality because it’s so difficult, painful and mysterious to accept it as a part of mortal reality.
But not all proponents of this kind of spiritual art (nor all of Penderecki’s compositions) are so mournful or intent on producing a mirror to calamity. There are countless orthodoxies layered into how we express music - not just as a channel of thoughts and feelings, but as a way of knowing and embodying certain forms of information that lack expression otherwise.
As I’ve sought repentance for my roast of Sustek this past week (and endeavored to forgive him his musical sins), I traced his thinking through Penderecki’s String Quartet No. 2, (the traditional chamber music form felt like a good, sterile environment in which to dissect the concepts). In the quartet, I find a more vital instance of this dark, cosmic exploration. While still containing a sonic character of brutality, the pieces are curious, activated and seem in touch with more than just the element of violence. The screeching sonorities and percussive string techniques of Threnody are present, but produce a raw, unmoral observation of a physical phenomenology - accepting its vitality in a spirit of both awe and fear. The same basic materials and means of producing the bomb in Threnody are here, doing new things and interacting in totally different ways. I’ve listened to Penderecki for a long time, but never thought about how significant it seems for his musical cosmology that the basis of these sounds and their significations are embedded across many distinct and formally unrelated affects.
It gives me a “barbenheimer”-like feeling: which do I look into first? something about the spirituality of destruction, or, the devastations which accompany and perpetuate creation? In either case, this variability suggests something hopeful - that there are possible and existing manifestations of raw energetic intensities that appear organized, free, dialogical, peaceful.
There is an incredible mystery in how music contains such a high compression of information and feeling. I agree with Penderecki that we should be very careful not to lose this way of knowing, as there are experiences and aspects of “the human metaphysical universe,” and its “difficulty hopes,” that we need access to, and that only resonate here.
Listen to this:
Beethoven, String Quartet 15 In A Minor, Op. 132, “Heiliger Dankgesang” - 3. Molto Adagio
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: DJ Nick Jersey - “Bite Thru (NFJ Melody)” / Nate Sib - “Secret” / Kidd G - “Down The Road”
It’s only mid-January and my season is over. My favorite football team lost in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs after an unforgettable run. The lights went out, and what’s left is brutal 10° weather and salt-strewn asphalt. Dry and chapped feelings. Sinus pressure. Somehow, street construction and repaving is still happening in this weather; pitch, tar, and loose bits of gravel crack into leftover shards of black ice at the intersection. I’m still drinking iced coffee in this environment—a stubborn, lazy habit that’s extended into the dead of January. Together with the wind, the chill of the iced drink cuts through my gloves. I’m trying not to be dramatic here, but can’t help it. Taking the L is a special sort of pensive emotion, especially so early in the year.
Brutality in stride, this week I’ll offer a selection of three artists who give strange inspiration within the coldness of this particular week in January, 2026: DJ Nick Jersey, Nate Sib, and Kidd G. Wholly unrelated, together, I appreciate their collective temperature.
DJ Nick Jersey is a producer and DJ I came across in a fleeting moment on social media, drawn in by a heaving beat that broke through my phone speaker, nearly snapping it right out of my hand. The track “Bite Thru (NFJ Melody)” is a perfect example of a concise, nouveau strand of ice-burnt techno/trance electronica that’s floor-ready—precisely the kind of music being sought after by DJs spinning at a midwinter clubnight. It’s Bloodborne-sygil rave flyer ready music. I’ve never been a four-on-the-floor or techno enthusiast, but this track has a dimensional bass swell and fried Rage undercurrent that wins me over. I can hear an adjacency to the music of Emma DJ, one of my favorite producers working right now, or even Container, and appreciate the sustained malevolence throughout. The beat’s snap starts pushing against itself beautifully midway through—as a frostworn high synth begins to shimmer above the wreckage. This is highly functional, highly stylized dancefloor music that’s produced perfectly. Cold music for a cold time, biting through.
Nate Sib is an artist I saw open for 2hollis back in October. You can read about that experience here in a previous 2020MG issue, but I didn’t talk about Sib’s music specifically. His track “Secret” from the EP “For Us,” follows through on a lot of the production tropes that have made 2hollis ascendent and—dare I say—great. They’re “best buds” by all accounts, and Sib’s opening set and collaboration with 2hollis on “Back & Forth” demonstrate that there’s a progeny for this type of music, a dynasty even, depending on how long everyone can stomach it. The core of “Secret” is a floating Kid A-style synthesis motif that encircles a more traditional High School Musical vocality. Sib’s voice is raw and acrobatic, containing a wired headphone mic fidelity that contrasts the depth of the beat production. Produced by South Korean “Dariacore” artist kimj (a genre emerging from the mashup productions of Jane Remover side project Leroy), Sib’s primary contribution to this emerging sound culture is by providing a Bieber-like vocal affect and melodic sensibly, recalling Bieber’s Skrillex directed and produced record “Purpose.” It’s a “god forbid a white boy get a little motion” style music—and I tell you what—I need some of that motion here in mid-January.
Lastly, I’d like to reintroduce and recommend the music of Kidd G. In 2020, the then 17-year-old country emo-rap star broke out with “Down The Road” and “Down Home Boy,” tracks that immediately stank like a Decatur County locker room. Alec and I even recorded an entire two hour podcast about him back in 2021, drawn in by the music’s trans-american rural aesthetics, reciprocities of youth and aging, and postmodern synthesis of “country-rap” as it reminded us of Harmony Korine, Ryan Trecartin, and our own experiences with weird suburbianisms in contemporary life. In 2026, Kidd G is now married and has a kid at only 22 years old. His music output has clearly stalled out a bit; he ain’t 17 anymore. Perhaps his newer music just can’t live up to the potential of those early singles—giving his sound a “peaked in high school” effect that actually secures the original suburban youth culture of his music. I’m revisiting “Down The Road,” and it hasn’t lost any of its power and presence. Maybe I’ve been watching too much football; but, the sentiments contained in Kidd G’s music—“down the road where the blacktop ends, you can find me with all my friends”—loops as a kind of proverbial promise of drinking beer at the end of the road, reunited with friends with everything to look forward to. That feeling is only sharpened when that promise also contains the possibility of stalling out, crashing out, drifting apart, your season ending. The moment of reunion becomes all the more poignant.
I’m Januarymaxxing with these music recommendations. This is all cold music for a cold time. Hands cold, heart cold—in the snow, with all my woes.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Katy Perry - “Firework”
Imagine someone asking you if you ever feel like a plastic bag. For this exercise, assume the context involves some mutually agreed-upon consideration of shared experiences, shared sentiments.
Now, imagine that they continue addressing you, describing their position in hopes that you might understand and even relate to it. This is emotionally loaded communication. At the fever pitch of their address, they say that you are a firework. What would you make of this?
Imagine another person telling you that you are their favorite movie, that they could watch the movie for a lifetime. They go on to say that you are their cinema, revising their initial claim. (Benny Benassi ft. Gary Go - “Cinema.”) Now, there’s another person telling you that they crashed their car into the bridge, but they don’t care, they love it. (Icona Pop ft - “I Love It (feat. Charli XCX).”)
It’s odd to imagine these things, to imagine being addressed in these ways. But we experienced it. This was simply the procedure of listening to a major narrative mode of popular music in the early 2010s. Next week we will consider this more in depth.
—Alexander Iadarola