Rhythmic Communication, Umbrella Acoustemology, American Oxygen
This week, for some reason we celebrate Bad Girl Ri Ri with three recommendations: a confluence of LLM operations and Rihanna’s poetics, an analytic riff on the umbrella and Steven Feld’s musical linguistic anthropology, and a love letter to Rihanna’s specific, missing aesthetic register in 2026.
Recommendation: Rihanna - “SOS”
I increasingly use Claude Code to design software, which is what I do for work. I use it in the terminal, which is a very different experience from using an LLM in a desktop app or browser. It has particular rhythms and syntax and a pronounced aesthetic dimension.
When a prompt is entered, the system uses interstitial messaging to communicate that it is being processed:
✻ Cascading… (1m 28s · ↓ 1.6k tokens)
The ASCII art morphs while a lo-fi orange gradient pulses across the action verb as the numbers increase. If you use the default terminal, it is in a monospaced font. The styling utilizes aesthetics from the past to communicate something specific about a futuristic suite of functionalities.
When the system processing is complete, the interstitial messaging is replaced by a response. It might simply provision information, or it might want to edit files on your computer depending on permission configurations. If you asked it to create a .txt file with the phrase “Hello,” it could do that.
Each time the LLM embarks upon a task, the system generates a different verb in place of “Cascading” in the example above. Such as:
Manifesting… Noodling… Cogitating… Tinkering… Whirring… Pollinnating… Frosting… Catapulting… Enchanting… Whirring… Whatchamacalliting… Tomfoolering… Smooshing… Recombobulating… Crystallizing… Herding…
These verbs define the character of the rhythmic communicative gesture.
What kind of rhythm is this? We are already familiar with rhythms of human-computer interaction: browsing pages in search of information, commodities, or media, embarking upon goal-directed user flows in Turbotax, navigating through menus and submenus and search results. The computational rhythm we are focused on today is different: it has affordances for nonlinearity, more amenable to end-user improvisation than a healthcare website, for example.
We can think of this rhythm as a transit back and forth between two poles. This week I noticed an instance of such a rhythm in Rihanna’s “SOS.” It features a gruesome, depitched “oh” sample, foregrounding Rihanna’s positive rhythmic enunciations through background negative enunciation at the levels of pitch, timbre, and EQ – a balance of contrasts. It sounds like a sample you’d hear in an old Total Freedom edit. It’s not really meant to be noticed. It supplies a chiaroscuro function, just beyond the threshold of direct focus, which is to say: just there, supporting things architecturally.
—Alexander Iadorola
Recommendation: Bosavi Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea, Steven Feld - “Voices of the Forest: A Village Soundscape”
I’ve been loosely considering music’s expressive deficiency for a long time. Maybe you share this perspective that the settings in which we mostly hear music and sound - live, recorded, digital, analogue, incidental, presentational, participatory - feel squeezed and compressed in their indexical, historical, sensorial, conceptual terrain, in contemporary mediatized culture. We sit in a chair, we stand in a crowd, we dance, we select a track for the commute, we decide to relax or stimulate, to challenge our states of mind or reconcile our cringe appetites.
Because the experience of music is largely commercial (even passively so) for us, optional, emotionally and socially modular, it often feels as though we are supposed to know what it is or means before we presently engage it; and, that to miss this cultural synaptic spark is in some way to miss “music” entirely.
The (theoretical) alternative to this social-linguistic contract is, maybe, a sensory-meaning vacuum, sealing the collective untruth of music’s projective meaning in with the individual untruth of its cognitive unintelligibility, in a lifeless, abstract suspense. Our participation in the representational mania of music’s ultimately social life is like a physical workout - something we do to feel better, stronger and more energetic - in accepting and sitting with the equal and opposite, discomforting interiority of those sounds.
Basically, the concerns I’m tracing out would be well supported by the body of inquiry that musicologist Steven Feld called “acoustemology,” in 1992. Of this portmanteau of “acoustics” and “epistemology,” Feld asks, and then contextualizes:
“Is the world constituted by multiple essences, by primal substances with post facto categorical names like ‘human,’ ‘animal,’ ‘plant,’ ‘material,’ or ‘technology?’ Or is it constructed relationally, by the acknowledgment of conjunctions, disjunctions, and entanglements among all copresent and historically accumulated forms? It was the latter answer that compelled a theorization of sounding and listening aligned with relational ontology: the conceptual term for the position that substantive existence never operates anterior to relationality.” (keywords in sound, Novak & Sakakeeny)
I think it’s helpful to observe, as Feld does, that in the opaque layers of sonic and social situations within time and perception, that the relationships we have and form within listening are never really fully facing or grasping the nature of where our relationality “comes from,” where our musical consciousness is enfolded with its unconsciousness. As if under an umbrella, we move down the street with a rattle of disparate drops forming a single copresent noise and rhythm. We can look out from under the cover of our interiority, observe their evental scatter in media res - ahead of and behind us - but we can’t ever see through to the source of those sounds that strike us in particular, in our unique context of listening.
Returning to my initial complaint of the sense that musical experience is somehow compressed, I think there is both more to say and many ways to address that sort of experiential constriction, as a matter of listening practice and hygiene, of playing and hearing more openly, attentively, and generously. For this week, I recommend relaxing: we aren’t ever really going to face the music.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Rihanna - “American Oxygen”
2026 marks ten years without Rihanna. She has released no new music aside from the amazing “Friends of Mine” single from 2025’s Smurfs movie. Her decade-old track “American Oxygen” wasn’t included on Anti, her start to finish, no skips, masterpiece (and maybe final?) album released in 2016. Instead, it was unveiled in the album’s early PR rollout, containing its precoded thesis: American tragedy, American romanticism, American scale—an enormous Hudson River School painting blurred with tar and blood, a white horse galloping across the continental divide, with a hoof-print-tire-tread that could pull the land apart.
“American Oxygen” is a heartbreaking track. Rihanna’s voice carries its own weather and climate. It’s a heavy, apocalyptic weather. Barbadian heat. Hurricanes form over warm tropical waters when moisture evaporates, rises, and condenses—creating low pressure, drawing in surrounding air that then begins to spin due to the Earth’s rotation. The storm strengthens cataclysmically as heat is released outward. This is so Rihanna-coded.
There is something about breathing in this oxygen, hurricane air, as a process of absorbing a current of coiled tragedy, but also interlocking with a lifeforce that sustains and perpetuates the rhythm of life. I think Americans can relate to this experience rather directly. The inhalation of empire—its conveniences, its horrors—is its own cycle of romance, hustle, desire, and pain. Our experience as American oxygen-breathers and our resultant responses to our current moment in history—how we must simultaneously hold loved ones close, extend compassion outward, and cultivate solidarity and empathy within—is intense. In Rihanna’s words: Young girl, hustlin’, On the other side of the ocean.
The strange brostep squelch that bubbles underneath the track’s somber piano balladry also spirals as a storm: Rihanna’s voice a vessel on the calamitous current. “American Oxygen” feels like a videodome circularly projecting a 360° image of the sprawling, vital, but ruinous style of American life. It’s a charged, bleeding heart thrown from the Friday Night Lights of a football stadium into the throat of Yosemite, into the gulf, into the city streets. Breath out. Breath in. American Oxygen. Rihanna, we miss you.
Breath out, Breathe in
American oxygen, woah
Every breath I breathe
Chasin’ this American Dream
We sweat for a nickel and a dime
Turn it into an empire, whoa
Breathe in this feeling
American, American oxygen
—Nick James Scavo