When I hear force majeure, I think of three things: the legal term for the voiding of plans; the 2014 film about the destruction of a relationship in a moment; and the album by Brandee Younger and Dezron Douglas. And, I suppose, there’s a Tangerine Dream album of the same name—turns out I think of four things.

It is fitting that all of these concepts are focused on giving oneself over to something grander than yourself: desired or required, you accommodate the scale of the feeling. Sometimes that feeling comes from more people being involved in the situation. Other times it comes from being compressed together.

There’s an equation for charting this out. In a group of n people, there are n(n-1)/2 one-to-one relationships. In a band of five people, there are ten distinct pairwise relationships, and that doesn’t account for group dynamics (three vs. two; four vs. one).

In contrast, the musical duo is powerful because it’s a line.

Let’s think about the famed formerly-married White Stripes for a minute. Jack and Meg’s powerful mythology was a mask. They posed as brother and sister in an almost vaudevillian way, just for the stage show—stylized theatrical misdirection by the candy cane children. But every marriage is a secret between a couple because of the conjoining of two points: they had a precise sense of each other’s capacities, and how to translate that intimacy into a controlled aesthetic—even as the relationship itself dissolved.”

There’s also Svaneborg Kardyb, a project that I’ve obsessed over within the context of this writing exercise. Their home-concert setting and their quiet, cyclical musical language create a sense of shelter, of intimacy. These guys are best friends and—crucially—even when they let someone else into their sonic landscape (as they recently did with Caoilfhionn Rose), they maintain the same aesthetics. There’s no redundancy, no alternate path, no place for tension to dissipate when the string is pulled taut.

During quarantine, as the world was in the process of evaporating, two other musicians decided they would put on a regular livestream. Music saved their lives, so they decided they would save others’ lives through music. Brandee and Dezron would perform jazz standards, but restructured to meet the peculiarities of the social media era: smaller snippets that could be easily shared, a head and a quick verse, and then back to the declaration of the theme again. And it didn’t hurt to have the harp and the double bass working together—two looming, imposing instruments that take up a lot of visual and physical space. I think they did all of this on Facebook Live, but the platform is incidental—it could have been any service or tool that lets us gaze through the one-way mirror into their marriage for a moment.

During those years, marriage, friendship, and artistry became overlapping modes of attention for many. Forced to be at home, in proximity to our partners, we felt the quotidian rituals even more deeply than we previously had. The creative partnership and the marriage partnership rarely weave themselves together in a totalizing way because—in normal life—people have separate spheres they travel in, some part of themselves that can never be known or apprehended. Built-in friction.

But with Force Majeure, there is no distance left to negotiate. The buffers disappear, the separate spheres collapse, and what remains is the connection between the two points. They hold the line.

Verdict: Keep

Have you been in a creative partnership with your romantic partner?

For years of my youth, I would sit at the blue-seated-brown-topped folding table and discuss important matters—listen to F make the case for Green Day as the voice of our generation, perhaps of all generations, with the forthcoming brilliance of “American Idiot”; dish with D and F about fan translations of Japanese video game ROMs; listen to studious B and K reading from the French textbook and giving us snippets of their circumflexed pronunciation; watch D empty his stepfather’s prized coin collection into the vending machine as penance for a domestic slight I would never understand. This was our literary salon, where we covered everything: the finer points of contemporary politics, history, artistry, debate. This is where we refined our acumen to articulate, to make a case for something, to pound the table and call someone else’s claim outrageous. And to listen.

Namely, we listened to the radio. Underneath the persistent din of the cafeteria, the lunchroom staff played a local FM station. There were two songs with the same name in regular rotation: “It’s My Life”. One of which was by the louche and bland Bon Jovi, the only redeeming quality the cartoonish use of the talk box; and the other was by No Doubt. Though I didn’t like it, No Doubt’s performance of the song was something I understood—the oddball punks reinterpreting some kind of anthemic song from a previous area, just like how the Red Hot Chili Peppers made their first magazine covers from a performance of “Higher Ground” by Stevie Wonder. Subtly, somehow, I knew there was a deep and rich genealogy to this tune: if a major mainstream act was willing to pluck something from obscurity at the height of their fame and turn it into a single, it had to mean something, right?

After school, I dug in on the video game forum, and learned that Talk Talk was a laughing stock. Or rather, they made a laughing stock of the A&R representative that kept them on EMI/Parlophone after experimental albums with the same lightly-surreal cover art, releasing an album named after the process Laughing Stock. This was my first exposure to the band, and the trivia was filed away for when I grew up.

My next exposure was during my days of listening to the same music over and over as I undertook consulting projects. I would put Spirit of Eden record on, build a content management system for environmental biologists to visualize and track all sorts of data sets, shift over from Access to MySql before end of life. This was the soundtrack to probably my fourth major project at my software development job, and it was a good one to be lost in.

I came across it unceremoniously, because it was on shuffle. But listening to the same song, the same piece of music over and over lowers cognitive load while building in predictable dopamine release—you know when the good part is going to hit, and you can anticipate it, which supports your mood regulation and helps with concentration. I’ve written about this before; no need to belabor the point. The difference this time is that the music was much busier than what I was used to entrancing myself to, that it had lyrics. I would occasionally be gazing deeply into my screen, and I would hear Mark Hollis half-speaking-half-singing to me. It was eerie but not unpleasant, so I repeated the exercise: inadvertently, like some of the others that I looped, this is probably one of the albums that I’ve listened to the most.

Eventually familiarity breeds curiosity, and you want to learn more about the thing you’re repeatedly exposing yourself to. Remembering that I had encountered the band before, but had no knowledge of its history, I did some digging.

Though I never directly experienced it, I understood that the rock scene in the late eighties was complicated—post-punk fought its way into mass culture, getting rid of many of the things that were decidedly and intensely innovating in terms of texture and timbre. Jazz was outmoded. Prog rock was gauche. Classical music was fusty. Dub (by white people) was cultural appropriation. Ambient music was just furniture. And if you were trying to do all of these things at once, good luck.

Somehow, Talk Talk was able to stumble through the literal darkness successfully, and come out with this fantastic song suite on the other side. Their music breathes and pulses in the way that post rock naturally would years later, sounding at moments like both Godspeed and Explosions, especially at the end of a song like “Eden” with dramatic pulses and dynamic contrast.

Across the whole record, the compositional style is almost akin to some of the avant-garde exploratory work someone like Brian Eno might do, or the same approach that folks like Charles Mingus might take after the advent of overdubbing in jazz: focused deeply on system design in order to get an interesting outcome. These are the steps for producing a record like this:

1. Get a huge record budget based on your previous success

2. Make a skeletal simple musical framework

3. Hire your friends and session musicians to perform

4. Give the musicians oblique and esoteric instructions, requiring them to perform in a pitch-black studio (like what Dawn of Midi would do years later)

5. Chaotically cut everything together after the fact

This was the kind of process music I could get behind. It was reminiscent of the same protocol I followed with my college band (except for point one, of course, but that would come with time).

But outside of all that, it is also simply beautiful. The constantly-adaptive musical environment can simultanesouly feel like a lament, a devotional church piece, haunting Delta blues with harmonica to match, and even an English pastoral composition. It rewards persistence of the sort I described above, being willing to immerse oneself. I’d be happy to feed more quarters into the slot, and listen for years to come.

Verdict: Keep

What was the soundtrack to your lunchroom?

‘Taste’ is oft bandied about in the world today, specifically in the world of technology. It is an impoverished, flattened reduction that merely gestures at an important idea. People are collapsing the complex dimensionality of a word that means so many things into one simple notion—that they are better than someone else at a particular thing, that they are higher status. It is in service of representing people who have refined their craft and abilities to execute to mere consumer choice: selection of that, not this. A filter.

That said, there is a grain of truth in the taste discourse. Ira Glass has this quote that I’m sure everyone’s heard at this point about how when you first start creating your taste doesn’t match with your ambition, and you have to fight through the discomfort and the pain until they are more in sync. But taste is not a filter, it’s a vector. Directional. Pointing toward something while potentially never getting there. And the magic of knowing the direction of some vector is that you can get other people to follow you toward what it’s pointing to.

I first learned about Pino Palladino from his work with the John Mayer Trio, after John pivoted from suburban sadboi to blues impresario. Once, I saw John, Pino, and Steve Jordan on the stage and was shocked by what a giant Piano was. It turns out he’s a giant of the musical world too, having played on so many of your favorite records and mine—D’Angelo to Dijon, Sakomoto to Sheeran. Once I figured that out, I knew I had to occasionally check in on his career. Read the liner notes, kids.

And that’s what brought me to this record, when I looked him up on a lark in 2021. Notes with Attachments is an experimental guitar-centric record where Pino and Blake Mills, esteemed outré producer and session musician, collaborate. But that’s not to minimize what an effort this was—there are so many genres expressed here, supplemented by the handiwork of thirteen excellent musicians over thirty minutes.

I keep coming back to “Soundwalk” as a statement piece that captures the spirit of this album. The title of the record evokes fragments repurposed from other sources, and this song in particular feels like it carries its own ghost of older sessions—a horn idea workshopped on the road years ago, slow and quiet riffing on both bass and guitar, organ stabs that could be at home on a dub record. Other songs like “Ekuté” or “Djurkel” are more straightforward riffy ethnomusicological excursions, and are equally delightful, but they aren’t as haunted. The music here asks you, expects you to keep retuning your ear as the arrangement retunes itself, making you think of the bricolage of each piece of the assembly as it unfolds in time. Where did this snatch of saxophone come from? This hand percussion? What pop star left this on the cutting-room floor?

In listening to the side projects of so many creative people, I often think there is a particular kind of album made by people who have spent whole careers making someone else’s record sound inevitable and effortless. You expect the invisible craft of the session—a lovely lick without standing out too much. What you don’t always expect is restlessness: the sense that everyone in the room is still searching, still dissatisfied with the first approach, willing to restructure everything on the fly while the tape is still rolling. That’s taste, the vector. Directional.

Verdict: Keep

How do you feel about ‘taste’?

There I was, at a friend’s house watching the Super Bowl. Setting aside a dalliance in my early years when I was preoccupied with card collecting and the Green Bay Packers, I had little-to-no interest in football. Rihanna was going to perform, so we were waiting around for that. I went to get a drink from the kitchen. During a Pepsi commercial, I heard the unmistakeable sinewy guitar figure: Surprise Chef was cooking up something.

Surprise Chef rewards noticing. There’s always a backbeat with subtle syncopation, occasionally hand percussion, keeping the music moving. This is the canvas upon which the rest of the group sketches out their songforms. Harmonically, pretty much every song is a vamp on a couple of open jazz chords with extensions spread across the spectrum—sometimes the ninths and thirteenths show up in vibraphone, sometimes synthesizer, and other times they fall into the bass. This gives which gives the pieces room to develop through dynamic contour just as much as they do through orchestration, ebbing and flowing using an approach similar to post rock, but with more complex chords. It’s the space where listening intently pays off and everything comes together.

The band came together as a group in 2017 in Melbourne, Australia. They emerged from the same musical world of Budos Band, that ‘direct to tape, deep funk’ atmosphere from an imagined blaxploitation movie shot down under and forgotten, shelved among the rejects of the recording studio tape archive where the other library music was, someone lucky enough to uncover it years later. The guys in the band lived in a commune together, The College of Knowledge, which was packed to the rafters with rare groove records and an analogue recording setup. Teenage me would have melted at the opportunity to live with my friends and play music all day with such an excellent setup. All I had was the barn.

The cultural moment at which this music burbled up through the pipes of whatever streaming service I first encountered it on is one I’ve written about before. It’s the same set of forces that produced Khruangbin and a slew of instrumental acts, or the furniture music Mac Demarco made that is designed to be ignored, to fade into the background. The songs on All News is Good News fade into the background too, sometimes, but mostly they let you choose when to go deeper into them.

Verdict: Keep

Best song you ever heard on a Super Bowl commercial?

As silly as it is, my introduction to the music of Mozart was probably through Looney Tunes—the genealogy is unclear. But I can for sure say that “Amadeus”, the Miloš Forman movie about the composer’s rivalry with Antonio Salieri, was my first exposure to his biographical facts. I never made it far enough in my piano lessons to be able to play anything of substance from the classical world, and—growing up in a place without a strong link to cultural institutions—never had occasion to seek out music that came out prior to the 20th century really. I wouldn’t typically learn about a composer unless the facts of their lives tangentially touched the things I was learning about in school.

And I was learning German. Through a quirk of scheduling had taken German V (the highest level) for three years straight—it was the only thing which allowed me to be in the other honors classes I was in. We were talking about the various movements of the classical world, the Romantic movement that was encroaching upon literature and art and made the new German state the preeminent font from which culture and systematic inquiry flowed. I was intrigued enough, but then we watched some segments of the film for my instructor, Herr K, to illustrate the aesthetic sensibilities of dress and architecture for Viennese aristocracy during that window of time.

On a movie day, we could take school significantly less seriously; goofing off, passing notes, doing whatever time wasting and disruptive activities kids did in the classroom prior to the era of cell phones—no one was paying attention. After Herr K had played a couple of different scenes, finger on the fast-forward button to skip to segments of interest on the VHS player, class was dismissed. After lunch, I was surprised to discover that we had a substitute teacher in my music appreciation class and would be watching exactly the same movie, until our teacher Mr. M was back from his bassoon auditions at some of the orchestras in distant locales. He would be out for the rest of the week, so we could definitely finish the film.

The lights dimmed, the DVD spun in the player, and we crowded around the TV. Turns out the movie is hilarious. Sophia Coppola’s film “Marie Antoinette” had just come out had similar sensibilities, jocular and satirical, but the conflict between the protagonist and antagonists were feminine in a way that clearly mapped onto the gossip circles and rumor mills of high school. In Amadeus, Salieri embodies more of a Looney Tunes character’s approach to conflict—the coyote to Mozart’s effortlessly brilliant roadrunner—and mixes up court intrigue, scandal, tragedy, and demise in a playful and compelling package for the viewer. The difference is, Salieri kind of wins in this masculine Macht sort of way, and simultaneously is his own undoing. This was the right kind of zany, and kept us engaged.

But the introduction of the music is no joke, either. You could think of the soundtrack as a greatest hits for people who never really listened to classical music before. It became a Grammy-winning album, one of the best selling classical albums ever. It communicates the playfulness of Mozart, the idea that this was music for a good time for wealthy and powerful people in close quarters.

This album is not that album. This is a different film soundtrack predominantly featuring the music of Mozart, one I have not seen and thus will not provide commentary on. The plot seems neat, albeit perhaps a little fusty in that late-1960’s art film way, based on a true story, focusing on a tightrope walker and lieutenant. People say the cinematography is “painterly”.

But the selection of pieces is strong and elegant. The interpretation from Anda, the featured artist, is subtle and seems to be phrased in a looser, more breathable way than some of the other Mozart performances I have heard. After his training at the Liszt Academy in his youth, his career’s two dominant forks were into interpretations of Bartók and Mozart. These pieces are emblematic of his skill. It’s a desert island disk for some classical heads; I’m simple when it comes to evaluating these things and even I can see the nuance. It’s good.

I won’t presume to know this music in great depth, nor will I say it’s something I would regularly listen to—give me the minimalists, modernists, or late-romantics any day—but I’ll keep this in the collection for when I want to cosplay European royalty.

Verdict: Keep

Who is the Salieri to your Mozart?

The demo, the dashed-off sketch to capture an idea, is the rough gemstone of the music world. Forget the fidelity, forget matching the timbre exactly—use what you have present-to-hand to capture a moment. Eventually, it can be polished, but it doesn’t have to be.

In my listening experience, there’s a taxonomy of demos. There’s the singer-songwriter sketch, which is a few chords and some lyrics or a melody. Then there’s the tunesmith arranger who puts together a piece for others to play over, with a four-chord structure or simple changes on repeat until the idea space is sufficiently documented. The world of the consumer reel-to-reel tape recorder made this a marvelous enterprise for the exploratory musician, allowing them to catch themselves when the spirit strikes and bottle some of the magic for a future practice session with the full band.

The magic of the demo is in how it emerges, its preservation of the moment of discovery. Because the tools are limited, the writer tends to make decisions quickly: a riff becomes a verse, a drum pattern becomes the basis of the piece, a piano figure becomes the harmonic identity. That constraint can sharpen focus and help a song arrive with unusual directness, right at the boundary between private life and public art. You hear the writer making choices in real time, finding the constraints of the composition. It is as if you are being let into the woodcarver’s workshop, where the rough-hewn cuts suggest possibility of what the pieces could become. Great pieces can emerge from this process of shutting yourself in a room with some good gear.

Charles Stepney had his workshop, his private space, and within it, his mise en place. His muses were upstairs—his wife, his daughters—while he put away cables on a Saturday morning. During the week he produced all kinds of people, anyone from Minnie Ripperton to Earth, Wind & Fire, making backing tracks for radio ad spots or playing vibraphones with Eddie Harris. Chicago was polyphonic in musical possibility in those days; I like to think that on the weekend he might let the reels play back and observe his handiwork, but he was probably too busy making sure everything was in its right place. When he died suddenly in 1976, he had these tapes in his personal archive, separate from the stuff he did with Chess Records. These tunes were stripped down to studs, the basic frame for one of Chicago soul’s most important behind-the-scenes architects.

Some of the songs on this album are clearly named ex post facto by the family members who compiled the record, further illustrating to the frenetic nature of attempting to capture an idea. On this record, songs are interspersed with some reminiscing about their father’s devotion to his craft. He worked so hard on the sound he didn’t worry about the name—perhaps the modern equivalent is naming the folder where you save your song from your DAW something generic like “My Song 3”. But a generic title belies the magic you hear in the song. A piece like “In The Basement” could just as easily be a contemporary lo-fi jazz piece by someone like Yussef Dayes, Thundercat, or Alfa Mist.

Back to the lab, we find a similar universe to Secret Life of Plants, or Sly Stone’s own attempt at medium-fi home recording, synth lines blossoming every which way from playful funk vamps. To my ear Step is he’s using the synthesizer as a top line stand in for a horn solo here and there. Part of me imagines a song like “That’s The Way of the World” being reinterpreted decades later into a pop hit, like how Mac Demarco interpolated “Chamber of Reflection” from Sekitō Shigeo’s composition “Word 2”. The drum machine here isn’t austere like it would be in the early days of hip hop. It’s a metronome more than anything; it’s clear that Charles wasn’t a drummer, but he could play one in the basement when things weren’t as precious. As a result, some of these songs sound like a Madlib beat or like Dilla in their loose smoothness. They’re a bit long compared to either artist, but that’s the nature of the beast when you’re playing all the instruments and layering things up.

What makes everything fit together so perfectly is the constraints: simple drum machine patterns, a Minimoog, a Rhodes, a drum set. These are the things so many country (or suburban or urban) boys dream about—all you need is four tracks and the truth. I had my friend’s barn; if only I had had more time there.

And just like that, like with any good demo, the tape warbles and the song ends, the ideas having played themselves off. On to the next one, when inspiration strikes.

Verdict: Keep

What’s your rough-cut musical gemstone?

Fleetwood Mac is a Ship of Theseus band, but not like The Ink Spots. Original members rotate through the lineup and eventually pursue their own projects, and the metamorphosis isn’t as straightforward as caterpillar-to-butterfly—there’s many intermediate creatures that are spawned and appear across life phases of the group.

My experience with Fleetwood Mac began in the band room in high school. In anticipation of every Friday night football game, we were able to bring in our own music to get pumped up. Since there was a hundred or so of us, there was often a pretty intense battle about who would control the stereo while we got our uniforms on. Thankfully, I was first chair of the bass trombone section (there were only two of us; I wasn’t that great), and that positioned me right next to the faders for volume control and the five-disc changer. My friends in the sousaphones had a live album of the band, and—much to the chagrin of the woodwinds girlies who wanted to hear more upbeat radio pop hits—we played that record on repeat for about half the season.

The name of this live recording we listened to is lost to the sands of time, but the band showcased pretty much all the eras they passed through across those two discs—some kind of retrospective in my mind’s eye (mind’s ear?). They began with blues and folk music like so many other acts of the time period, and then pivoted into something more atmospheric and ambient. And this is long before hits like “Dreams,” “The Chain,” or the dramatic interpersonal conflicts among band members—they’re still figuring out what the emotional core of what this project is going to be, and it’s fascinating to hear.

The songs on this record are expansive, and somewhat out-of-character if you already have an idea of the group. One—“What a Shame”—even features a Meters-esque deep sinewy funk line, the most out-of-character and most delightful for me. Notably, they had a proto-post-rock song featured in a Fassbinder film, marking a transition from straightforward songwriting into stuff that was a little more weird—maybe like a version of Pink Floyd that is more bright and upbeat, less dour. With this record, they anticipated some of the hazy-yet-melodic guitar-driven rock that would gain popularity in the mid-2000s, reminiscent of bands like Midlake or Arcade Fire or some of the Brooklyn groups that would later appear on Dark Was the Night.

If you want to hear Fleetwood Mac when they were more boundary-pushing, introspective, and pastoral, this is the collection you should seek out. Especially thinking back to the band room, the deep listening required for the songs on this album would not have worked with a bunch of loud, distracted kids trying to get ready for their own performance. I’m glad I found this later on, when I was ready to suit up for it.

Verdict: Keep

Fleetwood-McVie or Buckingham-Nicks?

For a generation of young people, the dopaminergic pathways of their collective brain were lit up by the frame of the 12-bar blues, and that light never went out. This musical form served as the foundational structure for rock and roll, a bridge between white pop music and Black cultural forms. The distorted guitar even supplanted the saxophone as a solo instrument, giving birth—later on—to heavier music than what someone like Leadbelly or Elvis could have ever imagined. People are still riding that high today.

To interpolate Marshall McLuhan with a pithy phrase: eventually a medium makes tedium. Keep it around for too long and the innovation potential for that medium will stagnate. By the time the 1990’s rolled around and I encountered people playing the blues, it was clear that all of the notes of the pentatonic scale had been hit, all the four chords led into the five and then back to the one in a closed loop, with maybe a gallop section to change things up. The suburban dads had taken an entire genre of music, digested it, and extracted all nutrients. There was nothing for me there.

Unfortunately this bit of Ry Cooder’s work appears to fall into that category as well. I was familiar with some of his instrumental slide joints on the soundtrack to Paris, Texas. Famously, the work that appears there is among the precursors to ambient country, a genre that I’ve written about on a couple of different occasions now. It’s the same world Explosions in the Sky would inhabit with their soundtrack to Friday Night Lights, the slight surrealism of the desert. I was expecting a lot from him, thinking that he would be able to put together similarly bizarre soundscapes, but perhaps with vocals instead.

This is not what comes together on Borderline. The record seems to be a mixture of classic guitar blues pieces with some intermingled gospel or R&B elements, similar in scope to Van Morrison’s Wavelength but with less of a churning, chugging musical revue quality. These songs are self-contained, each with their own tightly-constructed moment upon which everything pivots. They’re too slick for their own good. For me, these sound like the same kind of inoffensive breeziness of Jimmy Buffet, but self-serious instead of playful and comic (for the most part). It doesn’t feel like Ry is enjoying himself at all as he’s putting these tunes together.

Just because it’s one of the few that actually struck me, “The Girls From Texas” is probably my favorite on the record. There’s a talking blues component to the song, a circus-y country shuffle in 2-feel bassline, and organ that should—realistically—be an accordion to complete the Tejano/norteño feel to the whole thing. It’s the only time on the record that sounds like making the music is a pleasurable experience for the band, audible laughter off-mic as the singing ends. I certainly would not enjoy a record full of this stuff, but it’s less forgettable than some of the turnarounds you hear in other songs.

To put it succinctly: I am bored by the blues, by this vision of what country-western music is.

Don’t get me wrong, I love listening to the archaic and esoteric stuff that people collected by rambling around the Deep South with a wire recorder. That will always have a deep spiritual resonance for me, folklorist and anthropologist in an alternative timeline that I am. But the slick 1980’s fare that Eric Clapton made has utterly no appeal, nor this record.

Verdict: Set it free

What are your thoughts on Texas, and the blues?

Sometimes when we see a cultural figure working through large, complicated ideas, we cringe. It becomes obvious that they haven’t fully metabolized what they’re engaging with, that their understanding is partial, or that the medium itself is flattening something essentially multidimensional. But when the message is simple, like the language that carries most of Cat Stevens’s melodies, that problem recedes. I’ve written before about his laudable earnestness, and here that quality does more than signal sincerity: it creates space to discuss our innermost challenges. In that forthrightness, he can admit to being haunted, to living inside unresolved tensions, the core conflicts he is reckoning with. On Catch Bull at Four, that interior struggle is right there in the title itself, drawn from the Zen ox-herding pictures: the effort to seize, discipline, and ultimately understand the self through inward pursuit.

Released in 1972, Catch Bull at Four finds Stevens deepening—not yet resolving—his spiritual and philosophical commitments. This is still several years before his conversion to Islam; instead, he’s trying on different symbolic and intellectual garments—of course there were fellow travelers down this road. One of them is a loosely held, Westernized idea of Zen practice—exactly the sort of thing that bands like Steely Dan satirized. But because Stevens is the primary songwriter and composer, the record feels like a relatively unmediated line into that search: you hear process, a set of rules for living, as understood in the current moment. Through some of these songs, Stevens is inhabiting his inner hermit crab: he enters spaces to see what kind of self might emerge inside them, and then moves on when he outgrows them.

Apparently social growth was necessary leading into the 1970’s. The West, and particularly Britain, was plagued by social problems: ambient malaise, a dearth of spirituality, divestment from institutions, disaffected young people. Naturally, the artists of the period would work with those feelings in the zeitgeist, massaging that raw clay into a vessel that young people of the era could pour their feelings into. But what’s striking about Stevens for me is how small he keeps the scale of that response. Where others reached for grand statements or dense symbolism, he pares things down to something almost childlike in its clarity.

There’s an odd song on the record that I didn’t know what to make of at first: “O Caritas”, a piece in Latin featuring bouzouki. It isn’t my favorite song—that would have to go to either “Angelsea” (for bombast, the drum machine and synth, the nonsense vocals chorus) or “Can’t Keep It In” (for simplicity, staying on message about wanting to show up for the world, to be present). It’s a hybrid of chant and Mediterranean folk, with a processional, quasi-liturgical quality. Having grown up without religion in the long wake of Vatican II, I had rarely heard Latin sung, and confused it for Spanish the first time I heard it. Years of reflection behind me, I think this piece could be a bridge between cultures for Cat/Yusuf—the music of his Greek ancestors braiding and intermingling with the music of the Western tradition.

Stevens is searching. Something will call him in a few years. Until then, we have several records that document his feelings, fears, desires: what emerges during the search. These feelings, these records are the shells he shuffles between until he finds one that feels like his spiritual home.

Verdict: Keep

Can you keep it in?

I know precious little about Steely Dan. I’m sure that I saw them in the list when I was rifling through the family LP collection, attempting to find Beatles records better than the early hits. I can confirm, however, that I definitely saw their name somewhere—in the works of William Burroughs.

I spent the summer of my sixteenth (or was it my seventeenth?) year in a hammock in the backyard, reading the hardcover copy of Naked Lunch that I got from Books A Million at the outdoor mall. Mulberries would fall from the tree the hammock was tied to and occasionally stain the pages; I would imagine they were centipedes and I was the exterminator. With all the Frank Zappa I listened to, a band named after a steam-powered dildo would have the perfect amount of sophomoric sex obsession and transgression for me. Switch on the orgone accumulator folks; let’s get weird.

But that didn’t happen—the energies were never focused inside the chamber. This is one of the lacunae in my musical development; for whatever reason they never came across my path.

From what I understand, this album comes from the middle of the band’s career. At the time of this record’s release, Steely Dan were still nominally a rock band that toured, but the two musical leads—Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—were shifting the focus toward sophisticated, jazz‑inflected songwriting and studio craft. As a result, you can think of this as an album in transition—horns and vamps that could easily be at home on a Blood, Sweat, & Tears or Chicago record, but with literate lyrics that suggest ambivalence and disillusionment about the cultural moment. Makes sense; it was the Vietnam era, so that’s a pretty consistent background hum across everything, something even the slick 70’s studio production couldn’t keep out.

The core instrumentation is dense, but doesn’t ever become too heavy: twin guitars, electric and acoustic keyboards, bass, and drums, embellished by vibes, marimba, horns, and occasional pedal steel and slide guitar. It’s a strange assemblage, often leading to delightfully incongruous song structures. I understand that this, for an entire generation of young people, was their bridge from rock to jazz. The harmonic complexity, ambitious solos, the laid-back but syncopated groove was something they weren’t hearing on the radio. I can understand that part—maybe it sent some kids to the library to find something equally challenging. Sadly, I think there’s one core element that moves the sonic register from Thelonious Monk to Billy Joel: there are too many noodling blues solos strewn across the record. For me, they are contrived, but it’s because I grew up in a world where the White Stripes existed. Jack did it better: better tone, better fuzz, more grandiose.

Since my first listen was in preparation for this post, I found myself often thinking about the narratives in the songs, where the lyrics come from. Each piece sounds like an inside joke I am on the cusp of getting, but not quite. Just parsing some of the phrases can be a challenge. Referencing a mezzo-soprano and a roulade in a song about either karmic retribution or high-stakes gambling (or both) illustrates this--I knew roulade as a food, and then discovered it was a musical term as well.

“Bodhisattva”, in contrast, seems more specifically targeted at my interests. Having read through the Beat Generation’s broader works, and written my undergraduate thesis on Jack Kerouac, I was primed to understand the framing of the song. There’s a clear tension between true spirituality and the marketing of spirituality through new-age consumer culture. The song is an uptempo shuffle/boogie with a driving, almost rockabilly energy, but harmonically more slippery than standard blues—an obvious pairing when we think about luminous celestial beings, to be sure.

This is an interesting record for me: though it has so many different things I enjoy, I resisted it from the beginning. It was as if I understood where it was coming from, what the music was trying to do, and didn’t like where it got to. But I will keep this in the collection, return to it, and see if it surprises me yet.

Verdict: Keep

Is Steely Dan inviting you in on the joke, or quietly making you the punchline?

Like so many children of my generation that were fascinated by Egypt, I was transfixed by the news that we could X-ray King Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus and learn more about that ancient, distant civilization. That was probably my first encounter with the idea of sifting through the middens of a society to construct a broader narrative—about how people lived, how they spent their time, what they chose to keep and discard. But a sarcophagus is hardly trash--it’s an intentional vessel to preserve something lauded and important.

When you grow up in the country, given over to quiet and relative freedom--no constant supervision, no steady stream of organized activity--you end up trying to find your own way, make your own map. And exploration, more often than not, begins to resemble excavation. The sepulchers I found!

The old schoolhouses scattered in the middle of nowhere were perfect in their decomposition. They marked the death of a way of life, a specific kind of culture and community, but they also offered glimpses into how children from a century ago might have lived. These buildings—brick, with tarps stretched across their roofs—were neglected antiques sitting alone in cornfields. No one seemed especially interested in restoring them or repurposing them beyond the occasional use as a shed or garage. Mostly, they were left to decay, slowly reclaimed by the surrounding landscape.

The main doors were usually sealed, boarded up from the inside. The windows were exposed, their shutters fallen into the dirt, revealing boards meant to keep people out. My first real glimpse of one came after prying two loose boards, sticking my nose in close enough to peer through: graffiti from a ten-year-old in 1906, possibly someone’s great-grandfather now. I marveled at the looping consistency of the cursive and found myself wondering about the life that child went on to live. Inside, a slate board still hung on the wall—perhaps it’s still there.

From there, it was only a few short steps from public infrastructure to private homes, more modern abandoned houses. When a farmer could no longer keep up with a mortgage, they might leave quietly, sometimes overnight, letting the bank reclaim the land and whatever stood on it. I never knew where they went, only that they disappeared. The houses they left behind were often managed in the barest sense by distant owners: a mowed lawn, a field cut back by someone with a scythe. Enough to maintain appearances, but not enough to bring the place back to life.

On long, aimless bike rides—Saturday afternoons with nowhere in particular to go—I would feel pulled toward these places. They rarely disappointed. Some interiors looked as though a family might return at any moment, sit down, and resume their lives. Others felt like accidental art installations, long before I had the language to describe them that way. I saw all kinds.

One house sat just off the main road, a kind of quiet rebuke to the slow encroachment of the new development just further down, a “No Trespassing” sign in the window. Inside, the floors had been cleared, and a makeshift privy stood in the front room. Shag carpet climbed the stairs from the kitchen, then looped impossibly back through a hole in the ceiling—something like a Möbius strip, as if the house itself had begun folding in on itself.

Elsewhere, the grass grew to my thighs. Door frames tilted off their axes. The air carried the dense, unmistakable smell of rot. The house, despite being ornate in an older style, was almost animate in its decay. In the living room, four televisions were stacked together, a monument to a kind of entertainment that no longer functioned. A worn couch faced them. In the foyer, a dust-covered dresser stood against the wall, and on top of it sat a cleaver, placed with unsettling deliberateness. It was the only object untouched by dust. I promptly left.

I’d scribble down my experiences and write some of the imagery into bad poems that, years later, I would submit to my college literary magazine for a resounding rejection. Eventually, I’d see the film Stalker, read Roadside Picnic and knew that I was on the same journey as the protagonist, looking for alien artifacts in a depopulated zone. But those eyesores and pockmarks on my memory, on the flat landscapes of my youth, are what brings me to SUSS.

For my money, SUSS is the preeminent modern act in what you might call ambient country. They draw on the familiar tools of your Merle Haggards or Johnny Cashes, but stretch them across the kind of expansive, droning soundscapes more often associated with post-rock. If you imagine a band like Explosions in the Sky, aged a bit, trading their Stratocasters for lap steels, you get somewhere close to the texture of it. The music is spare and austere, evoking that high, lonesome quality associated with Hank Williams’s tunes: something mournful, emotionally direct, yet seemingly meant for a small and attentive audience.

Through the song suites the band puts together, they give shape to the quiet darkness that sits beneath everyday life when you are removed from its constant noise, the kind of disturbed Americana that churns in the background when you watch a David Lynch movie. Had I encountered SUSS when I was first getting into this sort of sprawling instrumental music instead of Sigur Rós or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, I think I would have ended up centered in the same spiritual plane. There’s shades of Boards of Canada and slick 70’s guitar groups, and it wouldn’t be right to talk about the sonic world without bringing up the Apollo soundtrack. Ultimately what interests me most about this particular record isn’t just the music itself—the textures, the instrumentation, or even the trivia that one of the members was once in the B-52s—but the dual meaning of its title.

The cover shows a distant city, a massive power post cutting across the frame, suspended in a kind of moonlit stillness. It calls to mind “Wichita Lineman,” that twangy plaintive standard that cascaded through 1970s country conveying remoteness, the quiet sorrows of the working man, the never-ending road trip barreling forth into the horizon (and namesake for a couple of songs in this collection). But it also suggests the High Line in New York—a piece of abandoned infrastructure reclaimed and transformed into something communal. A space once defined by neglect becomes a place for walking, gathering, and lingering—something human again.

That transformation feels central to the music, and to those fragments of abandoned lives where I spent fleeting moments of my teenage years. It suggests that elegance is latent within ruin, that even the discarded, the long-forgotten, can be reconstituted into something meaningful. You can also just rot in place and take something as it is, like a little red schoolhouse in a field.

Verdict: Keep

Tell me about your time in a place you weren’t supposed to be.

I’ve been doing this thing for a while, so you think I would know, but—as I sit down to write this post—I’m confronted with a question: what is an album?

The roots of the album come from an analogy to another container, another form. It is based around the idea of the scrap book or the photo book. At that time in the history of recorded music, you couldn’t fit more than one or two compositions on a disc (about five minutes per side), and people were figuring out how they wanted to compile and market recorded music anyway, because it was so new. Somebody somewhere (a record executive with their eyes on making a buck) would take all of their related records—artists performing works in a similar genre, movements of a symphony—and pack them into this special collection of envelopes, bound together, and that bundle would be sold. Eventually, as the years wore on, as musicians started writing their own work and being auteurs of self-expression, rather than singing the contemporary hits of the moment, as innovations in the medium (like the long-playing record) would allow for longer-form compositions to be compiled together into one prepackaged collection, the album became the fundamental unit of musical cultural exchange after the song.

In that sense, the album started out as a compilation. In our contemporary world, we imagine a compilation to be distinctly different from an album, possibly because of the 1960’s and 1970’s turn toward singer-songwriter culture. People began to think of their collection of works as an artistic statement and release records that had deep, intentional reflections of their internal life. But there were still record labels selecting songs and curating collections—some of them even bring together different pieces of music on a particular theme as an artistic statement. When these things survive, they can give us an excellent lens into particular musical movements or subcultures, carrying forth their ideas into the present day.

This selection, From L.A. With Love, captures a scene and a window of time. In the same way New York in the early 1990s was a veritable Galápagos Islands devoted to stylistic exploration of what hip-hop could do (Digable Planets being one such example), the LA beat scene of the mid 2000’s exhibited its own kind of founder effect: musicians who had come from elsewhere or were local—conservatory, film school, crate diggers, loop finders—were brought together to make sounds that were just straight up weird, trying to impress or surprise one another. There were folks who dug only in the spiritual jazz world and made their own variations on a theme but inflected with dub; others would go deep into the archive of Middle Eastern psych guitar records. Either way, it was forward-thinking and way out there.

The thing that’s particularly curious about this subculture, this music: so much of it was spread through online platforms as loose tracks. When it was being made, people were too concerned with getting their ideas out there to sit down and document their work in a structured, rigorous way. Myspace and Soundcloud releases ruled the day. Often, the music tends toward abbreviation: a sample flipped from an old jazz record, put through its paces, and then stopping short; a live cut when a beatmaker was doing some woodshedding at a local bar, fading into the next song; whatever the 20th century synth world’s core contrapuntal compositional structure is (fast arpeggios over a chopped-up amen break, indiscernibly-complex electronic machine malfunctioning in the background).

That’s not to say every song on this record is a short one. There’s at least one two-chord vamp that wouldn’t be out of place on a Can record, Follow that up with a smoky, sleepy jazz vocal sounding like an alternate spin on Massive Attack, but a particular kind of jazz freak out underneath when the singer steps away from the mic and the Rhodes is really able to get free. And the final piece on the final side of the final record (thank goodness we got LPs otherwise there would be dozens of these things!) could easily be the sprawling elegant music which sets the scene for a 1940’s film: tight harmonies in the woodwinds, strings, perhaps chimes in the background. It’s the combined powers of Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, two giants of the era (then and today), two pillars of the community coming together to make something beautiful.

Sometimes, there are elements of our artistic oeuvre that do not clearly fit in perfectly—things we might be proud of, and want in the broader corpus of our work but there’s not the same kind of consistent through-line for this thing as with the others. This is the value of the compilation now, and why it endures. It collects the footnotes of musical history and elevates their status so we can weave them into the central narrative if we so choose.

Verdict: Keep

What’s the first track on the compilation for your scene?

There are windows of time in recorded music that have an explicit sound to them. This sound quality is produced as a mixture of the performers’ styles and the music technology itself, added up and blended into something emblematic of the era. Think about how early American blues and folk songs sound: you can imagine the grain in the high frequency as if it were a piece of board, bent and warped by improper curing, but the music is there, still living and breathing underneath the sawdust. Most of that comes from the recording equipment, big machines someone trucked into the field or up to someone’s porch to capture that moment.

The ‘70’s have their own particular timbre, slick close-miked guitars and drums, when bands had plumb recording budgets that covered not just the tunes but also the lifestyle of the rockstar. Thank the transistor and the optimizations it made to the noise floor of studio equipment for that one. And then ‘80’s came along, microchipping everything that had been transistorized, and allowing FM synthesis to layer waveform-upon-waveform and create that particular synthesizer sound that you hear all over music of the era (and, of course, gated reverb as a production technique adds its own curious flavor).

Enter Tangerine Dream, or something; they never really left. Underwater Sunlight was their sixteenth studio album. They had been experimenting with taking their incredibly long musical suites and incorporating epic-sounding guitars, shorter forms, and more melodic qualities. I’m not going to confidently say that it was on this release that they switched to digital synths and sampled drums for the first time, but it was an early experiment for them. That explains why there’s dated (to modern ears) sounding synth drums on some songs: they were brave enough to try something at the forefront of technology before it stabilized.

The moment in time at which this music was being produced was around when New Age music was beginning to find a foothold. Similar themes were refracted through the work on Underwater Sunlight: the persistent arpeggio and screeching guitar solo over incredibly simple chord changes, the chorused acoustic guitar in the background. These qualities of the music are—admittedly—not to my taste most of the time; they remind me too much of ‘80’s action movie soundtracks in a farcical way that I mostly cannot enjoy.

But there is a season for everything, and normally I find myself putting this record on regularly as autumn approaches when we revisit the horror movies of the past. Or, alternatively, if you happen to have a blue Bondi iMac available, you could always fire up Duke Nukem 3D on mute, and play this as a stand-in score, as I did with my childhood friend N down the street.

To describe this record without describing the musical qualities, one could characterize the work as bright and fluid, just as its title would suggest. I swim in it, from time to time.

Verdict: Keep

Underwater sunlight or underwater twilight?

After the debut of indie rock, an entire generation of musicians displayed their resignation toward the norms and conventions of popular music—the bombast, the operatic grandiosity—by adopting a posture of not caring. They didn’t care about their songwriting, didn’t care about their musicianship—they just wanted to have a good time. The paradigmatic band in this category, for me, is Pavement—I never understood their free-associative burnout pothead lyrics, jangly pop riffs, or their popular acclaim, and I likely never will.

Other groups doing their thing during the same era resonated much more with me, perhaps because they were decidedly hard-working foils to the guys who couldn’t be bothered: Guided by Voices comes to mind, with their seemingly endless catalogue of albums, Jonathan Richman with his willingness to write about anything from transgressive dancing to pizza. Each essentially rejected at least one thing that the conventional record contract-having musician would otherwise have to: audio fidelity, song length, number of choruses or verses, lyrics. Perhaps the musical world is better for this approach of dispensing with imperfection.

As the world of media transformed with the internet, listeners like me found ourselves in a proverbial melting pot of listening options. The curious thing, however, was that the rapidly-oscillating trends that emerged on social media would often cohere into something resembling a genre or a movement, only to be supplanted by the next big thing.

In 2019, when Here Comes the Cowboy came out, we were in a musical moment focused on post-ASMR close-miked vocals, singer-songwriter bedroom pop, exoticism of other people’s nostalgia (the ‘80’s writ-large, but also Japanese City Pop and environmental music), and the utterly inescapable low-pass filtered beats of lo-fi hip-hop beats you can relax and study to. If you add up all these attributes and run them through some kind of algorithmic forecasting machine, you get a high likelihood of blowing and drifting low-energy music which sits comfortably in the background, not calling attention to itself. Perhaps this is a modern take on ambient--and a metaphor for the current orientation of society toward the arts: singer-songwriters who put themselves deeply, intensely into their work just to have it intentionally ignored by their audience.

Such music is often minimal and repetitive, a skeleton of a song. Mac Demarco, in particular, had made his music full of hooks up until that point, so people were confused by how empty the performances sounded. The vocals on the songs are very present, basically right in your ear, unadorned with effects like reverb. Everything else is stripped down, fairly clean and without noise, perhaps a contrast to his previously fuzzed-out bedroom tape machine recordings. Of course, on Here Comes the Cowboy, he still does his usual major-key tonal centering with 7th and 9th chord extensions to make things sound jazzy. He’s still doing his own version of speak-singing for the most part, but the harmonic language of the record is much slower to unfold and less likely to start the party.

Pity the earnest slacker, the goofy slacker. Once you’ve typecast yourself as such, how do you reinvent yourself? There aren’t many archetypes you can follow, but maybe Mac’s is one route—retreating to a more private notebook of songs and putting them to tape, leaning into the sprezzatura of their assembly so the pieces feel unforced rather than carefully “produced.”

It seems that approach worked. Listening to these mostly diaristic, plainspoken love ballads (”K” and “Heart to Heart” come to mind), people believed in the album enough to briefly propel it into the Billboard Top 10.

Though I’ve not spent a lot of time with this record, I am impressed by the ethos surrounding its production and where it sits in Mac’s discography. Admittedly, outside of the tones and timbre of the instrumentation, the songs themselves don’t do a lot for me. I’ll be leaving this one behind, but looking out for another reinvention.

Verdict: Set it Free

Are all of our yesterdays gone now?

As a group, Godspeed has been calling it as they see it for decades. They clearly do not have a Cassandra complex from repeatedly amplifying the social causes they care about--antiwar, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist—but instead become more rich with vitality as the broader population flirts with the same ideas and approaches. G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! comes out of the late‑Trump/early‑Biden pandemic era, written and recorded distanced and masked during the COVID-19 lockdown, surging street protests, and a broader sense of collapsing governance and exhausted capitalism. It was, in that historical moment, clear that there were other ways to be, and they gave those things a name, a Schelling point: state’s end, because the state had lost capacity to support (or more cynically, to control).

If you are coming to this record fresh, without context for the band, they make a lot of the moves one would expect from the: martial snare drums, field recordings, fuzz guitar drones and bass arpeggios, sorrowful strings crescendos. That’s the strong consistency you would expect as you dig into their back catalogue.

What you might not expect, however, is fanfare in the release of the record. It premiered via an empty‑cinema livestream with 16mm projections (the band often accompanies their music with film strips and loops), emphasizing the moment of suspended public life that all of us were in. In some ways, it echoed the Boards of Canada desert meetup that happened to promote Tomorrow’s Harvest, the convergence of super fans in a strange place to potentially uncover something new.

It was this era of Godspeed, post ten-year hiatus, post-pandemic, that my friend and I would see in a Seattle theater. We were dropped off by his wife in the rainy night, made our way to the venue, and gazed into the darkness, waiting for our eyes to adjust. It would be my first time seeing the band in person. From the concert videos I had encountered on the web, the audience seemed imminently more countercultural: all in black, safety-pinned patches on leather jackets, Doc Marten shit-kickers. But at this show, there were people in Patagonia fleeces, corporate puff coats with the abbreviations for AI companies embroidered on the breast, moms and dads with kids, all wearing matching gun-shooting hearing protection to protect their cilia from high-frequencies. Rather than take this in sadness, that the message had been diluted, it was delightful to see so many people of so many visibly different backgrounds taking in the music.

In trying times, people—and the institutions people create—prefer consistency and routine. In my view, this is where “first as tragedy, then as farce” comes from—you experience something bad and then due to your own nearsightedness, your inability to see the long view, you move into self-parody. But sometimes, doing the same thing over time, amid disaster and disorder, is instead a recapitulation of your core values, an opportunity to hone your message further.

It’s how a person, at the upper echelon of their craft, might produce the same thing over and over to eke out a minor asymptotic improvement. Godspeed could, for the rest of their career, make a record with the same musical attributes I identified above, with the same exhortations about politics, and they could just keep improving.

Verdict: Keep

After all this, are we at state’s end?

De La Soul rapped about the D.A.I.S.Y. age. Before that was flower power. And, somewhere in between, after Woodstock, when the hippies realized that the pedicel had to be firm enough to hold up such a big youth movement, there was Forest Flower—a cross between a field of posies and a grove of redwoods.

To set the stage, this concert marks one of the lasts gasps of jazz in the popular consciousness—it was falling out of favor with the dual-pronged rise of the folk movement and rock-and-roll. A Love Supreme had just come out a couple years earlier, and Coltrane was starting to get weird, but that didn’t exactly compete with Hendrix.

Lloyd was working out the Bay Area for much of his career, intermingling with the psychedelic scene. He regularly shared bills with the Grateful Dead and other acts the flower power generation was smitten with. You might even make the argument that the Dead indirectly influenced Miles in some of the spaciousness and experimentalism in his electric period. Listening to some of the funk vamps with woodwinds overtop from this set, the rising stars of Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette holding it down for the festival crowd—who wouldn’t be curious about taking music in another direction?

That direction is, of course, toward jazz fusion. The instrumentation of the group blends tenor sax and flute leads with impressionistic piano, walking bass, and flexible drums. During the song suite “Forest Floor”, the album’s namesake, melodies emerge as lyrical chants, evolving into Coltrane-esque intensity. Even in the first minutes, the rhythms switches up between straight-ahead rock, swing, and the rawness of the stutter-stop alternation lets you know you’re in for a wild ride.

When this set was recorded, The Beatles were still a thing, Astral Weeks and many of its fantastic cousins were yet-to-be released, and half of the important people to go electric still had yet to (Dylan, yes; Miles, no). But there were people still entranced by the way jazz music worked, by the atmosphere of people having fun in front of a crowd. Dave Brubeck beat Charles Lloyd to selling a million copies of a jazz tune (“Take Five” came out in 1961), but Forest Flower would be one of the first jazz albums to sell over a million copies, thanks in part to the high-fidelity sounds of FM rock radio. Folks were definitely on a different wavelength.

Verdict: Keep

What flower blooms on the forest floor?

At some point my shelves crossed a threshold where things began appearing without explanation. I would pull out a record and realize I had no memory of buying it.

I started this project with the intention of turning my anti-library into a library. But it’s worth thinking about why something ends up in the anti-library, the base collection, in the first place. Sometimes it comes from a place of aspiration—I want to be the person who knows this particular work or genre better, and I’ll get to it when I get to it. Other times, it’s intentional curation: I love this artist, and will bring them into my home in effigy through the artifacts they produce for the commercial machinery of culture (and maybe some work by people they recommend, just to fill things out further).

Maybe, in the case of this record, it was stuck in a pile of other things that I got for a good deal. I didn’t intend to bring it home with me, and yet there it was. Only upon later accounting did I recognize its presence, and attempt to make it fit in the collection through some kind of intentional intellectual integration. Of course, that coherence may never come, but we still try.

When there’s something you’re not expecting, you apprehend it from the obvious, the superficial. The cover art with the Rothko-like sunset, the block printing of the identifying information for the project in the top right and left of the jacket, respectively, as per the conventions of the medium at the time. It’s clearly recognizable as something from ECM, but unclear what’s going to come out of the grooves when you drop the needle.

Based on these things, I assumed I was in for a strange treat. I was correct: Patience is a niche but rewarding record.

It may be too on-the-nose to draw a link between the chamber jazz which appears here and Keith Jarrett’s European quartet, given that they were on the same label and recording at approximately the same time, but the pattern-matching is irresistible. The small acoustic ensemble blending jazz and European art‑music sensibilities balances enough composition to shape mood and narrative, but enough openness for collective improvisation shaped by strong listening. Yet another example of when ECM serves as both a scene and a label—I’m sure those in the know at the time were flocking to West Germany to see if they could conjure a collection like this.

The beauty of this music is that—thirty or forty years after its recorded debut—many of the practices or techniques have found themselves distributed scattershot through so many other genres of music. Segments of Patience are reminiscent of the ambient intro to a pop song or a rock song, but the opening salvo of the verse never arrives; instead, it vamps forever in that endless undecidability of tonal fields and ambient chordal structures. A great touchstone is “Sound and Color” by Alabama Shakes: in that piece, the vibraphone leads the way to the rest of the song, in the same way it does on a track like “Alison”. However, there’s no chorus here—just the skittering drums and arpeggiated idiophone, forever.

Any piece where multi‑reeds and van der Geld’s vibes engage in extended duolike counterpoint is something worth highlighting, but I love the subtle skronk of a bass clarinet duetting with bass before going into a solo, with a different chordal instrument holding down the tonal center. So, for me, the core piece has to be “Golden Stabs”. This is a pattern that I first heard on the second half of Please Heat This Eventually (here, vibraphone in the place of guitar, of course). The long, melody-first phrases imply changes without spelling every chord, leaving space for bass and reeds to co‑author the harmony. And the restatement of the head at the 6:40 mark, after an explosion of sound—sublime.

It turns out that after a couple of listens, I can see the nexus at which this otherwise unsuspected record sits. It’s equal parts Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This isn’t the kind of ambient jazz work that invites repeat listens, but I will certainly use it to build a background motif when the atmosphere calls for it. Another one for my hypothetical jazz kissa home.

Verdict: Keep

What do you do when you discover something unexpected in your collection?

If you spent much of your time, as I did, learning about music through the internet while living in what felt like a cultural backwater, you probably wouldn’t expect to encounter anything groundbreaking in your local environs. But there’s something to be said for being in the right place at the right time. I found myself at that crossroads—right place, right time—one summer when my family took a trip to Ann Arbor for the art fair.

Ann Arbor was a Mecca for me. I had availed myself of my local library; I had done my research. I knew Mingus had spent time there, that it had once been a hotbed for jazz and funk. I knew that its proximity to the Motor City and the White Stripes being on the ascent meant there were likely veins of garage rock running through college tenement basements. The flagship Borders Books stood as a counterweight to the moloch of the Big House and all the surrounding football frippery. I imagined myself going to college there, though I knew how expensive it was—a dream deferred before it ever fully crystallized.

We ambled around town, drifting from booths to tables to galleries. My mother surely bought a pair of earrings or some kind of totemic brooch bearing her preferred symbol—a dragonfly. I insisted on lingering at Encore Records, digging through tightly packed shelves for discounted Frank Zappa LPs. If my parents hadn’t indulged my Walter Benjamin–style flâneur wandering through record store aisles and cubbyholes, searching for the best-graded copy of Zoot Allures, I wouldn’t have picked up the handmade Nomo digipak from the counter: folded cardboard, a screen print, a small dossier tucked inside. And if we’d left for dinner on time, we might never have encountered the band at all, playing in the park on our way to get barbecue. Thank you for indulging me, Mom and Dad. Thank you for being patient, sister.

The group started playing as we queued up to order from a food truck. What a sound! At the time, I think they were a nonet, but they could just as easily have been a hundred.

The crowd straddled generations, full of families, kids, the elderly. The music was split between what animates the adult mind, carefully composed and expansive, and what delights the child: danceable grooves, singable melodies, performers visibly animated by the act of playing. The songs thrived on interlocking polyrhythms from congas, percussion, and electric mbira (thumb piano), layered with sharp horn blasts over fuzzed basslines and minimalist keyboard loops. Elliot, the bandleader, mentioned something about building his own instruments from the stage.

I had never heard live jazz arranged with that kind of vitality; granted, my listening sessions were pretty limited at the time. This was clearly different from when our school jazz band went to states and I sat in the audience listening to groups far better than ours; when the Mighty Meaty Swing Kings played my high school auditorium and all the wine moms got up and danced in the aisles; and a Duke Ellington–themed revue at a regional theater that left me cold.

Circa 2006, Afrobeat was hot—but that’s not just about the music. The mid-2000s revival carried the soul and spirit of the original movement, time-shifted and remixed for a new era. It intersected sharply with the Bush-era War on Terror, channeling Fela Kuti’s anti-junta, anti-authoritarian ethos into sprawling critiques of U.S. imperialism and post-9/11 policy. Rhythm against endless war. People in the new Afrobeat world were hardly the only musicians engaging with it.

Within a few years, this new wave (contra nü-metal, nü-Afrobeat?) had toured most major Western cities and seeped into adjacent scenes: indie (or at least its various flavors—Vampire Weekend riffs famously repackaged as “Cape Cod kwassa-kwassa” for pan-colonial marketing purposes), funk and soul (Budos Band, of course, though I won’t belabor the point), and experimental music, where Tortoise-style post-rock abandoned verse-chorus structures while still compelling people to dance. This is the context Nomo was writing from. It may explain their arrangement of a Joanna Newsom song, “The Book of Right-On”—a sagging, seasick translation for horns and synth bass. Perhaps without fully realizing it, they on the edges of a scene.

But most importantly, the band embodied the spirit of Afrobeat as something made by people just an hour away from me, not a continent away. Their proximity mattered. It suggested that the world was broader and more open than my immediate surroundings had led me to believe.

Verdict: Keep

Who are you picking for your nine-piece band?

College is for experimentation in many ways, including religious faith. I don’t have stats on this, but I would assume that more conversations and more conversions happen when someone goes off to a new city and a four-year university, on their own for the first time, struggling against the might of the world and forced into existential despair when they can’t get a good job and have to scrounge for food.

I started that journey by finding institutions that could give me a cheap (or free) meal and then had some edifying conversations—the pastor at the Catholic Church on Sundays who doled out spaghetti and sauce and encouraged us to take a box home, circulating past each table after we had eaten our first plate; the young monk at the Krishna consciousness house, just past our age bracket, who had a hint of southern Ohio twang as he told us about his worldly life and his daughter and sang so terribly at kirtan; the Christian sect that had wormed its way into the flophouses and slums of college housing, just off-campus, cementing its power and propagandizing the youth. These moments had a greater resonance for me while I wrote my thesis on Jack Kerouac and syncretism in his works, the bridge between eastern and western cultures that was happening quite a bit since D.T. Suzuki brought Zen to the states. But as I traveled in those circles, it was always at a distance, as an anthropologist.

My exposure to the Bahá’í faith came about for the first time when I was listening to music in the library I worked at, coming up with a display for new music releases that month. I saw a children’s book someone had placed atop the DVD shelf, and—in bringing it back to its proper home--discovered a whole section when reshelving. I did a google. It seemed interesting, but then I went back to sending some work emails and thinking about new records that were coming out on Daptone.

I hadn’t thought about Bahá’í since, until I was doing some reading about this record. Part of the journey here is that I don’t know anything about the religion—I don’t have a sense of its “aboutness” like I do with Buddhism or an emergent Christian cult—so it’s interesting to evaluate with a significant degree of distance. Of course, I had heard the one song, the big one about summer breeze making us feel fine. It was music that could have been for the dentist AM radio, perfectly relaxing and designed to de-stress.

This is an album from my parents’ collection that I can’t recall them ever playing, though the grooves are worn and the jacket has some damage, suggesting that it was well-loved. Based on the titular piece alone, I had always assumed this was the launching or ship-naming ceremony for yacht rock, capturing both a home-y “back to the land/family” atmosphere and the domestic peace everyone craved in the early‑’70s post‑Vietnam years. Then, as now, people just wanted to chill, and so they looked to some artists to write some chill music. It seemed superficial, and so I discounted it.

Most of the music on this record has a compositional character built on vocal harmony, acoustic textures, and smooth melodic writing, so it’s classically of the 1970’s singer-songwriter era. That’s probably why it ended up in my parents’ collection in the first place. But there are elements which subtly (again, apparently superficially) signify or imply the exotic east, as was the style of psychedelic-adjacent music of the time. “East of Ginger Trees” mixes up some light funk with a background drone that could be tanpura or a sitar drone and something that sounds like tabla, but—according to the liner notes—is conga or generic percussion. For some, this interpolation of other musical cultures through some instrumental additions might be corny, but I find the directness of the spoken word on “Boy Down the Road” significantly more self-serious and silly, and this is coming from a guy who’s a fan of sprechstimme. There’s even some stuff that breaks the mold, songs like “Say“ which are propulsive, odd-time, and could almost fit in on a Yes album.

Because of that fluidity and exploration, the mixture with more “normal” soft-rock songs leaves us with a record that equally emphasizes the simple beauty of the everyday and allows the act of listening to be a devotional practice, a kind of mystical travelogue. You can hear it in the instrumental duets between guitar and mandolin, little partitas that propel the storytelling about explorers venturing further down the road, following the journey of their faith.

Though this music is easy and breezy, there’s a hidden richness to it. It turns out that this album is a record of the performers’ conversion—they had, like Cat Stevens, felt a call from the occident to the orient. A more modern analogue might be when Ye deciding that he was a vehicle for Christ and putting out a gospel record, but Kanye was already famous at that point. In this case, the Bahá’í faith was the group’s new spiritual home, and they found it just at their moment of ascent. After this record took off, they would struggle with the doctrinal stipulation against proselytizing—they would do their best to let the core tenants of the religion flow out naturally in the music, the oneness of humankind, process of spiritual search and revelation—just as they were moving in more rarified circles of celebrity.

And, likely because of their earnestness and devotion, it works out okay.

Verdict: Keep

Does Summer Breeze make you feel fine?

From the perspective of my teenage self, with no noteworthy diacritics to discern proper pronunciation, I had always assumed that the band was named for the biggest little guy on my left foot. My legs and feet are different lengths, owing to a birth defect and childhood surgery. At some point during my teenage years it just stopped growing, unlike the work that the band produced.

I found Toe (actually stylized as toe but throughout I will use the uppercase to make the name more clear amid the text) the same way I found a lot of music back then—through DC++, through Soulseek, on a forum with devoted fans. I wasn’t searching for them; I just noticed their name in someone’s shared folder and downloaded it. In the early stages of becoming a digital hoarder, you grab things and figure them out later.

Part of my initial curiosity was that they were a Japanese group, and that alone made me pay attention—seeing song titles written in hiragana wasn’t something I was used to, though with my forays into Brazilian music you might say I had a predilection for exoticism.

In my memory, my first exposure to the group was a concert recording called TOE_DVD, where they put the audience through their paces, quick-turned from arpeggios and space echo experimentation to intense breakbeats, major sevenths and add9 shapes that stretch things out instead of resolving quickly. But what really stood out was how immediate the recordings sounded. The songs felt calm, even when they were complicated: clean guitars, often acoustic; well-recorded drums that sounded like they had just come out of a high-grade studio; nothing buried under distortion, or trying to sound bigger than it was.

Math rock was always something I was curious about too. The music was carefully built, through-composed, not just performed like a pop song. I had been listening to bands with sharp, precise guitar playing that sat somewhere near punk and emo but felt more controlled, more deliberate. Kids these days would probably refer to the timbral choices and chordal movement as adjacent to midwest emo, an emergent classification which collapses groups across a wide timespan into one simply-defined label. but—for me—a shortlist of core influences might be comprised of Cap’n Jazz, American Football, Fugazi, At the Drive-In, Minus the Bear, or Maps & Atlases. I suppose some of those aren’t from the midwest, but that’s a failure of genre classification for you. In any case, most of the math-leaning music I knew felt tense or compressed, too close to your ear. Toe was more expansive, spectral, haunting.

I found myself thinking more about Toe as I went back to visit my parents, to help them navigate the bureaucracy of preparing their taxes and to ferry them to medical appointments. They are getting older. I am getting older. But, through the affordances of music and spatial memory, when I am in my childhood bedroom, I am—for a brief moment—transported back to being seventeen, seeing the ghostly silhouette of my younger self just in front of me, gazing into the area of my now-empty desk where my CRT monitor once sat, enraptured by watching these men from half a planet away tap away at their instruments the way I tap at my keyboard, and knowing that the world is bigger and stranger and more beautiful than he (I?) imagined, because this music could be pulled forth from it.

If I had bothered to learn the Hepburn romanization when I was deep into the world of JRPGs, Murakami, anime, and this music, perhaps I would be able to pronounce the word “グッドバイ”—the standout track on this release, and a mainstay of their live performances—but I would never actually say it, and bid adieu to that era of my life.

Verdict: Keep

What is your favorite band named after a body part?