Archive • S/FJ • Buttondown

October 18 2024

October 18, 2024

An avowedly romantic (in either sense) take on existence is Gorecki’s Third Symphony. That linked YouTube rip features soprano Dawn Upshaw, though all the...

October 2, 2024

Grief on behalf of others begs a few questions. If we are trying to imagine the pain of people we don’t know, what do we think joins us? Are we imagining a...

Let’s ease back into our time together with Simisea’s “Cotorra,” a rowdy green rumbler released in 2020. Or go long with the Pop Not Slop playlist, compiled...

We are up to 174 encampments globally. I recommend this “Baroque World-Jazz” mix from Dan Letson and a dhrupad performance by the Dagar Brothers, Berlin...

Jen + The Freedom Flotilla

Jen is front row, dark hair, glasses, red hands Sasha Frere-Jones: Where are you right now? Where do you live? Jennifer: I’m in Astoria. SFJ: Should we say...

After the cop opened the gate and gave us Raisin Bran, he stopped. He'd given us twenty-two cereal onesies and eighteen paper cups of water. (I had time to...

don't know if this worked Constance Debré in Frieze, speaking about her phenomenal book, Love Me Tender. "The fact that there is nothing psychological in the...

sink right in I prayed for the first time in ages. It worked, which reminded me that it almost always does. Prayer is one of the daily practices I have...

February 4 2024

February 4, 2024

at Hedi's house in LA When we meet Andre 3000, he and Heidi bond over being Geminis. "We're crazy," he says. He is sitting on a couch on the second floor of...

February 1 2024

February 1, 2024

I could not be happier to be back. There is so much to tell you and yet nothing to say. I recommend Justin Duke and Buttondown without reservation. Before I...

January 1, 2024

reflections on 2023

December 25 2024

December 25, 2023

gifts gifts gifts and no thinking (the biggest gift of all)

December 23 2023

December 23, 2023

gratitude for 2023 and the preceding twenty years

December 8 2023

December 8, 2023

Deaths, despair, individuals, groups, and the four Bs: Beyoncé, Berger, Baldwin, and Basquiat

November 3 2023

November 3, 2023

music + not music

October 16 2023

October 16, 2023

My memoir, Earlier, came out this week. There is an excerpt of the book up at The New York Review and a chapter appears in the November 2023 issue of...

September 30 2023

September 30, 2023

A guest entry from the good and great Elvia Wilk, who is in charge of text until the next photograph down there: You’ve seen the biblical deluge in the...

September 12 2023

$ · September 12, 2023

The “greatest ambient album of all time,” hitting bottom in LA with Elliott Smith, 9/11 at Elixir Juice, the five kinds of music I do not want you to send me, a Kompakt mix, and a little bit more

August 31, 2023

We open today with rotating sandwiches. If you end up in one of those impossible discussions around some legacy of harm, there’s a good chance you’ll hear...

At The Tom Verlaine Book Sale

August 28, 2023

An afternoon waiting in line, with lines intersecting.

Claire Gapenne a.k.a. Terrine

August 17, 2023

the guts, they are back, and they are in France

August 10, 2023

Le Cinema Club is showing Many Kirchheimer’s astonishing Free Time (for free) and today, August 10, is the last day you can watch it. Released in 2019, the...

$ · August 7, 2023

The Landscape Channel, vaporwave, and more

Today is all treats, no paywall. If you like what you see and want to read the essays and interviews and other treat-based writing, consider chipping in. The...

$ · July 4, 2023

Merry fascism! When the Supreme Court is riding through town playing Dirty Harry, what can anyone do? What eases American pain? I find succor in back-of-the-...

$ · June 28, 2023

Subscribe now An Agnes Callard essay on travel has been recently mocked online, because that’s what the discourse is and does. Her point, to slightly reduce...

$ · June 27, 2023

Remember to order Earlier and let your web browser (not a submersible) take you into the deep sea. I almost drowned at the beach when I was a teen and that...

Dolby Atmos and your phone (June 23 2023)

This NYT piece on Dolby Atmos and spatial audio is fairly bullish on the technology, enough so that I am moved to share an outtake from the Harper’s piece on...

Color cannot be divorced from light but the possibility that there might be value in the act of perceiving these two variables separately—or the idea of at...

$ · May 17, 2023

Kaleem Hawa, Tel Aviv, All Night Flight Records, Time Is Away, Syd Nathan, The Lot, Studs Terkel, Robert Caro, Ancient Plastix, Rachel Kushner, Sianne Ngai, Astrid Lorange, x or size, Liz Stip, more

$ · May 12, 2023

Instruments that don't exist, the history of English, Frank Ocean, the internet, Elliott Smith, e-scooters, Cecil Taylor, Ian Penman, more.

$ · May 7, 2023

Prince, dub, reduction, JD Twitch, Arthur Russell, Terry Riley, Éliane Radigue, Charles Curtis, unreleased songs, Timbaland, Dido, caroline, Cop City, Ariana Reines, Morgan Bassichis, and much more

Ryuichi Sakamoto 1952-2023

$ · April 6, 2023

Ryuichi Sakamoto died at the age of 71 on March 28th, 2023, after fighting colorectal cancer for almost three years. For the past few days, I’ve felt anger,...

Friday March 31 2023

$ · March 31, 2023

When a friend of mine said, “the newsletter is so short now,” I realized I had to clarify. The action comes after the paywall and everything before the fold...

Sunday March 12 2023

$ · March 12, 2023

Bicycles, bakeries, Earlier, Busytown, Hammer & Hope, Lana Del Rey, Los Angeles, Ui, Radiohead, Kassel Jaeger, Balka Sound, Neal Schon

Monday February 13 2023

$ · February 13, 2023

Here’s the latest installment of our radio show, Busytown. My co-host is Mina Tavakoli and if you don’t know her work, start with this new one in The Paris...

Monday January 23 2023

$ · January 23, 2023

UK garage, Janet Malcolm, the 2022 playlist, worst diner in the U.S., and more

Wednesday January 11 2023

$ · January 11, 2023

I’ve been crabby as hell but the following sequence of music has lifted me towards agreeableness. Mohi Bahauddin Dagar’s Ahir Bhairav is his version of a...

Monday December 26 2022

December 26, 2022

This is our annual reflection post, and by annual I mean that we have done it twice before: in 2021 and 2020. The idea remains constant: talk about the year...

Tuesday December 20 2022

December 20, 2022

2022 in music, part two

Monday December 19 2022

December 19, 2022

2022 in music, part one

Monday December 5 2022

December 5, 2022

You probably know that the new Number One film in the once-a-decade Sight and Sound poll is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080...

Monday November 21 2022

November 21, 2022

So much yak and so much anxiety around where we should yak. With all this agitation afoot, it’s good to know that there is a spreadsheet of every single wint...

Monday November 14 2022

November 14, 2022

I spent two years talking to people (108 of them) in order to write this essay on loudspeakers and how we listen to music for Harper’s Magazine. Enjoy. Last...

Monday November 7 2022

November 7, 2022

Some thoughts on scale, moths, and rust.

Monday October 31 2022

October 31, 2022

I keep returning to an eleven-minute (sort of) jazz-funk reworking of “Sister Ray” from 1976. Lou Reed — with Marty Fogel on sax, Bruce Yaw on bass, and...

Monday October 24 2022

October 24, 2022

We lost a real one—poet and critic Peter Schjeldahl died on Friday at the age of 80. His last two published New Yorker columns, on Wolfgang Tillmans and Piet...

October 7, 2022

I interviewed keyboardist and composer Irmin Schmidt in the process of writing this guide to Can for Shfl. (If you like the band, I recommend Rob Young’s All...

Monday October 3 2022

October 3, 2022

Three-hour ambient mix, Joe Bussard R.I.P., Killing Joke’s “In Dub,” Rosalía at Radio City Music Hall, the slippery hill of life, axial edits, Oren Ambarchi, sad girl swag

Tuesday September 20 2022

September 20, 2022

Mike Cooper’s Forbidden Delta Planet Blues is a rosy halo of guitar dust. This is what I tweeted when Jean-Luc Godard died. I made a short movie in 1986...