ISSUE #232
I am about to be fulfilled—Laura Ann got me tickets to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra this weekend, the final part of my birthday present come to fruition and proof that Lydia Tár’s influence still leaks through our world like spilled ink.
The performance tomorrow will highlight Bach and two of his contemporaries, Handel and Vivaldi, in honor of Johann’s birthday which is March 21. But also, maybe March 31? Who cares—guy’s old! He was around way back in 1685—a year that was to pre-Mozart classical what 1986 was to comic books. He was born about 100 miles from Handel, both in Germany, while Vivaldi was learning violin as a young boy some 600 miles south.
Funny that he now signifies cultural elitism and über wealth, because he barely left central Germany in his entire life. He couldn’t even make the trek to meet Handel, though he desperately wanted to. Vivaldi was even farther away, though their connection was also more intimate, as Bach loved his work enough to make keyboard transcriptions of his Italian concertos—transcriptions that may have singlehandedly kept Vivaldi from being forgotten altogether. Vivaldi, in turn, inspired Bach to write concertos of his own—like the MC5 to Iggy Pop, the Meat Puppets to Kurt Cobain.
So it’s interesting to think that Vivaldi was the composer I’d known first of the three, as his Four Seasons absolutely rips and now pops up all over the place, from Looney Tunes to the devastating ending of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I’d always found Bach to be conceptually compelling but had to be in the right mood to actually listen to—he’s all movement, no vibes—which is fine, because he like single-handedly invented Western music, gotta hand it to him. I knew I’d come around.
I made this Earwyrms to mirror tomorrow’s program, which I’m clearly very stoked to see. I pass beneath the shadow of skyscrapers every day yet can rarely find the energy for the reason I moved to the city in the first place. As a Middle American boy, I always had dreams of Culture: the opera, the symphony, the Shakespeare, The Little Shop of Horrors. But it’s hard to get up and fulfill dreams on your own—it’s why we need those who have our backs, who give us a little push, who bring us places we could never reach alone.
In this house, we love Questlove. His is one of the greatest working minds in the creation, curation, synthesis, and analysis of music as a cultural force. Over winter break, I read his latest book, Hip Hop is History, and it’s his best work yet. It’s at once a comprehensive history and a personal work of music biography—as both a listener and creator—from a man whose heart is as big as his brain.
There are now roving bands of sonic scavengers in the fractured data gutters of the post–Web 2.0 internet, musicians often known by little more than alt-code symbols (♡u∫agi幻覚∀∁ⓛᙌ✬) or keyboard vomit (Sophiaaaahjkl;8901).
There’s a genre I included on last week’s summer pop playlist that I decided to dive deeper into today: Japanese city pop. This wave of what would best (if reductively) be described as “Japanese Steely Dan” was like a sister to the American yacht rock of the 1970s and 80s.
The scientists here at Earwyrms are always digging for new sonic gold, and well folks, today we struck an enormous vein. There’s an emergent genre down here that just might get us filthy rich if we take it to the ambient market.
You can hear dixieland jazz’s verve in the bounce music that came later. Both came from the irrepressible hunger to move, the desperate need to usurp polite society—the inevitably, if you will, of that ass to shake itself.
I am about to be fulfilled—I have tickets to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra this weekend, proof that Lydia Tár’s influence still leaks like spilled ink. The performance tomorrow will highlight Bach and two of his contemporaries, Handel and Vivaldi, in honor of Johann’s birthday.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and I thought this would be the perfect time to highlight an instrument without which American mountain music would scarcely exist in today’s form. So here’s a playlist full of Irish fiddle music. If you’ve ever craved the sound, this playlist is forever here for you.
Walk with me past the weathered gravestones, black with ages of grime. At the steps of a mausoleum, I grab my stick of chalk. The School of Goth is now in session.
Dungeon Synth is a genre fit for fantasy novels, inspired by video games, film scores, the neoclassical darkwave of the goth era, and the burgeoning home electronica on the horizon.
That gum you like? It’s coming back in style—today I made a playlist of bands that would almost certainly play at the Roadhouse from Twin Peaks, from dream pop to darkwave to jazz-flavored country.
Memory is the building block of everything — there’s no vision of the future unmoored from material history. When we picture where we’re headed, the vision is imbued with society’s hopes and dreams, concepts which could not exist without the past itself.
From the lab: another microgenre discovered in the field. Pop songs that cruise around 150 bpm with a kick-kick-snare-kick that could snap off your heel.
Dark Academia, if you haven't already heard, is a subculture emerging on TikTok and Instagram that adopts the aesthetics of the ivy-trussed campus: think browns and burgundies, greys and ivories, blazers and books like Mrs. Dalloway and The Idiot (Dostoevsky's, though the case could be made for Batuman's as well).
This week's playlist is the result of a thought experiment: what if I were asked to DJ a new Monster Mash? This led me deep into this early-2010s occult-flavored club genre called witch house. It's vaporwave's goth sister.
There’s a new subgenre of IDM that I’ve discovered since last week’s Boards of Canada issue. IDM is the condescendingly named “Intelligent Dance Music,” which is rarely even danceable and came when electronic musicians looked past the dance floor to the more experimental realm of personal, quiet spaces.