SCALES #58: enter entirely
Hello!
I’m back. Different town, different job, same newsletter. Easing back into it.
I was beat to the newsletter punch in recommending Robyn talking about “Honey” on Song Exploder, but I’m going to pile on and recommend it as well. One amazing thing to hear about was Robyn tracing the slow, accretive process involved in producing the song. At a certain point, Robyn talks about how after having already sat with the song for a while, when working with one producer she took all of the sounds she had been playing with and compressed them into this oozy smear the rest of the song sits on. It seemed like the perfect representation of what happens when you just sit with something for a while: a compost heap compresses down into a rich soil. A long stretch of time distills into a concentrated syrup.
Alongside that—and this is what R.S. calls out too—Robyn spoke about how for her the power of dance music was how it constructs a single unbroken moment. Less about a narrative arc and more about extending out a single point of time on and on. I’ve gone to some old-time, bluegrass music shows recently and there’s often a similar feeling there: trance-like repetition of a groove, a patch-work arrangement of different licks, slowly metamorphosing. All of it a nudge, a la Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, to sit and observe.
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Additionally—
Interviewed on The Ezra Klein Show, Randall Munroe of xkcd is just as thoughtful of a nerd as you might expect. (Also: hilariously on-brand that Ezra Klein interpreted “Someone is wrong on the Internet” as not a cautionary tale but a call to arms for years.)
Reading: Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror. Emily Nussbaum, I Like To Watch.
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Tire, duck, restored river.
Thanks for reading! You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe.
—Adam