should have said so much
Remember the “public sphere?” Time was, at the agora or the fireside, the tavern or the coffee shop, in the newspaper or on the radio or maybe even the Facebook wall, good citizens would project commonality and air out difference, scaffolding their shared identity as a people, and so on. Now as the army of robots closes in, it’s easy to feel nostalgic for that “theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk,” but that was always bullshit, wasn’t it? Like democracy itself, it was an unfulfilled promise at best, always viciously gate-kept, and, like most any community, imagined. Could it ever have been otherwise? Was its essential aspiration ever anything but a discursive camouflage for the material politics of property and class, and the sublimation of action into talk?
“Should we conclude,” asked Nancy Fraser way back in the 1990s, “that the very concept of the public sphere is a piece of bourgeois masculinist ideology, so thoroughly compromised that it can shed no genuinely critical light on the limits of actually existing democracy? Or, should we conclude, rather, that the public sphere was a good idea that unfortunately was not realized in practice but that retains some emancipatory force? In short, is the idea of the public sphere an instrument of domination or a utopian ideal?”
Her answer was a sort of “both, and,” and she offered a partial corrective in the idea of “subaltern counterpublics,” the proliferation of deliberative spaces based on shared interest and/or identity, which operate both as “spaces of withdrawal and regroupment” and “training grounds for agitational activities directed towards wider publics.” Absolutely necessary, of course, and something we're constantly enacting, I think. As we know from Stuart Hall, any communicative action also carries within it an attempt to interpellate its audience, and a tiny bespoke community is conjured into being around any and every speech act – not something that exists in a static prior form, waiting to be addressed, but something that’s constituted by and through each gesture that’s launched towards it. So when you make a public statement, for example, your statement also makes a "public,” right?
That's an empowering notion, to be sure, but don't such discursive spaces still maintain the slippage between objective condition and experience, between social position and identity, and between discursive construction and constructive action?
We might extend Fraser’s question to any formation of collectivity as such, whether it’s “public” or “people,” “community” or “nation." Do its constitutive erasures and exclusions negate its liberatory potentials? Does the exercise of asserting identity displace our energies away from building more effective forms of power (if that's indeed the goal). We might ask, along with Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, “How is agency produced? Under what circumstances, in particular places and times, does identity’s nonfixity become provisionally fixed, in such a way that individuals and groups can behave as a particular kind of agency, political or otherwise?” Do collectivities in themselves become collectivities for themselves by way of simply making demands via discourse, or by way of taking concrete action?
It can’t all be simulacra, of course. Even if we concede that the lion’s share of any notion of collectivity is either naive language game or cynical misdirection, and even if we can't precisely pinpoint the material reality that grounds its referent, can’t the simple and honest aspiration for the thing be enough for us to consider it something real? Even if, most of the time, the word “community” effectively obscures or disavows embedded relations of class and gender and race, we still know in our bones that we’re never not “in community” with those around us: there must exist, somewhere out there, such a thing as a “community” that’s more than simply something imagined, right? That’s got to be worth at least addressing.
In any case, I keep catching myself doing things "in public" as though I've got some reason to – writing, organizing, putting on shows that make no money and other such interventions into "the social," in spite of the fact that most of it stresses me the fuck out and yields precious little in terms of material reward. That’s another instinct I owe to DIY punk, I guess: the understanding of culture not as something one consumes but something in which one participates – in which one must, in fact, participate. What else, as they say, can a poor boy do?
So listen: it's now possible to become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. I hope you can forgive me. It's going to stay free, of course, so you won't get anything special for doing so, except for my deep and sincere gratitude. I really like making this thing, and if you appreciate it, throwing in some dollars will help me keep doing it for the foreseeable future (and ideally expand what's on offer a bit). For real, no pressure, but if you're interested, you can do that here.
Okay, now here's some songs (slow, sad ones). There's a higher proportion than usual of slightly older stuff here, for no particular reason other than that it just felt like they fit. This one's not exactly on brand with the recent weather, I know, but I've always had a sort of inverted SAD thing when the summer begins, so it makes sense inside my head. Listen to this at night, I guess?
It starts off with "Another World," the opener from Anhoni and the Johnsons' 2009 opus The Crying Light, and a veritable classic, really. The fragility and strength of it, the commitment and humility, the devastation and uplift – is there anyone who can do with their voice what she can? If anyone, it's likely Haley Fohr, whose baroque indie folk-pop as Circuit Des Yeux similarly defies categorization. The huge dramatic sweep of "Decoy," drawn from October's Halo On The Inside (Director's Cut), threatens to burst out of its own seams, but somehow the song – and, hopefully, the listener – manage to remain whole until the end. Then it's Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart's "shadow | mess," which is necessarily a little gentler. The trio of prolific string players and composers released the song in March as part of Body Sound, a collection of sonic experiments that's as generous emotionally as it is riveting technically.
Then we're back to piano and voice, now with Emma Ruth Rundle and "Return," from 2021's Engine of Hell. Though pulled back from some of the aesthetic heaviness that she's known for, it's still an arresting showcase of Rundle's signature emotional immediacy and her aching voice (and if it's the heavier stuff you're after, though, you'll be pleased to know she just announced These Killing Times, a new LP that's out in August). Next it's Ana Roxanne, who just released Poem 1, the long-awaited follow-up to 2020's Because of a Flower. Austere but still utterly gorgeous, "Berceuse in A-flat Minor, Op. 45" is an apt representative of the album, which takes some steps towards more direct songcraft while hanging on to the tenderness and ambiguity that recommended her earlier work so strongly. After that is an excerpt of "Through Time (Part Two)," the title track from Deaf Center's new LP, also released in May. As I've often mentioned, the Norwegian duo is responsible for some of my favourite "dark ambient" music of all time, and though they dial back the doom a bit on Through Time, it remains a satisfyingly gloomy affair without being too overbearing. That's followed up by a brief cello interlude from thee Jóhann Jóhannsson's 2016 LP Orphée. "A Deal with Chaos" is performed by Hildur Guðnadóttir, and includes the crackling samples of mysterious Cold War-era numbers stations which punctuate the thematically heavy album.
The mixtape's third suite begins with Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal's Snakeskin and "In the Pines," the haunting and mournful conclusion to last October's We live in sand. As with many of the other projects these two prolific Beirut musicians have been involved with (see last month's newsletter for an interview with Sabra's postpunk trio Postcards, for example), Snakeskin's scorched-earth take on synth pop is at once harrowing and transcendent, artfully voicing the daily struggle of maintaining one's humanity in the face of the inhuman. Next it's Perfume Genius, with "I'm a Mother." While 2014's Too Bright signalled Mike Hadreas' shift into more exuberant and sensual aesthetic territory, "I'm a Mother" nonetheless showcased his enduring love for the dark and despondent (and I'm here for all of it). Then it's Kyiv-based composer Natalia Tsupryk, with "I Walk and Shamble Beyond the Cemetery Wall," from her Vil'na LP, released in March, which A Closer Listen described as "a stark, deeply personal cycle of pieces that blur chamber minimalism and folk memory into a quietly devastating portrait of wartime Ukraine."
Nearing the end, it's the criminally under-acknowledged Mark Hollis, with "Watershed," from his self-titled 1998 LP. Hollis was, of course, the vocalist for English new wavers Talk Talk, who, after getting some recognition with songs like "It's My Life," went on to record a series of heady, experimental jazz-rock albums that have proven utterly timeless and paved the way for what would later be called post-rock. Years after Talk Talk broke up in the early 90s, Hollis would record this single solo album, before retiring from the music industry: a true legend, with an impossibly beautiful song. Finally, Danish folk-jazz duo Svaneborg Kardyb take us out with "Arendal," from Superkilen, released in 2024. It's meant to be a gentle denouement to what's been a fairly heavy journey, and I hope it does the trick.
• Mixcloud: should have said so much (june 2026)
NB: I think I'm going to stop uploading MP3 versions of these mixes going forward. It's a pain in the ass to set up, and it doesn't look like many people download them anyways. Let me know if that's what you need, though, and I'll be more than happy to oblige.
One last thing: I wrote a review of Don Hamerquist's A Brilliant Red Thread for Labour / Le Travail, which was probably my favourite read of last year and, in my humble opinion, exactly the kind of public learning we need more of right now. The review is behind the paywall, but if you're interested just let me know and I'll send you a PDF. Better yet, just take my word for it and go buy the book (and then let's talk ab0ut it!).
Okay, that's it! Many thanks, as always.
xo, graham