untwisting & untangling these strings i'm in
For this week, a poem, a buncha recs as always, a hatin’ ass root beer round-up, and writing about where anxiety playlists meet one of my favorite movies ever, Good Time.
I wrote a poem called BIRD PROOF. You can read it here.
Some news:
I have a ko-fi page! If you wanted to support this newsletter with money, you can do so here!
I’ll be performing as Ghost Down in my beloved Buffalo, New York on August 22nd.
The first ever Horsie show was wonderful, thanks Joey for putting it together! Excited for whatever we get up to next.
Music:
Arca’s electronic atmospheres are so important to me.
Many people bullied me to listen to this seamless dance adventure. They were right to!
Charli XCX - Music, Fashion, Film
Might be better than brat!
Banger EP from the electro-sleaze kids.
Haroumi Hosono - Haroumi Hosono & Tin Pan Alley in China Town 1976
As much a portal through time as it is a love letter to the mallet.
Nia Archives - Emotional Junglist
Really sexy and sweet!
Suzanne Ciani, Metropole Orkest & Simon Dobson - CIANI/ORKEST
Synths, atmospheres, and an orchestra!
Movies:
Bouchra [2026, dir. Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki]
If you’re a queer artist figuring it out amidst debilitating ‘ni de aqui ni de alla,’ check this out.
Total Recall [1990, dir. Paul Verhoeven]
Arnold at his Arnold-iest.
Sherman’s March [1985, dir. Ross McElwee]
Walked so John Wilson could run.
Barrio Triste [2025, dir. STILLZ]
Good piece by Joshua Rivera on this!
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun [2021, dir. Wes Anderson]
In stiff competition with The Grand Budapest Hotel for my favorite Wes.
Collateral [2004, dir. Michael Mann]
Scary Tom Cruise!
The Invite [2026, dir. Olivia Wilde]
Argue like you love them.
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez [2026, dir. David Alvarado]
Really good talk about this movie with the director here.
Remake [2025, dir. Ross McElwee]
A sequel to Sherman’s March that made me feel like I watched Sherman’s March 1000 years ago instead of a few weeks back.
I have to admit that some of this is on me for reading ‘Natural’ above ‘root beer’ on the menu at Montague Diner (great spot) and my alarm bells not going off. I saw the sleek can design and maintained some hope despite the ‘30 calories’ off to the top left. ‘No fake stuff,’ they claim. Yet the hated Stevia leaf makes its way into this beverage, the closest you can get to ‘fake stuff’ in God’s natural green world.
Fake sugar and root beer do not belong together. What coward sips this, what enjoyment do they feign at the coldly saccharine, finance bro flavor profile herein? Em suggested that I put this in the provided glass and that maybe that would make it taste better. It did, marginally. Maybe some of this drink’s foul spirit flew away on contact with the air between the can and the glass.
But even they tasted the agave nectar inexplicably dripped into this concoction and winced with recognition of their aversion for tequila. And I was still met with the soda equivalent of discount Dockers dress shoes dancing deep in grief like Leland Palmer on my tongue. Shame on Stiller’s, and the market of these detestable sodas, filling gaps in cane sugar and quality, childhood and charisma with the brown sludge they deign to call “The World’s Refreshing-est.” I’d like my mouth and memory refreshed of this nightmare beverage.
Stiller’s Root Beer: 1/10
[[[SPOILERS for the 2017 Safdie Brothers film Good Time below.]]]
Shepard Tones are in vogue lately. With the release of Christopher Nolan's new film The Odyssey, a new wave of anxiety music appreciation has descended. The people want scores that make your hairs stand on end, make your spine tingle, make you feel your teeth. The technique's illusion of constant ascension or descension has always felt to me, while effective, a little bit of shorthand for 'this scene is stressful.'
Alternatively, as a person who once ran vacuum cleaners through distortion, I have also lost my affection for somewhat effortless noise music. Orchestrating a Shepard Tone is hard work. Making people uncomfortable by rattling chains into a blown out mixer can be kind of easy. But the art of making a person feel like they're locked in the back of a speeding cab is something else entirely.
Back in 2020, I watched Good Time. Before this movie, I had learned to create music that was designed to be hard to enjoy, sampling a dishwasher, tapping a guitar cable and manipulating the electronic hum. However, I never quite understood what 'anxiety music' meant; I was just playing around, feeling for expression in whatever way I had access to. Oneohtrix Point Never's first ever solo film score showed me that the uncomfortable can also be evocative, you can use not just hissing, noise, and feedback, but dancing, hectic synths to tell a story. Even if that story makes you feel every inch of your veins as the blood hastily jets through them.
Rather than a director slapping music onto a scene to make it scary or sad when it can't emanate those feelings itself, the Safdie Brothers and Daniel Lopatin met existing visions together. While I was trying to get at Tim Hecker-style sound collage with no real intention or vision to meet it, Josh, Benny, and Daniel were chocolate and peanut butter: the Safdies had always viewed Daniel's music as the score to a movie they were desperate to make exist, and Daniel had always wanted to make a score like Good Time before he had the means to.
I was subject to the magic of these three freaks locking in, locked in the back of their speeding cab, and hypnotized. Shortly afterward, I was bit by some sort of playlist bug and decided to make what would be my first Anxiety Induction Mix, at the time titled:
FOUR CUPS OF COFFEE BEFORE A PARTY WHERE YOU ONLY KNOW THE HOST
Twenty-six songs and two hours of all of my favorite stomach-churning songs by artists across the genre spectrum. When I made it, I was surprised by how much hip-hop fit for the mix (like clipping.'s "He Dead," and Danny Brown's "Ain't It Funny") but it was a no-brainer to include such bangers as Anna Meredith's "Nautilus" (the song from the pool scene in the film Eighth Grade), Bobby Krlic's "Gassed" (the song from that scene in Midsommar), the Cleric Beast theme from Bloodborne, and Krzysztof Penderecki's "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" (as the screaming, plucked beacon of terrible light at the midway point). Xiu Xiu, Arca, and Sufjan Stevens lent queer terror to my tapestry. I still believe it is the best playlist I've ever made, and friends have told me they had to turn it off somewhere around song four because, in short, it works.
It's been about six years since I made that mix, and now I'm several albums, EP's, commissions, live recordings, and one score deep. I feel I have a little more of a handle on artistic intention, and executing it for myself and others, experience I might have never gained had I not studied the anxiety music blade. Recently I've gotten the chance to bring that new experience with me to a showing of Good Time in theaters (shoutout my beloved Metrograph and your not-as-bad-as-the-haters-say seats). It was screening as part of a film series called "This Night Has Opened My Eyes" alongside the likes of Before Sunrise, Irreversible, and After Hours, and the flyer is neon text laid upon my favorite film frame of all time.
Full disclosure, I had already rewatched Good Time earlier this year for another piece I've been chipping away at for months, that maybe you'll even get to read someday. But this time around, hearing OPN's score in a theater and seeing the grime laid thick upon the 35mm reel, a different sort of revelation occurred to me. This night really did open my eyes.
While I acknowledge that "FOUR CUPS OF COFFEE BEFORE A PARTY WHERE YOU ONLY KNOW THE HOST" was absolutely informed by my experience of watching the movie and wanting to emulate that arc sonically, it's been interesting to see the parallels between the narrative of the playlist's lyrics and the arc of the movie. I noticed this in particular on the stretch in my mix from Flying Lotus's "Descent into Madness" to the credits song of Good Time, "The Pure and the Damned." Hell, even the original cover of the playlist on Spotify was this Simpsons frame, and I still didn't make the connection until six years later:
Flying Lotus - Descent Into Madness (feat. Thundercat)
"There is no escaping out that hole
Darkness in your soul
Welcome to the descent"
Connie Nikas storms into his brother Nick's court-ordered therapy session and pulls him out. Connie is framed with a fast zoom as he busts through the door, and he later wraps Nick in a hug and (what feels like genuine) brotherly love, only to immediately coerce him into robbing a bank. A perfect introduction to the character as a whole: a black hole, trapping those misfortunate enough to encounter him within the consequences that should be his alone to face.
The Body & Full of Hell - Our Love Conducted With Shields Aloft
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
This blaring drone surrounded by The Body's yelling and Brian Chippendale's frenetic drumming feels like the entire opening credits sequence of this film, with Nick being subjected to Rikers Island, pepper spray, and the New York City justice system while Connie prowls about looking for the next person he can take advantage of.
"I could sell honey to a bee
In the fall time make trees
take back they leaves"
Connie effortlessly convinces his girlfriend Corey to go into ten thousand dollars of credit card debt to bail out Nick, in the first example of a leech-like pattern of draining and drying out the good nature of others. Corey, however, doesn't end up dead or in prison, rather keeping her money and her life. Additionally, her mother is aware of Connie’s nature and schemes and puts a stop to them, a benefit not shared by the rest of the people Connie would encounter.
"To the edge I'll race
To the end, I'll make it
All the risk, I'll take it
...
we know you're sugar
we know you're sweet like a sucka"
There is one particularly horrible moment in this movie, amidst a series of horrible moments. If you've seen it, you know the one I'm talking about. Connie sexually assaults a teenager. It's there to portray the depths of depravity this character will reach to escape culpability, escape blame. Sort of a giant waving red flag, 'if you were still genuinely rooting for this character, here's your sign to stop.' Taliah Webster plays the role of Crystal tragically well, a sixteen-year-old girl who has an inkling of understanding but doesn’t truly know to avoid this exact kind of man, this kind of white man, dying his hair into a blonde Aryan disguise, the word 'Power' in the most pathetic tattoo cursive emblazoned across his bare back. She goes along with him functionally stealing her grandmother's car, suckered into a journey that ends with her arrest, dropped when Connie's 'purpose' calls for it. Webster the actor is actually extremely cunning, having deftly hidden being a huge fan of the Twilight films and Pattinson until after she secured the role of Crystal.
"Don't nobody know my business
get used to fetch, I'll shoot
you catch, I snap, you come,
I don't call you back"
There's this chilling moment where Ray and Connie are sitting outside of the Elmhurst White Castle (RIP). Connie's ears perk up as Ray tells him the story of his past 24 hours, only to listen for the location of hidden money. Without communicating about it openly, Ray and Connie snake their words around the innocent Crystal with some fabricated 'I'm dropping Ray off at home' plan, in order to have her ride along as they steal her grandmother's car and drive way out into Long Island. These white men love their dogwhistles, coded language, using their faces and a society built on assumptions to take advantage of their environment, and dispose of whatever isn't of use.
"He wants to party til the wheels fall off
Six feet underground"
Ray plummets to his death. I don't necessarily think Ray as a character deserved this, even while the late Buddy Duress who played him was a sex pest prone to constant conflict (and may have caused the Safdie brothers' split). However, he really did party til the wheels fell off. He was dropped off from jail in front of a liquor store, imbibed in a drug cocktail, dealt drugs, and dove out of a cab after ripping off its immigrant driver, bashing up his own face in the process. He then goes on to flout his parole status for the sake of a quick buck, dose the poor Adventureland security guard to the point of permanent brain damage, and immediately raid that guard's liquor cabinet upon arrival at the apartment in the final act. In a way, it's tragic how he ended up folded into and going along with Connie's nightmare. Yet, everyone in this film feels trapped, from Crystal, to her wheelchair-bound grandpa, to Nick, to the neighborhood residents blinded by flashlights as the police's manhunt for Connie descends upon NYC's most vulnerable. Ray, while troubled, had the closest thing to 'agency' of anyone in this movie aside from Connie, taking his moments to kick the people lower than him whenever they came. Perhaps that's why he tried and failed to relate to him in the end ("So how much time you facing?")
The Lightning Bolt song "Dead Cowboy" is a direct address of President Bush's war crimes ("Take George Bush to Afghanistan / He's gonna bath in a river of blood"). Good Time is similarly influenced by the white supremacy, grift economy, and people left behind that seeped further and more boldly into daily American life upon the election of Donald Trump in 2016, like a dose of acid seeping into a Pepe the Frog comic. Ten thousand little Rays, shielded from blame, taking advantage when they're not being taken advantage of.
"Dead Cowboy" ends with layer upon layer of distorted bass, and a ceaseless bashing of crashes, kick, and toms. The Oneohtrix Point Never song "Connie" devolves from a plunky arpeggiated synth line into wave upon wave of distorted, drumless electronica. Just before his fall, Ray watches Connie get tackled by police as the acid that defined their past twenty four hours ends up in a puddle, common trash on the street.
The Oneohtrix Point Never song "Connie" folds out of waves of noisy chords into a quiet transistor pulse under a sweeping resonant filter. Connie stares blankly out the back of the squad car, either finally reckoning with all he's done, or thinking nothing at all. We see Nick again, and he's all fixed up, only light evidence of the cuts remain.
Oneohtrix Point Never - The Pure and the Damned (feat. Iggy Pop)
"Every day i think about
untwisting and untangling these strings I'm in
and to lead a pure life
I look ahead at a clear sky
Ain't gonna get there
But it's a nice dream
It's a nice dream"
This one was actually the final song in the movie. I think a lot about the character of Peter, and his earnest desire to help and be kind to whoever he encounters, guiding Nick into the group session, assuring him he’ll have a good time. I think too about the fact that Peter Verby is a real life criminal defense lawyer, and was carrying empathy garnered from a career of encounters with life's rich pageant. When Connie first storms into the office, Peter doesn't swear, he doesn't raise a hand, or even his voice, really. He simply says 'shame on you.' A man immune to Connie's deflection, a man who has seen one thousand Connies before and will see a thousand more, and a man just outside the event horizon of that black hole. He, and I, are relieved that he grabbed Nick’s hand, prevented that fall.
“Cross the room if you’ve ever been blamed for something you didn’t do.”
I have never watched the final scene of this film without crying, and I don’t think I ever will. I’ve also never been sure what the ratio of that emotion is between relief washing over us that at the very least Nick is okay, or the long nightmare finally being over. I think that’s a part of why I try to end my Anxiety Induction Mixes with relative peace, like Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Blink,” or FKA twigs’ “mirrored heart.” We all deserve that relief, that safety, that break. To be somewhere we belong.
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People (including my therapist) often ask "Will, why don't you have a 'Happiness Induction Mix'?" I do. The only song on it is Ween's "Ocean Man." That's all it needs.