UKG Breathwork, Positive Regression, Fred &&&&&..
This is Issue 17. This week our recommendations focus on a nuanced, non-linguistic affect of samples, the historical-aesthetic quality of “earliness” in music, and a deep read into the “refinement” of EDM and beyond, via Fred again..
Recommendation: Ghost - The Club
This track demonstrates incredibly advanced sampling technique. It isn’t an overstatement to call it dazzling. Motion, syncopation, variation, afterimages, gravitational voids, reversals. An array of small sounds, pitched, cut, and interlaced with remarkable precision. Today we’ll focus on one element in particular: the recording of laughter on the one, and the accompanying inhale later in the bar – at a delay, after a durational opening – preparing the loop for another refrain.
I am finding that the sound of this laughter doesn’t want to be described. Maybe laughter doesn’t want to be described in general. We could call it ebullient, infectious, or, I don’t know, free-spirited, but that wouldn’t get us very far. We are more interested in what it does, and its function triggers some pre-conscious, non-linguistic identification-effect. Not unlike the crow sample in Drake and Future’s “Jumpman.”
What does the crow sample do? Well, that’s pretty hard to explain, but if you listen to the song, you get it immediately. Again: describing it as ominous or slightly-evil sounding doesn’t allow us to make any progress. Back to “The Club.” There’s some kind of non-verbal entrainment happening here, a syncing up of disparate rhythms: tracheal, mechanical, percussive, biological. Multiple voices – very broadly construed – communicating in a sound space. Synthesis happens.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Early Music
I like “early” music. I will guess that you like it too, or that you’ve formed an opinion about it because other people that you know really like “early” music. Music from the renaissance and medieval period: we like it, and we call it Early. Unreleased music, traditional music, demos, the first-in-the-series, archival records… We like these, and they are all “early.” They are “early” in relation to a body of work that we know comes after, as a version of music that will find some further state of development, canonization, become iterated upon with some greater complexity, or refinement, etc. And, it’s noteworthy that we sometimes enjoy this contextual state of “earliness” separately, and occasionally more than the content itself. The ways in which contexts become a part of content - through the embedding of situational, cultural, social factors into the “signs” of music - is what I write about basically every week, so I’m going to bracket that out and explore this on a more granular level. So why, lateman, in this - the present moment - do you and I like “early” music so much?
Listening to Judie Tzuke’s 1982 album Shoot the Moon (2006 Remaster) as I write this, I heard a song that I didn’t know and that I particularly liked the sound of: “How Do I Feel - Demo” (it has some strange percussion at the beginning). Seeing the “demo” qualifier, and before I formed a conscious thought, I caught myself in a reflex: “Oh, a demo.” Something about the demo signifies an almost exotic set of possibilities - uncanniness, a strangeness in the mix, instrumental tones and timbres that feel uncharacteristically raw, thin vocal deliveries, exposed drums, room noise, and so on. These qualities aren’t in any way categorically unique to demos, but they nonetheless gain extra significance with that distinction. I listened to the later 1983 album release of “How Do I Feel,” and, as one would expect, it is more refined in its arrangement, it sounds better and because of that, it’s more fun to listen to. But it also entirely lacks the strange porousness that drew me to the demo. I like them both, but I have a special relationship with the demo.
I don’t think this is because of my repressed hostility towards “the arts” (2020MG is prescribed by my doctor). As I’ve alluded, the appeal of the “early” as a kind of historical-aesthetic thing in music hangs close with the general linguistic anticipation that “what comes next” is in some form of dialogue with what preceded it. Regardless of whether (or in what way) this is true, we experience it meaningfully nonetheless. To feel that we know what a song was before it became another thing, or to imagine what it might have been like, or what it might still become, is a highly imaginative paramusical experience. Why is this not merely enjoyed, but is also demarcated and imbued with valuable subtext? Is it about gaining authority or control through the sense of historicity that emerges?
Foucault’s “archive and power” argument is that we enact a mechanism of power by virtue of preferential recognition, collection, differentiation, and thus a determination of the boundaries of discourse. But I’m less interested in why authority or control subsumes the music-historical experience, and more interested in how our complex interactions with “the panopticon” reveal the soft points in such surveillance.
Freud’s treatment of nostalgia is useful, since that “early” connotes an unhealthy longing for the past - a memory protected within a defensive illusion, a fantasized reconstruction which smooths over conflict. The fact that we probably have nostalgia for the mere presence of countless records in many unknown archives is not the interesting part here for me; it is in the repressed conflict against which that nostalgic illusion is staged: an anxiety and uneasiness with time, memory and the means we have to experience and measure it. The fascination with the “early” in music is in one sense a kind of nostalgic performance that we do for ourselves, in which we fixate and substitute the unknowns of history with idealized continuities for art. Freud’s suggestion seems to be that we might correct this failure and complete the labor of mourning an aesthetic and historical opacity beyond any real clarification.
Like Anthony Fantano, I too am busy. But alongside my commitments to music, I also find time to enjoy and study football. Statisticians and ball analysts use the term “positive regression” to mark player performance that has fallen below their projections, but which is expected to return to the mean. The analogy between statistical and psychological regression catches on something meaningful in this broad field of considerations about archives and time. It’s unlikely that the poetry we find in imperfect memories and in our music-historical ideation is merely proof of our failure to exorcise the haunting discontinuities in life. Returning to the “early” steadies an otherwise shaky bridge that spans our general anxiety within time. It engenders a vital nostalgia toward the future, from the past: wherein after the demo, the music becomes what we always hoped and expected it would be.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Fred again.. at East End Studios, Sunnyside, Queens on January 31st, 2026
This past weekend, I was given a pair of comped tickets to see Fred again.. on the last night of his three-weekend-long residency at a warehouse in Sunnyside, Queens. I’ve been wanting to analyze Fred again..’s music for some time; and, this is a bit of a loaded recommendation this week as a result. Fred sums up at least a few layers of concurrent thought I’ve been having around electronic music, its production, and its ongoing refinement as a continuum throughout the 2010s and 2020s—and I’m glad this opportunity presented itself. I’m using the words “continuum” and “refinement” here intentionally, pointing to Paul Skallas’ widely circulated “Refinement Culture” and Simon Reynolds’ “Hardcore Continuum” essays that I’ll be loosely problematizing throughout this analysis as well.
As a personal experience, the event was, frankly, wonderful. It wholly succeeded in presenting a powerful, unified vision of bass sound, emotion, and collective enjoyment, even communion, with tactical production, mixing, and progression that so many musical experiences attempt to execute. Plenty of our most garish EDM and rave activities also simulate this collective experience; but, Fred again..’s music extrudes a complex and potentially insidious layer, twisting in the darkness of UK bass culture, without its precarious and insurgent historical background. Instead, Fred’s innovation has been through the embellishment of varied rap vocality (Young Thug, Baby Keem, Future, Lil Yachty, Skepta), the synthetic optimism of indie catharsis (Caribou, Floating Points, Joy Orbison, Anderson.Paak), and an omnivorous approach that seems to take in everything in its orbit—Fredifying it into a particular production texture. Syrupy autotune reverie, absurd bass, and an overall ascendent attitude all provoke a shivers-in-the-club, tears-in-the-club, hands-in-the-air music.
His collaborations and b2bs with Skrillex have positioned him in a similar caliber of simultaneously celebrated and maligned artistry—both edified and bogged down by a genuine, if not straightforward, love of music. Bass music. His contributions to the current state of EDM and club music are more detailed in the way they are consumed as both a form of wistful interiority and an externalized communal and commercial club experience. Fred is reaching toward something that’s maybe not quite there, flying close to the sun, pantomiming our desire-laden appeals for dopamine and connection within the slipstream of a continually emerging technological mysticism we’re experiencing—our disconnection giving new contours for processes of reconnection within the occasions that assemble us. Fred is almost like the Hans Zimmer of the hardcore continuum, reminding me of Christopher Nolan’s films in its coexistent severity and softness of narrative (all rotating around a core mystery that may or may not actually be there). Alec and I have recorded some roasts on our podcast Flavortone of James Blake and Zimmer, respectively, that probe some of these ideas. His music presents a cinematic flow of anticipatory moments, separated by clean and novel cuts in an exchange of revelry and ubiquity. It feels optimized and again, refined.
Danny Brown, Caribou, and Ben UFO joined at this particular show—as Fred’s hits were imbued further with 2010s post-dubstep and indie electronica, as well as plenty of varied moments that included Brazilian funk, brostep, stutter house, 2-step, and “future garage.” I sent a few videos to a friend, a great experimental musician, post-concert. Fred was surrounded by an enraptured audience either losing it in a frenzied drop or clutching their hearts, swaying with their arms around each other. His response: “when the music succeeds and is communal.” The music wholly succeeded but also almost felt too successful. A question emerged: is this greatest common denominator or lowest common denominator music? In the world of today’s public consensus, everything that’s even remotely mutually understood can sometimes feel like both.
My enjoyment of Fred again..’s music must come with caveats that demand some introspection, a turning over of stones. Firstly, it might be a bit easier to talk through why Fred again.. could be bad, as a paradigmatic example of the consumption and production of electronic dance music becoming streamlined during our technological moment. A less generous listening of Fred again..’s music would establish it as an inauthentic “fan music,” buoyed by a sincere love of the medium dialed into the stakes of a continually reworked and recalibrated, but fading, history. For example, upon entry to the concert, a sticker was placed over everyone’s phone cameras to discourage phone use. Throughout the entire show, the stickers were quickly and easily peeled off and discarded—as phones were up and out incessantly. Again, this simple gesture became a kind of pantomime that’s pointing to some kind of moral suggestion of a more authentic experience—perhaps a previous history of rave culture—and insinuation of a value system that clearly was not displayed, enforced, or even acknowledged in the slightest.
More, an essay featured on the website of Jeff Wischer’s new label Tutorial Island, titled “Occupational Hollowing and Vocational Parasitism in Club Culture: The Cognitive Limits of DJing as Art,” elucidates some negative points on the status of DJ culture and electronic music in our time. The essay establishes that “the cultural elevation of the club DJ to the status of ‘artist’ is one of the more striking symptoms of late-capitalist musical economies. The role is framed as avant-garde, innovative, and performative, yet closer inspection reveals it as an instance of occupational hollowing: the reduction of vocation to curatorial mediation, devoid of substantive creative labor.” While there’s plenty that I disagree with in the content of this essay, I take its overall point in stride and can easily apply it to my experience seeing Fred again.. Although Fred has an expansive production oeuvre (and is not solely a DJ), his is a project of fabrication, assembly and reassembly—a paratextual literature review of electronic music that’s rendered into a deeply personal, reworked, recombinant sublimity.
The response on social media before and after Fred’s show was all filled with vague superlatives: it was “life changing,” a “core life moment,” it “rewired my brian,” or, “this can’t be real.” Another fan shared a video of Fred giving prayer hands while looking up with an ear-to-ear smile with the caption: “our boy is taking it all in.” I can see why the positivity of these reflections—such a goal of music’s historical and aesthetic role up to this point—is triggering to those whose music has seemingly lost its value or presence in our various vocational handlings of it. Sometimes, when we peel back all the layers of our musical productions and positions, what’s left is our cryptic clinging to what our own musical “vocation” could possibly be. After the show, I posted a 3am IG story that I quickly ended up archiving after I got a response from a “real deal” electronic music friend. He sent a very direct and simple message: “Fuck thisssss.”
I’m not here in an attempt to be a historian for dance music and rave culture or explain why certain things are more authentic than others, or even why certain things are either failing or succeeding. Outside of our scripts of authenticity and sincerity, Fred again..’s music becomes its own kind of chimeric entity, referencing heights and depths of our communion and contentions with music—our atomization, our fragmentation, our optimization. I’m drawn into this hall of mirrors of “good vs. bad” and “fake vs. sincere” dialectics, and maybe always will be. I’m attracted to some kind of ultimate fallacy here, a palindrome of communion and separation that our experiences with music often provide. Union and disunion.
Simon Reynolds’ hardcore continuum, in this sense, could be a continuum that has been refined to include unifying moments over the last twenty years of musical production. His theory describes a continuous, evolving lineage and dialectic of UK-based dance music originating from the early 1990s rave scene, characterized by breakbeats, heavy bass, and rapid, underground innovation. It encompasses genres like hardcore, jungle, drum & bass, speed garage, grime, and more. Paul Skallas’ basic idea of “refinement culture” is that there has been a subtle shift in the last twenty years in many aspects of life around us: a refinement of design, architecture, accents, sports, video games, the environment, and overall aesthetics. Refinement culture can be summarized as a general streamlining and removal of any unique characteristics. It’s optimized. Although I think we can in fact unify these ideas as a more or less accurate critical assessment of Fred again..’s music, and the progression of dance music culture over the last twenty years, we can also safely problematize that the concept of a “refined” hardcore continuum optimized by the flows of capital also creates a set of objections: there never was such a thing as the hardcore continuum in the first place; or, it is no longer relevant to today’s dance music. We are reduced to a series of debates in this theoretical space. Laying that out here, we have two basic positions:
Anti-Refinement/Continuum: “You’ve mistaken the model for reality.”
Pro-Refinement/Continuum: “On the contrary, you’ve mistaken reality for a model.”
I think both Reynolds’ and Skallas’ reflections fall prey to the tense palindromic confusion of models interfacing with reality. Bringing us back to Fred again.., I see this confusion on full display in the reception of his music. Through his album USB, I hear the adages of a dark optimism interacting with a bright pessimism, a Nolan-esque cascade of emotionalisms and sonic/narrative triggers that we can respond to earnestly, only to be disappointed when they don’t cohere into a lasting feeling. When we peel back all the overlapping layers to his music, I’m not exactly sure what we’re left with. It makes me think of how music has served as both a model and as a reality in my life, both swerving into each other endlessly. As a text and physics. I spoke about this a bit in some writing on Pierre Boulez and amnesia a few weeks back; and, with Fred, it keeps going again and again and again and again.
In this concatenative space (&&&&&), I felt something deeply at his show in Queens. And I’ve quickly forgotten it. I’m sure I’ll be back to pick up a lot of these themes and ideas in future 2020MG writings.
—Nick James Scavo