There’s something about the sustained tones in Ellen Arkbro’s plaintive “For Organ and Brass” piece that reminds us of Sunn O))). Mainly their Monoliths & Dimensions album, which found the drone-on duo fusing their rumble-strip riffs with everything from an upright bass trio to a pair of trombonists.

The setup on Arkbo’s first proper full-length is much simpler: just the “reduced blues music” of a Renaissance organ and the blurred lines of a horn, tuba, and trombone. And yet, the cumulative effect is similar: chords that cleanse, and a record that resembles a ritual.

Whether it’s secular or spiritual is up to you; we’re perfectly fine losing ourselves in the minimalist teachings of La Monte Young, which Arkbro molds into her own image alongside two other tracks. (FYI: “Mountain of Air” was lopped off the LP pressing.) Both leave the organ behind without losing any of their power, staring at the sun in slow motion without feeling any pain.

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The first time I heard a Thursday record was nearly 25 years ago, when a fellow music industry minor at Syracuse University openly discussed how the band’s Full Collapse album was helping them deal with a friend’s cancer diagnosis. To hammer this point home, she played “Understanding in a Car Crash” for the whole class.

It was a heavy thing to share with a room of relative strangers. After all, Thursday’s spastic breakthrough single is more than just an enduring anthemic from emo’s third wave. It’s about how singer Geoff Rickly’s best friend in high school died in an accident his then-girlfriend — the driver — survived.

“I was 17 when the accident happened,” explains Rickly. “It wasn’t the first time someone close to me died, but it was the most visceral.

He continues, “A lot of the record actually refers back to that crash. Lines like ‘a silent dance that we did into this hospital bed’ were an exploration of the way trauma never leaves you. It bleeds into everything that you’re doing. It becomes inescapable.”

If that description sounds darker and deeper than much of the emerging screamo “scene” Thursday was lumped into after Full Collapse sold nearly half a million copies, you’re not the only one who noticed. Unlike the growing number of groups with girl problems Jessica Hopper famously slammed in her seminal Punk Planet essay “Where the Girls Aren’t”, Thursday was trying to wrap their heads around complex questions of identity, sexuality, futurism, indoctrinated societies, man’s capacity for cruelty, and the trying mental toil of life’s sudden tragedies.

“[The early 2000’s] was a really strange time,” says Rickly. “There were a lot of bands after Full Collapse that sounded like us, but hadn’t absorbed any of the lyrics. I found that incredibly disappointing to hear: ‘Oh, now every band’s gonna sound like Thursday, with a song about how they hate their girlfriend.’”

Not many people still feel that way, of course; if anything, Full Collapse hits as hard as it’s ever had on the eve of its 25th birthday and a headlining tour that is revisiting its high points along two other milestone records (2006’s A City by the Light Divided and 2011’s No Devolución, the last proper Thursday LP).

With that in mind, we asked Rickly to break down the conceptual, musical and personal details that made Full Collapse a nearly perfect album. (Care to guess which song he’d cut if given the chance today?)

“A0001”

I was obsessed with Spiritualized when we made [Full Collapse]. I really loved the way they used rounds in the first song from Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating Through Space. I thought that it would be really interesting to book end the album like that— this circular motion, like how a Walkman tape would flip back over and go back to the beginning. I liked this idea of a continuous loop.

I’d also been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick. I was thinking about these antiquated notions of AI and retro futurism — the quaint version of what people used to think the future was going to be like, and us coming up against the reality of it not being this glowing idealistic view. Not even the shiny, dystopian version; more like a disappointing, realistic future, which especially reflected issues of class.

That’s some of the stuff about “the tide being high on 14th Street” [on “I1100”] — this idea of people below the sea line getting washed away, and that for everybody else, it seems like this nice cleansing rain. It’ll just clear the heat, you know?

So that was some of the themes being opened up on the record: what you thought was going to happen versus what the future was actually going to look like for most people.

“Understanding in a Car Crash”

A lot of stuff on the record is about uncharacteristic things that happened while I was in high school. I remember my mom saying, ‘It’s not really normal for somebody to lose so many friends at this age.’

Like my French [class] partner committed suicide on train tracks that ran behind our high school after getting caught stealing change from a vending machine. His father was the vice principal, so he was yelled at in front of the whole school.

There’s repeated stuff about train tracks on the record, especially on “How Long is the Night” — “the change machine lied and it’s too late to scream.”

We had another friend who died on the train tracks, too. And when I was a young kid — like, 5, 6 or 7 — I had a bunch of friends whose older siblings died in a suicide pact. There’s a lot about that on [the album] War All the Time, especially the title track.

There were some heavy subjects on our first record (Waiting), but Full Collapse was a full exploration of childhood, becoming an adult, and trying to deal with trauma and what society is.

I think the main difference between Full Collapse as it was written and me now is it was an extremely naive and very innocent record of a young person trying to come to grips with adult themes. I don’t have that lens on it now. I am an adult, and I have dealt with a lot of that trauma. I continue to have experiences of loss, but now I have a much firmer grasp on my understanding of it.

The title “Understanding in a Car Crash” is very influenced by Meditations in an Emergency, a poetry book by Frank O’Hara. I like that juxtaposition of this zen-like understanding, a meditative take on a split-second emergency.

That’s the biggest key to the record, I think; everything else revolves around that song. Even with the lyrics — there’s this oblique language in moments, this idea of feeling so alienated from life. “Staring at the setting sun; no reason to come back again.” I didn’t realize that it was depression at the time, but I was looking through a screen door at the world, and I couldn’t get there. I was pushed away from it.

At the time, [the song’s success] was very scary and sort of upsetting. I felt very guilty: ‘Wow, my band’s super popular now because of this horrible thing, and there were other people besides me involved in it.’

My friend who died in the crash [is] never gonna hear it, which is a strange thing to reckon with. But I always wondered what my then-girlfriend thought of it. I was just too scared to ever really talk to her.

Last year, she sent me a note — something like, ‘hey, I heard this song... Was it written about me?’ And it was really interesting, because she said something along the lines of, ‘I understand if you blame me for this.’

I just thought, ‘Wow, of course, I don’t blame you. You were a child for one thing, and it was just an incredibly hard event for all of us to process. I hope you don’t feel like this is pointing some finger.’

We had a really nice talk about it. A lot of the strange feelings of survivor’s guilt that I had built up around the song over the years dissipated.

I’m just really glad that [the video] was a performance clip. Like, I don’t want anyone’s dramatization of what they think the song is about. I couldn’t handle that.

“Concealer”

I had a close friend growing up, and whenever we were wrestling or fucking around, I’d get makeup smeared on my clothes — concealer, because his mom was hitting him and putting makeup on to cover it up.

My mom explained what happened to me when I was a kid. I think the thing that really stuck with me was that makeup is usually used for glamour, and it’s called concealer or cover-up. [What happened] is right in the name of the product.

“Autobiography of a Nation”

I had a teacher who would do these exercises where they’d read a poem and they’d tell you to do free writing around it.

When the record came out, somebody had sent me a copy of Michael Palmer’s “Sun.” I was pretty shocked at how many of the lines were direct quotations from that poem, which we’d read in class. I was pretty upset by it, to be honest, because I thought, ‘Oh, my god, it’s like I’m practically stealing this poem.’

In a lot of ways, it was a reply to some of the poem’s ideas. Like it starts with “write this,” and the song starts with “write these words back down.” It’s like this reaffirmation of a feeling I had once had, or a statement that I had once read. You know, this idea of taking something you read to heart.

I think that’s one of my favorite songs on Full Collapse. I love how it turned out.

When I was a kid, my parents were intensely anti-war, and very interested in radical politics. They would take me to marches and folk things. And they were huge fans of Jefferson Airplane — you know, “up against the wall, motherfucker” [from the song “We Can Be Together”].

So I had an understanding of some [political] stuff. When you really start to have those eye-opening moments, you have to almost deconstruct everything you think you know about society…. Everything about American life is an indoctrination, and when the other side is presented, it’s like a 3D model — ‘well, this is one way to look at it.’

At the time [of Full Collapse], it was so fringe to open your mind at all. I mean, I wasn’t the only person thinking about it. Rage Against the Machine were taking really serious dives into dialectics, but if somebody told you, ‘Oh, I’m a Marxist,’ you’d be like, ‘What does that even mean? Is that imaginary?’

“A Hole in the World”

“A Hole in the World” is from a more punk point of view.

There’s a great band called Frail; they were a straight-edge band before Ink & Dagger did all the drugs. They had a song called “Reversal of Man,” which is what the band Reversal of Man named themselves after. It had this great part at the end, talking about compassion: “Love is love.” I wanted to loop it [over and over again].

I had the chance to sing for Ink & Dagger when they did their reunion. They’ve always been a really huge influence on the way that I think about punk, where I don’t want it to be all these different, weird, artsy, radical ideas jammed into what DIY culture can do. I always thought they were one of the most exciting bands. Seeing the singer from have an Aphex Twin tattoo when I was a kid was very mind expanding for me.

[Frail] was so weirdly dramatic... They were all falling on the floor, screaming and crying and not using the microphone for half the show.... I had never seen anything like it, where a hardcore band just emoted. They weren’t fetishizing the twee stuff about indie rock; they were still this completely uninhibited, physical, visceral experience, but it was in other emotions than anger. There’s nothing tough about it; it didn’t feel like posturing... It was a different kind of rawness than I knew.

When Ink & Dagger started doing drugs and painting their faces like vampires... I remember they would go to emo shows where everybody was wearing sweaters and dressing up nice, and they’d break pens and throw ink all over everybody’s fancy clothes because they thought it was so absurd.

They were very, very provocative. They liked to start trouble. They would be immediately canceled now. I remember they went to an Earth Crisis show, and [singer] Sean [Patrick McCabe] showed up in a fur coat and threw yogurt at them. Even though [Sean] was vegan, he just wanted to fuck with them because he thought [their militaristic views] were so lame.

I’ve always appreciated anachronistic bands. Like when you hear Refused’s A Shape of Punk to Come, they cite Ink & Dagger. They had tried to get [guitarist] Don [Devore] to come play in the band when they were making that record. The idea of putting electronic music and different ideas in goes back to Ink & Dagger. They were one of the great, undiscovered hardcore bands of the era.

I thought of punk and hardcore as its own kind of like dialectic where everything was in conversation with everything else. You could answer and refute some ideas, and you could support other ideas. And we weren’t all online. Some of my roommates were on Angelfire and some listservs, but I wasn’t.

We were all here in the underground, whether it was Rainer Maria or Ink & Dagger or Converge. Anything DIY was in conversation with each other.

“Cross Out the Eyes”

The idea for “Cross Out the Eyes” initially came to me when I was reading Jane Eyre. There’s a part where she’s drawing a self-portrait, and she blacks out her own eyes. I was thinking a lot about what that said about identity.

A lot of the postmodern ideas I had floating around in my head all came out here. In a way, that song was a self-portrait of all the things that I thought about with respect to communication. You know, the image of the telephone wires converging all over the place and being crossed — just the ways that we reach out to one another.

I had a professor at the time, Miguel Algarín. He started the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York. We were very close; he was one of my advisors. He had written this book called Love is Hard Work. It was about compassion and seeing other people’s points of view. It wasn’t just a fuzzy feeling that you got. It was something that you had to work hard at — to see other people.

My lyrics were a lot more sophisticated than my singing was [on this album]. My singing was quite raw; I considered myself a communicator, somebody who was trying to get an idea across more than anything.

As for the line “and the morning dove gets caught in the telephone wire,” I thought a dove would be an interesting symbol for the band — not because it’s the dove of peace, but because I really like how that symbol had been used by so many different people. It’s had so many different layers of conflicting meaning piled on it, so I really liked the idea that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious what we were saying. People would read different things into it.

Which became a bit of a problem, because we would end up getting invited to play, like, Christian shows. We’d get there, and then kids would hate us. They’d buy shirts before we played, and try to return them afterwards.

“Paris in Flames”

There was this movie at the time called Paris is Burning, an essay written about the movie called “Is Paris Burning?”, and then there was an answer to that called “[Who’s Doin’ the] Twist”. So I was thinking about those two essays when I wrote this.

I had had a relationship with a guy in the hardcore scene. He was a young Black guy, and he would tell me about feeling so different in the hardcore scene.

On the one hand, he was different in his family because he was into punk, and had all these tattoos. And he was different in hardcore because he was both Black and… not necessarily gay, maybe bi. I’m not sure how he would identify himself, but our experiences together [had] this sort of universal feeling of apartness we all have.

We had really connected over 108 and their album Songs of Separation. That’s why the title of that record is nodded to in that song.

I used to think, ‘If all of us feel so apart all the time, isn’t that something that we share? Isn’t that something that should unite us — a feeling of shared longing, of shared detachment?’

“I Am the Killer”

This song title was hotly debated in Thursday. I think some of the band members thought it was too provocative. But that’s what I liked about it.

The story behind this is I had gotten mugged and stabbed. And I had a pair of scissors in my backpack, so I stabbed the person who was mugging me back.

That kept me up at night — not knowing what happened to the other person, if they were okay. It seems like a strange thought, because I was basically fine. I had a wound in my leg, and they also broke a bottle over my head. I have white hair where the scar is; that’s the only real thing that you can still see.

But I used to think, ‘What if I fucking killed this person?’ I think they’re probably fine; it was probably a young person’s anxious, guilty conscious. But I was thinking about that incident over and over again — obsessing about it, wondering if I had hurt another human being.

Maybe 10 years ago or so, I was held up at gunpoint, and I must have looked pretty scared or upset. I remember the person who mugged me saying, “Hey, man, I wouldn’t take it so hard. You probably come from a lot more privilege than I do.”

It really fucked me up. It was like they knew exactly the kind of thing that would get to me — that I would not stop thinking about. He wasn’t blaming me for getting mugged, but it made me a little bit feel like, ‘Okay, I guess it’s okay to have a gun pressed into my rib cage, and have to give everything that I have on my person to you.’ It’s a strange thing to be the victim of a violent crime, and to feel guilty about trying to defend yourself.

“Standing on the Edge of Summer”

I always tell people this is the happiest song I’ve ever written about my grandmother dying. I think it’s a really beautiful song. In some ways, it is very bright and hopeful, because it’s really about trying to remember that if you’re alive, life is beautiful. Even in the midst of pain and suffering and loss, you’re alive. Go live.

Maybe it’s a trite or cliche message, but it’s something that I need to remind myself of. Especially at that time, like, ‘Hey, man, your life is just starting. You’re fucking 20. Go out there and enjoy your life.’

“Wind Up”

This song is from our demo tape. We were like, ‘It’s not good enough to be on our first record,’ so it ended up on our second one instead because we found out that we could make an extra 11 cents a record if we have a full track listing [laughs].

We were like, ‘Wind Up’ is cool. It’s sort of punk; it’s sort of heavy.’ And since we were on Victory, a hardcore label, we thought maybe it’d be cool [to include it].

I don’t hate the song or anything, but it’s a little shallow. I don’t even really know what it’s about. Conformity in hardcore? It’s kind of like, who cares?

You know what I mean? It’s a social song that made sense in a time and place maybe, but now it’s kind of like, ‘Sure, the hardcore scene is conformist — like every other social scene in the world.’

“How Long is the Night?”

I think this is the sleeper [hit] on the record — the most important song, but also one of the least discussed. It’s about insomnia, when you’re in the middle of the night and thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, I’m never going to sleep. I’m never going to get through this interminably long night.’

I think it was a good use of a subject that could encapsulate all the other subjects on the record and make it feel whole, because you have its narrator up at night, thinking about all the things that have gone on and unable to sleep because he can’t get his head around them.

Another one of the big themes that the record was about was this idea of group consciousness — whether it’s the band, a peer group, or the community that we have together — versus the individual ‘I,’ and the way those things play off each other.

For me, the most important part of “Understanding in a Car Crash” is how “we followed white lines to the sunset.” And then it’s like, “I don’t want to feel this way forever” — the first real emergence of the individual identity on the record.

“How Long is the Night?” starts with the line “if we run far away, do you think we will ever die?” It’s this idea of if we can maintain this group — this community — can we get away from all of these horrible things that have happened? And then at the end, the very end of the song, it’s like, “I’m falling down, and you’re not there to catch my fall.” It’s this sort of feeling where the community has not saved you from yourself; ultimately, the collapse happens. There’s no one there to support you.

“I1100”

That’s kind of the downer ending to the record — another reason why I really liked how the last song comes in and brings you back to the beginning. It’s these endless cycles of individual and group, and hope and disappointment.

I think that’s why it’s sort of ended up as a whole record, rather than just a few songs that people love. It’s an experience.

The one thing that I remember about this record is the person who owned the studio that we did it at, Tim Gilles. He passed during the pandemic, and was a real mentor for me. I worked at my first studio for him. We were able to record our demo there because he was like, ‘You worked all this time for almost no pay, so I’ll help you out.’

He used to call me ‘Tone Geoff,’ because he said I couldn’t carry a tune to save my life. And when he heard Thursday, he was like, ‘Oh my god, are you actually learning how to sing? This is good. Like, you’re not perfect, but you know what you’re doing now.’

So we did Waiting, and he was like, ‘cool, whatever.’ But when we did Full Collapse, he heard the songs and was like, ‘I don’t care that your budget is limited. We’re gonna make this a great record. There’s something here; you figured something out. And when people finally get this record, it’s gonna have a huge impact.’

I remember multiple times of just crying in the in the booth because he was riding me so hard: “You’re just not hitting it. That’s not the note. This is the note. Here, you missed that.” Just over and over — 20 hours on one song, that kind of thing.

I really appreciate him believing in us, you know? And now that he’s gone, the thought I’ll never get to work with him on stuff is really strange. It’s really made me realize how much I love him, and how much I owe him, and how lucky I was to have somebody that was such a champion of me. Like, ‘Yeah, you can’t really sing, but you’ve got something worth pushing.... I should teach you how to do this right, because you’ve got something, even if it’s not natural talent.’

Tim mixed the record, and he was [producer] Sal [Villanueva]’s mentor. Sal would be like, “I’m just not believing that line,” but Tim would be like, “We’re gonna go over this melody 30 times, and you’re gonna fucking know it in your bones, and then you’re going to give the performance that Sal wants you to give.”

He was one of those extremely loud, extremely outspoken [people who] was always screaming. But he was also full of love, and wanted everybody to be great. You know what I mean? Just a true complicated person. I was very lucky to work with him.

The most raw performance he got out of me was “I Am the Killer” — those verses where it sounds like I’m on the verge of tears. That’s him pushing me.

But the most intense moment of the record that he very much helped with was “Paris in Flames.” Not only did he convince me to develop the melody of the chorus, he said, “You’re changing minor to major in the chorus and back again. You need to hit that. You need to find the beauty in that.”

After we got the chorus, he was like, “You sang a real fucking chorus. Listen to that; it’s a real fucking chorus. All right!”

He was the one who did all the keyboards at the end of “Paris in Flames” — the way they stack up and become this epic, sort of apocalyptic thing at the end. It was because he decided to make it a fucking symphony.

He was like, “You guys don’t know what you’re doing here, but it’s basically, like Mozart. It’s fucking crazy. And I’m gonna build on it. It’s gonna be insane. Because [guitarist] Steve [Pedulla]’s playing ‘Close to the Edge’ by fucking Yes and he doesn’t even know it. He’s not playing in time with the rest of band. And it’s fucking incredible. You guys are doing all this stuff by accident. I’m going to show you what you’re trying to do, and then we’re going to fucking have something here.”

That was kind of his vibe. So when I hear “Paris in Flames,” I’m like, ‘Yeah, Tim, you were fucking right.’

One thing we’ve been eager to get back off the ground since our recent Substack reboot is self-titled’s Needle Exchange mix series. It’s featured a wide range of rising and iconic artists over the years — everyone from Nils Frahm, Oneohtrix Point Never and Laurel Halo to Kruder + Dorfmeister, Justin Broadrick and The Orb.

At some point, we’ll try to make sense of its first 352 sets and share a rundown of our personal favorites, ones that turned the idea of an increasingly disposable medium on its head. In the meantime, we’re psyched to end our indefinite hiatus with a widescreen entry from the Rotterdam-born, Berlin-based producer Nadia Struiwigh.

Much like her majestic new LP IKIGAI — which is weaved in throughout more than an hour of Artificial Intelligence-adjacent music — it’s an emotionally charged expression of her father’s recent passing. (IKIGAI’s title is taken from the Japanese word that means “reason for being.”) Custom built for cushy headphones, it takes its time building up tension and defies gravity with its inherent grasp of deeply human dynamics and glassy, electronic grooves.

Or as fellow space cadet Philip Sherburne put it in one of his recent newsletters:

Few people are keeping the flame burning for ’90s-style electronic listening music quite like Nadia Struiwigh…. [though] there’s nothing explicitly retro about her sound; she strikes me as someone guided first and foremost by the possibilities of her machines, rather than any predetermined ideas about musical style.

Blast off below, right alongside Struiwigh’s track notes, a few animated music videos, and streaming versions of her last three full-lengths….

This mix begins with my own track “Magnetic Light Magnetic Night,” taken from my [new] album. It felt like the perfect way to open the journey.

The piece carries a very emotional energy for me, because the whole album was created for my father. There is a sense of nostalgia running through it, almost like looking back through memories, and that feeling gently sets the tone for everything that follows.

Right after that comes “Hito no Kaze,” another track from the album, which continues that atmosphere and opens the space even further.

These first moments of the mix really lay the emotional foundation for the whole story.

The overall mood of this set is deeply connected to how I grew up with music. Artists like Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, Enya, and Björk were a huge part of my world and still are today.

That dreamy, emotional and slightly mysterious kind of sound has always felt like home to me, and you can definitely hear that influence throughout the mix.

I also included music from a few artists I deeply admire. Shed and John Beltran are both masters at creating worlds through sound, and their music fits beautifully within the emotional landscape of this mix.

In the middle of the journey there is a very personal moment with “Debugging the Soul,” where you can actually hear my sister and my niece.

That makes the track incredibly special to me. After that comes Gaian, another piece from the album, and those two tracks sit together very naturally, almost like different memories or cultures meeting through sound.

I also had to include a couple of tracks from Tom VR and Otik, because honestly their music is just too good not to share. Their sound fits so naturally within this atmosphere.

Toward the end of the mix the energy slowly opens up a bit more and becomes slightly more dance-leaning. I return again to some of my own music from the album, which lifts the energy while still keeping that emotional thread running through the story.

This mix is very close to my heart. It brings together my own music and some of the artists and sounds that have inspired me for many years.

Enjoy xx

TRACKLISTING
Nadia Struiwigh – Magnetic Light Magnetic Night
Nadia Struiwigh – Hito no Kaze
loket – Sanders Groove
Otik – Zone Doubt
Chestnut People – IV
Earth Trax – Bruises
Nadia Struiwigh – Phantom Frequency
Moritz von Oswald – Infinito (Version)
John Beltran – Peninsula
Nadia Struiwigh – Debugging the Soul
Nadia Struiwigh – Gaian
Tom VR – Achemore
DJ Qu – Candle Lit
Shed – Time
Otik – Cosmosis
Nadia Struiwigh – IKIGAI
Tom VR & Louf – Harmonix
Nadia Struiwigh – Circle the Sun

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Further Listening

One thing we’ll be doing on self-titled’s new Substack in the months ahead is revisiting the best writing from our website, which launched in 2008 and wound down 16 years later — when running an independent publication truly became untenable.

On deck today: a beginner’s guide to experimental icon Éliane Radigue, who passed away last month at the age of 94. Fellow synthesist Matt Carlson wrote it, capturing the French composer’s work (and drone music in general) on the deeper level it deserves.

Here’s hoping Carlson’s one-off gig with Golden Retriever last summer was an early sign of the duo working on new material — Carlson and Jonathan Sielaff’s first joint effort since this expansive Longform Edition from 2021…

Why do some people want to sit and listen to one note for 20 minutes? Or one chord for an hour? Successful drone music is actually not about stasis itself. When it works, it’s because it allows a shift to occur in the listener, wherein the subject of the music becomes your own phenomenological experience.

Good drone work is about the way you perceive it: how your focus shifts when a layer you didn’t even notice before suddenly leaps to the forefront in a way that makes you question whether it happened in the mix or in your own mind, the way a mass of static sine waves will cancel each other out depending on how your ears are aligned to the speakers, how what would be an insignificant change in traditional music becomes completely seismic in a context of limited means.

It’s about duration being one of the primary structuring mechanisms of human experience, so that the same sound therefore has a completely different meaning depending on whether it lasts for a tenth of a second, one second, 10 seconds, one minute, 10 minutes, one hour, etc.

Eliane Radigue’s music is one of the clearest examples of work that succeeds in articulating ideas about these things. Because the subject of this work is your attention, the music can’t fully speak if you use it as background. If you listen to it that way you’re likely to get little back from it. Its pleasures reveal themselves to those who try and allow it to be their primary object of attention.

Your mind won’t stay with it all the time, but that’s okay. The shifting focus of the mind and the ear is part of what she’s working with. Her music doesn’t impart readily comprehensible emotions, but that doesn’t mean it’s cold and unemotional. It affects your mood and the feelings in your body through circuitous channels rather than obvious emotional signifiers.

Although slow and contemplative, it’s not really ambient because you can’t use it functionally to tint the room with a particular feeling. Her music couldn’t be further from the common conception of drone as an essentially passive music: something “nice” you put on just to bliss out and relax, but not really pay attention to.

Similar misconceptions exist about meditation, a practice that Radigue has been dedicated to since 1974, which is often criticized as a withdraw from the challenges and difficulties of life into a false and naive tranquility. But in both meditation and in Radigue’s music, the goal is not to retreat from reality into a cocoon of good vibes, but to engage directly and in a deeper way with reality in all of its challenges, by harnessing the mind’s salient capacity for awareness and applying it with rigor to the minute and subtly varying complexities of our moment-to-moment experience.

Although there isn’t really an “accessible” place to start with Radigue, I’ve chosen Tryptych (Important, 2009) because it’s broken up into shorter 20 minute tracks that some might find easier to digest than uninterrupted hour-long pieces.

Beginning with a filter slowly opening over white noise, “Part 1” immediately evokes nature: wind, the ocean. Radigue’s work always feels like a particularly earthy form of electronic music, especially compared to the outer space associations common to this period. Sound patterns shift and undulate like a river, like mathematical expressions of natural phenomena.

There is a very hand made quality to these pieces. Radigue records her Arp 2500 synthesizer live to tape in real time, and the mixing process is a complex live performance on multiple tape machines.

As a composer, Radigue occupies an interesting and unusual place at an intersection of the French classical mysticism of Messiaen, the tape studio performance techniques she studied with Schaeffer and Henry at the GRM, and the emphasis that American minimalism places on the direct perceptual experience of sound.

“Part Two” introduces a rhythmic element in the form of beating tones, a favorite Radigue technique that allows her use of long tones to exist in an ambiguous place on the spectrum between pitch and rhythm. Never flat or static, Radigue’s long tones are always in motion, churning and shifting rhythmically.

The pacing of the composition is impeccable: every gesture is given time to sit there for a moment and be fully experienced before a new one is introduced. The piece gradually builds into a spinning kaleidoscope of subtle simultaneous rhythmic patterns. There is no traditional sense of “development” in this music. It is not concerned with memories of where you’ve been or premonitions of where you might be going. The focus is on sound and experiencing its perception in the present moment.

“Part Three” immediately immerses you in a thick cluster of close high tones quickly beating and pulsing at different speeds. You can focus on any one of them, or none of them, or all of them. Your attention is not guided or told what to focus on, what is foreground and what is background. Radigue openly presents a field of simultaneous phenomena and your attention is given ample room to wander, like in early Robert Wilson or the long shots in Tati’s Playtime.

Often the music sounds quite different depending on where your ears are in relation to the speakers. A small turn of the head will reveal or hide various layers, or make what had been a rhythmically active beating tone suddenly stand still. This is a quality it shares with La Monte Young’s Dream House: although the musical content of the composition is objectively fixed, an emphasis is placed on how the listener’s subjectivity actively participates in creating the musical experience.

Transamorem – Transmortem (Important, 2011) begins with a blast of very high frequencies, but because they’re from an analog synth recorded to tape, they’re not piercing in the way high tones sometimes are in digital music. They blend with the noise floor of the reel-to-reel in an attractive and musical way.

This sustained high tone tangibly colors our perception of all concurrent sounds, and the experience starts to feel like an investigation into perceptual psychoacoustics: the duration of this sound and our expectations around its duration become manifest as the central question at play in the composition.

Throughout the piece there is a single square wave pulse every four seconds or so marking out units of time like measures, a metrical grid within which you can place the faster subdivisions of polytemporal beating tones.

The piece ends with a fadeout so slow that for the longest time you can’t quite be sure whether it’s really even happening or if you’re just imagining it. It’s like the body feels the music fading out before the mind knows it is in fact taking place. It’s a good example of the way Radigue’s music explores phenomenology: the ending becomes about the question of how long a musical gesture can take place while still being registered as a musical gesture by the conscious mind.

The Adnos (Table of the Elements, 2002) trilogy is among my favorite of Radigue’s work, comprising three 70-minute pieces composed between 1974 and 1980.

Again, questions about the rate of perceivable musical change are central: it deceives you into thinking it’s static. After listening for a while you become aware that the music has modulated keys, but there was never a precise moment when you heard the modulation actually take place.

What do key changes mean in music if you never hear them happening? It’s like a Zen koan that Radigue both proposes and offers up possible answers to.

“Adnos I” is a good example of the extreme depth-of-field at work in Radigue’s music. There’s a strong sense of foreground, middle and background, but sometimes your attention will suddenly shift and you become aware of a whole entire microcosmic universe of action taking place in the very extreme background of the music.

What’s interesting and unusual about this is that although these moments feel like a massively epic shift in the composition, from an objective standpoint almost nothing in the music actually changed; you create this seismic shift in the composition. Your subjectivity is responsible for creating what feels like a massive structural change in the music.

No two people will experience these moments in exactly the same way, and no one person will experience them in exactly the same way twice.

In “Adnos II,” what starts as the implied rhythmic content of her beating tones blossoms into full-on pulse music, albeit a pulse music consisting of many layers each pulsing at a slightly different tempo in which nothing is synced and there’s no master clock.

“Adnos III” takes this approach even further, using her Arp’s ring modulator to create what sounds like a percussion ensemble of twinkling electronic metallophones slowly drifting in and out of phase with each other. The Adnos series seems to be the project in which Radigue’s style and relationship to her instrument and tools fully attained its distinct and uniquely discreet virtuosity.

The final copies of Matt Carlson’s latest solo record are now available via Bandcamp.

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The other day, I woke up to a fog as soupy and sinister as the central figure in the freaky John Carpenter film that turned 45 last year. Not quite what you’d expect in the middle of a Minnesota winter, it seemed to hang over our house like a shadow lingering just outside its window panes.

Sure enough, I had the perfect match for this mood: Nocturnes, the first proper solo LP from multi-instrumentalist/composer/producer Jesse Hackett in more than a decade. Piano-led and sax-laced songs in search of a serious ghost story, it’s essential listening for anyone into moon-lit music along the lines of Bohren & Der Club of Gore, The Caretaker, and unsettling film scores from another timeline entirely.

More than any of his myriad projects over the past couple decades (Owiny Sigoma Band, his Blludd Relations duo with Bullion) and the elusive productions and pieces he’s created for Stones Throw, Nyege Nyege Tapes, and Honest Jon’s — either under his Elmore Judd alias, or alongside visual artist Mariano Chavez in the otherworldly outlets Metal Preyers and Teeth Agency — Nocturnes also feels deeply personal.

There’s a reason he released it under his own name, and put a faded photo of his grandparents on the cover, a decision he detailed on Instagram:

🌑 Nocturnes Album Image 🌑

Albert & Blanche Close .My grand parents .

Blanche was a factory worker in Hull and also an accomplished pianist who taught children privately from her home .

The album which features this image on the cover is dedicated to my mum, Judy who after her own mother passed away decided she wanted me and my brother to learn to play piano keeping the tradition in the family .

Thanks Blanche Thanks Judy

Much Loved & Much Missed

X

It’s not that Hackett’s other records have worn a metaphorical or literal mask (although Metal Preyers did make a menacing hoodie once). It’s just that he’s starting to reflect on his own life in a more direct manner than he could when he was, say, playing keyboards in Gorillaz — a role he fit right into between the band’s Escape to Plastic Beach and Song Machine tours.

With a Nocturnes live show currently in development along with another Metal Preyers x Akira Umeda album (last year’s Clube da Mariposa Mórbida LP actually features the artwork of Hackett’s father Bill, a sculptor/jewelry designer who brought Keith Richard’s iconic skull ring to life), we thought we’d ask for a rundown of the records that inspired this meditative turn inward and out.

Be sure to lean into more expansive listens of the albums he alludes to if you’re looking for the perfect Sunday pairing. I, for one, appreciated the intro to Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus. Aki Takahashi’s performance is particularly haunting, reflecting her (in the words of Feldman himself) seance-like approach to the piano.

[Listen on Apple Music]

Erik Satie, Vexations

Vexations is an 1893 avant-garde piano piece by Erik Satie consisting of a short, dissonant theme that must be played 840 times consecutively. A complete performance — first organized by John Cage in 1963 — lasts around 18–24 hours. It is often considered a pioneering work of conceptual art, creating a trance-like, or sometimes distressing, experience for both performers and listeners.

Until recently I was only familiar with Satie’s most well-known works. The universally recognized pieces, such as Gymnopédie No. 1, were enough to make me want to explore further.

Mark Ainley, the founder of Honest Jon’s Records, recommended that I listen to Bertrand Chamayou’s interpretations. They are played beautifully and sound incredible. The particular album I listened to also included pieces by John Cage.

I am now reading a book about Satie by Ian Penman called Erik Satie Three Piece Suite. It has been fascinating to learn more about this incredibly idiosyncratic and eccentric figure. Just before he died, Satie was composing music for a film called Entr’acte, which was intended to be shown during an avant-garde ballet performance.

Maurice Ravel, Miroirs (1905)

Miroirs (1905) is a seminal five-movement suite for solo piano by the French composer Maurice Ravel, marking an important evolution in his harmonic style toward Impressionism. Dedicated to members of the avant-garde group Les Apaches, the work evokes natural, nocturnal, and emotional imagery through shimmering and complex textures.

I have always been haunted by this piece. It sounds aquatic, dark, and completely nocturnal. I remember spending long late-night hours in my early 20s taking drugs and listening to this music with my girlfriend in the suburbs of East London.

Dark stuff.

Olivier Messiaen, Oraison

This piece was written for an early electronic instrument: the Ondes Martenot, a close relative of the theremin. It is a haunting work that somehow reminds me of Delia Derbyshire, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and the soundtracks of early black-and-white science-fiction films.

Cold gear.

John Cage, All Sides of a Small Stone

All Sides of a Small Stone is a beautiful Satie-inspired lullaby by John Cage, performed by Bertrand Chamayou. It provides a lighter, more emotive moment amongst the darker and murkier pieces I have selected here.

Béla Bartók, Bagatelles, Op. 6, Sz. 38: No. 3

What I enjoy about this piece is the whole-tone scale and the rippling sound effects, which also remind me of some of Ravel’s piano works.

Morton Feldman, For Bunita Marcus

For Bunita Marcus is a renowned 70–80 minute solo piano composition dedicated to the American composer of the same name. It is a quintessential late-period avant-garde work, characterized by extreme quietness, sparse repeating patterns, subtle shifts in harmony, and a strong focus on sonic decay.

Maurice Ravel, Pavane pour une infante défunte

Pavane pour une infante défunte (“Pavane for a Dead Princess”) is a work for solo piano written in 1899 while Ravel was studying at the Conservatoire de Paris under Gabriel Fauré.

Ravel described the piece as “an evocation of a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court.”

The pavane was a slow processional dance that was popular in European courts during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Erik Satie, Le Fils des étoiles

Le Fils des étoiles (“The Son of the Stars”) is incidental music composed in December 1891 by Erik Satie to accompany a three-act poetic drama of the same name.

It is an important work from Satie’s mystical period (1891–1895) and later played a role in his rediscovery by the French musical establishment in the 1910s.

Erik Satie, Gnossiennes: No. 4

The term “Gnossienne” is somewhat mysterious. Although Satie popularised the word, it appeared earlier in French literature and in the 1865 Larousse Dictionary, referring to a ritual labyrinth dance created by Theseus to celebrate his victory over the Minotaur.

The Gnossiennes are a series of piano compositions written by Satie in the late 19th century. The pieces are largely in free time and are highly experimental in their form, rhythm, and harmonic structure.

Maurice Ravel, Ma mère l’Oye

I learned to play this piece by the French composer Maurice Ravel called Ma mère l’Oye (“Mother Goose”). It was originally written in 1910 as a five-movement piano duet for children and was later orchestrated into a ballet in 1912.

Inspired by fairy tales, the work features delicate, magical melodies and elegant harmonies. It evokes a quiet, mysterious atmosphere—something I’ve been trying to explore in music myself.

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Further Listening

Back when I was still in elementary school, a music teacher did something that would have gotten him fired — or declared a domestic terrorist — in 2026. He rolled a VHS player out of the A/V room and shared a freshly taped recording of “Freedom.”

Why, I’ll never know. Maybe it was his attempt at turning a room full of fidgety sixth graders into future poly-sci majors: wokeness before it became a four-letter word.

Either way, I’m pretty sure the Peter Christopherson (yes, that Peter Christopherson… the one from Coil, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV) collab was lifted straight off a live broadcast of 120 Minutes. The influential MTV program helped ignite the slow-burning success of Rage Against the Machine’s debut album between its initial 1992 release and breakthrough moments like its spastic lead single (“Killing in the Name”) and a Lollapalooza bill shared with such ascendant midstream acts as Primus, Tool, Dinosaur Jr., Arrested Development and Alice in Chains.

“Freedom” landed with a whiplash in late 1993 — a cherry bomb on top of a tireless year that included more than 150 live dates. One of those stops was a First Avenue show that featured a frantic version of “Bombtrack.” Singer Zach de la Rocha prefaced the performance with a rallying cry for the release of imprisoned American Indian Movement member Leonard Peltier, a “hypocrisy all of us need to expose.”

To beam you back to the analog-ness of that time period, de la Rocha implored the crowd to pick up some pamphlets near the band’s merch booth and share their solidarity with “that Dixiecrat Clinton, whoever that fucking punk is. Let’s fill this punk’s room full of fucking mail. I know it’s not the fucking most powerful form of fucking change, but let’s get the ball fucking rolling, alright?”

The band’s decision to include this moment in their Live & Rare LP and a later Rage Against the Machine XX reissue makes perfect sense. After all, the American Indian Movement was founded in Minneapolis in 1968 to combat decades of discriminatory, post-colonial policies and forced assimilation.

President Clinton didn’t get the message. While Peltier was eligible for parole in 1993, his life sentence for participating in a Pine Ridge Indian Reservation shootout with two FBI agents wasn’t commuted until 2025. (President Biden reduced it to an indefinite house arrest just before he left office.)

Rage Against the Machine’s first national tour wasn’t the only time they left a lingering mark on Minneapolis and its sister city, St. Paul. In 2008, they were set to play a free concert at the State Capitol — a protest against the Republican National Convention — but it was blocked by police due to curfew and permit claims.

They didn’t let that stop an impromptu, megaphone-led micro-set of “Bulls on Parade” and “Testify,” however. And many fans marched straight to downtown St. Paul afterwards, leading to this somewhat surreal scene around Xcel Energy Center:

The group also played a proper show — their last Minnesota appearance, and first in 11 years — at Minneapolis’ Target Center the next day. They took the stage in orange prison suits and hoods clearly inspired by the ongoing controversy over inhumane conditions at Guantanamo Bay. Star Tribune critic Chris Riemenschneider described the night’s fallout as follows:

De la Rocha did not break to make a speech until the last song before the encore, “Wake Up,” when he urged fans to “interrupt and disrupt the destruction that this party has brought to the world.” As the encore ended with the crowd screaming, “[Expletive] you I won’t do what you tell me!” (the final refrain of “Killing in the Name”), the singer tempered the anger with pleas to “protest peacefully.”

Accounts vary about post-concert rioting. Police reportedly arrested about 70 protesters, but those mostly came more than an hour after the show. Whether the trouble was sparked by the Rage show (or was just more protesting, or was just bar-hopping drunkenness heightened by the heavy police presence), don’t let it be a black eye on the concert.

I’m here to tell you that Minnesota is in desperate need of a redo — a cathartic pushback against the clear occupation of a place that didn’t need, or ask, for ICE’s “Metro Surge.” Why would we? Crime is down. And our diversity has made us a warm and welcoming place for more than a century, from waves of Norwegians, Danes, Fins and Swedes looking for land and opportunity to war-ravaged Hmong, Burmese, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, and Somali refugees.

Please consider signing the petition below to send a bat signal to local officials, a band that claims to be done with touring, and a country that needs to clearly wake up before more innocent people are murdered, or it’s simply too late.

Sign Our Petition

At the risk of being viewed as hyperbolic (I’m not), I’ll leave you with this recent online reflection from a lifelong Minnesotan who loves the outdoors, biking, and helping people as much as Alex Pretti did:

If you're reading this from outside of Minnesota, Minnesotans need your help. The federal government is murdering civilians on our streets and that's not all. It's worse than what you see on TV, than what might appear to be isolated incidents.

There is a pseudo-military occupation of Minneapolis right now, with 3,000 federal agents wearing long guns and tactical gear, caravaning across our streets. I see them everywhere now on runs and after grocery shopping.

They're mocking parents standing watch with whistles outside of daycares, smiling and waving at them. They're beating up and spraying pepper spray at people - ordinary people who would rather be working their day jobs - trying to prevent abductions of neighbors.

Yesterday, after murdering Alex Pretti, there were enough agents *not* at the scene that ICE convoys were still seen all over Minneapolis, with brave residents trying to follow them to protect their neighbors and neighborhoods.

Stand up. Attend a protest. Write your legislators. Call them.

If you're a 2nd Amendment supporter, call the NRA and call your local gun club to find out what they are saying and doing.

Thanks in advance for your support.

To find out more from the frontlines, please follow the localized regram feed here.

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As we resume our regularly scheduled programming in the heat of the hell that ICE has wrought on self-titled’s adopted hometown — we moved to Minneapolis in 2018 — I find myself pulled in two deeply polarized directions: the stress-reducing sounds that drive our site’s ambient side project (self | centered, which has a new home right here) and the extreme noise exemplified by everything from Converge’s latest single latest single to a Rage Against the Machine reissue I may discuss in more detail soon. (Timeless protest tracks like “Killing in the Name” have taken on new meaning in light of Renee Good’s murder and what’s beginning to feel like a paramilitary-led police state overseen by a petty madman.)

A sterling example of this spectrum’s middle ground — music that’s both calming and chaotic — is Guido Zen’s Abul Mogard project. More of a fully formed alter ego than a swiftly named solo outlet, it was first presented as the work of a Serbian factory worker haunted by the industrial drones heard throughout his life.

Which makes sense; its slow-moving soundtracks often sound like they’re stuck in a sonic limbo between serenity and decay. The three-part record In a Few Places Along the River captured this beautifully in 2022, when its weightless, reverb-laden experiments in “extremely slow, intertwined tones” received a quiet digital-only release on the eve of Mogard’s emergence from anonymity.

“[I] wanted to mark this new period,” explains Zen, “so I decided to release it quickly, by myself.” This step away from the shadows didn’t go unnoticed; In a Few Places Along the River is a favorite among fans and fellow artists, and has been excerpted in everything from an augmented reality installation (Peder Bjurman’s Slow Walker) to a politically-charged animated film (Fleuryfontaine’s Soixante-sept millisecondes).

Given everything that is going on throughout the world — a recalibration of long-held realities, with no clear end in sight — we can’t think of a better time than now for the album’s long-overdue physical release on Zen’s own Soft Echoes imprint. Look out for a limited run of 500 vinyl copies on March 6.

In the following exclusive feature, Zen discusses the first Brian Eno record to leave a lingering impression on his own work: 1983’s Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks…

I first discovered Apollo in the early ‘90s, when two of my best friends brought me the CD, insisting it was a great album I had to listen to. Up until then, I only knew Brian Eno through Nerve Net, which I had purchased when it came out and really liked.

But Apollo was something entirely different. In fact, I believe it was the first ambient album I listened to, alongside Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II, which came out shortly after this first encounter of mine with ambient music.

Apollo has profoundly influenced my own work. I must have listened to it hundreds of times, often falling asleep to it. There is something about the sound: those heavy yet subtle drones beneath layers of delicate, pointed melodies that immediately caught my attention. From the first few seconds of “Under Stars,” I was completely drawn in.

Listening to the album helped me understand a new way of using the space between the notes, the weaving of melodic lines, and the seamless continuity carried by the atmospheres. At the time, I knew little about its background, but listening to it was almost addictive. I love the way your mind can follow different strands of sound and stay with them.

Afterwards, I explored many other works by Brian Eno and came to understand that he is a master of intricate simplicity.

Another work of his that brings this to mind is the sound installation I Dormienti, created in collaboration with sculptor Mimmo Paladino. I saw it at the Roundhouse in Camden, London, in 1999.

I still vividly remember walking through the vast space, with sounds coming from all directions, catching my attention, and those low bass tones resonating through the architecture. It was a beautiful work and an incredibly immersive experience.

Returning to Apollo, I also love its more melodic pieces. “Deep Blue Day” became widely known years later when Trainspotting used it in the memorable toilet scene.

Oddly, the pieces featuring pedal steel guitar didn’t appeal to me at first. But much later, after attending a Q&A with Brian’s brother Roger in London in 2019, I came to understand the idea behind it.

The music on this album was written as the soundtrack for an Al Reinert film made from NASA footage of the Apollo missions (For All Mankind). Brian Eno was aware that astronauts were allowed to bring only one cassette tape with them to space, and he discovered that they nearly all chose country and western music, as many of them came from the southern United States and simply liked that genre.

Both Brian and Roger shared a quiet passion for the genre, which led them to imagine a psychedelic, slowed-down interpretation of country music that could suit the long, meditative sequences in space where almost nothing happens. Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel guitars, which I hadn’t fully appreciated before, now feel absolutely perfect in that context.

This understanding gave me a new way of hearing those parts. They point to something unexpectedly human — a cultural thread carried into space.

To me, Apollo is a soundscape that opened up a new world, shaping how I approach melody, texture and atmosphere. It remains one of the key works I keep returning to, still deeply inspiring.

Explore more of Abul Mogard’s immersive music on Bandcamp.

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It’s difficult to think of a DJ who was more in tune with the manic spirit of self-titled than Optimo co-founder Keith McIvor.

Better known by his alias JD Twitch, he first landed on our radar with the wild, free-wheeling CD How to Kill the DJ [Part Two]. The first official mix from McIvor and his longtime creative partner Jonnie Wilkes channeled the spirit of their revered Sub Club residency with a sprawling tracklist that included seamless snippets of everything from Basic Channel and Blondie to Ricardo Villalobos and The Rapture.

As much of a mission statement for the Scottish duo’s omnivorous style as it was for the arty dance-rock scene they helped shape, it left an even deeper impression with its second disc. Less of a club-oriented listen than a living room-calibrated playlist, it introduced us to a slew of seminal artists and songs we’d never heard before, including Sun City Girls, Os Mutantes, Arthur Russell, Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra, and a Kraftwerk-quoting string quartet.

As ubiquitous as mixes became in the post-Soundcloud landscape that followed How to Kill the DJ’s 2004 release, McIvor never stopped treating his twisted online sets, loving compilations, and thoughtful mixtapes like boundless history lessons. Had self-titled’s own Needle Exchange series made it to its 500th installment by now, we would have asked the Edinburgh native to mark the milestone in a way only he could.

Sadly, McIvor passed away last Friday — just two months after he was diagnosed with an untreatable brain tumor. Wilkes shared the news on Instagram:

It’s with immense sadness that I’m writing to tell you Keith passed away peacefully yesterday at 2.06pm at The Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow. In a 28 year partnership he changed my life immeasurably and together we took our work in directions and to places few people are lucky enough to explore. I am forever grateful for everything he bestowed on me, both as a partner in music and as a friend. Keith’s intensity and passion for life, for music, for creativity and for positive change simply never let up. He was formidable. His belief in people and the idea that standing together, that our collective strength is powerful was unwavering. I loved him for that.

My thoughts are with Keith’s family and friends. Thank you to them and the extended group who have tirelessly supported Keith and each other in the last few months. Thank you to the staff at The Hospice who made this last while as good as it possibly could be.

Keith left us far too soon. He will go now to travel those space-ways but I know his energy remains in every one of us who had the privilege of knowing him. I love you forever Keith.

The following exclusive feature is taken from the 15th issue of self-titled’s digital magazine. It revolves around the records that helped shape Optimo over their nearly 30-year run as restless selectors — including the bulletproof back catalogue McIvor curated for Optimo Music — and kindred spirits, creatively and personally.

THE RECORD THAT WAS REALLY, REALLY HARD TO WORK INTO ONE OF OUR SETS (BUT WE DID IT ANYWAY)

Love
”Everybody’s Gotta Live”
(RSO, 1974)

Keith McIvor: I was obsessed with this record, so I played it at Optimo one night and it completely cleared the floor. So I played it again the next week, and every week after that. We had such a regular, dedicated audience that after about three or four weeks, people would ask me if I was going to play ‘that song.’

Before long, people were going crazy for it, singing along from start to finish despite the fact that almost nobody knew what it was or how to find it. It became a genuine Optimo anthem, and a Glasgow anthem in general as other DJs in the city picked up on it.

Then when we put it on our How To Kill the DJ mix CD, people in other places would ask for it when we played. One of my favorite memories is playing in Tokyo and having most of the crowd singing along rapturously to it even though they probably didn’t even understand the words.

THE RECORD EVERYONE SHOULD OWN

Funkadelic
Maggot Brain
(Westbound, 1971)

Jonnie Wilkes: Just last week in San Francisco, we took a short taxi ride and the driver was playing Funkadelic — later stuff than this, maybe a compilation of hits — and I complimented him on his good taste.

I was enthusiastic and asked if he’d heard Maggot Brain. He said he hadn’t. I then went on to give a drunken, crude description of one of my favorite records ever, telling him how George Clinton was out of his mind on LSD and told Eddie Hazel to play the first half of the song like his mother had just died, and the second half as if he had found out she was alive.

THE PSYCH RECORD THAT’S BETTER THAN ANY DRUG COULD HOPE TO BE

Hawkwind
Space Ritual
(United Artists, 1973)

Keith: Drugs and music go hand in hand, right? Or do they?

I was heavily into dub reggae before I ever got stoned, yet getting stoned didn’t seem to make any difference to how I heard it. And I never really liked Ecstasy, as it made dance music I didn’t like sound a thousand times worse.

Hawkwind aren’t generally regarded as a psych band, but their early records genuinely alter my state of mind whenever I listen to them.

I will boldly state that is the greatest live album ever recorded. It’s a monolithic beast of a record that I’ve probably listened to over a thousand times. When the first cheap Walkman clones came out I made a pause button edit of the track “Orgone Accumulator” that lasted the full length of a C90 cassette.

As a teenager with next to no money, I’d have to find cheap thrills, so I’d explore the city or the countryside listening to that track until the batteries ran out. It took me to a place no drug ever has.

THE GREATEST MUSIC-FOR-AIRPORTS RECORD THAT ISN’T REALLY MEANT FOR THAT KIND OF THING

Whitehouse
Great White Death
(Come Organisation, 1985)

Jonnie: I’m always in airports, and unfortunately relaxation is a skill that I just don’t possess. I’m a worrier, I’m easily distracted, and I’m usually running late.

I’ve tried meditation, noise-canceling headphones, stroboscopic brain machines, Buddha Machines and, of course, ambient music to try and diffuse tension while I travel and have had little success.

I know Eno’s intention was to create ambient pieces which didn’t force listening — music that could or should be as “ignorable as it is interesting,” music that puts one in a different state of mind. For me however, there’s just too much up ahead.

I’m likely to become more anxious listening to Music For Airports as I queue for security or immigration. I was thinking instead I would try something from my most extreme records: total power electronics, something actually sonically closer to the sounds of the aviation industry.

THE RECORD THAT HELPED ME APPRECIATE COUNTRY MUSIC

Johnny Cash
”Ring of Fire”
(Columbia, 1963)

Keith: Growing up on the east coast of Scotland, we weren’t really exposed to country very much. I’d only really know the MOR songs that would breach the Top 40, and I would literally tune them out.

In the late ’80s in Edinburgh, there was a wildly energetic band called Swamptrash who played bluegrass and country music with a punk intensity. I must have seen them dozens of times, every time thinking they were the best live band in the world.

They also introduced me to Johnny Cash, with an epic, turbo-charged version of “Ring of Fire” that was always the highlight of their set. I remember telling a friend it was my favorite Swamptrash song and him looking at me like I was an idiot — I was! — only to inform me it was by the Man In Black.

So another door opened and I explored a lot of rebellious country music. Moving to Glasgow a little later, I discovered that country music is deeply entrenched in the local psyche. There’s even a Grand Ole Opry here.

At Optimo, we’d play a lot of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and very old Americana, particularly early on or towards the end of the night.

It’s the original punk music, isn’t it?

THE RECORD I LOVED AS A KID AND RECENTLY REDISCOVERED

Gene Vincent
”Be-Bop-A-Lula”
(Capitol, 1956)

Jonnie: Over the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve bought a lot more rockabilly music. (I dabbled as a teenager and went to a few rockabilly clubs with my mates, but didn’t explore the music that much really.)

Gene Vincent’s version of “Be-Bop-A-Lula” is a song I remember from way before that, at my parents house in the early ’70s. A lot of daytime Northern Irish radio DJs would play ’50s rock ‘n’ roll records alongside country music and Ulster “showbands,” so I got to hear some stuff like this.

For me, this record was just funny and I loved it for that. It sounded funny, it had funny words, and I thought I was funny doing bendy-legged dancing while my mother peeled the potatoes at the sink.

I often play this now if we are playing a few records in a bar or after-hours with friends.

THE RECORD I NEVER QUITE UNDERSTOOD THE APPEAL OF

Daft Punk
Discovery
(Virgin, 2001)

Keith: I don’t understand the huge amount of love there is for this record, or Daft Punk in general. I don’t actively dislike it — I like a couple tracks, actually — but it remains a mystery to me why they are regarded by many as the masters of dance music or to use a term I loathe: EDM.

While Daft Punk openly admit their influences on their earlier track “Teachers,” most of their output feels like a cheap copy of the real (Chicago) deal. I’m not a purist who thinks only those born in the Windy City have a right to make Chicago-style house music, but the records that are the blueprint for Daft Punk’s sound will always sound better to my ears than their take on it.

Perhaps it is merely proof positive that a good image and marketing combined with reworking an American blueprint can lead to iconic status. It just doesn’t sit quite right with me.

THE RECORD I LEARNED TO APPRECIATE

John Coltrane
A Love Supreme
(Impulse!, 1965)

Jonnie: I found this while digging in second-hand stuff and had to have it; it looked so special and it weighed a ton. When I played it, though, I wasn’t that excited. I’d already found freakier free stuff like Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra, and Coltrane’s hard-bop sound just wasn’t crazy enough for my taste. I wanted the trippier stuff; everything had to be ‘out there.’

A couple of summers ago, I bought some more Alice Coltrane records. Having previously only owned Journey to Satchidananda, I read about the relationship between John and Alice Coltrane and decided I should revisit.

Although it’s not what Alice Coltrane’s music is to me, I would certainly say I ‘appreciate’ the record now and realize that things had already begun to slowly head towards the cosmos.

THE CREEPIEST RECORD I OWN

Vagina Dentata Organ present Jim Jones
The Last Supper
(WSNS, 1984)

Keith: This is a recording of the last moments at the People’s Temple in Jonestown, where Jim Jones talks his followers into drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. The tasteful picture disc came in an edition of 912 copies — one copy for everyone who died.

The recording was allegedly made by the CIA and ended up falling into the hands of Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV associate Monte Cazazza, who helped facilitate this release. It is a deeply disturbing recording of a patently paranoid, delusional individual, and a scary indictment of how far the cult of personality can go towards controlling others.

I can’t say I’ve listened to it very often but it is genuinely disturbing and creepy.

THE RECORD I WISH I’D WRITTEN

Suicide
“Dream Baby Dream”
(Island, 1979)

Jonnie: The simplicity in the composition of “Dream Baby Dream” and the emotional purity of the song is incredible. When something is repetitive like this, but gaining in strength as it repeats, it’s rarely purely musical.

THE ACID RECORD THAT’S SO GOOD I’D PUT IT IN A LATE ‘80S TIME CAPSULE

Fast Eddie
“Acid Thunder”
(DJ International, 1988)

Jonnie: If we’re going to try and describe the sound of a great club around that time, this would be the record I’d choose. I’ve always thought this track had a narrative more than most ‘acid tracks.’ I love its structure, even though it’s kind of clunky. It has an intense start–an insane 303 just repeating and repeating until that extended fill on the kick leads to the hooky 303. Then the use of simple sound effects and the melancholic pads that come in towards the end.

This record is kind of like the story of a night out back then, and maybe it’s the right record to tell that part of our story.

THE RECORD THAT NEVER LEFT MY WEEKLY CRATE AT THE SUB CLUB

Dinosaur
“Kiss Me Again”
(Sire, 1978)

Keith: When I first listened to this record, I thought it was a bit of a mess and pushed it to the back of the pile for a few months. Then I put it on again late one night, and it was if a lightning bolt went off in my head.

I realized the first time I’d played it, my mixer had been set to mono and I hadn’t heard the vocals. But now I had discovered the magic in the record, and I stayed up all night listening to it on repeat.

The A-side mix that Sire demanded be made — they thought Arthur’s mix was too weird — is okay, but Arthur’s 13-minute B-side mix is a thing of wonder, and possibly my favorite 12-inch ever.

People in Scotland clubs have short attention spans, so I had to make a shorter edit. “Kiss Me Again” ended up becoming one of the most beloved Optimo songs, with a full audience singalong and much clapping and cheering every time it was aired.

I’d also end up hearing it at almost every post-Optimo party I went to, where it would be drowned out by late night revelers crooning along to the lyrics.

THE RECORD THAT MAKES ME PROUD OF BEING SCOTTISH

Fire Engines
“Candyskin”
(Pop Aural, 1981)

Keith: For such a small country, Scotland has produced an incredible amount of great music. It’s really hard to narrow my favorite local artists down, but if pressed, I think I’d have to pick the Fire Engines.

Glasgow has always overshadowed Edinburgh when it comes to great bands, but in the early ’80s Edinburgh held its own with a huge number of amazing bands, labels and clubs. Sadly I was too young to appreciate this, but was vaguely aware of it when I went into Virgin to buy Blondie records and saw all the posters for upcoming gigs.

A few years after the fact, I picked this 7” up secondhand and was bowled over by it. I later discovered the band hated the fact that the label added strings to it, but I love the combination of somewhat shambling dissonance with blatant pop aspirations.

I always wished I had been born a few years earlier so I could have seen them live, but then they briefly reformed around 2005 and played at Optimo. Most of the crowd had no idea who they were and were looking suspiciously at this group of middle-aged men setting up on stage, but they went on to play an astonishing (and astonishingly short) 15-minute set that literally blew everyone away.

THE RECORD SO AHEAD OF ITS TIME YOU’D SWEAR THE ARTIST WHO MADE IT HAD A GODDAMN TIME MACHINE

CTI
“Dancing Ghosts”
(Doublevision, 1984)

Keith: Recorded in 1982 for the soundtrack to a video piece, this track by Chris & Cosey is one of the most beautiful, ecstatic pieces of electronic music I know.

Chris Carter is a total gear head, so he got his hands on the very first Roland 808s and 303s to reach the UK. This is perhaps the first recorded piece of music to utilize both machines, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m averse to using the term ‘proto,’ I might well describe it as proto-acid house.

I started DJing in 1987 and would play the warm up set at a club in Edinburgh where this was the perfect track to set the mood for the night. When the first house records started arriving here, they didn’t sound shockingly new to my ears, as they used a very similar sonic palette to this. To my ears, they were part of a continuum rather that a sonic revolution.

I licensed this for a compilation in 1994 and a lot of people at that time asked me if it was a new recording. I still play it out today and am on occasion asked if it is something that has just been released and am always tempted to answer that it was beamed into the future by Chris & Cosey 30 years ago.

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It happens to the best of us before we know it — the point where seeing a show goes from being a daily occurrence to a bi-monthly ordeal. Having my first, and most likely last, child at 40 was where this turning point hit straight home, and the reality of my (privileged, yes, but that doesn’t make it any less real) situation began to sink in.

It’s not that I don’t want to see live music anymore; it simply has to warrant claiming an increasingly limited amount of time, money and energy. Or as blink-182 once told the gathered masses outside TRL, “I guess this is growing up.”

Enter Nine Inch Nails, a band that’s been around since the late ‘80s, and realized it didn’t want to run on nothing but fury-induced fumes after the close of its climactic “Wave Goodbye” tour in 2009. Trent Reznor, who was 44 at the time, billed this self-imposed break as an indefinite hiatus from his iconic outlet — an open invitation for him to explore other creative avenues (namely a new band and a seemingly endless stream of acclaimed film scores alongside core NIN member Atticus Ross).

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Reznor wrote a lengthy note on the official NIN site in the lead-up to its final bow (for the moment): “It’s time to make NIN disappear for a while. Last year’s ‘Lights in the Sky’ tour was something I’m quite proud of and seems like the culmination of what I could pull off in terms of an elaborate production. It was also quite difficult to pull off technically and physically night after night and left us all a bit dazed.

He continued, “After some thought, we decided to book a last run of shows across the globe this year. The approach to these shows is quite different from last year — much more raw, spontaneous and less scripted. Fun for us and a different way for you to see us and wave goodbye.”

In many ways, NIN’s current “Peel It Back” tour picks up where “Lights in the Sky” left off. Lineup-wise, Foo Fighters and NIN traded drummers in late July, bringing Josh Freese (see also: A Perfect Circle, Devo, and his longtime punk band The Vandals) back into the fold for the first time since 2008. Judging by his genuine smile below — captured on their first night in North America — and Freese’s inhuman fills on songs like “Wish,” “March of the Pigs,” and “A Perfect Drug” at last Sunday’s Minneapolis show, it didn’t take long for the consummate professional to get reacquainted with the rest of the band.

If anything, NIN’s current live combo sounds as tight as it’s ever been together. From the multi-instrumental mayhem of Ross, Reznor and Alessandro Cortini to the wild guitar work and venom-dripping backup vocals of Robin Finck, “Peel It Back” sounds like the spiritual epitome of “getting the band back together” one last time.

This is especially apparent in the beat-hammering nihilism of NIN’s early records. Revisiting key moments from “The Downward Spiral,” “Pretty Hate Machine,” and the “Broken” EP doesn’t feel like fan service. It sounds essential: a call-to-arms echoed in latter-day lashings like “The Hand That Feeds” and “Less Than.”

Everyone’s at the top of their game physically, too — something that can be seen as the quintet sprints between a well-lit, relatively simple middle-of-the-floor setup and a striking main stage cloaked in a sheer curtain, video mulch and epileptic lighting. It’s the look of a lineup that’s not just comfortable with one another, but the “if not now, when?” demands of aging gracefully with self-respect, determination and grit.

The other thing that sets “Peel It Back” apart from other post-“Wave Goodbye” tours is the sheer ambition and scale of the production itself. Every detail appears to have been debated and developed like a fine-tuned concert film, starting with the seamless way in which NIN’s opener (Boys Noize, in fine EDM-turned-EBM form here, right down to old head nods to obscurities like “Near You” from the Raster-Noton rave-up “CoH Plays Cosey”) ratchets up tension only to have it released by Reznor’s spare rendition of the cutting “With Teeth” closer “Right Where It Belongs.”

Its opening line — “see the animal in his cage that you built” — reads like a dead-on distillation of what it must feel like to be a figurehead of pop-oriented pain for decades. It’s not an accusation; more like an acknowledgment that he’s still here because of NIN’s fever-pitch fans, and willing to wade into the same exhausting waters that brought the band to an inflection point about 15 years ago.

Reznor doesn’t seem to be letting up on the gas this time. He’s driving straight off a metaphorical cliff with his longtime friends and collaborators in the backseat. And we’re peering over the edge, wondering how a band a few years away from its 40th birthday sounds and looks not just revitalized, but absolutely vital.

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NIN’S MINNEAPOLIS SETLIST

B-STAGE
Right Where It Belongs
Ruiner
Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now)

MAIN STAGE
Wish
March of the Pigs
Reptile
The Lovers
Copy of A
Gave Up

B-STAGE (WITH BOYS NOIZE)
Vessel
Closer
As Alive as You Need Me to Be
Came Back Haunted

MAIN STAGE
Mr. Self Destruct
Less Than
The Perfect Drug
I'm Afraid of Americans (David Bowie cover)
The Hand That Feeds
Head Like a Hole
Hurt

Now that Nine Inch Nails is several months into their long-awaited “Peel It Back” tour — including a North American leg that passes through St. Paul this weekend — and we’re about to hear the band’s album-length take on the Tron franchise, I thought I’d share one of my favorite shot-in-the-dark stories from self-titled 1.0: an essay from British artist Russell Mills about his chance encounter with Trent Reznor and the full-circle relationship that bridged the gap between “The Downward Spiral” and NIN’s last fully fledged LP, 2013’s “Hesitation Marks.” (Its follow-up five years later, “Bad Witch” was more of a menacing EP-turned-mini-album than a proper long player.)

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In 1994 I was living on a back road just outside of Ambleside in the Lake District, Cumbria. My home was a wonderful old house made up of two conjoined houses: the earliest, a 17th century farmhouse and the latter, a Victorian addition of 1841. My studio was in a 17th century barn next to a stream. It was formerly the home of Dora Wordsworth — Wordsworth’s favorite daughter — and her family.

The house was visited by Wordsworth, his family, and all the Romantic poets. Neighbors had included Thomas and Matthew Arnold, Thomas De Quincey (he wrote “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” in Fox Ghyll, the house next door), various members of the Wordsworth family, and every so often Woodrow Wilson who would come to visit in secret, staying at a cottage a few hundred yards down the road.

The road itself, known as Under Loughrigg, was and is recognized as one of the most beautiful walks in the Lake District, had been walked by a galaxy of cultural stars, thinkers and visionaries, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Tennyson, De Quincey and one of my ultimate heroes Kurt Schwitters, amongst many others.

At that point I was in the middle of working on a year-long commission for the Royal Shakespeare Company, producing artwork for use in all of their print campaigns (posters, programs, flyers, etc.) at their three venues in Stratford-upon-Avon, Newcastle, and London.

One beautiful spring morning I was outside in the garden taking a break, having a coffee, and reading the paper. The view I had was over fields to the River Rothay, across the valley down to the little town of Ambleside with its church steeple and irregular clusters of roofs set against the range of fells called Wansfell. My neighboring farmer was out with his Border Collies rounding up the sheep. It was an idyllic, bucolic, rural, very typical reassuring English view; very old world.

The phone rang. It was Trent Reznor’s then manager, who having introduced himself, then introduced his then-designer Gary Talpas, and finally Trent himself. His manager was on one phone in Cleveland; Gary on another, also in Cleveland; and Trent was on another phone, possibly in LA.

It was my first experience of a conference call and given the context of where I was, what I was looking at, and the project I was currently busy with, it seemed fairly surreal. They explained that Nine Inch Nails were preparing a new album; they’d seen my work and liked it very much and they asked whether I’d be interested and able to undertake artwork for this forthcoming album: “The Downward Spiral.”

I told them that I knew NIN’s work and was a great admirer, and that, yes of course I’d be very interested in taking on the commission. Having got over the preliminaries Trent and I talked for about 20 minutes about ideas and possible directions.

I came off the phone already knowing the kind of territory that I thought I should explore and I began work that afternoon.

Two days later his manager called again. He said that Trent doesn’t work with people he hasn’t met and that I was to go to Manchester Airport (my nearest airport) on such and such a day, fly to LA to meet Trent.

Two days later I was in LA. I was met by Gary who took me to book into my hotel, the Hotel Mondrian on Sunset Boulevard — “a parallel universe of perpetual possibility.” My room was the penthouse, a huge suite on the top floor, big enough for several large families, with views over LA and the hills. I had one backpack with me.

He then took me for a quick tour of some of the beaches. It was drizzling rain, grey, bleak and the beaches were empty. I wasn’t too impressed or interested. That evening: dinner with Trent, Gary and the other members of NIN in the hotel restaurant. We talked more about the ideas we’d already discussed on the phone a few days earlier, bringing them into sharper focus.

Trent didn’t talk much; he let me talk while he stared at me, as if he was checking me out. The other members of the band were charming, occasionally entering into the conversation, but mainly talking between themselves. It was all very low key. After a couple of hours Trent and co. left, leaving Gary and I to talk over a drink. Gary then left as he had to drive back to Cleveland.

I was alone in a city I had no knowledge of, I didn’t know anyone there, and I was due to fly back to the UK the next day. I was considering venturing out to wander, look around, sniff out the area, possibly find a bar, when out of the shadows of the restaurant a figure I vaguely recognized emerged.

It was the Irish singer and musician Gavin Friday. I’d met Gavin several times in Dublin and London, usually in the company of an old friend the Edge of U2, who I’d first met in 1984 at Slane Castle when they were recording “The Unforgettable Fire” with another of my old friends, [Brian] Eno.

We headed for the bar. He had been in LA working on some soundtrack work for a few weeks and was bored out of his skull and incredibly frustrated with the place and the people. He told me he’d been spending every day working and having to deal with people, well arseholes, who were constantly wanting to change what he was trying to do. He was desperate for intelligent conversation — for English/Irish conversation — about art, politics, culture, music, films, humor.

We talked about everything and anything well into the morning and got fantastically drunk. I think it was about 4:00 a.m. when we staggered up to our rooms, giggling uncontrollably. On the occasions since when we’ve met he has always given me a huge hug and thanked me for being their that night. I reciprocate as I think that fortuitous meeting saved us both that night.

I returned home and just got on with the work, becoming totally immersed in the project, eventually producing about 30 new mixed media works towards uses on what became “The Downward Spiral” album.

Other commissions followed every so often: “Further Down the Spiral,” “March of the Pigs,” “Closure,” etc.

And then in December 2012 Trent called again…

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Check out excerpts from “Cargo in the Blood” — a long out-of-print book documenting Mills’ extensive “Hesitation Marks” work — and a short documentary about the project.

In honor of his ace new album ‘I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away’, here is Hayden Pedigo breaking his favorite William Basinski album (‘Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive’) down for self-titled’s old ambient outlet self | centered. Like s/t, its new home is here on Substack, with a mix of new and nostalgic content landing in your inbox every week.

I have always joked that the best ambient music in the world comes from Texas. I mean, Stars of the Lid and William Basinski both came from this state.

I always wondered if it was because of how expansive and vast Texas is. I grew up in Amarillo, which is in the center of the Texas panhandle — out in the country where everything was yellow and the sky went on forever.

I remember the first time I heard William Basinski; I was 15, doing school work at my parent’s house (I was homeschooled), and listening to Pandora on some station, maybe Harold Budd or something. “Variation III” from Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive (Durtro / Die Stadt, 2004) came on and I stopped everything I was doing. It was the closest feeling to time actually stopping I have maybe ever experienced.

In that moment, the sound was devastating — like nothing I had heard before. I jokingly say it’s the most accurate audio representation of what depression feels like. The loop of the piano keeps repeating like a memory you can’t let go of and with each mental repeat you start to lose the actual memory until it’s just a blur, a repeatedly xeroxed photo reduced down to washed out pixels.

As sad as the music on the record is, I can’t help but feel hope emitting from it just because of the sheer beauty. William has always been able to tap into something so human with these loops that very few people have been able to recreate. Variations isn’t just music of a landscape or place like a lot of ambient music tends to be; it is the sound of how we feel and think within those places and the memories that come afterwards. Like putting your soul under a microscope.

“Melancholy” is an overused descriptor when it comes to ambient music, but for William and this album, it feels wrong not to acknowledge how the feeling of melancholy is absolutely monolithic — like being hit with a tidal wave that you saw approaching for two hours, but you are in awe of its size and are rendered frozen.

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Hayden Pedigo’s new album, ‘I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away’, is now available via Mexican Summer. Stream it in full below, along with the rest of his ‘Motor Trilogy’.

Considering she’s classically trained as an opera singer, and still receives semi-regular lessons from her longtime teacher, it should be no surprise that Nika Roza Danilova (better known as Zola Jesus) recently launched her first solo piano tour of such major North American cities as LA, New York, Calgary, San Francisco and Seattle.

What’s surprising is how much resistance she had from a former booking agent at first. “I was really nervous about how the American audience would take this show,” explains the singer/producer, “because it took so many years to get this tour to happen. It was not for a lack of trying. I was told by a booking agent that promoters didn't want to take the show on — that it wouldn't be successful. Fans don't want to see this; venues don't want to book it.

“When I played in Europe, it was a proof of concept,” continues Danilova, alluding to the powerful live performances epitomized by the booming chapel EP Alive in Cappadocia. “I kept coming back because there was so much interest. And then I found a new booking agent who was really open-minded and was like, ‘Yeah, this is totally something we can do easily.’”

Of course they can; Heavy Trip has built their hard-earned reputation on supporting the singular visions of artists like William Basinski, KMRU, Marie Davidson and Alessandro Cortini. In Danilova’s case, her current set is a spare-yet-spellbinding run through her back catalogue and far-beyond-fitting covers of spiritual and sonic forebears like Giacomo Puccini (“Dido’s Lament”) and David Lynch (“In Heaven”).

The following conversation was edited for clarity after Danilova’s stellar kick-off show in Minneapolis, her second city after many years of residing in rural Wisconsin.

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Your live set, and the people you perform with, has changed a lot over the years. Where did the idea for your solo piano show originate?

It was really organic. It definitely stemmed from me feeling burnt out from playing in clubs with bands — where there's a backing track and everything is energy-based. I did the Versions tour with a string quartet, but the bulk of my touring has been in clubs with the same setup and a lack of detail being put into the dynamics of the performance. It's more like, 'Let's just put on like a rock show.'

I wanted to do something that would challenge my sense of performance. I know how to be on a stage wielding a mic, commanding a crowd that way. I have a tendency to move back and forth — to harness that energy physically. The new challenge for me was, 'How do I harness that energy musically, with no one else on stage to help me?'

There was this feeling of needing to challenge what I'm capable of as a musician. The idea of sitting behind a piano for an hour and still commanding people's attention felt horrifying to me.

So this was a proof of concept for myself — that I can just sit behind a piano, not even look at the crowd for the bulk of the show, and still hold the stage. Harnessing and controlling that intensity when you can't give it physically requires a whole different level of musicianship and interpretation.

Is some of this you coming full circle with your classical training?

That was another part of the challenge. I sing a couple arias in the set. The big one is 'Dido's Lament,' which is from a [Henry] Purcell opera. The first time I ever sang that live, I basically choked. I've tried to sing it operatically, publicly, many times — especially like when I was studying as a child — but I would choke back then, too.

I have really bad stage fright when it comes to showcasing a skill set, because I'm so hard on myself. The opportunity to do a piano set, and sing operatically in public, was overcoming a lifelong fear. It was preventing me from being able to really use my entire voice, because I didn't trust myself to be able to get through it without choking.

When you say you're choking, do you mean not being able to fully let yourself go?

Yeah. Most embarrassingly, I performed this with a smaller orchestra as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York. William Brittell made an arrangement of 'Dido's Lament,' and when it was my time to come in, I literally choked. I had [the experimental classical ensemble wild Up] stop and start the song over.

In order to sing operatically, you have to have an open throat. But when you're nervous, your throat closes. So whenever I would sing operatically and be really nervous, my throat would close so that nothing could come out. I would literally choke on the words because you can't sing operatically unless you're relaxed.

Your Minneapolis show was my first time seeing you in this kind of setting, and I just kept thinking to myself, ‘Why have you not taken a year off to be in an actual opera?’ Has that kind of opportunity been brought to you before, or is it something that would interest you in the future?

It's definitely a carrot that's dangled in front of me. That's what keeps me really motivated as a vocalist. To this day, I take voice lessons every single week with my opera teacher. I have been since I was a child.

You haven't stopped at all, huh?

I've stopped for a couple years here and there, but it's been pretty consistent at this point. I made a lot of progress within the past five years because... a woman's voice doesn't really mature until her mid-to-late 30s and 40s. That's when opera singers are in their prime. So my voice didn't actually start getting to the point where I could sing this way until [recently].

But yeah, my dream is to write my own opera. It's about getting to the point where I feel like I have the chops and the skills — not only as like a vocalist, but as a composer. That's my ultimate dream.

Have you worked with the same teacher over the years?

Since I was 7 years old.

What's kept you taking those lessons? Does your voice feel like this instrument you have to keep refining?

In the beginning of my career, I sang with really bad technique because I was trying to sing with a voice that I didn't have. I had so much tension because of that fear; it created so many bad habits it took me years to get rid of.

Now it's about, ‘How do I sing with my voice? How do I just open my mouth and my voice is what it is, where I’m not trying to affect it?’

Because these days, so many vocalists are singing with the voice they want, instead of the voice they have. That makes you sing with bad technique that will make the lifespan of your voice very short, because you're creating a lot of tension.

So for me, I'm just like, ‘I need to just accept who I am and sing with that voice.’ That's a psychological process, as much as it is a technical one, so I work with my voice teacher to make sure I'm not falling into those bad habits.

Not to get too off track, but what does she think about how you've evolved? It must be surreal to have a student that you've had since they were a kid playing the Guggenheim and doing a concert for David Lynch.

I think she's really proud of me. I’m not doing the normal opera thing, but at the same time, she’s like, ‘This is someone that I’ve known since they were 7 years old, and they’ve taken their passion to make it into this career.’

She’s the GOAT. She’s a real one. She’s so meticulous [laughs]. I love her.

She can probably call you on any bullshit, too, if she's known you for that long.

Yeah, and she knows that I can take it.

It's nice to hear that your ultimate goal is to write your own opera, because that feels like one art form that that hasn't figured out how to appeal to a younger, newer audience the same way newer classical artists like Max Richter have.

It’s the most profound live experience — to hear someone sing without needing a microphone. And also being in [different] spaces. Why I want to play in churches isn't for the goth-ness of it; it’s for the acoustics. Because churches were made to amplify instruments naturally. There's an acoustic experience of listening to music and performing music in a church that is so sonically superior to a black box rock club.

Clubs try to make a sterile environment where you have to synthetically recreate space. A church has the space built into it. The most exciting thing in the world is to hear music in these spaces — to hear music that is amplified by nature.

You started your Minneapolis set with an Armenian folk cover (‘Krunk’), right — something you'd released as a benefit song before?

Yeah, I released it as a charity song for for Relief Armenia. It was composed by Komitas and sang by this beautiful Armenian singer. I couldn't stop listening to it when I first heard it, so I learned how to sing it.

I like it as a way of opening the set because it is in the range I need to be in to really release my voice. It starts me off in a place where I really need to be relaxed in order for it to sound good. Therapeutically, it sets a good groundwork for the show.

That's one of the notes I wrote down when I heard it — that this is setting the tone for the rest of the show. It’s like, ‘Okay, shit’s gonna get real now.’

That's great.

You talked a little bit about ‘Dido’s Lament’ before. Of all the different opera songs you could do, why that one in particular? Do you feel a personal connection to it?

I just love that song. Two of my favorite singers have done amazing versions of it: Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman. It's such a beautiful song. It's also one of the few arias I can play on piano and sing at the same time. So it’s more digestible in terms of what I can do in this show, and it's also one of my favorite songs in the world.

Is there anything about the lyrics that really connects with you?

It’s a lament of someone who's losing their lover, so there’s this deep sorrow and grief. It's very dirge-y in a way, because it feels like this kind of death, you know? I tend to be drawn towards arias or songs that are very dark, very melancholic.

There aren't as many [arias] as you'd think that have that heaviness. I love it. It just resonates with me, lyrically — ‘when I'm laid in earth, forget my fate.’ I don't know; it's just got these words that embody when I sing.

It sounds like lyrics that would have been on your first record or something.

Yeah [laughs].

What's another aria that would appeal to fans who are hearing ‘Dido’s Lament’ for the first time and really connecting with it?

One of my favorite songs isn't from an opera. It’s an art song, which is basically an operatic song that isn't part of an opera. ‘Um Mitternacht’ is part of the Rückert-Lieder cycle of art songs. I'm prepared to perform that one at some point, too.

What's one of your favorite versions of it?

Jessye Norman has done a great version of it. She's the GOAT — my favorite singer. [I] also [love] anything by [composer Richard] Wagner. The songs from Tristan und Isolde are so good.

What do you love about Jessye?

Don't get me started. Not only does Jessye have one of the most beautiful voices — a huge, dark voice — but her taste and repertoire is unlike anyone else's. So many singers go into opera and they do Puccini; they do Verdi; they do all the normal bullshit, which is what you do if you want to survive.

Jessye went over to Europe and did Schubert. She did Mahler, and she had a big voice, so she could do Wagner. She would do Stravinsky. She would do this weird stuff that not many people do. Her repertoire was top-notch. She had amazing taste. And she always dressed amazingly too, like she had these flowing gowns.

Are there any other performances of hers that you would recommend?

She did a couple staged recordings. One of them is of 'Dido's Lament.' She's wearing this really beautiful costume. It's very cinematically staged. It's kind of like a studio music video for 'Dido's Lament.'

Dude, it's so good.

That sounds awesome.

It's so inspiring.

Another song I wanted to ask you about is your cover of ‘In Heaven.’ Singing that song must feel like a full circle moment since you originally did ‘Lady in the Radiator’ on your first record a long time ago, and then you eventually ended up performing that song for the David Lynch Foundation, right?

Yeah.

Could you tell me a little bit about the version you did on your album, and how you connected with that movie originally?

I originally saw the movie when I was 14. My brother bought a Korean bootleg. This was before it was on Criterion.

A Korean bootleg?

Yeah, a Korean bootleg — those were the days! It almost felt like a snuff film back then: Eraserhead. I was just like, ‘Whoa.’ It was one of the first art films I had seen. And then from there, it basically opened up my brain. I was like, ‘Whoa. Movies can be like this?’

I got into other weird stuff from there — things like Brothers Quay, Jan Švankmajer, and [David] Cronenberg. It basically opened up the floodgates for me. That is the most beautiful song, and the weirdest scene [in the movie].

When I was asked to perform it at the David Lynch Foundation concert, it was completely, utterly surreal. I was able to meet with David and talk to him about the song. Then he passed, and I started doing these shows. I felt like I wanted to put it in the set — just intuitively — because it was a very full circle moment.

What was the closest thing you'd seen to something like Eraserhead before that?

Maybe [Quentin] Tarantino or Troma movies — stuff like that.

Did you know what you were in for? Did your brother already have a sense of what Eraserhead was?

I think maybe we had known about David Lynch prior to that, but I am a year and a half younger than him, so he was a little ahead of me, mining the caves of culture. He definitely turned me on to that. When we watched it, I was a little too young to be like, ‘Whoa, this is sick.’ I was more like, ‘This is insane.’

And then the older I got, the more in love with it I got. But yeah, it was more of a ‘this is a crazy movie you can't find anywhere’ moment. You had to get a bootleg, so there was this kind of occultness to it we both liked.

David Lynch's passing felt like losing someone who was on another plane entirely. Do you feel compelled to push things even further as an artist because someone like that's not in the world anymore?

I do. I don't know if I said this during the show, but usually I do this spiel — almost like a plea to everyone in the audience, where it's like, ‘now the onus is on us to bring that like weirdness and that unconscious channel.’

That's really why I want to perform it — because it’s a reminder not only to myself, but to everyone else, 'Okay, it's on us now. We all need to be channels for the divine, and for the weirdness, and for the strangeness, and for the things that we don't actually understand.'

These days, we're subject to this pressure to make art that you can already understand, because when it makes sense to you, it'll make sense to other people. But that's not where art becomes magic; when art is magic, you only understand a portion of what you're doing. That's when it truly becomes a mystical experience. That’s what David did so uncompromisingly his entire career.

When somebody like that passes, the common refrain is ‘there's never going to be anybody like that again.’ But there's gotta be some way to tap into what he was tapping into — something we're all capable of. We just don't know how.

We're all capable of being channels of things that we don't understand. We're all artists; it's just a matter of trusting ourselves to let go.

I love that idea. Something else I noticed about your set was the album you played the most from: Okovi. Is that the record you're the most proud of in your career?

It's really funny you say that because just before [this call], I was playing ‘Soak’ on piano. I was just rehearsing, and then I pulled up the original song and the rest of Okovi because I hadn't listened to it in so long. I was just like, 'I'm so proud of this record.' It still holds like this kind of aura to it — this essence of what I felt when I was making it with Alex DeGroot, my longtime collaborator and bandmate.

I didn't actually notice that a lot of the songs [from my set] were from Okavi, but a lot of them fit together. Like I love playing ‘Siphon’ and ‘Witness’ together. They're also easier to play on piano for some reason.

Okovi must have felt like a turning point record for you, a return to your roots after your clearest attempt at making a pop record.

And the one that I play nothing from [laughs].

Do you just feel like you just don't connect with that record anymore?

I guess I don't. That record kind of broke me, because it was technically considered my sophomore [album] in some ways. I had the pressure of following up Conatus, and I put everything I thought I needed to put into that record. I was like, ‘I need to clean up all the edges. I want to make a great pop record. I don't want to be a lo-fi musician anymore; I want to be a real musician.’

In order to do that, I thought I had to scrub away all the dirt and make myself really clean and presentable. In some ways, I felt like I needed to conform to a template of what I thought music is.

While I love that record so much, people call it a flop. I felt like the response was really negative, because a lot of my audience didn't want that from me. They didn't want me to be squeaky clean.

It made me feel resentful of my entire career, and of myself. I went into a really dark depression after that, because I just felt like nobody wants me. I'm not good enough; even when I try to be the goodest girl, they don't want me as the goodest girl.

Okovi was a very wounded record. You can kind of hear that pain, but at the same time, it was so much more honest in a way, because I was like, ‘I’m just gonna do me. Fuck everything. I’m over this. I’m done.’

Which makes sense; some of our best work comes out of saying ‘fuck it.’

Right?! I wrote ‘Exhumed’ when I was so angry. And I wrote some of the other songs when I was so sad. My uncle attempting suicide during that process really pulled me out of my self-pity. I was like, ‘Oh man, now I’m really sad, but not for myself…. There’s real shit going on here.’

That's how a lot of that record feels to me — that it's not just about you. It's also about all the heavy stuff going on with the people around you.

Yeah. At that time, someone else around me was dying of cancer. So there was just a lot going on. And it was made over quite a few years. So the beginning was this deep self-hatred — almost like a misanthropy. And then it changed and became a deep compassion [laughs]. There's a lot in there; when you listen to every song, it’s like, ‘Oh man, this is quite a journey.’

It sounds like pure catharsis. Was the cover meant to be a nod back to Stridulum?

Jesse Draxler — a buddy of mine who's a visual artist — and I just kind of collaborated on ideas. I think I liked the idea of wearing a mask on, so he took that photo of me, and then he put this mask on me with ink.

It seems like a very clear contrast with the record before it. The record before it is you facing the camera like a pop star — the very opposite of wearing a mask.

That's probably how I felt: ‘I’m hiding.’ I’m such an extremist; whatever I did the last record, I need the opposite for the next record in some ways.

I was looking up who did the cover art for Stridulum; I didn't realize Indra [Dunis] from Peaking Lights shot it. Did you two know each other from Wisconsin?

Yeah, at that time, Aaron [Coyes] and Indra were living in Madison. They were really good friends of mine. She's a photographer, so she came over to my friend's house. I was in a bathtub, and my bandmate was pouring chocolate syrup over me as she was taking those photos.

So that cover art was a little less serious?

What I wanted was very specific because I was really into the Yugoslavian movie Sweet Movie and its director, Dušan Makavejev. It's ridiculous; there's a scene where this woman is naked and being covered in chocolate. I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, I want that,’ because I love chocolate. But I wanted it to feel kind of grotesque — almost like a studio photo.

Did you meet LA Vampires through Indra? I feel like that was around the time where everyone was working in the scene around Not Not Fun.

Oh man, bless up the scenes of the 2010s. I was just friends with [Not Not Fun co-founders] Amanda and Brit [Brown]. She asked me to do that project. It was super fun.

People were just doing shit back then. There was lots of collaborating, lots of connecting...

Not overthinking it.

Not overthinking anything. Things were just kind of like flying by the seat of your pants and just having fun.

Now that everything is streaming, it feels like you can literally do whatever you want. But maybe that's a bad thing, because people can literally just record everything now on their own and just put it out there. Figuring out how to self-edit is a skill that you have to learn.

Yeah, and there's also no community around music.... Like I remember playing South by Southwest and going to the Not Not Fun showcase, and, hanging out with Britt, Amanda and [Best Coast multi-instrumentalist] Bob Bruno — all the people in this scene. There was a feeling of formality with everything: 'Oh cool, you're in the new batch of Not Not Fun tapes.'

I think scenes and communities are really underrated, because now you just throw things up on streaming, and you're just like, 'Okay, this means nothing. None of this means anything.' There's no context.

Well, to frame this conversation, the first time I talked with you was at South by Southwest in 2010. There were so many different scenes coming together back then. And now South by Southwest isn't even a music festival anymore.

Culture is very cyclical, but it's crazy to be like, 'Wow, this thing that was so important in our lives, or so foundational — this big moment, and these big institutions — are gone now.' You know?

It's something that's totally normal and natural, but at the same time you're just like, ‘Man, that’s wild — how things change like that.’

Is that why you started doing Patreon — because it's a way of forming and maintaining your own community with fans?

I like it because I'm a very skeptical person. I’m very skeptical of institutions; I’m skeptical of platforms; I’m even skeptical of Patreon. I'm not skeptical of the people that use it, but I'm skeptical of the platform.

For me, it's all about redundancy. How can I make sure that I'm as directly connected to these people that I need to be connected to in case any of the shit goes down? Because it will. Labels and festivals fold; apps close down or change.

That’s so true. To bring things around to your last record, ‘Desire’ was one of the standout songs from your [Minneapolis] set. If people just saw the name of the song, they would think it’s about love, but isn’t it about something bigger — the different forms of desire that drive us as humans?

Yeah. Desire is such a big, loaded term, because it can mean something sexual. It can mean love. It can mean desire for a thing; what do you desire?

As a practicing Buddhist — which is funny to say, but true — desire is an interesting term in that regard. Desire is something you try to fight, because desire is attachment to wanting something.

But then at the same time, there’s good desire. I’ve talked about this with the abbot at the monastery near me. I asked him, ‘Is desire inherently bad?’

He said desire is not bad, so long as you desire something that's inherently good for you. Like you can desire to be a great Buddhist. You need to have a spark in order to feel a drive to get something done. It's not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s something I experience a lot in my life, because I'm an extremely passionate person. I feel a lot of desire in all the different ways that desire can be felt.

So the song isn’t just a love song. I say ‘lick my wounds like you can taste them. Would that make much of a difference? If you knew my pain, if you could see my side only for a minute, just enough to empathize?’

The song was written about someone who didn't understand that desire in me. There was a feeling of can you just understand that this is just a part of who I am? It's not bad, but it's not always good. It is what it is, you know?

Well, that struggle never goes away, right? I guess it’s a matter of not letting that desire control your entire life. Following a Buddhist lifestyle doesn’t have to literally mean living with no possessions.

It's not like that at all. It's not this thing where you have to live in total poverty or deprivation. It's just about understanding human drives and being aware of the traps we often get stuck in as part of this human experience. Buddhism has been so healing and helpful for me. If I could be evangelical about it, I would.

Kind of like how David Lynch was with TM, right?

Definitely. It really helped him. There are these modalities in life that we can adopt to become better people. Buddhism has not only made me a better person, but it's allowed me to really handle the waves of life. It can sometimes feel caustic to be alive.

I have another question about this — something I'm sure many people have struggled with. How do you get past the feeling of being an interloper, since Buddhism is so closely associated with East Asian culture? How do you get the courage to just reach out to a local abbot the way you did?

I think it's so cool that he welcomed you into his community, and you have been able to learn from one another since then. That's the way life should be, and yet, many of us face criticisms of cultural appropriation when it comes to learning about something like Buddhism.

That's a totally valid question — something that I thought about. It’s like, if I was only going to be able to learn about or practice things that are according to my culture, I would have to be a Christian or whatever. And I don't identify with that.

For me, it was about finding something that resonated with me spiritually, and felt like it made sense. Buddhism is a cultural religion; people grow up Buddhist that live in Asia, but at the same time, anyone can be a Buddhist. Buddha would want everyone to be Buddhist; Buddha would want everyone to learn this technology, because it's about freeing yourself from the ills of modern, human life.

Zen is a particularly practical school, or sect, of Buddhism, whereas Tibetan, is very idiosyncratic and woven into Tibetan culture. It actually feels quite alienating to me, because that's where I feel like I don't know how to fit into this.

I also like Shingon a lot. It's like an esoteric Buddhism. It just works for me. I’m also much more familiar with Japanese culture than I am with Tibetan culture or Nepal.

I will say that Zen Buddhism is a technology, because it teaches you how to live. There's ways you can walk; there's ways you can see; there's ways that you breathe. You know? It teaches you how to meditate. There's ways to eat properly — to stand properly. That's why I call it like a technology.

Why did Zen Buddhism speak to you on a more personal, intrinsic level than TM?

TM gives you a mantra you're expected to repeat for 20 minutes, twice a day. You don't need to know what the mantra means; you just repeat it. I guess it's even more of a technology than Zen Buddhism is. But that's it. That's Transcendental Meditation. You're done.

Zen Buddhism is Buddhism filtered through direct experience. You're learning about and practicing the tenants of Buddhism through how you live your life. It's like how you make tea every morning. How you make breakfast. How you eat. There's prayer involved, there's chant, but it trains you to see the world differently.

The meditation also strengthens your parasympathetic nervous system, which makes you less reactive. Which is similar to Transcendental Meditation; it's just done a different way. And it bakes in this whole lifestyle modification that allows you to live in a way that's kind of easier.

Less anxious, which is something many of us struggle with now.

Right. We have access to way too much information. We're also very alienated from each other; we don't have community. We don't have ritual in our life, which grounds us to the present and grounds us to the past. Zen Buddhism is definitely a Japanese practice, so you kind of have to be into Japanese stuff.

There's also people like this guy (Noah Levine) that runs the group Dharma Punx in New York. I'm pretty sure it's Zen [Buddhism], but he gives talks and records podcasts. He talks about modern issues and ailments, and really ties psychology and science in with everything.

Alan Watts Westernized Zen Buddhism in the ‘60s, so people have been doing this for a long time. But we need it more than ever, I would say.

I noticed you put something up on Instagram recently that seemed to allude to that — something about needing silence and space...

That's another reason that I really like these piano shows. When you go to a show these days, you're over-stimulated as fuck with your phone, your life, and everything coming at you, fighting for your attention. Going to a show [depletes] the energy reserves in you; it's loud and overwhelming.

So, for me, I want to play with silence and space and the humanity of what it means to see a performer — to give people an opportunity to breathe into the music, instead of feeling like they're holding their breath as they're watching someone play.

At this point, what I do needs to be healthy for me as well, because I deal with chronic pain and I deal with an anxiety disorder. So I need that just as much as the audience needs it — to play with tension, space and silence in a way we don't get the opportunity to do as much these days.

How do the solo noise shows you've performed as Nika fit into this? Do they bring out a primal energy that was missing in your other live sets?

I played my first Nika show in 2019, at the Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago with Burial Hex and Bloody Minded. Yeah. It was unlike any Nika show I've played since — like the ritualistic evisceration of Zola Jesus. It was totally acoustic and completely improv, just me and a harmonium.

I don't even remember what I did. I blocked it out, actually, because it was so embarrassing. But it was kind of like peeling the skin off of myself and setting the groundwork for this other project with its own set of elemental, uncompromised rules. Number one: They're all improvised. They're all using a specific set of gear — this little noise synth, some pedals, and a microphone.

It's more like that experience of trying to access the channel we were talking about earlier — like how David Lynch accessed the unconscious and let things come out in a very focused, controlled way that is also very feral and primal.

That was really medicinal for me, because the psychology of Zola Jesus felt bound by certain limitations. The Nika project was an exercise in being able to have this unfiltered antagonism, aggression and intensity — a much more mystical experience. I don't really have to think about anything; I can just be and do.

What's been the purest expression of that goal so far?

At the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands, because it was so loud... The sound was so bass-y, so intense that the doors were rattling backstage. People said their hearts and their rib cages hurt.

With the good shows, I usually come in with ‘this is what I'm channeling.’ For that one, I was channeling one of my faves: Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess of war and health. She's this very double-edged sword. I work with her a lot in meditation, but I was really trying to evoke her in this show. And it really worked. It was this laser beam-like Sekhmet intensity.

Are there any plans to put anything out on record as Nika, or is that just going to be a live outlet for you?

I want to, but as soon as I say, ‘Okay, I’m going to make a Nika record,’ it's like the same shit that happened with Zola Jesus — it becomes compositional. So I'm just going to start recording the shows and putting them out.

If I have an idea where I'm like, 'I'm gonna put this out as Nika,' I'll do it. But this whole project is not supposed to [trigger] the part of my reptilian brain that's like, 'Oh, this is a real thing now.'

Right. That's something you're trying to reject on some level.

Let's talk about the recent LA sessions for your new record. You mentioned earlier that each record is somewhat of a rejection of the last one, but you’re working with [producer] Randall [Dunn] and [drummer] Matt [Chamberlain] again.

How is the process itself different? I believe you mentioned something about songs starting with them laying down rhythms rather than you presenting them with something that's already almost there?

What I traditionally do is sit at this computer and write songs. I'll make a demo or a rough version, then I'll take that to a someone and be like, ‘Okay, let’s replace this and that.’ With ARKHON, I was like, ‘Let’s replace [my electronic] drums with Matt Chamberlain,’ which is so fucking funny because he can do so much more than I can.

That's normally how I work, but I was getting really burnt out on that process because I felt like I start the song the same way every time. I'm working against nothing new in terms of what I have to work with. It's the same tools, the same patterns — me. I'm just feeling like I hit a roadblock of what I can do on my own, in terms of making something that feels fresh.

So this time around, I got in the studio with Randall Dunn and Matt Chamberlain in LA, at Matt's studio at Sound City. For a week, we just gave him random prompts — said maybe use that drum, maybe do this kind of beat. And he just went wild. So now I have a drive full of insane stuff I'm taking and piecing apart, and writing songs to. Then Randall and I are going to make sense of them; we're going to build everything from there.

I wanted the process to feel really collaborative, and write in a different kind of way. I've been really interested in the way Brian Eno works with people — where making records are more about discovery than they are about composition or paint by numbers. So I have a group of people around me that I really trust and I really like believe in as musicians. These people are better musicians than I am, you know? So it's allowing me to challenge what I'm capable of as a writer.

Something you said before really stood out to me: that you couldn’t do a record like this in your early days because you had something to prove as a female musician.

When I first started, the climate and the culture was really different. It was a lot more misogynist, and there was this lack of trust in a woman's skill to write her own music. And so inherently, I felt this pressure to prove myself as an auteur: ‘I wrote every note on this song.’ Even when I was working with people — with guys — I would almost want to downplay anyone else that was in the room because I was like, ‘I need to purify this; this needs to be coming from me.’ And so I would kick everyone out, and be very protective of my process.

I was also young, so I didn't trust anybody else or my own voice. That made everything worse; I felt like I needed to prove myself even more.

So I didn't ask for help. Or if I did have help, it was really controlled. I feel like a lot of my work suffered because of that.

But now I'm at a place where no one in the culture cares about that anymore. I don't care about that anymore. I'm like, ‘Dude, write the whole song — please. I just want to be a singer.’ And even though that’s not happening, I want to collaborate, because I feel like the best music is written with a group of people most of the time.

I guess the closest thing you had to that over the years was Alex [DeGroot], right?

Yeah. He was the co-producer and mixer for Stridulum and Valusia, and was in my band — the music director — for the next 10 years or so. Then he co-produced and mixed Okovi with me, so he was like my guy. But there was also a push-pull because I was afraid to give him too much control and didn't trust anybody around me. I regret that, but that was just how the times were. It is what is.

It was a totally different environment in the early 2010s, for sure.

Yeah, I was being compared with my peers to a pathological degree. Like I saw one blog post years ago where someone was comparing me with another one of my female peers — rating us and seeing who was the better one, you know?

So there was always this like feeling of, 'I'm not good on my own. I need to be good on these insane standards that I don't even understand. It was a really toxic environment.

If it makes you feel better, that entire industry is gone. None of us are making any money, and the whole blog thing is pretty much dead at this point.

I mean, blogs were also really helpful. They were really good, but the culture around comparisons was kind of degrading. I've read some horrible things about myself in the Brooklyn Vegan comment section for sure.

What made you feel ready to let Matt and Randall into your world?

Randall is like my dharma brother — a very spiritual guy, and a practicing Buddhist. We actually connect on a spiritual level. I became so close with him. I have a level of trust in him. And that's the thing — when I work with people, I really work with people. It was like this with Alex, too; a kind of brotherhood happens. That's how I can feel safe with people — I really need like that level [of trust].

I really trust Randall, and he really believes in me. He has believed in me when I have not. That goes a long way.

And then he has a relationship with Matt. Dude is down for anything; he is one of the best drummers in the world. He is a total beast, and also just like the chillest, coolest guy in the world — non-judgmental, so open, so down.

So [with] them together, I just feel very safe and free. I feel like we can handle anything, musically and otherwise.

I know we're still in the early days of what this record is going to be, but is there anything else you can share about the headspace you're in right now?

Well, the songs are rhythmic. I don't know if the whole record will be like that or not, because I'm also inspired by a lot of other things. I'm really into Pérotin and Léonin — these early sacred composers — right now. So is there going to be some of that on the album — early polyphony... stuff like that? I don't know.

I'm also into Hildegard of Bingen, and other music that has a sacred quality to it.

The rhythms of the recordings that I have are body music, but very organic. It feels kind of shamanic in a way. I don't want to use that term too lightly or heavily, but it feels mystical. I feel like the energy of the record is shaping up to be sacred in a way.

That's as much as I know. I'm really trying to not over-complicate the process, put the cart before the horse, or try to box anything in right now, because I've done that in the past, and I'm over that. I'm letting everything kind of just become what it is. But I feel like emotionally, that's where I'm at right now — doing things and making music that feels very deep. Like borehole deep, and communing with the divine in a way.

That makes sense. There's something very primal and shamanistic about hearing someone lock into drum patterns and different forms of percussion — something you simply can't replicate with electronic music.

There’s so many different types of rhythms that we're not really getting with electronic music because of swing and the human element and poly rhythms. I’m so sick of the computer right now. I’m very fatigued with electronic music, because I feel like I’ll hear electronic music and go, ‘Okay, I know how that was made. I hear Crystallizer. I hear this plugin. I hear that plugin.’

Well it's all so accessible now.

Yeah, I hear the production, and I hear what the tools are. I want to make something where you're like, 'What planet is this from? What are they using?' I want to make music that can't be made by AI, you know?

Is your goal to not overly process these recordings then?

Yeah, and if they're processed, they're going to be in ways where you're just like, 'What the fuck did they use?' They're going to be plugins Randall made, or, things that are modular.... I feel very inspired to make things in reaction to the technological circumstances of our time right now.

Because you feel like the whole AI thing is so inescapable?

There's just so much slop — AI and otherwise. It's so easy to make a decent-sounding, generic-ass pop or electronic song.

I want to make a Fleetwood Mac record — a great record. I don't want to just make a good record for this time, or a record that hits the boxes and fits into an algorithm. It's kind of anti-algorithmic music in a way.

So what is the general goal for how this is going to come together?

I want to get it done by the end of the year. I'd like it to be out by next year, but I'm also not rushing. I've been putting a lot of time into these piano shows, but they've been evolving me in a way that I wasn't ready for. So that's also been taking time out of my writing. But yeah, I hope it comes out next year.

These shows must be pushing your voice into new places, too.

Oh yeah. I didn't know how to sing quiet before. I didn't really know how to sing with dynamics. I didn't need to because I was on a stage in a rock club with so many musicians behind me, I could only project.

I guess that's the tradeoff of having a voice like yours — it's so powerful, it's easy to forget certain aspects of subtlety and dynamics.

Yeah. It took me a long time, even with these piano shows, to be like, ‘I have a microphone. I'm using a microphone. Use the microphone. You don't need to project all the time.’

The best thing my voice teacher ever told me was, ‘You know people like chocolate cake, but if you give it to them too much, they're gonna get sick of it.’ I have this voice that I can use, but don't do it all the time, because you're gonna blow your voice out, and then you have nowhere to go from there.

Learning dynamics have been a huge game changer for my future music.

The last thing I wanted to ask you about is how someone who makes such emotional music responds to a world that's essentially on fire. At the end of the day, we need music to make us feel hopeful, not hopeless. We need people to wake us up and pull us out of this thing, right?

Yeah. Lately, I've been really inspired by ecstatic poets like Rumi, Sufi poets, and early Greek poetry that de-centers the direct human experience outside of a mystical, profound connection to nature. I think I'm getting really into that kind of poetry because everything is very literal right now. Our lives are very literal, and there's isn't a lot of creativity in the world right now. I think that grounds us in this kind of narrative-istic experience of life.

We know the world is shit. We know things are falling apart. There's a lot to feel anxious about, and in the past, my lyrics have been very blunt and direct in a way that's cathartic. But I think for me, what's the most inspiring is when I experience art that takes me out of my body and takes me out of my reality and builds a utopia or a dream that gives me respite from the world.

I'm not saying in an escapist way; I'm saying it a visionary way.

Lyrically and artistically, I'm much more interested in pursuing a vision that isn't just about why everything is bad. What is so bountiful and abundant and everlasting about life and the human experience that can follow us back down to the earliest artists and musicians? What has always been divine about life? We need to re-situate ourselves in in a world that is okay.

Because our world is okay; we are okay. There’s a lot of destabilization, but our world has always been unstable. People still survive and thrive, because art grounds them in the present in a way that is healing.

So that's what's most important to me — to contribute that kind of art to the world.

Check out Zola Jesus’ current tour dates here and read her old film column for self-titled.

Considering how deep his discography goes — a string of strong solo efforts on Warp, predated by such wide-ranging projects as Africa HiTech, Harmonic 313, and the Tom Middleton team-ups Jedi Knights, Reload and Global Communication — and the fact that he just released an highly experimental record (Tall Tales) with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, we can’t think of a better time to revisit our retrospective of the songs that shaped Mark Pritchard over the past three decades.

Up first: the timeless work of Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis…

THE RECORD I’VE BOUGHT FOR FRIENDS BECAUSE IT’S THAT GOOD

Mark Hollis
Mark Hollis
(Polydor, 1998)

I was lucky enough to walk into my local record store in Yeovil, Somerset, the week this came out. It seemed to come out of nowhere and just disappear. Sadly, we haven’t heard any music from Mark Hollis since.

Due to how incredible this album sounds, I worked with Phil Brown years later. He’s the engineer who worked on most of Talk Talk’s albums and helped with this one. I learned so much from Phil.

To my ears, this album — especially as it was recorded in the ’90s — doesn’t have any time stamp on it from a recording and production point of view. It’s beautifully detailed and timeless.

So whoever was involved with the short sightedness at the tail end of Talk Talk’s career and the sheer neglect of the way this album went into the world, I would like to say… pardon the language, but fuck you! 🙂

This record was reissued on vinyl in 2011, though, so well done to whoever organised that.

THE RECORD I WISH I’D RELEASED

Circadian Rhythms
”Maytherebepeace”

I met Gwen Jamois at Mixmaster Morris’ house around ’92 and he played me a test pressing of something he had made with Charles Bullen of This Heat. I really couldn’t believe what I was hearing. (Ed. note: the 1998 album ‘Internal Clock’ is the duo’s only official record under the name Circadian Rhythms.)

Up until a few years ago, that was the only time I heard this music. That was when I asked Gwen “what happened to that 12-inch?” and he kindly sent me a vinyl rip of it. The bass line was still clearly in my head all these years. As I pressed play on the file, I wondered how it was going to sound 25 years later and it was as good as I had remembered it.

We really wanted to release it on [my label with Tom Middleton] Evolution, but it just never happened. I would still like to release it on Evolution, but more importantly, I would just love to see it released full stop. So I will carry on emailing Gwen every year with the hope that it will finally make it into the world.

THE RECORD THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH TECHNO

Various Artists
Equinox Chapter One
(Retroactive, 1991)

A tough one to single out! It would probably have to be Equinox Chapter One, as it was probably my first time seeing the name Underground Resistance. It also has another all-time fav of mine: “Covert Action” by Urban Tribe.

The BFC track above (“Please Stand By”) affected me deeply; it still does. So thank you Carl [Craig]! And thank you Detroit — Juan [Atkins], Kevin [Saunderson], Derrick [May], [Anthony] “Shake” [Shakir], Jeff [Mills], and everyone else out of there since that first wave.

THE RECORD THAT REMINDS ME OF BEING A KID

The Specials
The Specials
(Two-Tone, 1979)

The 2 tone sound was the first musical movement I got into, even down to the Doc Marten boots and Harrington jacket. The Specials were my favourite group as a kid. I never got to see them, but my parents did take me to see Fun Boy Three down in Bournemouth for my birthday. I met Jerry Dammers a couple of times and he told me he liked the Harmonic 33 releases. That was all a bit much to take in!

I remember my best friend at school — Lee Hartlebury, who was also a big Specials fan — had an older brother who said “have you heard the new Specials track ‘Ghost Town’?” when we were walking home, and we were just desperate to hear it. After we left school, Lee used to DJ on a local sound system in Yeovil and his son messaged me last year to say that he and his dad listen to “Elephant Dub” (my release on Deep Medi) in the car. I don’t think I’ve received a more heartwarming message than that.

THE RECORD THAT PUSHES DRUM ‘N’ BASS PAST “AMEN” BREAKS

Danny Breaks
Vaultron
(Droppin’ Science, 2014)

I love an “Amen” and never bored of it, but if I had to single one person out that really pushed the vibe of digging for drum breaks, it would have to be Danny Breaks. You would always get something fresh with Danny and he also carried on using breaks throughout the late ’90s, when everything was going into 2-step [garage] patterns and the breaks were disappearing.

Photek often gets mentioned as the pinnacle of intricate drum break manipulation — and rightly so — but for sheer variety of drum breaks and samples, Danny is the don for me.

THE RECORD I TOOK A CHANCE ON (AND ENDED UP LOVING)

Ilhan Mimaroglu
Sing Me a Song of Songmy
(Atlantic, 1971)

I did some DJ tours of the U.S. in the ’90s and was blown away by the record shopping over there, especially the prices compared to the UK. I bought so many records I struggled to bring them all back; I bought a second record box to try and not get stung by excess baggage costs. It was a bit more lax back then, luckily.

Due to the prices being so much cheaper, I took a chance on this album. I think it was $5 or $10. I’m glad because it’s one of my favourite albums now. I don’t think I have anything else like it, really — that combo of avant-garde electronics and tape manipulation, with jazz and spoken word all mixed up.

THE RECORD THAT WAS WAY AHEAD OF ITS TIME

Everything Delia Derbyshire did

Delia appears on various BBC record releases. At some point, there needs to be a definitive compilation box set of all of her works. In the world of electronic music, I think she was ahead of pretty much everyone, really, and still is.

THE RECORD THAT LEFT AN IMPRESSION ON ME LYRICALLY

The Beach Boys
“‘Til I Die”
(Brother / Reprise, 1971)

The directness of the hit of emotion that is conveyed on the change to “I lost my way and it kills my soul” is overwhelming to me. I love Brian Wilson, and also what Van Dyke Parks did lyrically on the Smile album.

When I was working on [the 2016 album] Under the Sun, there was a period where I would listen to the Smile album every day before I started work. It was a reminder of what can be achieved with an album as a format, really.

It’s hard to believe that this was done in the late ’60s; it really is mind-boggling.

THE RECORD TOM MIDDLETON AND I BONDED OVER IN THE BEGINNING

Tomita
The Planets
(RCA Red Seal, 1976)

A true master of modular synth manipulation. He was a big inspiration for us, especially with the Global Communication project. We would look on the back of his albums and dream of owning a modular Moog.

I also still want whatever Phaser he used to use.

I always put this in lists but then that’s because it deserves to be there. Arthur Verocai’s debut is, without hesitation, my favourite album of all time. No other album has given me that much joy. The latest reissue on Mr Bongo came from the original master tapes, so save yourself a few thousand $ and grab that one.

THE RECORD EVERYONE SHOULD OWN

Arthur Verocai
Arthur Verocai
(Continental, 1972)

I always put this in lists, but that’s because it deserves to be there. Arthur Verocai’s debut is, without hesitation, my favourite album of all time. No other album has given me that much joy. The Mr Bongo reissue came from the original master tapes, so save yourself a few thousand $ and grab that one.

This album is what started me on a mission to find out what a Waterphone is, and eventually track down its inventor (Richard Waters, RIP) around the early 2000’s to buy one off him. I used it on a few Under the Sun tracks and the title track on The Four Worlds.

THE RECORD THAT WAS A REVELATION

Lalo Schifrin
Dirty Harry: The Original Score
(Warner Music France, 2001)

I love the way Lalo builds ominous tension in his tracks using a combination of instruments. There is another sound in this that I still can’t identify; it also features in the Enter the Dragon soundtrack. I’m guessing it’s a synth, and it sounds quite high-pass filtered. The drums on this are killer; they have so much attitude.

The album was finally released digitally as the full score in 2001, but before that I got some of it from Sudden Impact and the Best of Dirty Harry.

THE RECORD THAT BRINGS ME BACK TO THE NINETIES

A Tribe Called Quest
People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm
(Jive / RCA, 1990)

I’m a big fan of that whole movement: the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Tribe, etc. I also love the samples they used; it was the first time I heard “Think Twice” by Donald Byrd, for example. I used to love finding the drum breaks and samples they had used.

A Tribe Called Quest did five albums throughout the ’90s, and I love all of them.

I did a remix for a Jive project in the late ’90s. Unfortunately, it never came out. You can hear it here, though. I got Pino Palladino in for the remix, and it was done with friends of mine who were in a UK hip-hop group called The Creators:

THE RECORD THAT OPENED A DOOR TO ANOTHER UNIVERSE

Various Artists
2001: A Space Odyssey
(MGM, 1968)

Aside from being my favourite film of all time, and Kubrick being my favourite director, this soundtrack opened me up to the world of avant-garde classical composers. First off, György Ligeti; I searched for as much music by him as I could after hearing this soundtrack. I guess I became aware of Krzysztof Penderecki after The Shining, too, so thank you Kubrick again!

“Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” is another all-time favourite of mine, along with “Lux Aeterna” by Ligeti. And from there, it all led me on to John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Edgard Varèse, Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis, to name a few.

THE RECORD THAT NEARLY DROVE ME TO TEARS

Arvo Pärt
“Cantus In Memory of Benjamin Britten”

The first time I heard this, it felt so intense that I couldn’t even let it in. I basically had to put a barrier up, as I didn’t want to tell the person that was playing it to me to turn it off!

It’s so fascinating that music can do that to you; it’s the same with the Penderecki track I mentioned above. It seems to slow down the perception of time and take me somewhere else.

THE CREEPIEST RECORD I OWN

Patty Waters
Sings
(ESP Disk, 1966)

It’s the last track, really. The rest of the album is really nice. It’s her version of “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” I’d heard a few versions of it before, but nothing like this! I think it’s amazing, to be honest, but then I collect creepy, weird music.

I was going to mention an album on BBC Radio Enterprises called Born to Trouble: The Recorded Testimony of a Psychopath here, actually, but I couldn’t find any audio of that online.

Mark Pritchard’s new album with Thom Yorke, ‘Tall Tales’, is now available through Warp. Stream its visual side below via YouTube, along with the pair’s previous bar-setting single, “Beautiful People.”

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Like many elder millennials, my first exposure to Nick Cave wasn’t seeing the Birthday Party slay a bar in Berlin, or hearing such early Bad Seeds essentials as From Her to Eternity, Your Funeral… My Trial and Tender Prey.

It was the histrionic use of “Red Right Hand” in the horror movie Scream — a music supervisor move so fitting it became the franchise’s unofficial theme, as much a part of its iconic Ghostface character as the killer’s grotesque mask. According to Bloody Disgusting’s oral history of the song’s recurring pop cultural role, Cave’s own kids thought its cameo was peak dad-being-cool, making him more than happy to reboot the original recording with a 30-piece string section and plot-appropriate lyrics on the Scream 3 soundtrack.

Given its immediate onscreen impact and lingering popularity, you’d think last Sunday’s performance of the song at Minneapolis’ hangar-like Armory would have been a runaway highlight. While it was certainly entertaining — a self-aware instance of Giving the People What They Want rather than resisting it like Radiohead — it was not the best part of the Bad Seeds’ spry two-and-a-half-hour set.

Depending on your disposition, that distinction could have been a split decision between a thunderous Elvis nod (“Tupelo”); a generous encore that started with a snarl (“Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry”) and ended with a solo piano singalong (“Into My Arms”); and several of the eight Wild God songs that revealed their raw power alongside Cave’s widescreen band and such welcome touring members as Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, keyboardist Carly Paradis, and a robust choir rounded out by Wendi Rose, Janet Ramus, T Jae Cole and Miça Townsend. (Ramus also nailed PJ Harvey’s parts in a tour premiere of the rarely performed “Henry Lee.”)

Cave clearly wasn’t kidding when he declared “there’s no fucking around with this record. When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.”

In many ways, Wild God is the psychic and spiritual release Cave has been working towards since the tragic death of his son Arthur a decade ago. Unlike the spare arrangements and relative restraint of the Bad Seeds’ last two LPs (2016’s Skeleton Tree and 2019’s Ghosteen), it bursts forth with bright orchestral movements and pure bombast that benefits from the final touches of mixing board maestro Dave Fridmann (see also: such windswept albums as The Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin, The Delgados’ Hate, and Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs).

More importantly, Wild God provides hints of not just hope, but full-on joy in the face of the sorrow we all must feel at some point. Cave explained his evolving perspective in a revealing Stephen Colbert interview, which included this insightful stance on the metaphorical fork in a road he faced not that long ago: “We have a choice, I think. On some level, there’s a desire to turn inward and sort of wrap ourselves around the absence of the person that we’ve lost… I think this is a very dangerous situation, and a mistake. We must be able to turn ourselves the other way — [to] look at the world and understand that [it] is full of people who have lost things.”

He continued, “We need to understand that that is what we are. I’ve found by looking at the world in that way, that I saw the world not as a cruel place, but as an extraordinarily, systemically beautiful place to live in… There is joy, and there is happiness, in a way you could have never believed possible on the other side of grief.”

In recent years, Cave has applied this mindset to a strikingly intimate solo tour and more than 300 editions of an Ask Me Anything-style newsletter called The Red Hand Files. Unlike the playful, piss-taking products on his Cave Things store, it can be deadly serious, incredibly thoughtful, and completely devoid of irony — a blessing to his bigger-than-ever legion of devoted fans.

The same could be said for the Bad Seeds’ current run of climatic shows. Aside from boasting such best-of staples as “The Weeping Song,” “The Mercy Seat” and an increasingly tense “Jubilee Street,” the band’s airtight Minneapolis performance elevated the “Stagger Lee”-esque menace and rapturous denouement of “White Elephant” (a highlight from the collaborative Warren Ellis album Carnage), offered a touching Rowland S. Howard tribute (the pre-Birthday Party cover “Shivers”), and broke just about every barrier —literally and figuratively — one could expect from a venue that holds as many as 8,000 screaming fans.

Cave didn’t just strut across a catwalk that stretched across the entire stage. He screamed “you’re beautiful!” right at the front row, and meant it. He reminded us “we’ve all had too much sorrow; now is the time for joy” in a way that was deeply relatable, not melodramatic and maudlin. And he looked people directly in the eyes and held their hands the way a Sunday preacher or funeral director would, as if to quietly say, “I see you. That pain? I’ve felt it. In fact, I’ve been to hell and back. And thanks to you, I feel better than ever before.”

SETLIST

Frogs

Wild God

Song of the Lake

O Children

Jubilee Street

From Her to Eternity

Long Dark Night

Cinnamon Horses

Tupelo

Conversion

Bright Horses

Joy

I Need You

Carnage

Final Rescue Attempt

Red Right Hand

The Mercy Seat

White Elephant

ENCORE

Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry

The Weeping Song

Henry Lee

Shivers

Into My Arms

Learn more about self-titled 2.0.

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Sean McCann’s Recital imprint first gave this gorgeous collection of gamelan pieces a proper release in 2016. In My Arms, Many Flowers has gone through three blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em vinyl pressings since then, but you can still let the album’s four sublime vibrations reverberate across your living room online.

Pulled from the personal 1978-1982 archive of music teacher/composer Daniel Schmidt, it alternates between minimal studio recordings and live performances without missing a mallet. The first side starts off strongly, melding Schmidt’s metallic progressions with a simple digital sampler — lent by Pauline Oliveros and loaded with a lovely string quartet — and the prickly counterpoints of a bowed rebab.

The rest of the record sticks to a gamelan setup, emphasizing the strengths and signatures of an instrument that’s been an integral part of Indonesian culture for centuries and a driving force in Schmidt’s own career.

Here’s how author/fellow musician David Toop described one of the most impactful gamelan performances he’d ever seen in the seminal ambient book Ocean of Sound:

Toop also shares this apropos gamelan nod from the Colin McPhee book A House in Bali: “Forever changing, brilliant and sombre by turn, the moody music seemed to express a new spiritual restlessness, an impatience and lack of direction, for it was as unpredictable as the intermittent play of sunlight from a clouded sky.”

Check out more gamelan music below, and more from self | centered here.

The first record that resonated with me immediately this year (especially its enthralling opener, “Megaloner”) was Circuit des Yeux’s operatic album ‘Halo on the Inside’. Haley Fohr first hinted at its heart palpitation hooks, gloomy electronic grooves, and pure melancholy with the one-off single “God Dick.”

Recounting its reset button status — halfway between a psychedelic orchestra pit and a poison-tipped dance floor — she describes the song’s metaphorical subtext as “a love banshee bursting through porcelain skin one hair at a time until, finally, the beast within is fully on display.” Which, yeah, that sounds about right.

The following vintage feature ran around the release of Fohr’s ‘In Plain Speech’ LP a decade ago. It finds the singer/composer/multi-instrumentalist ruminating on key releases from ESP-Disk's own elusive back catalog. More than just a rough guide, it alludes to the many potential creative paths still lying before her.

Check out Circuit des Yeux’s upcoming tour dates (featuring Low’s Alan Sparhawk on guitar!) here.

Founded in 1964 by the late Bernard Stollman, ESP-Disk stands today as one of the most visionary curators in music. Between 1964-1970 and 2005-present, Bernard and his staff have worked tirelessly to unleash free thinkers and acid drinkers, releasing hundreds of titles without compromise.

I was introduced to ESP-Disk as a teenager by pure chance. Voodoo and fortuitous times led me there by way of my own music. In the summer of 2007 my great friend Katie Leming and I started a punk band called Cro Magnon. It was our first adventure into music, and it was only a short time before we learned of the other Cromagnon from 1969.

I quickly became seduced by the ESP-Disk catalogue. The Fugs, Charles Manson, and other anti-society, proto-punk resonated like a gong in my angsty teenage brain. Eight years later, I am still uncovering mind-bending music from another time and world.

Whether you enjoy punk, folk or jazz, surely there is something for you here at ESP-Disk. If you are a first-timer trying to dive into the ESP-Disk catalog, it can be overwhelming. There is so much material to be heard that I could see how one wouldn’t know where to start.

I’ve picked three releases that I hope can be utilized as a jumping-off point:

START HERE

Albert Ayler Trio, Spiritual Unity (1965)

If you have time to listen to only one ESP-Disk record, you must listen to Spiritual Unity by the Albert Ayler Trio. Released in 1965, Albert Ayler (saxophonist), Gary Peacock (bass) and Sunny Murray (percussion) effortlessly fly off into their own rhythmic freedoms, creating a tri-paneled field of sound.

This isn’t dissonant or harsh music. The way Peacock and Murray counteract Ayler’s almost micro-tonal-meets-Mozart passages reflects the album’s title. It’s free jazz before its time, and it’s hard not to wonder what syrup they were drinking that led them to this unprecedented union.

As a younger woman just entering college, Spiritual Unity was an easy grab for me. The beautiful versions of Ayler’s most familiar composition “Ghosts” was easy to digest for a person not yet acquainted with the underbelly of the free-jazz movement.

Ayler’s short yet ambitious recording career resonates, and his easily identifiable style of playing embeds Ayler as a legend and role model for many.

NOW TRY THIS

Pearls Before Swine, One Nation Underground (1967)

Now that you’ve become acquainted with ESP-Disk, it’s time to step further into the strange. If free jazz isn’t your thing, no worries; there are many other genres to be had.

Do you like The Doors? Canned Heat? Jefferson Airplane? Check out Pearls Before Swine’s One Nation Underground. One of the more polished records in terms of production and songwriting — and one of the more successful ESP-Disk bands — Pearls Before Swine’s “Playmate” sounds like Bob Dylan if he tried to play banjo in a prog band. The minimal synth on “Miss Morse,” deliberate and quaint, is a pivotal point for me on the album. “One Nation Underground” is a studio masterpiece.

Unlike many of the live one-take records on ESP-Disk, Pearls Before Swine offer clear ideas that makes you wonder if the Beatles had a copy of this shit while they were off trying to be hallucinogenic on “Yellow Submarine.” Do not be fooled by the “psychedelic” burnout tag stamped on Pearls Before Swine.

“The only thing I was smoking at the time was Winstons,” frontman Tom Rapp once said. Thus the psychedelic came from within. Hearing this album inspired me to hone in on all aspects of an album and push for a tight, clarion idea regardless of impoverished recording settings and budget.

Basically, this band is the shit.

FOR SERIOUS FANS

Erica Pomerance, You Used to Think (1968)

This next record is my personal favorite. Erica Pomerance’s You Used To Think sits at the top of my record collection. It’s Erica’s debut album, recorded in 1968. Erica is a woman with an air of arrogance, sting and wisdom.

As a fellow female vocalist, Erica’s vocal delivery is what is most striking to me. Utilizing hard panning and strange harmonies, her vocals both float and bite at the same time. Her staccato percussive delivery on the title track gets the blood boiling.

It’s hard for me not to think of Jennifer Herma or Janis Joplin during “Burn Baby Burn.” Her vocals go from full guttural to airy falsetto in a matter of seconds. Lyrics like “power without the glory,” “tomorrow is too late,” and “to think is the treason” help Erica sit firm on the arc of late 1960s progressive folk, but it is far, far on the outside spectrum.

Things get really drippy by side B, due to “the acid setting in,” as disclosed in an intimate 2010 Blastitude interview. I adore Erica on this record for her unabashed raw muscle, her bravery to hit whatever note flies out of her throat, and the sheer power that she managed to capture in this recording.

In a time where headlines read about “the music industry flailing” and “record sales being at an all-time low,” I find solace in the ESP-Disk catalog. It stands as a testament of true vision and art. It is proof that all music has the chance to be heard. And it is a reminder that a musician can follow her own path, disregard the temptations and pressures of today, and hold onto the hope that one day her music will still be listened to and affecting those around in a time after her own.

FURTHER LISTENING

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As we get set to launch the Substack edition of self-titled, we’re celebrating our favorite stories from s/t’s past lives as a daily site and quarterly magazine.

Today’s flashback is from the three years (2011-2013) where we asked rising artists like Kendrick Lamar and Charli XCX to share candid shots from SXSW. It was a different time, for sure — Instagram’s early days and the last gasp of musicians letting their guard down without fearing how they’d look or sound.

CHARLI XCX

KENDRICK LAMAR

BLACK LIPS

TORO Y MOI

DIVINE FITS

THE COATHANGERS

DENT MAY

JACUZZI BOYS

WHY?

TEENGIRL FANTASY

YOUTH LAGOON

LOWER DENS

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As we get set to properly launch the Substack edition of self-titled, we’re celebrating some of our favorite stories from the past 16 years.

Today’s newsletter is a long overdue look back at Jen Monroe’s two-part ‘OMG JAPAN’ series of rare and experimental ‘80s records from Ryuichi Sakamoto, Inoyama Land, Junko Yagami, Miharu Koshi, Mami Koyama and more.

While Monroe is now widely known as the visionary chef / artist behind the food design firm Bad Taste, she was busy making us believe in MP3 blogs again back in 2015. That’s when the Listen To This founder asked if we’d like to share her loving tribute to the kind of cutting-edge Japanese music that’d soon be lionized by the likes of Light in the Attic.

‘OMG JAPAN’ remains one of our best-performing mixtapes for a reason — because the Bryan Sweeney collab sounds like a secret cut to a Memorex cassette tape. Have a listen and a look at Monroe’s liner notes below. We’ve also dropped a newly downloadable edition of ‘OMG JAPAN 2’ right underneath it.

Why? Because we love you.

The diversity of Japanese pop in the 1980s is astounding. Something magic happened; whether it was the sudden glut of Western culture after Japan’s strict isolation, the economic boom, the sudden availability of synthesizers, or a Japanese proclivity towards razor-sharp musicianship, the ’80s were a singular time for Japanese music.

At the heart of the explosion was one of the most influential electronic music acts of all time, Yellow Magic Orchestra. Their music is usually described as technopop, but Yukihiro Takahashi, Haruomi Hosono, and Ryuichi Sakamoto were all deft genre-benders, both as a group and as solo artists. They experimented with folk, funk, house, electro, disco, hard techno, new wave, exotica, surf pop, and Indian synth ragas.

Unsurprisingly, the three left their fingerprints on all the best music that was made in Japan at the time. In assembling this mix, we found that almost everything we loved was one degree removed from YMO, be it through their production, songwriting, an instrumental cameo, a collaboration, or their imprint, ¥EN Records.

This is a mix of Japanese pop songs, most of them with a synth funk backbone. The most exciting aspect of this era of music, though, is how unafraid these musicians were to push the limits of genre: They loved Van Dyke Parks, Kraftwerk and Martin Denny, but they were never confined by any one sound, nor were they afraid to poke fun at Western constructs of the “oriental” or Japanese fascinations with Western cultural novelties.

Track two of this mix, Miharu Koshi’s “L’amour…Aruiwa Kuro No Irony” (yes, a tri-lingual song title) is built around a funk bass line, but sitting on top is a looping sample of a woman panting, rattling synth textures, layers of Koshi’s airy vocals, and a sample of what might be an Indian electric banjo. Colored Music’s “Heartbeat” sounds like a cassette that got melted in the sun, with a faraway pirate chant and agitated house beat shredded in half by an almost unlistenable piano meltdown.

Minako Yoshida’s “Tornado” is a showcase of achingly clever songwriting and wicked funk musicianship wrapped in a delicate marimba gauze. Sandii’s “Zoot Kook” is a warped, lush, slo-mo rollerskate disco track. Elsewhere, we hear traditional Japanese drumming, jungly synth washes, oil-slicked city-pop, an orchestra, and new wave guitar, often stacked together in skewed ways with a sly sense of humor.

We hope that the recent resurgence of interest in this era will continue, and that more reissues will push these artists to become household names outside of Japan. The candy-coated appeal of these songs can’t deflect from their progressive (and often deeply subversive) nature, and their importance in the global musical dialogue.

TRACKLISTING:
Chiemi Manabe – Untotooku
Miharu Koshi – L’amour…Ariuwa Kuro No Irony
Hiroshi Satoh – Say Goodbye
Colored Music – Heartbeat
Minako Yoshida – Tornado
Ryuichi Sakamoto – Kacha Kucha Nee
Mariah – Shinzo No Tobira
Yukihiro Takahashi – Drip Dry Eyes
Sandii – Zoot Kook
Haruomi Hosono – Ohenro-San
Osamu Shoji – Jinkou Station Ceres
Neo-Plant – Kisagari Koharu
Inoyama Land – Wässer
Aragon – Horridula
Asami Kado – Kagami No Naka No Zyugatsu
Tamao Koike & Haruomi Hosono – Automne Dans Un Miroir
Hiroyuki Namba – Hiru No Yume

As we first explored in the inaugural volume of Listen To This’ OMG JAPAN series a couple years back, few scenes have shaped contemporary electronic music as much as Japan in the 1980’s. Synth-pop and its offshoots — city pop, electro-pop, and techno kaya, among others — were particularly at the forefront of the conversation, enabled both by an increased availability of relatively affordable synthesizers and a culture of musical curiosity.

Genres mutated in a way that was largely unprecedented at the time, and the members of Yellow Magic Orchestra (Yukihiro Takahashi, Haruomi Hosono, and Ryuichi Sakamoto) were at the center of the shift. The group’s influence has been enormous, so much so that it’s impossible to trace in a straight line: Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, The Orb, David Sylvian, 808 State, and Afrika Bambaataa have all cited YMO as a major inspiration for their work.

Just as compelling as the music others made in response to Japanese synth pop, though, were the conversations that Japanese musicians had with each other, often in response to imported sounds. After all, YMO’s breakout single was a synth reinterpretation of Martin Denny’s “Firecracker,” a favorite piece from the father of exotica and a soundtrack of 1959 suburban fantasy-fueled Orientalism.

That interest in playing with conceptions of “Japanese-ness” shows up all over the Japanese pop canon, not just in the work of the members of YMO. On this mix, you can hear it most palpably on dip in the pool’s sparse and sprawling “Rabo Del Sol,” whose heavy, ceremonious drum and bell syncopation suggests traditional taiko, revisited with a medieval-futurist sensibility.

That proclivity towards inventive genre splicing is all over this mix, actually, perhaps most noticeably as a reggae influence in three very different incarnations.

First, Akiko Yano’s steel drum-flecked synth-reggae cupcake “Ashkenazy Who?” is replete with gleefully gnashed vocals, twisted and slung in the mouth as if to mimic warped synth pulses.

Next, Junko Yagami leans even more explicitly into reggae fusion on “ジョハナスバーグ” (“Zyohanasubargu,” i.e. a Romanization of the Japanese pronunciation of Johannesburg), a thick synth-funk ode to a global love for reggae, winking with drum machines and synthetic accordian.

Last is Pecqre’s “Kylyln,” a spaced-out dub rendition of a song originally written by Ryuichi Sakamoto for Kazumi Watanabe, which comes from one of the most slept-on records in the Japanese canon. It was largely recorded in Jamaica at Channel One and Tuff Gong Studio on a trip organized by Bob Marley himself, as the story goes, at the urging of drummer and diehard reggae fan Masahito Hashido (aka Pecqre). It’s an incredible lineup: between Aston Barrett and Robbie Shakespeare on bass, Carly Barrett and Sly Dunbar on percussion, Minako Yoshida’s lead vocals, and Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt singing back-up, one can only dream of being a fly on the wall during those sessions.

Elsewhere in genre-bending is the supremely strange and wonderful “Down? Down, Down!” / “Stay Outta My World,” from Mariah vocalist Jimmy Murakawa, which, between its cavernous metallic clanging, creeping synth lines, and echoey muttering, feels more German industrial than Japanese. But by the song’s conclusion, it’s somehow morphed into a slinking hip-hop bass line with reverb hand-claps and sinister kiss-off lyrics to match, sounding uncannily like an unfinished Notorious B.I.G. track. Mami Koyama’s “Love Song” is a stunning piece of hypnagogic ambient pop punctuated by smoky swirls of koto, hyper-polished both in its opiated production and futuristic use of dimensional space.

Pizzicato V’s cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” is, for all its cheekiness, a gorgeous lounge-pop precursor to the Shibuya-kei sound that the group would go on to make famous in the ’90s. Ayuo Takahashi’s “流れる” sounds like top-tier, private press, cosmic New Age, except it’s by way of an avant-garde child prodigy-turned-early music scholar in collaboration with Koharu Kisaragi, a playwright and experimental theater figure (who, incidentally, makes an appearance in OMG JAPAN Volume 1 as well).

It’s generous music, and the rabbithole seems to go on forever, so it’s not surprising that it attracts obsessive record collectors. While a resurgence of interest has brought about a stream of exciting reissues, there are still countless incredible records that have yet to be distributed outside of Japan — so happy digging, and happy listening!

TRACKLISTING:
1. Tabo’s Project – Feel
2. Imitation – Narcisa
3. Jimmy Murakawa – Down? Down, Down! / Stay Outta My World
4. Zabadak – 蝶
5. Akiko Yano – Ashkenazy Who?
6. Junko Ohashi – I Love You So
7. Junko Yagami – Zyohanasubargu
8. Tatsuro Yamashita – Love Talkin’ (Honey It’s You)
9. Yukihiro Takahashi – Konchu-Ki
10. Sandii & The Sunsetz – The Serious Game
11. Pizzicato V – The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)
12. Pecqre – Kylyn
13. Joe Hisaishi – The Winter Requiem
14. dip in the pool – Rabo Del Sol
15. Masami Tsuchiya – Never Mind
16. Mami Koyama – Love Song
17. Toshifumi Hinata – サラズ・クライム
18. Ayuo Takahashi ft. Koharu Kisagari – 流れる
19. Hiroko Yakushimaru – 透明なチューリップ (Transparent Tulip)

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On the morning of November 6, I woke up early in a Helsinki hotel room, apprehensive yet energized by what the day had in store. The vote was in. Trump won.

Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised. Admittedly, I was kind of excited, but not for the same reasons the more than 76 million Americans who voted for him were.

I was in Finland to guest lecture at the University of Helsinki and discuss my upcoming book (Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency) at the city’s Punkmuseo. I study punk music — particularly the lyrics of hardcore bands from the 1980s — and whatever inspiration I got from the news concerning a second Trump presidency stemmed from this fact alone.

Like Reagan before him — the first president to witness a torrent of verbal abuse from punks — Trump had been a polarizing yet inspirational figure during his first tenure of office. On my walk along Mannerheimintie that morning, all I could think about was whether punks would respond with the same level of rage they had in 2016.

When he was first elected in 1980, Reagan immediately became the musical mark for disaffected youth who were frustrated with their monotonous suburban lives and fearful that the end of the world was just a button push away. In fact, so many bands aimed their lyrics directly at the 40th president that New Jersey’s Chronic Sick parodied the phenomenon with their 1983 single “Reagan Bands.”

Among these was the aptly named Reagan Youth, a band whose formation was inspired by their namesake’s election and who would remain together only through his time in the White House. Like D.I.’s “Reagan Der Fuhrer” and Teenage Depression’s “Reagan’s Gestapo”, their song “Reagan Youth” was one of the many that made juxtaposing the rule of Reagan with Nazism common among bands of that era, a tactic that would not be saved for him alone.

Throughout his two terms in office, Reagan’s name landed in more song titles than can be listed here. Bands in cities and towns across the country (and the world, for that matter) wrote tracks like “Reagan’s War” (Demented Youth), “Reagan’s War Puppets” (The Accüsed), “Reagan Gun Club” (Social Spit), “Reaganomics” (DRI), “Raygunomics” (Agent 86) and “Reaganomix” (Beefeater). Punk rock’s perception of the Reagan Revolution also popped up in “If Reagan Played Disco” (The Minutemen), “Reagan’s In” (Wasted Youth"), and “Bye Bye Ronnie” (MDC).

Other groups were far more forthcoming, holding nothing back with titles like “Reagan Sucks” (Bum Kon), “Reaganomics Fuck Off” (The Accelerators) and “Fuck, Shit, I Hate Reagan” (Pagan Faith). A few even alluded to John Warnock Hinckley Jr.’s assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, including Suicidal Tendencies (“I Shot the Devil,” which begins with the line “I shot Reagan!”) and The Crucifucks (“Hinkley Had a Vision”).

In the lyrics of songs such as these, Reagan was subjected to a grassroots, real-time, artistic outpouring of criticism few other presidents before him could claim. And he opened the door for those that followed — particularly George W. Bush, who would have his name used by bands like Wartorn (“Adolf Bushler”), The Brainwashed (“Kill George Bush”), and Environmental Youth Crunch (“George W. Shitbag” from their EP We Live to Smash the Family of Bush).

While George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barrack Obama also received some attention from punk bands, their detractors were minimal compared to who came after. Emerging from a field of 16 Republican candidates in 2016 — engaging in what New York Magazine columnist Frank Rich called the “quadrennial tug-of-war to seize the mantle of Ronald Reagan” — Donald Trump provided his critics with plenty to sing about during his first term.

From the moment he first became the Republican nominee through the election of 2020, Trump witnessed an abundance of abuse from punk bands, some of whom had cut their teeth when Reagan was in the White House.

MDC — still fronted after 35 years by Dave Dictor — released Mein Trumpf in 2017 with a reboot of 1981’s “Born to Die.” Its lyrics were simply changed from “No War, No KKK, No Fascist USA” to “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA,” a chant used by anti-Trumpers at rallies and concerts throughout his tenure. They also repackaged their farewell homage to Reagan as “Bye Bye Donny” a few years later, similar to their Canadian counterparts D.O.A. Around since 1978, they turned their “Fucked Up Ronnie” into “Fucked Up Donald,” just one of the songs on 2020’s Treason, a firm expression of D.O.A.’s opposition to the Trump presidency.

Former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, backed by the Guantanamo School of Medicine since the Obama years (and one of the few who had actually critiqued his presidency with 2012’s “Barackstar O’Bummer”), joined in the fun releasing Tea Party Revenge Porn, with “Satan’s Combover” as the opening track.

Less lyrically direct than the other Reagan Era bands, punk rock stalwarts Bad Religion recorded Age of Unreason near the end of his term, with guitarist and Epitaph owner Brett Gurewitz telling LA Weekly prior to its release, “we should have an album’s worth of ‘Fuck Trump’ songs pretty soon.”

Fellow Californians and labelmates the Descendents would also get in on the action with Suffrage, a two-track single released right before the election that informed voters “hashtag maga-maga, what a fucking joke!” on “Hindsight 2020”.

While Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” resonated with enough Americans to win him the presidency in 2016, it also fostered a sense of discontent that had not seen the lyrical light of day since the presidency of the man he had pilfered this slogan from.

In the wake of Trump’s first election, The Guardian ran an article with the headline “Rise Above: Will Donald Trump’s America Trigger a Punk Protest?” Drawing a direct connection between the two presidents, Jon Bernstein wrote, “The similarities between Reagan and Trump have left some wondering if the next few years of underground rock music may bear any resemblance to the wave of independent-spirited, politically conscious rock that arose during the Reagan years.”

\While what happened in the 1980s may never happen again, there was definitely a resemblance. Numerous Trump-inspired songs were written between 2016 and 2020, all with familiar punk pronouncements. Songs like “Trump Is a Nazi” (Candy Warpop), “Donald Trump Is a Nazi” (Sister Munch) and “Donald Trump is Not My Fuhrer” (Fall Children) continued the punk tradition of linking contemporary Republican presidents with the Hitler regime.

Like Reagan before him, Trump was also denigrated in “Fuck You Donald Trump” (Sharptooth and Bi Tyrant) and “Fuck Trump” (Scorn Dog). One band, Battle Pussy, double-double denounced him on their 2017 album Revolution  with “Trumpty Dumpty,” “Tweety Tweet,” “No Trump” and “You’re Fired.”

As Reagan had been before him, Trump was also suggestively threatened in songs like “Do You Think Donald Trump Is Flammable” (Savage World), “Die Trump Die” (Psycho Sin, a noisecore group that had written similar songs about Reagan 40 years earlier), and a few other violent assertions that might cause listeners concern in light of the attempts on his life during the run up to the recent election.

Whether these and the many others not mentioned represent the musical movement hoped for in 2016 is debatable. With only four years to work with, there were limitations compared to what was produced by punks during the Reagan Revolution. Never in the history of music had one man received the lyrical attention Ronald Reagan did. But that could change.

With Donald Trump winning the presidency again, will we witness a “wave of independent-spirited, political conscious” music as The Guardian pined about eight years earlier? Are punks ready and gearing up for another round of lyrical lashing?

The answer to both questions might be found, ironically, in Finland. Not long before I left for Helsinki, I got a new release update for a band I follow on Spotify called Rattus. First formed in 1978, they are one of Finland’s most well-known hardcore groups. The song suggested was titled “Keppiä Donaldille” — loosely translated as “Stick it to Donald.”

Exactly 40 years earlier, it was Reagan that drew the group’s ire on what was originally titled “Keppiä Ronaldille.” The beginnings of a reboot? We’ll have to wait and see. If the history of punk tells us anything, it is that Republican administrations receive plenty of lyrical attention. Here’s hoping the response is a worthy and meaningful one, which brings me to my last point.

Is all of this worth it? My book that’s out in May is titled Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency. Anyone who reads will quickly surmise that I’m as much a fan as a scholar of the bands I reference. I argue that Reagan helped usher in one of the most meaningful (although often ignored by scholars of the era) critical protests in our nation’s history.

But at what cost did this come? Proxy wars across the globe, drastic cuts in social services, the most massive military buildup ever, the threat of nuclear holocaust, the continued militarization of law enforcement, the despoiling of public lands… Was all of this worth the incredible artistic outpouring that is 1980s hardcore punk? That is a question that we should constantly be asking ourselves, particularly in light of the fact that many of the same concerns still plague us today.

Since Donald Trump entered the political arena there has clearly been an increasingly unstable sense of order that all Americans — left and right — have felt at one point or another. It was this feeling that prompted punks during his first term to take up their pens. It will most likely do so again and Rattus might have thrown the first punk punch. But again, will it be worth it?

My answer is a firm yes — not because punk bands create tangible change with their lyrical pronouncements, but rather because the presence of populist protest is an essential aspect of the American democratic experiment that must be maintained. Punk rock, in my opinion, is a much-needed continuation of this trend.

George Orwell once wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” The value of punk rock isn’t that it will eliminate such oppression. It never has and never will.

Its value lies in being one of the few art forms still willing to candidly make us aware of who or what is wearing that boot.

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As we get set to properly launch the Substack edition of self-titled, we’re looking back at some of our favorite stories from the past 16 years.

Today’s selection is an exclusive Aïsha Devi essay about the major role meditation has played in her personal life and multi-dimensional music. It’s about to hit even more ecstatic highs, too, as Devi unveils AKA Hex, a new duo with Nairobi producer Slikback that drops its debut on Danse Noire this Friday.

A lot of my friends see how meditation impacts my everyday life, but they don’t know how to start themselves. They’re like, ‘I’m sitting here,  getting bored and frustrated.’

It was actually a long process for me. I’m not sure I was a good candidate for it at first. It started with me getting interested in guttural singing — how music and tone is very important for Tibetan monks. I started doing a mantra connected to ancient texts like the Vedas… knowledge that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism or dogmatic religion. It’s more about the body, really; there’s a lot of medical stuff about treating yourself with music and breathing.

I came to meditation to enhance my lung capacity for singing. Because I used Western techniques at first — bel canto, which is how sopranos are trained. It’s very egocentric, and I was very frustrated with that.

So I started to sit and focus on my breathing. At first, it’s a discipline that takes a lot of effort — very boring. But it gets easier over time.

Singing liberates certain frequencies. It’s a vibration you feel throughout your body, which really helps you tune yourself with a very soft and generous state of mind. Meditation isn’t about looking at yourself meditating. You have to lose yourself in the tone and the vibration; then you can go to the origin of yourself and matter. Because matter is just an illusion. It’s just a 3D spatialization of different frequencies.

Once I meditated and did my mantra for a while,  a second voice suddenly appeared, kind of like the deep Kargyraa voice you hear in Tibetan throat singing. I was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing. What is happening in my body?’

I was very sick before starting meditation. I had anorexia for 10 years; it was very brutal. And I had eczema all over my body. Two months after [starting meditation], everything was gone. It was self-healing — very natural. I felt so good. It was like, ‘Oh, meditation isn’t just a trend. It’s about finding your own tuning.’

Singing is exactly that for me — all about going back to the essence of the human condition. It’s like I’m in an altered state of consciousness.

I’m working a lot with binaural beats now. Each of the frequencies are different, but they combine to make a new vibration. The Delta puts you in a very meditative state. It’s almost like a drug—like heroin or something like that. It turns your brain into an open, meditative mind like LSD. And the other frequency I’m using is the Theta. It helps regenerate cells — really holistic.

It’s about more than just feeling better in this life, though. With capitalism, we are limited to this 3D world that loves making us feel depressed and telling us we’re going to die soon. It’s about fear and guilt and consumption. Meditation is this invisible force, empowering us to live in another dimension.

I think people are so depressed because they know there’s something more than the 3D world, but they can’t always tap into it. For instance, video games help people organize another life in their mind. It’s like dreaming, and they can’t deal with the fact that these other realities don’t fit together. We have to eat; we have to work; we have to have a place in society. Meditation is the best gateway for humans to understand they’re more than just matter. It gives them hope.

With the right frequency, ritual music can open up all 11 dimensions. That’s why it’s important for musicians to go back to ancestral knowledge — the mantras that put us in an altered state of consciousness. Reconnecting helps us transcend and live in other realms. Capitalism lobotomized us to make us more productive and forget about these other realities.

I apply all of this to my music, whether I’m producing or performing live. It’s funny; the last time I did a show, some people came by afterwards and said, ‘That was crazy. I felt this massage all over my body.’ It’s because I’m using this frequency that has a big impact. That’s why I love using [subwoofers]; they’re the lowest frequency, and they move you. Subs can actually break glass; know what I mean?

I was dancing with friends at a rave once. It was 4 a.m., and I remember the frequency of the subs made a little cactus fall on the floor. I love the idea of having an impact on the body and reordering human matter.

Meditation is very important for that; it opens up these gates for people to understand how the body is more than just that. That’s why I called my [2018] album DNA Feelings — because I think we can rearrange our DNA. Nothing is static.

Capitalism teaches us the only option we have is to grow old, which isn’t true. I don’t believe that. When you’re about to die, you’re not going to think about your car or your house; you’re going to think about all the invisible things — the things society tends to call ‘spiritual’. Although that’s bullshit, a box you put everything you don’t understand in.

We’re in an era of so much frustration. Musicians need to be these mad men, opening doors for everyone — sabotaging capitalism and sharing alternate visions. People are looking more and more for this. They’re quitting their jobs because they aren’t willing to be little soldiers for this society anymore.

It’s a good time now. Even pop music is becoming less egocentric. Like I was listening to Frank Ocean the other day and thinking, ‘Wow, even pop stars get it.’

It’s very interesting to think about how we’ve always adhered to this very compact format of a verse, a chorus, and something very ego-pleasing. Now songs are extending themselves and putting us in a kind of trance. Like I love that new generation of rappers who mumble. For me, it’s connected to the African griot and the idea of mantras. The words aren’t important; the frequencies are.

That’s why saying mantras in Sanskrit is so powerful. English uses a frequency that’s all about the lips and the mouth, but Sanskrit and other languages like it are more based in the throat. The resonation is so much bigger; the way you open your thoracic cage is so different than we did in the West. It’s almost like a shamanic voice.

I like that idea — that musicians can be hi-fi shamans guiding you through space. With good intentions, of course. Frequencies can bring order to so many things. Music can make you sad or happy, but it’s not about our personal [lyrics]; it’s more about the frequencies and how they heal or reorder your body. Like my “Cell Stems Spa” track is supposed to make you feel younger.

Live is more naked, so people really understand it. It’s funny — this difference between what is music and what is entertainment and what is healing. I like to play very loud, to confront people and purge them with sound. But it’s still in the format of a collective rave gathering. I think we have that inside us as humans: to rave and lose ourselves together in an altered state of consciousness.

We called some of the music from the ’90s ‘trance’ because it was supposed to induce a  similar trance-like state. I’m using a synthesizer from back then that really does work, actually. It messes with your brain; it’s like taking a drug.

There’s tons of people doing something that’s similar to me; a lot of people have that intention of providing an alternative. I’m not talking about hippies or New Age, either. It’s so much more than a social movement. It’s not a naive utopia anymore.

It’s not a coincidence that ambient music is a trend. There’s a call for that, because we’ve realized that Western capitalism is collapsing. So we have to find an alternative—a new language to empower people outside of the rules.

With my music, I sometimes use untuned things on purpose because the Western world often uses the diatonic scale or closed harmonies… three or four notes. Whether you like the ritualistic music of India or not, it puts you in such a meditative state.

Ravi Shankar always said he never used closed harmonies because then your brain opens. It helps you transcend the rules — what you learned at school and have been told your whole life. Non-diatonic music can put you in a meditative state quickly.

Western music is more about satisfying the ego — this post-Romanticism ideal. I am the subject; I am happy; I am sad. But the ritualistic music of the Middle East, South America and Africa has this idea of transcendence.

Ambient music also uses these techniques, and it gets rid of space-time because it’s not like a four-minute track with verses and a chorus. It can be extended. When I do music, I turn my voice into a loop. I could die while vacuum cleaning and it’d still continue. It’s bigger than me.

There wasn’t a precise moment where I started to look at the world this way. I grew up with my grandmother and always felt like an outcast. Always being alone made me invent my own cosmos — a place where I’d feel better than the real world. I always sought other realities.

Many people are submissive to the system that makes them feel happy and have money. I was never satisfied with what was put in front of me on TV. I hated school; I hated racist teachers. Being different meant that I really suffered. I tried to conform, but it didn’t really work.

The first time I felt like I found my place was in art school. It helped me realize there was an alternative path to what you see on TV. That opened the door to a life of experimentation. It also brought me to meditation.

The first 20 years of my life felt especially isolating, because I grew up in a suburb of Geneva surrounded by older, rich people who are really materialistic and have no questions about life. Like one of my neighbors was the old FIFA president, Sepp Blatter.

I didn’t feel like I belonged to that. Nature really opened the gate for me. I’d sneak out and try to connect with the cosmos.

Traveling with my grandmother also helped open my mind. It helped me realize how suffering is all over the world. I didn’t want to be this imperialistic, European kid. I always wanted to truly understand wherever I was.

When I started to go to India, I was already out of art school and touring. It kind of brought me closer to my roots, not because I wanted to find who I was. More because I felt like knowledge was more interesting there than Western academic knowledge. I had amazing answers. I still haven’t been to Nepal, where my father is from, but it’ll happen.

It’s weird now; younger people have a different brain because of the internet. They aren’t confined to one location. Now everything is mobile. I love the idea of people losing their office jobs and contributing on a global scale. The ability to create something with your hands is so powerful and not so abstract.

But I’m not a hippie. And I don’t want to belong to any kind of cult or dogmatic religion. I prefer to talk about spirituality and the energetic world outside of religion. Jesus, Buddha and Shiva were all enlightened. There’s so much common knowledge in every religion, but humans corrupted it and used it for power. I’m more interested in the basic ideas within them. Like atoms were already mentioned in the Vedas — thousands of years before this era.

I really believe this life is just a physical manifestation of our eternity. Believe it or not, but that’s how I feel. I like the idea of life being an experiment. It’s interesting to grow and get stimulated by many different ideas and forms of stimulation.

I put that into the music and never think, ‘Oh, that was my best album.’ My main goal is to impact people. I’ve always loved the idea of nightlife. It’s not good or bad; it’s your own awakening.

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