Brutalist Beauty

Loner jams old and new

Leomi Sadler

The Tim Buckley song “The River,” begins simply. Just Buckley strumming his 12-string, then a cymbal roll comes in, repeats, repeats again and Buckley’s voice—which, I’ll be honest, sometimes sounds like more of a bleat, but does not sound like a bleat here!—arrives, quavering, regretful, rounded, lonely. For the duration of the song, the rhythm is anchored by that cymbal’s *tshhh,* electric bass wandering around on its own meandering journey, and then, crucially, David Friedman comes in on the vibraphone, the abject melancholy of the song transmuted into noble sadness by the way his vibes follow their own distinct pathway through the song, not so much bouncing along on top as weaving in-between, tracing alternate paths before returning to the root.

The great Freedom to Spend label released the first song from their next reissue. “The Machinist” is by Repetition Repetition, an LA duo who spent the ’80s making zonked minimalist music in the vein of Philip Glass and Terry Riley. The Glass comparison is obvious and immediate, but what Repetition Repetition are doing feels a bit less academic, a bit more guided by a primal connection to, and exploration of, uh, repetition. This is scrappy outsider art music cut to tape, remastered for vinyl, and blasted out into the world in a singular vision of whooshing texture and layered brilliance—when the guitar swoops in (and it gets as close to a literal swoop as music can get), it conjures images of Ballardian concrete-scapes, brutalist beauty, the magic of concrete butting up against more concrete, with wild nature growing through the cracks. Fit for Consequences: Original Recordings 1984-1987 is out May 30th. It’s an essential listen.

It used to be that if you went to Phil Elverum’s old website, you could click on a semi-hidden tab that would take you to a series of pictures of his bookshelves (in a move that implies that he must understand me in my deepest depths, it’s now much easier to find the link to the shelves, and you can see way more spines). They weren’t even that zoomed in, so you could only see some of the spines, but whenever I was in search of new inspiration, I’d click in and see what I could find. While this was a small thing for me to do, it was also no small thing for me to do. At this point in my adult life, it’s rare that I’ll wholeheartedly take recommendations from others—it’s not that my mind isn’t open, because it very much is—it’s just that usually I’ll also carry the whole history of the person’s recommendation with me (do our tastes mesh? do we consume art in similar ways? etc ), whereas, when Elverum recommends something, I believe wholeheartedly in his perspective. I trust where he’ll lead me, and where he’s recently led me, via his latest newsletter, is to the album in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music, by the artist Dagmar Zuniga. The album is largely made up of sparse, hushed folk— you’ve heard music like it before, and hopefully for you, like me, the magic never gets old: sometimes I come across an album or a song that makes me feel like I’m eavesdropping on something so intimate that I’m not meant to be listening at all. This has that quality, but there’s something else too. A quote on Zuniga’s Bandcamp page, from a review, says this:

"Every element—songwriting, visuals, tape recording methodology (Dagmar is a TASCAM virtuoso!)—contributes to an undeniably self-contained world. Haunted, absurd, touching. It reminds me of the year I had sleep paralysis daily. Forming non-antagonistic personal relationships with ghosts and hallucinations out of necessity. You could get lost in this album's thick, phantasmal texture but the strength of the songs underneath provides a precarious tether to reality. It's special! Listen all the way through for uneasy comfort."
–Edvard Soundsnopes (Accord Tones)

The callout of the TASCAM as an instrument in itself helps bring the tape hiss that is prevalent across the record to the forefront. It becomes its own entity. A texture that draws you further into Zuniga’s fragile world.

Angry Youth

The most doomed generation creates art from despair.

Gary Panter

In this newsletter:

• Gregg Araki rap (kind of)

• Drunken style

• Seventeen years of angry youth bummer jams

ROAM FREE

Last night while doing my evening chore circuit (also known as cleaning up dinner, but interspersed with extended bouts of staring at the wall in aimless contemplation), I decided that the Philadelphia rapper Skrilla is basically rap’s very own Gregg Araki. What I mean by that is that both artists have an amazing ability to present an almost cartoonish version of brutal youth, of degradation, of subcultures that are run-of-the-mill to their cohort, but shocking to anyone outside of it. They do not make realistic art, but they make art that magnifies realism into something dark and unsettling and sometimes a little ridiculous, blurring the lines between honesty and showmanship.

Skrilla’s output thus far is fairly one note, but it hasn’t gotten old yet. He tends to rap about getting fucked up or seeing somebody get fucked up over doomy beats with heavy bell clangs. But its his style and disregard for the boundaries of cadence that makes him compelling — at his best he approaches the sloppy freedom that ODB mastered so well in his too short life. Though you pretty quickly get a sense of where all of Skrilla’s songs are going to go, how he gets there is always interesting: he’s coaxing back into public consciousness half-forgotten choruses from semi-recent rap songs, letting his voice lilt into a nitrous-haze of heartbreak and trauma, and then bouncing back with a too-dark joke or a disturbingly callous rendition of witnessing someone OD—it’s music that feels like it could only exist right now, and what I mean by that is: it captures the precarious, dark, no-hope moment we exist in.

The other appealing thing about Skrilla is something he shares with occasional collaborator Lefty Gunplay: both rappers sound like they’re barely able to wrangle the beats they’re rapping on, like the smallest distraction will cause them to lose it entirely before it becomes clear that they’ve mastered the approach of sounding unhinged without being entirely unhinged. It’s a level of artistry that can be difficult to puncture for more traditionalist listeners, and it feels not dissimilar to how the general public took a long time—too long a time—to under understand why Gucci Mane was a virtuoso rapper. I’m not comparing either of these guys to Gucci, just pointing out how a specific rap style can exist on the margins and then eventually become entrenched in tradition until someone else supplants it.

FRIENDS WERE GONE

The other day, Nathan Williams, aka Wavves posted on Instagram in honor of the 17th anniversary of the release of the first Wavves album, included in the slideshow of photos was the cover of an issue of FADER with him on it. I wrote the story. At the time, Williams was coming off a fairly tumultuous moment—he made hooky lo-fi pop punk music that sounded like it was recorded in the bottom of a cast iron pan caked with mud, so it’s safe to say that his sudden immense fame was not entirely expected. Williams played the part, though—he was a rockstar in the traditional sense, because he was afforded the space to be a rockstar in the traditional sense. He got fucked up. He had a “meltdown” on stage at Primavera in Barcelona. He got in a bar fight with a guy from the Black Lips at Daddy’s, the only bar I frequented enough to call myself a regular. Williams was living the impossible life of a rockstar, at a time when not many people got to be rockstars. I think we could all tell that his type of fame wasn’t long for the musical world anymore. The major label complex wanted more control. Sometimes it felt like hitching a ride on a comet, even when we were watching from a distance.

I remember not a lot about the story, other than that it ran as mainly a Q+A, and was pegged to the release of Williams’ at-the-time cleanest sounding album, King of the Beach. I remember doing some edits on the piece over the phone while I was so far into upstate New York that I was basically in Canada. I remember trying to figure out how far Williams could take his sound before a record executive forced him to do something different. I remember wondering if any of this was sustainable.

The earliest Wavves songs were appealing because of how authentically they captured shitkicking boredom and apathy and the kind of hopeless existence when you cross over from teenage life to adulthood and realize that actions do have consequences that stick around far longer than you’d like.

My two favorite Wavves songs, though, don’t appear on any album. One is a pre-King of the Beach loosie that I had a hand in getting onto this 7-inch record we put out while I was working at the FADER as part of a 7-inch series, the other came after King of the Beach, and is from an aborted collaborative album with frenetic drummer Zach Hill of Hella and Death Grips.

What the songs have in common: both sound like they’re held together with frayed duct tape. Both have a frenetic sugar high energy to them. Both involve Williams looking inward and contemplating his own mistakes.

“Friends Were Gone,” the one from the 7-inch, is lonely. A brief missive on losing friends and trying to close wounds that can never fully close (“No it’s never gonna be this lonely again / but you’re always gonna be that guy without those friends”). “Cool Jumper,” the one with Hill, goes longer, is angrier, centers on misplaced trust and people using others to get what they want. It sounds like Williams took a look at the industry he was becoming part of and did not like what he saw at all.

Learning to Read

Don't fake it.

Lale Westvind

In this newsletter:

• People on the internet didn’t read something, once again.

• Everything is folk music.

• 20 minutes of pure sonic bliss.

• Chicago experimentalists reunite for more experimentalism.

NACHO MAYHEM

It’s not especially notable at this point, but it bothers me every time.

Yesterday, a review of Lady Gaga’s new album MAYHEM went live on Pitchfork. It was written by Rich Juzwiak and it got an 8.0. Obviously, he liked it. I’ve never been a Lady Gaga fan—she’s not my thing and that’s fine—so if not for this kerfuffle I probably would have skipped the review, despite enjoying Juzwiak’s writing. But I didn’t, because a corner of Twitter got up in arms about the quote that Pitchfork’s social media team decided to highlight for promotion:

This tweet went semi-viral because a large amount of people were annoyed/mad/confused by the pull quote in it about nachos. I saw a lot of variations of “this can’t be what music writing is” that I can only assume came from people who read that tweet in isolation, didn’t bother to read the rest of the review, or just wanted to be sort of irritated by something at that moment.

If they’d actually clicked on the review, they’d see in the first paragraph Juzwiak frames his review with the fan-chatter and context around “Lady Gaga’s reheated nachos.” This was not something I was previously aware of, but I became aware of it simply by reading the. first. paragraph. of a review. This is apparently too much work for some people.

When I see this kind of misplaced outrage—and I see it often—I mostly feel confused. If you don’t care enough to read the review, why care enough to get mad about it? If a line about nachos doesn’t make any sense in isolation, it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means you lack the proper context, and if you don’t care enough to learn the context, then what are you even doing in the first place?

There are a lot of reasons that cultural criticism is in trouble, and most of those reasons have nothing to do with the regular people who tend to at least passively consume cultural criticism, but this is one area where we can get better. Otherwise we’re going to go further down the rabbit hole of half-assed writing: written to please everyone, but read by no one.

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FOLK YEAH

I really like this quote from GothBoiClique artist Fish Narc, who has gone from being an integral part of Lil Peep’s musical career to making ramshackle PNW indie on K Records (trust me, if you grew up in the Pacific Northwest, this musical journey is totally natural, even if it seems weird from the outside).

This is a great way of looking at the fruitful period where artists all over the PNW were making sonically disparate music that tended to get lumped together when it probably shouldn’t have. It gets right to the heart of the aesthetics of a scene that were at first hyperlocal, then impossibly global, and then hyperlocal again. The DIY scene he’s talking about did a great job of separating itself from the more craven aspects of what the Seattle music scene briefly became when it went global—but no one tried to pretend all the grunge stuff never happened, instead they went further into esoteric modes of sound, cobbling together a sound from the ashes of attention.

Fish Narc’s album Frog Song is a deeply enjoyable listen. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does its thing really well. It reminds me of the years I’d travel up and down a portion of Washington State, between Seattle and Olympia, past the paper mill stink of Tacoma and into the woods of The Evergreen State College, with meth labs dotting the edge of the campus, creating a border.

It’s gloomy—Pacific Northwest Gloomy—in LA today, so I’m listening to “Crystal Ball” and “Never Better” on repeat, somehow missing the drive I grew to despise.

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CALM DOWN

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s new record Gift Songs is out March 21 on Mexican Summer. I’ve been living with the whole album for a little while now, and it’s already a 2025 highlight. I recommend the whole thing when it drops, but for now enjoy first single “The Milky Sea,” which is 20 minutes long, built on what I think is a shaggy loop of light cymbal, piano, reverb, and a subtle synth wash that engages with the push and pull of the muffled thud of the kick drum. It’s immediately calming, but never complacent. Listening to it is a spiritual experience that does no diminish upon repeat listens.

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FORGET TIME

Speaking of spiritual experiences: Ten years ago, Chicago kosmiche experimentalists Bitchin Bajas teamed up with Chicago spiritual jazz experimentalists Natural Information Society for Automaginary, an album I totally forgot about until the two groups announced their second collaborative album, Totality, with the single “Clock No Clock,” which builds and builds, layering upon itself, basking in the push-pull between organic and synthetic.

What Means the World to You?

Lando

In this newsletter:

• Meditations on fire.

• Nate Lippens’ Ripcord.

• The power of not inserting yourself into the story in Sarah Gerard’s Carrie Carolyn Coco.

• A forgotten ’90s post-grunge band loved by me and Keanu Reeves and maybe no one else.

• Shameless self-promotion.

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“Leo asked how I could believe in nothing. How could I not? Nothingness is enormous and impossible. All that endless silence, much bigger than god.”
-Nate Lippens, Ripcord

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THE ART OF DISAPPEARING

When it was my full-time job to write magazine profiles, I meticulously cut myself out of every part of the story.

Story subjects did not tell me anything, they just said things into the air. Scenes happened, observed by an omniscient narrator who was both me and not me. I took myself out of every story because it was what you were supposed to do. Profiles of celebrities are profiles of celebrities, not profiles of celebrities and writers…unless they suddenly become both when something really interesting happens. This is a “rule” of magazine writing, but we all share the tacit understanding that sometimes, maybe eventually, it’s time to break that rule. My problem was I never knew when that time was, so I kept writing first drafts that had me in it, and then removing all evidence I was ever there.

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BLACK SMOKE AGAINST A BLUE SKY

When I woke up last Wednesday—after a sleepless night in a house in Los Angeles with no power, my son in my bed next to me so I could shield his body from a shattered window if the winds really got that strong—I opened the front door. What I saw was apocalypse. It looked wrong. It was morning, but the sky was still black, not night time black or dawn blue-black, but a greasy, unsettled black that wasn’t supposed to be there.

I sloppily packed an evacuation bag and went out to put it in the car. A wide, steadily expanding triangle of toxic smoke was drifting lazily from a single horizon point in the distance. I couldn’t tell if it was from the Eaton fire or the Palisades fire or both or some other new fire I was unaware of. I saw a man strolling down the street in a gas mask.

My son and I got in the car and drove North.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the emotional cost of trauma—how easy it is to say “we evacuated once, so we can just do it again,” how that faces head-on the facts of the situation, while eliding the feeling of it entirely. How do I push aside the memory of the thought of telling my son to put on his sneakers instead of his Crocs because I was imagining what would happen if we got stuck in fire traffic so bad that we had to abandon the car and go on foot? How do I push aside how silly that memory feels now?

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THE ART OF DISAPPEARING II

In the book Carrie Carolyn Coco the writer Sarah Gerard writes with precision about the murder of her friend. For the first 50 pages or so, she goes to great lengths to take herself out of the story, despite being a person who very much has agency to be in it. Her absence in the narrative, even as she is constructing it, is striking. Each line has extra weight when you remember that the emotional processing she must have been doing was purposefully forced off the page, and when she does bring herself into it, it’s with a jolt. A reminder that the story is hers too.

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THE FUTURE WON’T BE LONG

The first time I remember feeling nostalgia was in elementary school. My mom handed me a CD by a now-forgotten band called Lifter—passed on to me through her by who knows who.

Lifter were an LA-band who can barely be classified as one hit wonders, yet they had the kind of ’90s music industry boom career that you rarely see anymore. Founded by Mike Coulter and Jeffrey Sebelia (if Sebelia’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the winner of Project Runway s3), the band kicked around Silverlake before it was Silverlake, hanging with Dave Navarro, writing post-grunge breakup anthems that turned Keanu Reeves into a fan. They shot a number of songs out into the music industry ether in the hopes of getting a hit—the videos for “Headshot” and “The Rich, Dark, Sultry Red of Hate” were directed by Wes Craven’s son, but didn’t really do much for them. It was “402,” a song not meant to be a single, that caught my attention when I was around nine years old.

“402” was on the radio in Seattle pretty often. I had no idea at the time that the local alt-rock station KNDD The End (you may remember it from The Real World Seattle, because the cast “worked” there), had gone rogue and just decided to play it even though they weren’t authorized by the band’s label, Interscope, to do so.

“402” is about how when you’re a teenager/new adult playing at being an adult you sometimes get into situations that remove some part of your innocence before it’s ready to go, which is scary and weird and tends to make you long for childhood because it’s a reminder that you’re no longer a child. The chorus goes like this: “I want to go back home and mow the lawn for my dad / I want to walk to school and get high with my friends / Where is my honey-dipped life and my pretty wife? / Why can’t I leave this town and tell my mama I tried?”

Hearing that sparked something in my kid brain—some projection into a future scenario where I’d be somewhere I didn’t want to be. Never mind the fact that when I first heard the song I regularly, begrudgingly, mowed the lawn for my dad, often walked to and from school, had never smoked weed, was too young for a wife, and had no interest in leaving the town I very much loved. I couldn’t have known at the time that what I was feeling wasn’t actually nostalgia, it was anxiety about an uncertain future. I could never have predicted the feeling of looking out at a world I didn’t recognize and having to make a decision because there was no one else around to make it for me.

There’s another line from Ripcord that keeps coming back to me:

“When did I stop saying goodbyes? Probably five years ago when I realized it made no difference. Goodbyes slowed the exit.”

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SELF PROMOTION CORNER

Thanks for reading this far! Here’s your reward: some self-promotion.

Recently, for the print edition of the Southwest Review, I wrote an essay in fragments about monoculture, the art of obscurity, Kurt Cobain suicide bricks, Final Fantasy VII, and more. It went up online the other day.

I just completed the 27th installment of New Environments, my monthly radio show on Dublab. My goal with the show is to create mixes that really hold together as long pieces, sustaining a mood or feeling or environment. Predictably, the most recent episode is uneasy and restless and very informed by having fire on the brain and in my reality.

I'm Not Okay But I'm Gonna Be Alright

Is this moving me? Y/N?

Mark Beyer

In this newsletter:

• Stoner shoegaze I heard in a weird brutalist structure in like 2004.

• An album that might help you rediscover yourself in a dentist’s office.

• Expansive guitar drift from the ever-reliable Tarotplane.

• A new song with an Earl Sweatshirt verse that is making some waves on the internet.

• Random thoughts about Limp Bizkit, for no reason at all.

• An appreciation of an article about Superman and Mike Kelley and comics.

MEMORIES OF VARIOUS DUDES FOLLOWING THEIR DREAMS

In college, I got moved into family housing on the outskirts of campus even though I didn’t have a family. My house was near a brutalist structure that was ostensibly for playing, I guess, street hockey, but no one ever did that so it was repurposed for no sports at all and instead became a place to smoke weed. I rarely went in there, but when the wind was just right on certain evenings I could hear a guy playing guitar. Mainly, he’d create these cavernous drones using the natural echo of the space, occasionally letting a twinkle of a bent note rise above the hum. Once I went over there to see what was happening. He was standing alone with his guitar and pedal board, coaxing an endless drone in the crisp autumn air. His friend was there too, recording with his Minidisc player. I never told them I was watching, or that I opened my window to listen every day. We were an audience of two.

In 2008, my girlfriend and I took the train to Cold Spring, NY to walk around. We ate ice cream, got in a fight, and I bought a used copy of Terrapin Station at an antique store for like six bucks. Classic 2008! The town of Cold Spring ends abruptly at the water, where residents and tourists lounge around on nice days. On this particular day, a guy with a shitty amp and even shittier guitar was posted up on the grass, his skin leathery and grooved, like he’d been baking there for decades. He played over a chintzy drum machine loop, his guitar weaving into zonked out crescendos and then looping back to the simple pattern he began with. It wasn’t mindblowing, but it did point to a sort of zen way of living that I imagined was largely unencumbered from the stresses of modern life, possibly at the expense of personal relationships or “interacting” with “society”. All that aside, it pointed to a refreshingly simple way to engage with music? Maybe we should always be asking the question: “is this moving me? Y/N?”

MUSIC FOR WAITING ROOMS

In a recent installment of his newsletter, Sasha Frere-Jones reminded me of the existence of White Poppy, who has been making gauzy electronic music for awhile now, but with this year’s Ataraxia, has landed on a sound that captures a sort of effortless drift while still being compelling enough to offer up a deep listen. Frere-Jones says that listening to it makes him feel like he is “sitting in a room filled with plastic orange flowers.” I listened to it this morning while walking through Elysian Park, surrounded by real flowers—the effect of the music, the way it walks an uneasy line between digital and organic, between cheesy and genuine—was powerful, like having a personal epiphany in your dentist’s waiting room.

MEDITATIVE REPETITION

You can’t really go wrong with any Tarotplane release (there are so many). They all do a similar thing emotionally: make you feel like you’re having a transcendent moment of personal growth. I’ve been spending a lot of time with Improvisations for Echo Guitar, which is exactly what the title says it is. Tarotplane plays a Thai guitar on side A, and a Stratocaster on the B side. You can hear some differences, and probably get really nerdy about said differences, but both of these pieces play well as a singular experience, with the “echo” in the title acting as a sort of dub effect, allowing the guitar to move from beautiful desolation to humid, hypnotic repetition.

RAP MUSIC MADE BY RAP FANS (RARE)

Earl Sweatshirt has a new verse on the El Cousteau song “Words2LiveBy.” Even without the presence of Earl, though, the song would still be great—the beat sounds like it’s going in two directions at once/like it’s about to topple over and fall apart (it sounds like both but you can pick one if you choose). Earl, always the best rapper in the room, but not necessarily the most quotable (his style of writing has always been for me about the full song, not the individual line), comes through with some all timers here:

“I’m not okay but I’m gonna be alright”

and

“Free Gaza/We on the corner like some Israelites”

both deserve to be enshrined in whatever the modern version of the Ego Trip Big Book of Rap Lists is (the internet? Your high school yearbook?) Earl Sweatshirt, meanwhile, continues to sound great on any beat he raps on, because he’s an actual fan of rap music and is therefore enthusiastic to hop between subgenres the same way real rap fans will sift through thousands of mixtape tracks from virtually any artist out there in order to find pure gold.

TOXIC TEENAGE BOY SYNDROME

I’ve been thinking a lot about Limp Bizkit lately. If you know me, you know this is not exactly uncommon. That band, and the nu-metal genre they were associated with, were making some of the most popular music during the last gasps of the music industry as we used to understand it. Lack of critical acclaim be damned, we can’t just pretend that a huge, huge swath of the country wasn’t listening to this music all the time, and probably still is.

It’s interesting to examine why this music worked so well when it worked so well, and there’s lots to dive into culturally: the hypersexualized turn of the century, MTV’s stranglehold on music videos just before music videos became mostly irrelevant, etc. I, on the other hand, want to focus on just one moment from Limp Bizkit’s seminal “Nookie,” which ranks right up there with “Break Stuff” as a massive hit song that also happens to be massively toxic. For much of its runtime, “Nookie” is all Fred Durst hating on a girl for hooking up with his friends and lying to him, so he turns around and tells her that actually he just hung out with her so he could have sex with her and he never really cared about her at all. Cool, healthy lesson, bro! Then, midway through the song, Durst’s voice drops to a mumble verging on incantation. Structurally, it’s there to make the return to the chorus more explosive, but in the moment, it feels like the only true part of the whole song. Durst sings: “Ain't nothin' gonna change/ You can go away / I'm just gonna stay here and always be the same.” It’s petulant, but it’s also a pitch-perfect lyrical capture of what it means to be a teenage boy: all that bitterness and simmering rage and frustration and light nihilism is real, and that he was able to capture it in a way that goes so unnoticed that it feels subconscious (and probably subconsciously resonated with a lot of teenage boys at the time), is an achievement. Maybe next time I write one of these I’ll talk about how Korn’s “Got the Life” is a takedown of the popular music machine so scathing that I think it inspired an entire generation to distrust record labels. Or maybe not. Whatever.

OK ONE LAST THING

The writer Leah Mandel’s piece for Poetry.org about Superman comics, said comics’ many lost city of Kandor storylines (most of the time, the entire city of Kandor is trapped inside a bottle), Mike Kelley’s sculptural Kandors, Sylvia Plath, and much more. It’s a brilliant piece of writing for the way it weaves together sculptural art crit, personal reminiscence, the politics and themes of silver age Superman comics and more. Like Mandel, I also had a memorable experience at PS1’s 2013 Mike Kelley retrospective, and like Mandel, comic books of all types are an indelible part of my life, both as a human and as a writer. In writing this piece, she did achieved something unfortunately rare: comics criticism and analysis that manages to place the work alongside more “considered” or “established” works of art. It happens sometimes, but not as much as it should. Please read this piece.

Uncovered: My own communion with Kelley’s Kandors in 2013. I don’t remember this photo being taken, but it’s in my phone. I think I was 29 at the time.

See you next time?