Sounds

Sound, Subsidy, and the Ground We're Actually On Damon Krukowski's Why Sound Matters insists on what platforms would rather we forget: sound is material, labor is real, and the way we treat both reveals what we value. Noise pollution, streaming's devaluation of recorded music,

In praise of the wobble, the breath, the noise, and the bits the plugins keep trying to bleach Here’s the quiet catastrophe of modern music—the secret everyone senses but few dare phrase aloud: we built tools that elevate those who can’t, and tools that flatten those who

On Interventional Listening and Why You Shouldn’t Unscramble an Egg I had spent an entire morning doing a “home remaster” of Levitation’s Need For Not, that much-anticipated—and then promptly mishandled—debut from Terry Bickers and his band of merry conspirators. I loved the lead-up: the

The Vanishing of Opal and the Rise of the Unintentional Custodians After the release of her solo album Five Ways of Disappearing, Kendra Smith pulled off her vanishing act into the woods of Northern California. Left behind in that puff of smoke were the two LPs from her previous and

There's a question that keeps surfacing in conversations about music, collaboration, and how work survives: why do certain projects—often the ones that looked most promising—collapse before they find their audience, while others that seemed fragile or difficult somehow endure? It's not a simple question

Under the Hood of Dalis Car Dalis Car looked inevitable on paper. Peter Murphy, newly untethered from Bauhaus, carrying theatrical gravitas and mythic self-regard. Mick Karn, freshly freed from Japan, bringing one of the most elastic and idiosyncratic instrumental voices of his era. The promise was obvious: nocturnal art

Frankie, ZTT, and the Accounting of Survival One simply does not write about Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasuredome in 2025 without confronting mortality. Doesn't happen. The music is too bright, too decadent, too confident in its own futurity to hear it now without