Oceans of Sound

Context collapse, RealYungPhil, the slow torture of tinnitus, romantic black metal, and more.

Now that we’re roughly halfway through 2024, I see a lot of music writers taking stock of the year in releases thus far. General consensus seems to be: great year for music! I’m going to go ahead and posit that there’s literally never been a bad year for music, just a bunch of people aging in and out of trends and missing or finding the good stuff. A good or bad year in music is directly proportional to how much attention you pay to the music being released in that year. Still: I’ve talked about context collapse, and about how diffuse culture has become plenty of times in this newsletter—usually in a negative way. Shared cultural moments are important! When they only happen with, like, the top .2 percent of releases (if that), then we’re left with a pretty bland-seeming cultural landscape, despite what is lurking underneath. And man…there’s a lot of stuff lurking underneath! The benefit of this cultural diffusion is pretty great if you’re down to do a little work. There is so much readily available great music that there’s simply no way to hear everything you want to hear. When it came out almost doesn’t matter anymore. A great song that not enough people listened to in 2022 is just as good in 2024. Here’s some music I’ve been digging. Some of it is new, some is “new,” and some is neither of those things.

In this profile, the artist Lola De La Mata unpacks the unique torture of severe tinnitus—something we’ll all probably be dealing with in varying degrees of severity in the near future—documenting her experience by making music that grapples directly with said tinnitus. There’s a quote at the end of the piece that I found illuminating:

“The more I speak to biophysicists, the more I’m learning that although you create something very crisp and perfect when you’re thinking about the purity of sound, your ear will still always add distortion to it.” 

That quote ran through my mind while I listened to Brooklyn producer M Wagner’s neon-lit, anxiously pulsing We Could Stay, which takes the gorgeous repetition of the Field’s best work and imbues it with a sense of grit and momentum. The grit is obviously not being added by my ears, but it does make music that would otherwise be sleek feel tactile. Do our ears add distortion, even the smallest amount, as a way of helping our brains comprehend what we’re hearing? Also: the drum break that comes in toward the end of “Marcy Av” is revelatory.

While I was writing this piece about lo-fi music and cassette culture for The Southwest Review, I naturally spent a lot of time thinking about lo-fi music. What it does, why it works, how it has evolved…etc. You can read the piece if you’re interested. While writing it, I frequently listened to “Wanderer” by the black metal artist Këkht Aräkh. I enjoy listening to black metal, but I also can’t deny that it is an acquired taste. “Wanderer” is about as accessible as it gets, though. If you’ve ever thought, hey, the music of Burzum sounds cool, but it sucks because the guy who made it is a murdering white supremacist moron then you’ll probably dig Këkht Aräkh, who growls about love in a goblin voice over a genuinely pretty riff that sounds exactly as thin and low fidelity as the Burzum stuff, just without all the baggage of being a shitty person. As with all theatrical music like this, your mileage will vary. No one will blame you if you can’t buy in to the vibe/aesthetic/tone, but your life will be better if you can.

Last year, Alphonse Pierre wrote about the Los Angeles by way of Connecticut rapper RealYungPhil, beginning his piece with the astute observation that “RealYungPhil can make a producer’s weirdest beat sound incredible.” That is certainly the case with the Earl Sweatshirt and Harrison produced “You Know,” which wobbles with melancholy, as RYP floats, dropping deadpan blunted non-sequiturs over a beat that sounds like it’s falling apart in real time. Right after it finished playing, YouTube forced the new Eminem single on me. No thank you! Jarring. Bring me back to RealYungPhil’s world please.