milk crate

I first heard Sezen Aksu in the back of my mom’s minivan. Her song, “Değer Mi,” would play each time someone turned on the CD player, a glittery, synth-heavy pop song with a repeated hook: “Değer mi hiç, Değer mi hiç, Değer mi hiç,” which asks “is it worth it, is it worth it, is it worth it?” As a child, I sang along as best I phonetically could, without knowing how to speak Turkish. I sounded something like “dare me,” an Americanized take on Aksu’s lyricism. It wasn’t until I revisited the album in my junior year of high school that I began to uncover the true meaning of Aksu’s lyrics and see her music as more than just an old song still stuck in my head a decade later.

“Mira Niñita” by Los Jaivas The kind of song that just seems to be about everything. Deeply spiritual and overwhelmingly beautiful, like watching the stars in the night sky illuminate their way through the din in real time. As much a song about a father connecting with his daughter as it is about something far…

On February 6th of this year, Nashville based artist Ovven released his debut album, Gnawing At The Cord. The record quickly became one of the most memorable records of the year, blending country twang and rugged Midwest indie rock seamlessly. Recorded at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, and produced by Alex Farrar (who has also worked with modern indie icons MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, and Indigo De Souza), the record is a super fresh take on what he describes as “loud guitar music.” 

Last week, I got the chance to sit down with Ovven and pick his brain about the production of the album, Wilco, the great city of Nashville, and what comes next.

“Ingenue” by Atoms For Peace The beginning of this song reminds me of the first scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Stalactites dripping incessantly in the untouched hollows of the earth. Like saliva off the slack-jawed fangs of some granitic beast. Deep in those cratonic bowels where the water fell and sang. A death knell…

One month after my sixteenth birthday, I got to see Kid Cudi’s “To The Moon” tour at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. I was young, and afraid of my own shadow but as I walked into the arena, already hazy with weed smoke, and saw twenty thousand other people who felt seen by Cudi’s lyrics, it melted away.

Tranquility is not the first word I would use to describe Andrew Snakez’s latest album; it’s the last. To get to the state described in its title, Tranquility of a Pink Horse, Snakez must first take us on a journey through fields of distortion and meadows of gentler longing, along the way lassoing an impressively diverse array of sonic influences into his coherent universe — simultaneously as familiar and unusual as its kitschy cover image of a pink horse mid-gallop.

Hooverphonic’s first album, A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular, is a bit of an outlier in classic trip hop. Unlike all the classic trip hop albums we have from the likes of Massive Attack and Portishead, Hooverphonic takes in influences from shoegaze, giving it a strange dreamlike feeling. This feeling isn’t nostalgia to me; it’s something much stranger and weirder. Mark Fisher wrote a couple of times about what he called “Lost Futures,” those futures we thought of in the past that never came to fruition: the aesthetics of cyberpunk, the flying cars of early science fiction, etc. And a lot of trip hop does feel this way, including Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, giving us, in 2026, something that could have been, something that was lost—that we haven’t heard from in years and could only glimpse in something like Lana Del Rey’s song, “A&W.” The feeling I get from Sound Spectacular though, is something much different. It’s not a future lost, or never began, no, when I listen to the album, I am listening to something happening at the moment, as if, despite coming out 30 years ago, in 1996, it still feels of our time.