gravity well

We’ve all known for a minute now that Spotify is, broadly speaking, evil, but Liz Pelly’s excellent Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist goes well beyond a retread of the familiar arguments. There’s plenty of fuel in there for righteous outrage against the streaming giant specifically, no doubt, but it anchors a much broader critical agenda, in suggesting music as a lens through which to ask much farther-reaching questions about technological innovation and its imbrication with the development of capitalism writ large: “The problems faced by musicians, like those faced elsewhere in society, aren’t technological problems: they’re problems of power and labour,” she writes. It’s a really apposite and timely addition to nearly a century’s worth of scholarly work on what the ascent of capital’s law of value has done to art and culture and to the people who make it (two distinct sets of effects which are often blurred into each other), and it’s a credit to Pelly’s depth of vision, I think, that her inquiry into Spotify connects so strongly to this ongoing conversation. That is, while Spotify’s egregious remuneration models and structural pressure towards aesthetic numbness certainly constitute a fairly extreme acceleration of these trends, it’s the latest iteration of a problematic that’s been with us for at least as long as recording technology has existed at all.

That’s an awful lot to bite off, of course, and this isn’t the space to cover it in earnest, but it’s never a bad time revisit The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduction. Certainly Benjamin’s argument that the “aura” once held by the work of art becomes diminished in the age of mechanical reproduction is relevant here, and Pelly does some awesome deep reporting on Spotify’s “Perfect Fit Content” project (there's a excerpt on this published at Harper's), a pretty damning confirmation of Benjamin’s warnings about the thinning out of the content of artistic forms. I think perhaps the more crucial takeaway from Benjamin’s work on this, though, is his beautifully dialectical thinking about the relationship between capitalist (re)production and democratization, the constant push and pull between the imperatives of individualized profit-making, artistic expression, and collective participation in culture. We can’t deny the way mechanical reproduction technology opens up a whole world of possibility in terms of the horizontalization of both production and consumption of culture, nor can we dismiss it as politically inconsequential, even as we deplore the way it concurrently chips away at the heart of what makes art meaningful in the first place; art critic Ben Davis calls this a “technological society that has made plausible the promise that everyone can be an artist, but then transformed that into a new instrument of alienation.” That’s essentially the story of popular music, I think, and in a way it gets down to the very core contradictions: vastly increased productivity and decentralization made possible via the destruction of artisanal traditions and a cannibalistic cycle of re-centralization (as if to drive the point home, while I was reading Mood Machine the latest newsletter from More Perfect Union landed in my inbox, entitled “Why Your Furniture Sucks Now: How bad trade deals and IKEA ruined Americans’ couches and tables.”).

At what point does necessary participation in a system constitute complicity with that system? Can there ever be meaningful purity of purpose when profit motives are so baked into the infrastructures that are the condition of possibility for creative expression? Pelly persuasively argues that Spotify is best primarily thought of not as a music product, but rather an advertising vehicle; music was simply the traffic source that Daniel Ek and his co-conspirators chose to capitalize on. That’s obviously fucking gross, but again, it’s worth considering how different this is, structurally speaking, from, say, the old alt-weekly ecosystem, which was also kept afloat thanks to advertising in their pages. Was the jump to streaming a qualitative change or a quantitative one? If popular investment in arts and culture has always been predicated on the bottom lines of for-profit platforms, where do we locate that ostensible autonomous drive to create and appreciate music in and for itself? Did it ever really exist, or was it always essentially a bourgeois myth?

For what it's worth, I think it did and still does. It’s important to remind ourselves every so often that there are still some aspects of the process of social reproduction that have not, as yet, been entirely subsumed by the mechanisms of capital accumulation, even as those mechanisms insinuate themselves ever more insidiously into the very fabric of “the social.” The choices we make in our daily lives remain spaces of contingency and contestation (and of hope, if you like). I don’t think we’ve passed the event horizon just yet, but the dynamic drives of capitalist competition and innovation form a fucking powerful gravity well, and we need to learn to recognize it if we’re ever going to pull ourselves out.

Which is all to say: there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, but I still think people ought to strive to support artists by buying their work.

As it happens, I have a few suggestions. The mix this month starts off with an excerpt of "Ghost Notes" from Chicago-based composer and writer Eli Winter, released last October by the wonderful Longform Editions. It's a stunning piece of experimental jazz-pop, worked up from digitally manipulated recordings of a live studio session performed with a quintet; it's complicated and heady, but not at the expense of its intuitive, driving groove. Staying in Chicago for the moment, next it's experimental composer Olivia Block, with "f2754," a dense roil of keys and drums from last year's The Mountains Pass. The album is an extended ode to the mountain ranges of New Mexico, the track itself named after a particular endangered gray wolf, tracked by scientists in a journey across hundreds of miles of southwestern desert. This slides into an excerpt of "alto," a new offering from Berlin duo Andrea Belfi and Jules Reidy – Italian freeform drummer and Australian just-intonation guitar experimentalist, respectively. The track is taut and propulsive, Reidy's gently unsettling improvisations given wings by Belfi's fluid yet muscular hits.

Then it's Asheville's favourite improvisational guitar wielder Tashi Dorji, with "meet me under the ruins," from last November's we will be wherever the fires are lit. It's classic Dorji, joining biting political ruminations to expressive and life-affirming solo adventures up and down the steel-string fret board. After this, it's Kurdish-Iranian tanbur master Mohammad Mostafa Heydarian, with "Bâyeh Bâyeh," from his forthcoming Noor-e Vojood LP, out in March on the always amazing Radio Khiyaban. Heydarian's work is rooted in deep tradition and extensive study, yielding a grainy, tactile and honestly just thrilling experimental folk.

Next it's a more introspective passage from Fadi Tabbal's just-released I recognize you from my sketches. Alongside his prolific work as a musician and sound engineer, Fadi is one half of the team behind Beirut's Ruptured Records, who have been releasing a frankly shocking quantity of incredible genre-defying music over the last decade or so (including Fadi's collaboration with Charbel Haber, Enfin La Nuit, one of my favourites of 2023). "Absence or death" suspends a single complex, repeating chord over a vast and dusky canyon of reverb, slowly filling the depths with waves of anxious and haunting ambience.

Then it's a dip into the ambient shoegaze of "I'm Too Sleepy... Shall We Swim?" from Belong's now-classic 2006 LP October Language. The New Orleans duo made some waves last year with Realistic IX, which, though great, left me craving the buoyancy of their older work (and I think it fits in here nicely). After that, it's something from no floor, the new collaborative LP from USians more eaze and claire rousay: "limelight, illegally" is a peaceful, subtle blend of mari maurice's alt-country-tinged neoclassical string arrangements and rousay's static-laced found sound and electronics interventions. Next it's Berlin-based composer Aimée Portioli, who records as Grand River, with "Tuning the Wind," a 2022 sound installation piece set to be released as an LP in March by Umor Rex. The mesmerizing 36-minute piece, which is briefly excerpted here, is worked up from recordings of blowing wind with varying synth devices weaving in and out of the samples.

To finish off, first it's "Al Moulatham," from Ghadr, another set of truly sui generis electro-acoustic avant-gardism from Ruptured released last year, this one a collaboration between Sandy Chamoun, Anthony Sahyoun, and Jad Atoui (the former two being members of the incredible Beirut post-rock sextet SANAM, which you'll want to watch out for); and finally, a clip from the mighty Big Brave's forthcoming OST. Following a string of crushing minimalist drone-rock, this new LP captures a series of open-ended studio experiments, many of which were based around an instrument Mathieu built from the discarded innards of a piano salvaged from the hallway of Robin's studio. It deploys a different set of textures than their usual work, but OST is very much recognizable as a Big Brave record, in its attention to the contours of space and its barely-contained menace.

• Mixcloud: gravity well (feb 2025)

• MP3: 25/02 - gravity well.zip

NB: Same as last time, I've included a single hour-long MP3 of the whole mix in the zip file linked above (along with the individual MP3s).

Okay that's it. Many thanks to Ian and Kira for chats about all this, and Don for editorial support.

For what it's worth, I'm hoping to expand the reach of this thing a little bit this year, so if you think of anyone who might be interested, please feel free to share.

Also, if any of you Ontarians feel like listening to me and my friends yelling about Mars, Clayborne will be playing shows in Hamilton on Feb. 28th and Toronto Mar. 1st. Come say hello?

Okay, that's it. Thanks again, friends.

xo, graham