Nicolas Jaar has commitment issues. His music slithers between psych-speckled post-rock, world-building ambient, minimalist techno, hip-hop-inflected house, and reconstituted pop. Sometimes it’s slinky and sexy, other times it maps out a cavernous space that is icy and foreboding. As an artist, Jaar can be thought of as an arch conceptualist or a sharp-eyed technician, a festival-headlining electronic music god or a museum-dwelling avant garde knob twiddler.He’s all these things, of course. Regardless of the medium, the most interesting artists are the ones who spend their careers negotiating contradictions. Jaar is no different. He’s the NYC club kid, the omnivorous intellectual, and a product of South America’s political unrest. His tireless pursuit of Born in 1990, Jarr came up in the late-’00s NYC house scene, playing Brooklyn’s Marcy hotel parties. Gadi Mizrahi, who hosted the parties as one half of the legendary NYC house duo Wolf & Lamb, heard Jaar’s early compositions — which veered toward experimental atmospherics — and suggested that he add a 4/4 house beat beneath them. Within two years, Jaar had become one of the hottest DJs in NYC’s house scene, releasing his first EP (The Student) and starting his record label (Other People). At the end of this hot streak, he turned 20.Making a playlist of Jaar’s best music is difficult, to say the least. Figuring out how to sequence the euphoric house of his A.A.L. project with the austere techno of his Nymph EPs is a fool’s errand, while blending the Southwestern inflected psych twang of Darkside’s “Golden Arrow” with the sorrowful piano tones of his 2013 Leonard Cohen cover, “Avalanche,” is near-fucking-impossible.And what does one do with Pomegranates? The 2015 release was intended as a soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 Soviet-times movie The Color of Pomegranates, and combines scraps of electronic debris to approximate noisy ambient music. The music at the beginning of the collection is largely abstract sound design — the whizzing harmonics of opener “Garden of Eden” gives way to the clattering, gear-crunching ambience of “Construction” — but this leads to some of Jaar’s most beautiful music: the twinkling, near-East melodies of “Tourists,” the pastoral sheen of “Shame,” and the haunting piano ballad “Muse.”It all makes a little more sense if you’ve seen the movie. Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates is considered one of that era’s definitive underground films. In it, as well as its predecessor, 1965’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Parajanov bucked the state-sanctioned aesthetic of social realism — a stylistically rigid movement that celebrated the nobility of the proletariat — for an hallucinatory style that veered between esoteric, Freudian examinations of a vast innerspace and oblique, symbolist critiques of Soviet politics and society. Upon release, Parajanov’s films were generally panned by native critics and banned by the censors, and Parajanov himself was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Siberia (ostensibly for his homosexuality).In many ways, Parajanov’s sideways agitprop is a fitting corollary to Jaar’s own work, but Jaar has definitely had an easier go of it. By the time Pomegranates was released in 2015, Jaar was one of the most celebrated producers and DJs in the world. He had a teaching gig at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. His collaborative side-project Darkside had released their critically acclaimed debut, 2013’s Psychic, and became a touring powerhouse, treating audiences worldwide to their loose, spaghetti techno. And Jaar formed an interdisciplinary arts collective called Clown & Sunset Aesthetics that performed inside a geodesic dome at MOMA’s PS1 contemporary art museum. His 2012 BBC Essential Mix was named Radio 1’s Essential Mix Of The Year, while his 2011 debut, Space is Only Noise, was named album of the year by Resident Advisor, Mixmag, and Crack Mag.But Jaar’s breakout composition was 2010’s “Mi Mujer,” which remains his most streamed track on Spotify. It was a song that was never intended to come out — Jaar had laid down the Spanish language vocals of his mother, somewhere between a tribute and a joke — but Jaar released it after bemoaning the appropriation of Latin music samples in electronic music.This is not the only time that Jaar’s family showed up in his work, nor the only time that he has engaged with the issues surrounding the Latin American diaspora. Jaar is from New York, but his family is Chilean. His father, the celebrated multimedia artist Alfredo Jaar, was born in the Chilean capitol of Santiago in 1956. Alfrado’s family soon moved to Mozambique, but they were devoutly liberal, and when the socialist Salvador Allende was democratically elected in 1972, the family returned to Santiago. Unfortunately, Allende’s reign was short lived, and the following year, when Alfredo was 17, Allende was assassinated as Augusto Pinochet rose to power in a bloody coup.Much has been written about Pinochet and Allende, particularly of the CIA’s involvement, but the net of it was that 3,000 were killed and many more “disappeared,” tortured, or imprisoned by the Pinochet-backed Chilean death squad the Caravan of Death (Caravana de la Muerte). Jaar’s family stuck it out in Chile for nearly a decade after Pinochet took power before moving to New York in 1982. Pinochet himself held onto power until March 11th, 1990, when he was disposed following a country-wide referendum. At this time, Nicolas Jaar was 3 months old.Nicolas Jaar has never been an explicitly political artist, but this particularly gruesome chapter of history shows up in his work, particularly on Sirens, from 2016. That album is both his most personal and political work to date. If Pomegranates and the Nymph EPs found him exploring particular strains of his music — musique concrète and fractured techno, respectively — then Sirens is a synthesis, blending the warbling post-rock wanderings of his Darkside project with the textural elements of Pomegranates and the conceptual, cinematic framework of Space, while adding a veneer of pop to give the songs more structure. The collection also, perhaps tellingly, abandoned sampling, and was solely constructed with live instrumentation and Jaar’s voice. “The Governor” and “Three Sides of Nazareth” have a presence that’s lacking in his other work — in particular, the cowpoke vocals and driving baseline of “Governor,” which are juxtaposed with the swirling, subterranean sound effects.The spectre of violence and political unrest hangs over all of Sirens, but the most pointedly political track is “No.” It contains one of the albums few samples — a clip of Andes folk music — and its title references the 1988 referendum that would eventually bring down Pinochet (the choice was, effectively, “yes, he stays” or “no, he leaves”). Speaking to Pitchfork, Jaar noted, “What interested me a lot was that, in 1988, there was a referendum that asked the Chilean people: ‘Do you want Pinochet to stay for eight more years?’ That simple, yes or no. So the resistance—which was artists, leftists, activists—created a campaign for the ‘no.’ They effectively turned a negative message into a positive message, which seems like the most elemental change that you can do.”The track ends with a snippet of sampled dialogue between Nicolas and Alfredo Jaar taken from when the former was a child. It can be translated as such:“Alfredo: Stay against the wall. Put yourself against the wall. Go there and tell others. The one you like, tell a nice story.Nico: Once upon a time there was a little bird that was flying. And there, there was a man with a very big gun and did like this (gunshot).”It’s tempting to view Sirens as a culmination (or synthesis) of Jaar’s approach — the marriage of the personal and political; narratives built from scraps of memories and noise — but 2012 – 2017, his 2018 release under the moniker A.A.L. (Against All Logic), displays yet another side of Jaar. The tracks are hedonistic, transcendent, and eerily (for Jaar) coherent. “Rave On U” builds off clomping high-hats and smeared synth textures for a banger, while “Cityfade” comes outfitted with gospel handclaps, a streaking piano line, and a submerged children’s choir, and is his most accessible work to date. “I Never Dream,” meanwhile, is pure dancefloor euphoria, building off shuffling rhythms and lightly processed female soul vocal for a finish that’s as pretty and blissful as anything Jaar or any of his contemporaries have ever made.When building a playlist, the curator always tries to find the center of an artist or a genre. With Jaar, that’s nearly impossible; his work is endlessly digressive and varied. There are strains of ideas and sounds that appear and reappear, but putting a finger on one feels impossibly reductive. The journey may be bumpy, but it also includes some of the most important and idiosyncratic music created this decade.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.Rapper/producer/super-villain MF DOOM is a paradox. He is a legend, revered by a generation of indie music fans, but he’s also all-but-unknown to casual music fans. He is at once mercurial and unmistakable -- he wears a mask to disguise his face, changes monikers like Hillary changes pantsuits, and has appeared, disappeared and reappeared again (without warning) over the course of his 20 + year career. Yet, there is also no mistaking DOOM on the mic -- the slightly nasally flow, the jumble of alliteration and internal rhymes, the expansive surrealist imagery. It’s easy to over-intellectualize MF DOOM, but he is also genuinely funny -- such as on Rhinestone Cowboy, when he declared that he “got more soul than a sock with a hole” -- and playful (his take on lesser rappers: “Out of work jerks since they shut down Chippendales/ They chippin nails, DOOM, tippin scales”).It’s a really fun but, I suspect, largely thankless task to come up with a list of his best tracks. For this one, we’ve used three criteria: we wanted to represent as wide a span of his career as possible (it’s tempting to just cull from the span between Doomsday and Madvillian); and we want the list to have a certain flow and work as a playlist that you can put on and listen to all the way through; and we want to throw in a few left-field and obscure tracks for those who are already familiar with him. -- Sam Chennault

Subscribe to our "Best of Pharoah Sanders" playlist here, and follow us on Spotify here.Pharoah Sanders music is a place you can get lost in. It’s noisy and transcendent, carving out universes in tinkling vibes and jumpy blues grooves that are upturned by Sander’s trademark squawking, primal tenor saxophone. The music feels timeless. They frequently last for more than 20 minutes. But even beyond that, they seem to exist beyond our more pedestrian concepts of temporal matters. But there’s also a cultural context for all this ecstasy and upheaval, one rooted in a very specific cultural and political milieu. The New York-by-way-of-Arkansas free jazz icon had a coming out party of sorts on John Coltrane’s 1965 album Ascension. That album consists of one, 40-minute track (Spotify breaks up the track into two parts, for some reason) and marks Coltrane’s complete abandonment of post-bop for free jazz. The cascading, squealing interplay between Coltrane and Sanders sounds bracing even today, but the key to understand it is that it’s a product of a particular time and place. The Vietnam War was dramatically escalating, the social norms of post-war America were quickly being overturned, and, perhaps more importantly, the civil rights movement was splintering and turning increasingly militant: Malcolm X had been assassinated four months prior; the Black Panthers would form a year afterwards.But this isn’t nihilistic music. It’s the sound of confusion and propulsion, of being angry in a dark room, of taking a dive into a deep, unknowable abyss. In two years, Coltrane was dead, and Sanders would strike out on his own, becoming a band leader while employing the sonic template that Coltrane had forged. The 11 albums that he would release on Impulse Records over the course of the next either years -- starting with 1966’s Tauhid and ending with 1974’s Love in Us All -- serve as a high water mark or sorts for free jazz.Free Jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman once said that Sanders was "probably the best tenor player in the world,” while Albert Ayler famously quipped, "Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost.” It’s easy to understand why when listening to tracks such as “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah” or “The Creator Has A Master Plan.” The tracks capture the uncertainty and chaos of creation, they sound like either the big bang or the apocalypse. You have to destroy to build, and Sanders did plenty of both.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.One of the greater meta-narratives in hip-hop in recent years has been the genre’s embrace of gospel music. Kanye called his album Life of Pablo a “gospel album with a whole lot of cursing” and arguably hip-hops biggest new star, Chance the Rapper, has an album that unapologetically tackles themes of spirituality. Kendrick Lamar, meanwhile, has spent his career mapping out a space for spirituality amidst inner-city carnage.While it’s kind of unusual the degree that this thematic strand has risen to the forefront, hip-hop has been flirting with the sacred for nearly its entire existence. Outkast, Tupac and Mos Def have all skirted the spaces between the sacred and the profane. The tracks compiled on this playlist aren’t “Christian rap” exactly — as with Kanye, there’s some cursing on many of them — but they all tie back to the genre’s debt to gospel music. -- Sam Chennault

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Top Dawg Entertainment is a bit of an enigma. It’s hip-hop’s most popular label and, some would argue, its most recognizable brand. It’s achieved this by seemingly being both everywhere at once—thanks to stars like Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q, and SZA—and also appearing to shrink from the spotlight. Until 2014, there were scant online photos or interviews available of its founder and namesake Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith. This has changed gradually over time, but the enterprise is still shrouded in a good deal of mystery. Piecing together what we have learned about this label, we’ve assembled three origin stories, each of which speaks to a different aspect of the label’s history.

2012: BEFORE THE FLOOD

It’s October 21, 2012, and we’re standing in a parking lot in San Diego alongside the entire TDE team. The next day, Kendrick will release good kid, m.A.A.d city, and tonight the crew is playing a sold-out show to around 1,500 people, which, at that point, was considered a large crowd for the guys. They’re excited, slightly raucous, and maybe a little bit nervous.Over the course of the previous three years, TDE had established itself as a regional powerhouse, releasing seminal West Coast independent releases like Schoolboy Q’s Habits & Contradictions and Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80. They’d been able to parlay this underground success into a deal with Interscope, and they had quickly become Dr. Dre’s pet project. The lead single from good kid, m.A.A.d city, "Swimming Pools (Drank)," had reached the Top 20 on Billboard charts. All signs pointed towards an impending breakout success, but there was still an unsettled energy.The scene in San Diego recalled that part in Goodfellas when Tommy (Joe Pesci) is going to be made and Henry (Ray Liotta) and Jimmy (Robert De Niro) anxiously wait for the news in a nearby cafe—except, of course, in this case, no one gets shot. (At least not on this night.) Kendrick’s manager, Dave Free, paces outside of one of the tour buses and concedes that there’s no way that they’ll get the No. 1 slot for good kid (Taylor Swift’s Red comes out the same day as well), but he’s expecting a solid No. 2. Jay Rock seems a little more upbeat, and (rightfully) thinks that this is going to be a landmark album. Ab-Soul is bouncing around, getting high and spitting out overly complicated theories about the ratchets, while Kendrick and the rest of the TDE peeps are goofing around with their friends who had driven down from L.A. for the show.“It’s a time of reckoning, like it’s finally happening,” Ab-Soul later says to me. “Right now, I see the potential to take over the whole game.”At this point, five years later, we all get that he was right. Good kid, m.A.A.d city went on to become a watershed release, going platinum despite coming in second to Taylor’s Red its first week. Schoolboy Q would score two No. 1 albums (Oxymoron and Blank Face LP) in three years. And the label’s three breakout artists (Kendrick, Schoolboy, and SZA) would headline festivals and arenas around the world. By 2017, TDE would seize nearly 5 per cent of the hip-hop/R&B market share. By most measures, they’ve become the most important and success label of the decade, and to the outsider, or recent fan, that success seemingly came overnight. But the path to get here was long and arduous—and took the better part of two decades.

1997: OGs AND BLINDFOLDS

Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith is nearing his 30th birthday. A seasoned hustler, Tiffith understood that the tenure of someone in his position was short, and that he needed a Plan B. He looked to his uncle, Mike Concepcion, as an example. Concepcion was a founding member of the Crips gang, and was shot and confined to a wheelchair in 1977. In the ’80s, after his mother died, he gave up the gang life, and turned to music, producing the 1990 anti-violence anthem “We’re All in the Same Gang,” which was produced by Dr. Dre and featured Ice-T, N.W.A., Digital Underground, and King Tee. He was also immortalized in a line from Nas’ 2001 track “You’re Da Man”: “45 in my waist, staring at my reflection/ In the mirror, sitting still, in the chair like Mike Concepcion.”Tiffith decided that the first step to breaking into the music business was building out a studio in the back of his apartment, so he went shopping for equipment.“When we picked it up, this dude told me he could help put it together,” Tiffith remembers. “[Later] I go and pick the dude up, and I say, ‘Yo, I got to blindfold you.’ He’s like, ‘What?’ I’m like, ‘Lay down back here. I’m not going to do nothing to you. You don’t need to know where you’re going. I don’t want you coming back, stealing my shit.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I understand.’ I get home, pull into the garage, and my girl’s there. So when I was like, ‘Come on,’ he pops in with the blindfold, and she thought I had kidnapped the n---a. Like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’

2003-2006: GETTING THE GANG TOGETHER

Though Tiffith was able to stick it out in the game longer than others, by the early aughts it was time to move on. "I lost a lot of friends, saw a lot of partners locked up,” he says. When things got kinda hot, I had to find something else to do.”He had the studio, but he didn’t really know how to use it, nor did he know any artists for that matter. He enlisted the help of producer Demetrius Shipp, who was a veteran of the rap game, producing the track “Toss It Off” on the posthumous Tupac album Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, and Tiffith had once done him a favor, chasing down a debt for him and letting him use the studio. Tiffith had originally thought of producing R&B groups, but he soon decided that rap would be more profitable.“One of the homies said, ‘You need to check out Jay Rock.’ I heard his name because he was messing up,” Tiffith recalls.“I wind up chasing Jay Rock down in the ’hood. He seen me a couple times and tried to go the other way because he think I’m fixing to discipline him. Then one time I catch him on the porch getting his haircut and his eyes got so big like, ‘He got me.’ I said, ‘Yo, you can rap, I need you at the studio tonight.’ We went from there."Rock had grown up in the Nickerson Gardens housing projects and was a member of the Bounty Hunters, a Blood gang that has been in that area since the turn of the ‘70s. The gang was originally called the Green Jackets, when, in the aftermath of a deadly, Crip-led battle at a Curtis Mayfield and Wilson Picket concert in 1972, the anti-Crip gang contingent formally coalesced into a faction they named the Bloods, with the Compton-bred gang the Pirus as their leading crew.Though Rock was born in Nickerson Gardens, which was firmly Blood territory, he had to cross over to Locke High School. It was only two miles to the West, but due to the complex matrix of gang territories, he was firmly in Crip territory. “There were a couple of bloods, but it felt like I was the only one,” Rock recalls. “I had to watch my back when I go home. I was on enemy territory. People would be running into my class, and I had to get out. That’s how it was back then.”

Map of Gang Territory in L.A. from www.streetgangs.comSoon, Rock would have company. David Free was a local high-school DJ who had recruited a number of promising MCs, most notable among them a 16-year-old kid from Centennial High School named Kendrick Lamar. Free immediately saw Lamar’s potential, and set out to put his music in front of the right people. But connections were scant at that time in South Central L.A., and though Tiffith was just getting started, he represented the closest thing in the neighborhood to the recording industry.Free had no prior relationship with Tiffith, and did not directly approach him; rather, he posed as a computer repairman in order to gain access. Arriving at Tiffith’s house, Free was nervous. He didn’t have a clue how to fix computers, but he wanted to play Kendrick’s music for Tiffith. He’d taken the computer completely apart, and, as soon as the tape was over, he looked up, exasperated, turning to Tiffith and declaring, “Man, I don't think I can fix this.”He accomplished his mission, and Tiffith agreed to audition Lamar in person. At that point, Lamar was still calling himself K-Dot, and though his technical skills belied his young age, he had yet to find his own voice. Tiffith was initially skeptical, but was soon won over. "I told Kendrick to get on the mic and flow over some beats I chose,” Tiffith says. “I like to make rappers spit over double-time beats to try to stumble their ass up— but he was rapping like a motherfucker! I tried to act, like, unimpressed, but that made him go even harder. He stepped up.”Not everyone was happy about this development, and there was initially some uneasiness in the studio. Though Jay Rock was happy to have company, Kendrick was from a part of Compton that repped for the West Side Pirus, who were then at war with Jay Rock’s gang. "It was a little tension with Kendrick and Jay Rock early on because our ’hoods were going at each other,” Tiffith remembers. “They didn’t know how to react. With me being the big homie [I would advise them]: ‘You guys can bridge the gap between the ’hood, because y’all can speak to the world now.’ You can get some money and change all this gangbang shit."Once Jay Rock witnessed Lamar in action, he was a quick convert. “Kendrick came through,” Rock says. “I remember we was doing this record, the first record we ever did. And I was struggling writing my verse. I’m writing on a piece of paper. I’m trying to hurry up and finish my verse before him. But he’d already finished his verse. I’m like, ‘Where your paper at, homie?’ He said, ‘Nah, I write in my head.’ From that moment right there, I was like, ‘Wow, this dude is something else.’

By the end of 2006, the two were joined by Hoover Crip Schoolboy Q from South Central and Ab-Soul, a German-raised eccentric who learned to rap in the freestyle chat rooms of the African-American social network, BlackPlanet. The modern incarnation of TDE was born. The studio was christened The House of Pain to reflect the group’s tireless work ethic. Tiffith even came up with a five point, handwritten manifesto that he taped to the wall:

1. Charisma, personality, swagger.
2. Substance.
3. Lyrics.
4. Uniqueness.
5. Work Ethics.

Though the pieces were all in place, it would still be a long, hard-fought journey for the label. The ’90s were the golden era of West Coast hip-hop, producing Tupac, N.W.A., DJ Quik, Kurupt, and many, many others, but the aughts were much leaner. The most popular and artistically adventurous hip-hop was coming from the South, and New York was able to stay on the map largely thanks to the bruising raps of 50 Cent’s G-Unit crew. But L.A. hip-hop had not really moved on from the G-funk era, and the only one true commercial breakout artist, The Game, was a nostalgist who was most closely associated with G-Unit.An entire coast would wander through the desert for the better part of an entire decade. But, when they emerged in the early ’10s, TDE was leading the charge.This is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to sign up? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter or with this link. They'll thank you.Related Reading:Video: Life and RhymesA New Hip-Hop Recipe With A Familiar SoundTop Dawg Entertainment is Building a Hip-Hop EmpireMeet David Free: Kendrick Lamar’s 30 Under 30 ManagerWho is Schoolboy QMeet Dave Free, Kendrick Lamar's 30 Under 30 ManagerKendrick Lamar and Anthony 'Top Dawg' Tiffith on How They Built Hip-Hop's Greatest Indie LabelTop Dawg Entertainment's CEO Speaks Out On Label, Signing Kendrick Lamar & MoreTop Dawg's Kendrick Lamar & ScHoolboy Q Cover Story: Enter the House of PainMike Concepcion speaks on what a Real O.G. is, the music game, and more pt 1

Photograph: Misha Vladimirskiy/FilterlessBrainfeeder got its start in 2008 as an imprint for the landmark LA producer/DJ Flying Lotus. And while it took a few years to find it’s footing, it’s now home to some of music’s most progressive artists. From the hazy lo-fi beat experiments of Teebs and Lapalux to the rich jazz fusion of Kamasi Washington, the label’s sound is constantly expanding and changing, but there are some clear through-lines: a tendency towards jerky rhythms overlaid by ambient textures, an abiding belief in the idea (if not always the sound) of free jazz, and a relentless pursuit of turning over the next musical stone.

It could be argued that Colemans greatest influence was beyond the borders of jazz. Generations of rock and experimental musicians have internalized the lessons of Coleman, understanding that oftentimes some of the most beautiful music first sounds ugly and random. You can hear Ornettes jagged, screeching stabs in everyone from the Grateful Dead to Television, but more than just a style or type of playing, Coleman taught musicians a new way to approach music -- an improvisational and at times confrontational method that was akin to a primal scream. Of course, Ornette could pull that off because he had chops, and the head-first style would later generate a lot of really bad noise, but weve tried to collect some of the better examples here. Some of these artist are explicitly indebted to Ornette. Thurston Moore has sited him as an influence; Nation of Ulysses named their song after him; and both the Grateful Dead and Lou Reed played with the man.

When describing his own “furniture music” -- an early 20th century, Dadist-inspired prototype of what is now called ambient music -- the avant garde classical composer Erik Satie offered what is still a pretty good working definition for ambient music, calling it, "a music...which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself.”This isn’t what Tim Hecker is doing, though the Vancouver producer is considered a leading light of the genre. Since the 2001 release of his debut collection, Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again, Hecker has created music that is unbelievably heavy and visceral. The grinding feedback and high-pitched tones of “Whitecaps of White Noise 1” -- from his landmark 2006 album, Harmony in Ultraviolet -- bludgeon the senses, while the shimmering noise and twisted choral choir of “Castrati Stack,” from 2016’s Love Streams, effectively places the listener inside of a nightmare. True, like other ambient music, it doesn’t move the way music normally moves - phrases are chopped off and movements swerve, swell and then abruptly freeze, frequently disintegrating into planes of noise -- but just because something walks like a dog, it doesn’t always mean that it’s a dog.This much was obvious the last time I saw Hecker perform live. About 500 of us stood in the mildewy remains of an abandoned movie theater deep in San Francisco’s Mission District. Just prior to Hecker taking stage, the lights cut out, and we were suddenly placed in what was a near-total darkness. An opaque rumbling sound began to emanate from the large speakers to the side of the stage, and, soon, shards of enveloping industrial sounds snaked through the crowd. Occasionally, the thick black curtain that had been erected at the back of the theater, providing a cocoon of sorts, would ripple and crease, and the lights from the street would invade the space, revealing inert bodies strewn across the floor, lost in a noisey maze. It felt like a purge -- dominating and imposing, a type of “ambient” music that was anything other than ambient.You can see Tim Hecker perform live at the San Francisco MUTEK Festival, which takes place May 3 - May 6 at various venues. Advance tickets available here.

While contemplating whether or not to boycott Kanye, listen to the soulful, spiritual jazz of Kamasi Washington. Itll take the edge off, we promise.In this time of great shitiness, when the ruler of the world is a reality star who rose to power by stoking the basest racial sentiments of a populace knee-deep in Russian propaganda, I think back to other shitty times, namely the late-summer of 2005. Less than a year before, we’d re-elected a president who led us to war based on a lie that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and forever shattered the Middle East. Louisiana, my home state, was underwater after Hurricane Katrina, and people were dying. The president was, at best, cavalier about the loss of life, and, at worst, complicit in it. Kanye, during a marathon to benefit the victims of that hurricane, famously declared that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” and that felt like one of the most courageous and comforting things I’d ever heard. His words were bold and empowering, and though the odyssey Kanye would undergo over the next decade was slightly more ambiguous, it all felt of a piece with that moment. To put it plainly, I loved Kanye.I supported Kanye after his marriage -- not despite of who he was marrying, but because of it. Kim Kardashian was a beautiful, wealthy, and savvy woman. Who wouldn’t want that? I thought what he did at the VMAs with Taylor Swift was funny and warranted, and that the more extreme reactions against it were tinged with racism. I didn’t agree with everything he said in his “rants,” but I also thought that it was an inspired piece of stagecraft. All those things were awesome, in my opinion, and are among the reasons I love him. What Kanye is doing now has nothing to do with that narrative. When he poses in a MAGA hat, as Lyor Cohen appears to be throwing up an alt-right hand sign, he’s giving comfort to those who want to hurt the ones I love. When he professes his love for Trump and bashes Obama, it feels as if he’s helping push the boot down on our collective necks. He is not smashing the liberal groupthink or spiking our bi-coastal kool-aid via with a truthbomb. There’s no aspect of this that qualifies as speaking truth to power at all. The conservatives in this country control every branch of government. They dominate at the federal and state level. They have instilled what is effectively state-run media that is the highest rated news source in our nation. And they’re being led by the guy who took out a full-page ad begging for the execution of five innocent African American kids. This is the guy Kanye loves.There’s no post-ironic reading of this. It’s enabling oppression. Listen, I don’t normally boycott people. People have their opinions, and I respect that, and I can generally separate the performer from the person. I still obsessed over The Good, The Bad and The Ugly even after that weird-ass Clint Eastwood speech at the RNC. I still love Michael Haneke movies even after said some pretty disagreeable shit about the #metoo movement. Im embarrassed to admit it, but I listened to R. Kelly a lot longer than I should’ve. This feels different. Kanye’s narrative is intrinsically tied to his artwork. It’s a postmodernist cliche at this point, but his life is his art -- he very consciously turned it into a cross-platform meta-narrative -- and, if in the course of crafting that story, you transform yourself into an alt-right villain, you shouldn’t be surprised when people treat you like one, and that means you get boycotted.Still, it’s difficult to turn my back on Kanye’s music. He’s given us so much, and I’ve loved each and every one of his albums. I can’t think of another artist from the past 20 years whose name is on as many classics. He’s changed the way music sounded at least three times over the course of that period, and I was genuinely looking forward to hear where he was taking it next. Still, it’s hard to separate KANYE, THE ART PROJECT from Kanye, the rapper and producer. Perhaps somewhere along the way the former overtook the latter, and now we’re left with this thick web of misdirection and irony that will never be untangled. But part of me says that even that reading is too generous.So, I get that this is normally the part of the essay where I, the writer, tries to negotiate the contradictions, clarify the argument, and come to full-throated resolution. I’m sorry, but that isnt’ happening here. I’ll wait and see, process my feelings about this, and see if I’m able to separate Kanye from KANYE. Its going to be tough, either way.

Weve spent the better part of a decade watching Tyler, The Creator grow up. On the early Odd Future mixtapes, he embodied a particular type of post-adolescent id—petulant, terrifying, frequently brilliant, and consistently offensive. He gobbled cockroaches, incited multipleriots, declared that “rape’s fun,” squabbled with LGBT activists, and, ultimately, was banned from the UK and New Zealand. Throughout these various ordeals, he used his age as both a weapon—taunting “40-year-old rappers talking about Gucci”—and as a defense, confessing, “Im not a fucking role model, I know this/ Im a 19 year old fucking emotional coaster”.This was at least somewhat tolerable because Tyler and his friends were talented, and, perhaps more importantly, it was all presented as a joke. This wasn’t the crack-era nihilism of Mobb Deep or the urban-trench warfare of Tupac. It was a lot more low-stakes than that. O.F.’s various offenses were wrapped in the detachment and filters of post-Tumblr irony. If you were offended, you didn’t get it, and, if you didn’t get it, you were old, irrelevant, etc. Yeah, Tyler was a serious person, but he was also very serious about letting us know he’s not particularly serious. The dynamic was both exhilarating and confounding, but it hit a dead end. Cherry Bomb’s mishmash of cloned, clamoring N.E.R.D. beats was nearly unlistenable, and Tyler’s shouted adolescent angst schtick was wearing thin. He was still squabbling with his critics over saying “faggot,” and there was one hackneyed line (“Im so far ahead you niggas, Im in the future”) after another (“The boys a fucking problem like turbulence, boy”). The initial shock-of-the-new transformed into the tedium-of-the-rote, and even his admirers begin to wonder if there was actually any there there.Flower Boy is supposed to be his coming-out party. This is the point where Tyler pulls off the bandages, and reveals a true(r), more mature self. And, for the most part, it works. He still has the same tools in his kit—he’s still ripping off the Neptunes, and he’s still a very self-conscious provocateur—but he does refine, expand, and, ultimately, negate his prior persona. It’s an exciting and unexpected transformation. For our corresponding playlist, weve collected the albums key tracks, as well as its influences, collaborators and sample sources.The album hits a high point with “911/ Mr. Lonely.” The song is restless, sonically and thematically, skirting between various movements and motifs. The first few seconds sound like a lark, a tongue-in-cheek riff on the sort of pleading R&B love songs that serve as a decades-spanning through-line for that genre. Over a trainwreck of stacked drums, vocalist Steve Lacey coos, “call me, call me sometimes,” before quickly adding the punchline, “911.” Then the song shifts; the drums fall into place, a lovely, melancholic piano melody peeks through the haze, and Tyler emerges to deliver one of the albums most startling lyrics: “My thirst levels are infinity and beyond.” The line is both corny and transcending, and, throughout the song, Tyler mines the space between kitsch and confession, declaring himself the “loneliest man alive,” while referencing Elon Musk, Celine Dion and Hasbro toymaker Arto Monaco. Later in the song, he’ll admit that “I’ve never been good with bitches,” because “I’ve never had a goldfish.” ScHoolboy Q briefly appears, and declares Tyler an “old lonely-ass nigga.”The track is surprising, funny, a bit unstable, and aggressively self-negating. It’s also revealing and shocking in a way that is not merely “provocative.” Tyler’s comfort with ambiguity is one of the album’s defining qualities, and Tyler uses these gray spaces to his advantage. Much has been made of Tyler’s line about “kissing white boys,” and whether or not this means that Tyler is queer. It’s what everyone is talking about, except Tyler. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who Tyler hooks up with—he’s found new, exciting ways to make himself vulnerable, and, ultimately, Flower Boy works because it feels high-stakes. Tyler understands the old maxim that he needs to destroy in order to rebuild, and the danger inherent in that process has pushed him to create his most refined, focused, and satisfying work to date.