More than any pop star today, Rihanna makes it look easy. But a look at the numbers proves that her career has been anything but that: Across 12 years, eight albums, and 52 singles as a lead artist or equally billed collaborator, she has reinvented and redefined herself in incredible ways. She’s flipped from sunny Bajan princess to take-no-prisoners pop assassin, from EDM chart-topper to bawdy rap slayer, from reluctant center of tabloid scrutiny to a boss fully in charge of her own deeply enviable life. She’s arguably the most influential singer of the past decade. Hell, even Spider-Man tries to be Rihanna at this point. Here's our list of her best radio moments—all of Rihanna's singles, ranked.

A User’s Guide to the Grateful Dead

By Jesse Jarnow

As avatars of San Francisco's ’60s-born counterculture, the Grateful Dead have served as an alternative to American reality for more than a half-century. Performing from 1965 to 1995 with guitarist and songwriter Jerry Garcia, the Dead survive through a vast body of live recordings, originally traded by obsessive fans and now preserved on a long string of official releases. Though the band has an epic narrative (told in Amir Bar-Lev’s rapturous four-hour Long, Strange Trip documentary), much of the Dead’s story and significance remains purely musical. Part of the group’s staying power is due to the mysterious vastness that exists outside the bounds of their official studio recordings, a live canon shaped by generations of the still-active Deadhead music trading network.

Flourishing in an extralegal sharing economy built around the exchange of concert tapes and psychedelics (the tapes were never to be sold), most of the Dead’s live recordings could only be accessed through profoundly anti-corporate means. Rather than killing music, as an infamous British music industry campaign claimed in ’80s, home taping actually propelled the Grateful Dead to stadiums, as the Dead themselves acknowledged.

Profoundly unslick, the Grateful Dead's anti-authoritarian creative tendencies remain palpable in the current era. Self-consciously apolitical and populist to a fault, the Dead built a diverse audience across the political spectrum while continuing to act as a catalyst for young and old seekers, music heads, counterculturalists, and psychonauts. Simultaneously, the Dead produced dancing music, folklore, and lyrics to nourish an extended community that continues to thrive at shows by the band’s surviving members and a national scene of cover bands.

Navigating the Grateful Dead’s shadow discography can be daunting, a tangle of different periods and idiosyncrasies. This list of recommended song versions—chronological, not ranked—serves as an introductory survey of the band’s different periods. Loosely, the 37 entries here chart a path from garage-prog (1966) to lysergic jam suites (1967-1969), alt-Americana (1970), barroom country & western (1971), space-jazz (1972-1975), and epic hippie disco (1976-1978), eventually arriving at the more slowly evolving band of the ’80s and ’90s, whose driving creative force sometimes seemed to be their own inertia.

It’s the latter era that is most prone to cleave even Dead enthusiasts. It represents a divide between the tighter, more critically accepted earlier band and the beloved-by-Deadheads ’80s and ’90s incarnations, when they were beset by addiction, the technologies of the era, questionable aesthetic choices, and an evolving secret musical language that sometimes made more sense in sold-out stadiums of dancing fans. While the Dead got more popular every year in their later decades—and continued to generate jam surprises and bold performances aplenty—new listeners will likely want to start with the band’s earlier epochs. One can see long-running debates even among our contributors encapsulated in entries for beloved songs like “Jack Straw” and the “Scarlet Begonias”/”Fire on the Mountain” combo, with a contingent of heads here deeply digging the chaotic stadium psychedelia of the later band.

The majority of the primary song choices presented below come from the classic years of the ’60s and ’70s; for many songs, Key Later Versions from the ’80s or ’90s highlight further developments for the discerning Dead freak. There, one can hear the band finding new places hidden in the old, mining the mountain range of material they'd generated earlier in their career.

Though the band’s proper albums have earned an undeserved bad reputation, American Beauty and Workingman's Dead (both released in 1970) especially contain a small handful of songs for which the studio versions remain almost undisputedly definitive. While songs like “Ripple,” “Attics of My Life,” “Box of Rain,” and several others belong on any list of the band’s campfire standards, they’re left off here in the interest of songs that varied more greatly in live performance. Likewise, Europe ’72, which features elements re-touched in the studio, generated a number of great live tunes served perfectly well the version found on that album, including “Ramble on Rose” and “Brown-Eyed Women.” Though the Dead continued introducing new originals up through their last tours, this list focuses on something like a core curriculum of live Dead.

Nearly every selection on this list can and should be argued by anyone with an opinion about live Dead recordings. But these picks are intended to be gateways into different scenic and well-manicured corners of Grateful Dead land for those who haven’t spent much time there, places that might feel welcoming before drumz/space kicks in. From there, the paths are nearly infinite: an enormous live catalog splattered unceremoniously across streaming services (but helpfully listed chronologically at DeadDiscs), the complete fan-curated collection at archive.org (navigable via DeadLists or Relisten.net), a riot of Grateful Dead historical and ahistorical blogs, academic conferences, a nightly slate of #couchtour webcasts, or a live music venue near you.

It’s an uncommonly brisk evening in McAllen, a small city in Texas that sits just north of the Rio Grande and, beyond that, Mexico. In the backyard of a bar called Yerberia Cultura, a piñata in the shape of an anthropomorphized border wall is being brutalized by a young woman with a mop handle. The McAllen pop-punk band Fantástico! eggs her on with a customized cover of Khia’s notoriously raunchy hit “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)”: “Do it now, hit it good, hit that piñata just like you should!”

The scene takes place in the middle of March’s Dreams festival, a laid-back event where independent-minded local and out-of-town acts share a sprawling patio with a woman selling T-shirts emblazoned with catchphrases like “Your History Books Are Puro Pedo”—that is, “Pure Farts”—and a food stand run by a mom who put her daughter through college with her flautas. The musical lineup at Dreams is inspired, and it likely wouldn’t happen anywhere else.

The three artists at the top of the bill have wildly different sounds and live shows, but there’s a common thread connecting them. As Helado Negro, Roberto Carlos Lange records deeply inward-gazing lullabies, protection spells, and guides to self-care dealing with the fear and anxiety of being brown; Xenia Rubinos balances sweet soul with smart bass riffs while exploring her own identity and the Latinx experience in white America; Downtown Boys pay spiritual homage to both Bruce Springsteen and Selena, making aggressively confrontational punk rock spiked with politically charged calls to action.

“Representation is super important on these lineups, especially for us down here,” says Dreams organizer and McAllen DIY mainstay Patrick Garcia. “To see these artists, to see their skin, and to see what they are.” Recently, many young bands in McAllen and the surrounding Rio Grande Valley have been emboldened by this kind of recognition, offering their own takes on the Latinx experience, from the prog-metal stylings of DeZorah, to the indie-pop snark of Pinky Swear, to the nimble-tongued raps of Caldo Frio. Despite a deck stacked against them by geography, postcolonialism, and modern politics, the music scene in the Valley is more than just healthy—it’s thriving.

Pinky Swear: "Change for Me" (Buy on Bandcamp)

Garcia points to Downtown Boys’ first McAllen show a couple of years ago as a flashpoint representative of already shifting attitudes. “People freaked out seeing a brown woman shouting ‘girls to the front,’” he says. “It was like, ‘Whoa, you’re loving us and telling us to take care of ourselves.’ It invigorated the community.”

The feeling is mutual. “You’re instantly contextualized—you can’t play here without knowing that you’re in McAllen,” says Downtown Boys vocalist Victoria Ruiz. “You’re able to see people who look like you, and they could be your cousin. It’s so hard to feel that context in a lot of other cities that we play.”

So as bands like Downtown Boys tour the country, or the world, they spread the gospel of McAllen as diehards like Garcia see it: A community and culture with more to offer than the two-dimensional narratives of crime and poverty that have proliferated on conservative outlets like Breitbart News, all the way up to the White House.

In the Rio Grande Valley, notions of heritage and pride often involve an undercurrent of assimilation that permeates everyday life. For a lot of families, achieving the American Dream means shedding much of the culture they left behind and adopting their new home’s language and ethos of white supremacy.

The assimilation may be driven by the innocuous intentions of a parent wanting a better life for their child, but it can foster a subconscious self-loathing that bands like Downtown Boys aim to obliterate as they chant brown pride anthems in Spanish, or when guitarist Joey DeFrancesco goes on a political rant onstage as Ruiz translates it into Spanish in real-time. The band’s arrival in the Valley seemed to dovetail with a burgeoning movement of young people in the scene looking to reconnect with these lost parts of their identity.

The traditional regional sounds of the Rio Grande Valley are loosely referred to as Conjunto, ranch music based around a Mexican 12-string acoustic bass guitar. It’s an ever-present part of life in the area, heard at quinceñeras, family barbecues, or even just in the street. Tejano music sprouted up after European immigrants—specifically from Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia—began to settle in south Texas in the mid 19th century, bringing with them their waltzes, polkas, and most importantly, accordions, which would become the style’s defining instrument.

Ask a young person in the Valley today what they think of Conjunto or Tejano music, though, and they’re unlikely to identify with it. But filmmakers Charlie Vela and Ronnie Garza hope to recontextualize the Valley’s music history with their new documentary, As I Walk Through the Valley, which traces the area’s musical spirit across genres and generations.

“Tejano was very punk in its attitude,” says Garza. He goes on to explain how the style was employed as Chicanos in the Valley fought against corruption and marched for human rights in the 1970s. That rebelliousness has fueled independent music in the Valley for decades, through the punk, metal, and hardcore scenes of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, but despondent and bored young people in the area are often caught in cultural limbo, unaware that previous generations of kids built their own DIY scenes, and they could, too.

“Part of why we’re doing this project, is that we’re cut off from our own local history and narratives,” Vela says of his film. “They’re not taught in school, certainly. Young people are trying to connect with these things, but there’s no unbroken tradition. We’re just trying to piecemeal it together and find some sense of roots, and where they’re cut off.”

Through events like Dreams, Garcia and others are also doing their part to build bridges from the past to the present when it comes to both grassroots music and activism, often using one to propel the other. The McAllen music scene was recently forced to organize to protect its very existence after a white, developer-friendly politician sought to ban outdoor amplified music and all-ages shows in the city’s 17th Street Entertainment District—a ban that would have killed live music at the Yerberia Cultura and, by association, Dreams. A campaign spearheaded by Garcia and veteran local musician Andres Sanchez collected more than 1,000 signatures on a petition to oppose the ordinance in a single day, ultimately forcing the city commission to back down and rescind it.

But other fights rage on. The same forces that keep people from traveling out of the Valley to see or play shows—poverty, geographical isolation, and the border patrol checkpoints on every road leading north and south—make it difficult to access healthcare services such as abortions, or to visit family or seek economic opportunity elsewhere. Some of the same kids screaming “She’s brown! She’s smart!” along with Victoria Ruiz at Dreams can be found escorting women to the sole clinic in the Valley that provides abortion services; some of the same people proclaiming that they’re “young, Latin, and proud” along with Roberto Lange at the Yerberia Cultura were also at an event earlier that day in nearby San Juan, Texas, where community leaders assembled by newly elected Rep. Vicente Gonzalez hosted a roundtable for Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi, directly speaking truth to power regarding issues of immigration, religious tolerance, and environmentalism.

Also in attendance at Dreams was Eduardo Canales of the South Texas Human Right Center. He works with law enforcement and local landowners to provide fresh water stations for the undocumented migrants seeking points north along the massive ranches and scrubland that divides the Valley from San Antonio. The bodies of those he can’t save—people that die from exposure or dehydration—he helps recover from private land in hopes of reuniting them with their families.

Few issues in South Texas are as charged, however, as access to affordable abortion services. After Texas passed a measure designed to result in the closure of the majority of abortion clinics in the state in 2013, the Whole Woman’s Health clinic on South Main Street in McAllen became the only remaining clinic providing services in the entire Valley—an area that covers almost 5,000 square miles and is home to more than 1.3 million people. Whole Woman’s Health argued the bill was unconstitutional, took their case to the Supreme Court, and won. But the damage was done—many of the clinics that closed have yet to reopen, and Texas’ assault on these clinics continues.

At the forefront of that fight in the Valley is South Texans for Reproductive Justice, an organization founded by activists Denni and Melissa Arjona that is committed to evolving the conversation around abortion to include factors of marginalization like poverty and citizenship status that disproportionately affect women of color. For the last few years, the Arjonas have organized a concert called Skank for Choice—featuring Denni’s band Los Skagaleros—to benefit La Frontera Fund, which helps provide practical support to Valley residents who are seeking abortions. Additionally, local Cathryn Torres, a staunch supporter of reproductive justice, produced a show called Justicia, promoting women in hardcore and benefitting La Frontera Fund.

McAllen’s lone remaining abortion clinic is often quite literally a battleground, with anti-choice activists maintaining a constant presence in the public spaces surrounding the building and posting massive signs within every possible sightline for patients arriving for appointments. The facility was closed when I visited, but a handful of protesters were still posted up out front, praying their rosaries.

It’s gotten so intense that in addition to a security guard, there is a literal wall in front of its doors, limiting the points of access to the facility. When the anti-choicers—typically led by leaders in the Roman Catholic community—mobilize on the clinic, the South Texans for Reproductive Justice puts together counter-actions to protect patients and employees of the clinic, often forming a human barrier.

If there’s one organization that represents the intersectionality of the Valley’s progressive front, it’s the LGBTQ advocacy group Aquí Estamos, which has strong ties to the music scene and various activist organizations—and few members of Aquí Estamos embody this spirit better than Alexis Bay.

Bay, who prefers gender-neutral pronouns, is one of the few people I meet in the valley who is not Chicano; their family immigrated from Cuba through South Florida, and moved to the Valley when they were just 3 years old. They spend their days working at a nature center in one of the few preserved plots of wildlife in the area, teaching people about its old growth forests that predate colonialism; the Valley’s positioning as a migration highway makes it one of the premier birding destinations in America. Bay is also involved in the fight for reproductive justice and volunteered to assist South and Central American refugees. “There’s no separating these things, they’re very interwoven,” Bay says of the various organizations and causes they are a part of. “The Valley is a very beautiful quilt in that sense.”

Part of that quilt can seem contradictory, and one unavoidable intersection is the role of Roman Catholicism in the culture of the Valley: Members of Aquí Estamos often find themselves volunteering with members of the church at the Humanitarian Respite Center, only to find themselves on opposite sides of the picket line in the fight for reproductive justice. And beyond the awkwardness of working with someone who might hate you for your orientation or thoughts on abortion, there’s also the struggle of Catholicism’s looming role in identity, even for those in the Valley who aren’t religious.

“Even if you’re not Catholic, on some level, you’re still probably culturally Catholic—there’s still some imagery that invokes emotion or comfort,” says Bay. “If you go to other parts of the country, they’re more than happy to be like, ‘Keep your rosaries off my ovaries,’ [but here] you still meet Latinx folks that may have a rosary. It still means something to them.”

And though progressive activists of all stripes are making advances in the Valley, that’s not to say that Brown Pride has completely taken over: There are still Mexican-American Trump supporters in the area, perpetuating false narratives about themselves.

“It’s so strange,” Patrick Garcia admits. “It’s not that I can’t blame them, but when I look at it, I understand they’re in a system of poverty, and to them, success is wealth, and wealth is being offered via this candidate via the rhetoric of false freedom, so they’re going to lean towards that.”

But even if the wall has some supporters in the Valley, of all the activist fronts in the region, the fight for the dignity and human rights of undocumented immigrants seems to have the most solidarity: You can find Catholics, atheists, musicians, grandmas, and grandchildren among the ranks of those advocating for the cause. And it’s likely because many people don’t have to look back too far to find their connection to Mexico or points south, or have a friend, relative, or neighbor without papers. The ham-fisted narratives about drug-smuggling violent criminal immigrants are hard to swallow when you know plenty of normal, hard-working people whose only difference from you is a piece of paper.

For an undocumented musician, it’s especially heartbreaking; even as the Valley’s profile grows and the opportunities for local musicians expand beyond South Texas, without papers, the risk of being detained at a checkpoint is often too great to be able to take part.

Jesus Reazola is 31 years old and stands some six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a hulking frame that belies a soft-spoken nature. His friends call him Chuy, a common Mexican nickname for Jesus. He plays drums in the band Monstruo Bohemio and raps in a group called Caldo Frio with drummer Carmen Castillo. Castillo’s family hails from Reynosa, Mexico, McAllen’s sister city on the other side of the border, and they crossed when she was barely a year old; she’s since acquired legal resident status. Reazola has not.

Over tacos at his favorite restaurant in McAllen, Reazola tells me how his family fled from intense cartel violence in Monterrey, Mexico in the summer of 1998 when he was 11, just old enough to remember the journey into the U.S. While Reazola was still living in Monterrey, his mother would make frequent trips into the U.S. to work. (Before drug cartels monopolized the smuggling routes across the border, freelance coyotes—human smugglers that knew the safest routes to cross undetected—could get you across for a reasonable fee.) She told him how, while crossing the Rio Grande, she was swept up in a current and just narrowly escaped drowning, exhausting herself fighting the river’s strong current. “Don’t fight the river, it’s too strong,” she said. “Just float.” When they crossed as a family in 1998, the advice became a mantra: “Flota con el Rio.”

Years later, when Reazola was 26 and living in the U.S., he found himself at a party when a fight broke out, drawing the attention of law enforcement. He says that he was trying to break it up, but it didn’t matter—he was rounded up and taken to jail, and when his undocumented status was discovered, he was deported to Mexico, where he hadn’t lived since he was a child. Like a lot of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the U.S., staying in Mexico wasn’t really an option for him; his life, job, friends, and much of his family were in the States.

But as the U.S. ramped up its war on drugs, and the smuggling routes became too valuable for the cartels to ignore, the independent coyotes were given a choice: Start working for the cartels, or else. Many chose to flee. People looking to cross without papers faced a similar dilemma: If they were discovered crossing without paying the cartel, they too faced reprisals. Unable to afford the few hundred dollars to pay the cartel, Reazola chose to risk his life crossing with a former coyote, who had fled to the U.S. rather than work for a cartel, crawling for hours to avoid detection. “I was in Mexico for less than 24 hours,” Reazola says. “Me and my friend crossed back as soon as we touched down in Mexico. We didn’t even eat that day.”

When they arrived at the Rio Grande crossing, his mother’s words came rushing back to him the moment he stepped into the water—wisdom that likely saved his life. The throughline of those experiences—Reazola mother’s perilous crossing, the family’s flight from Monterrey, and his mad dash back into the U.S. as an adult—became the basis for “Flota con el Rio,” the sixth track on Caldo Frio’s latest album, Aca en el Sur (Here in the South). It’s a bouncy rap song colored with strings and a somber acoustic guitar riff, peppered by Reazola’s rapid-fire flow; he speaks English well, but he raps in Spanish, his first language.

Caldo Frio: “Flota con el Rio” (Buy on Bandcamp)

When Reazola first told me his story, I struggled with the responsibility of putting him at risk by sharing it publicly. But like many other undocumented immigrants in the U.S., he understands that in order to change policy, you must first change hearts and minds. Undocumented immigrants often struggle for the most basic dignity, for the right to move freely, to be recognized as human. Near the border, this results in a peculiar kind of detention—not in a camp or locked-down facility, but within the hundred-mile floodplain that makes up the Rio Grande Valley. With checkpoints all around, the risk of being deported is too great to justify even small trips—for an artist like Reazola, the idea of even traveling to Austin remains in the realm of fantasy. There can be no tour, no SXSW showcase, no exploration of the country he risked his life to reach.

Most of the people I speak with in the Rio Grande Valley are exhausted by the rhetoric of border politics and by national media presuming to speak for them. Some are even taking the issue into their own hands with Neta, an independent news source for, by, and of Valley residents, a place for their voices and stories to be heard, on their own terms. For musical diehards like Garcia, Vela, and Garza, the dream is for the music of the Valley to be recognized for its rich past, present, and future; for the South Texans for Reproductive Justice, the dream is for all people to have equal access to healthcare; for Reazola, the dream is merely to take his art beyond the confines of the low-lying scrublands that he now calls home. All of these are American Dreams, each one worth fighting for.

Over the last 10 years or so, the Jamaican production duo Equiknoxx has crafted breakout hits for dancehall artists like Busy Signal (“Step Out”) and Aidonia (“Hundred Stab”), but only one of their riddims—2010’s Jim Screechie—reached that coveted state of dancehall saturation where the beat itself becomes the star of the show and every single artist who touches it can expect repeated spins. Though they’ve put some of Jim Screechie’s signature elements—a piercing eagle scream and organ-like synth vamps that suggest the vocalist is being chased through the studio by an evil clown—to good use on other tracks, none have ever quite achieved that same rare air, and you could be forgiven for thinking that Equiknoxx had retired from the scene as one-riddim wonders.

That all changed last year when the logic of dancehall was turned more or less upside down by the release of Equiknoxx’s debut album, Bird Sound Power. Instead of creating buzz in the Jamaican market and hoping a tune would cross over, the record came out on DDS, the imprint of Manchester-based dark ambient duo Demdike Stare, and clicked almost instantly with a whole host of new fans via websites, clubs, and radio shows that typically cover more self-consciously experimental electronic sounds. Even more shocking, instead of 12 artists singing or toasting over a single catchy beat, Bird Sound Power comprised 12 startlingly original riddims with no vocalists at all. Layer upon layer, almost every track forms a sound collage that is exceptionally dense for dancehall, a genre which traditionally prizes minimalism, or at least a certain economy of means to keep everything moving forward. On many of the album’s tracks, the oxygen that would conventionally be taken up by someone like Beenie Man is occupied instead by snatches of disembodied and distorted voices, oscillators, harps, glockenspiels, and bird noises. In fact, if it wasn’t for the unforgettable sonic logo of that octave-shattering eagle scream, you could also be forgiven for believing that this is not even the same Equiknoxx that was putting down more conventional dancehall hits back in the summer of 2010.

And, in one sense, it’s not. Equiknoxx has always been a loosely-defined collective, but it has also always more or less centered around the production work of Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair. By the time of Bird Sound Power’s release, however, one of Gav’s many collaborators, Jordan “Time Cow” Chung, had organically become a full creative partner. The brilliant and jarringly new Equiknoxx sound heard on BSP is largely the result of the creative chemistry between the two artists; an eclectic and unexpectedly recontextualized array of samples and voices talking to each other within a leaner, muscular framework of electronic drums and bass as tough as any dancehall’s seen in a decade.

Equiknoxx: "Clunk" (via SoundCloud)

That sound is worth analyzing for a moment because, in addition to a new audience, Bird Sound Power suggests a whole new direction for the genre itself. While the rhythms of dancehall have always evolved quickly, generally getting more uptempo as Jamaican producers absorbed and reshaped influences from house, 2step, and other dance forms, since 2012 or so it has become more static. This is partly the result of the transition into Auto-Tune and ProTools-based production, a switch which has somewhat limited the genre’s sonic palette.

But Gavsborg and Time Cow’s use of samples and unconventional sounds expands that shrinking palette into a rainbow of weird flavors. “A Rabbit Spoke to Me When I Woke Up” sounds like the peeping of robotic frogs, while “Last of the Mohicans” employs synthesized feminine voices to create an awkward body music of “oohs” and “ahs,” like Siri imitating a bored porn starlet. One track even features a prominent sample from psych-rock duo Silver Apples’ early foray into machine music, “Oscillations.” Like the best and most boundary pushing productions from ’90s hip-hop heavies RZA and DJ Premier, these tracks create tension with dissonance, off-kilter rhythm, and disorienting references, only to corral these elements back into a larger rhythmic structure, making the uncanny danceable in a sort of meta-syncopation that happens at a level that’s conceptual as much as metric.

Equiknoxx: "Last of the Mohicans" (via SoundCloud)

In that sense, Bird Sound is both a new approach and something of a throwback to the golden era of dub experimentation, when reggae producers not only regularly issued instrumental LPs but experimented with techniques like revving motorcycles in the studio, kicking the spring reverb unit in time with a drum, or manipulating reel to reels by hand during mixdown. And Equiknoxx went a long way towards cementing their connection to the spirit of the dub era with March’s Majestic Melodiesmixtape, which features the haunting melodica work of Addis Pablo (son of dub pioneer Augustus Pablo) over an eclectic bed of tracks mashing up classic ’70s rockers, Dr. Dre, and a dubplate version of Drake/Popcaan’s “Controlla.”

Equiknoxx and Addis Pablo: Majestic Melodies Mixtape (via SoundCloud)

Majestic Melodies is very different from Bird Sound in mood and tempo, but it seems to be driven by that same conceptual process—rhythmically reconciling the paradoxical. Gavsborg and Time Cow reconciled a few more paradoxes on a crackly mobile connection from Kingston to discuss their unique approach.

Pitchfork: How did Equiknoxx first come about and what roles do people play in the collective?

Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair: Equiknoxx originally started out as a group of four high school friends a long time ago, back in the year 2000, in Kingston. We started out rapping, basically. Eventually, the other guys went their own ways and I was standing alone. At the same time, there was this strange character on my email over the years, always sending me his tracks. Some I didn’t like, to be honest, but I could definitely hear the potential in others. What I was mostly interested in was that he thought very differently—kinda similar to me. Not the same, but similar. So around 2012, [Chung] sent something and I was like, “Aw, shit. He nailed it. This is mad.” After that, gradually, informally, he became a part of the collective.

And the material on Bird Sound Power is both of you together?

GB: Yeah. Around 2015, I got a call from a man called Samrai who is a DJ over in Manchester, UK, who was looking for tracks to play. Samrai formally introduced me to [Manchester DJ] Jon K, who introduced me to a label called DDS from Demdike Stare who said, “We’d really love to do an album with you guys.” We spent a year putting the tracks together, back and forth on the email, making simple edits to enhance each one. We called it “The Longest Email Thread Known to Man.” That went on almost every day for a couple months, until we finally agreed that this is the vision that we come up with for the Bird Sound Power album. It was very refreshing to have our first official album be a riddim-focused album, so the focus wasn’t around vocals. My mom was very happy about that. She always wanted to slam the songs out of her car but, as a Christian woman, she couldn’t because of some of the colorful content. She was finally able to like say to her friends: “Yo, here’s my son’s work: it’s clean, fun for the whole family!”

Equiknoxx: "Timebird" (via SoundCloud)

It’s a bit of a throwback to put out a full album of riddims like that these days. How did you make that decision?

GB: When Jordan and I started sending tracks back and forth in the early stages, were like, “Who’s gonna record on them?” And then we were like, “Nah, it doesn’t need it.”

So who comprises the Equiknoxx stable of artists at this point?

GB: It’s a simple crew. On vocals we have Shanique Marie, who travels with us on tour and normally does a live set singing. Kemikal is also a vocalist and he also did an independent project with Jordan. On production is Bobby the Blackbird, Time Cow, and myself. Naturally we have my younger brother, Brent Bird, hanging around the studio. That’s more or less the family, then there are the artists that we work with: Aidonia, Busy Signal, Masicka, RDX, Capleton, Beenie Man, Alozade, Elephant Man, and Chico.

Chico might just be my favorite—and most under-utilized—artist from that whole’90s singjayera. What are you working on with him?

GB: We have an upcoming EP with Chico, Alozade, and Kemikal. It’s an interesting sound with the three of them together that started with a song called “The Link” that Kemikal envisioned a couple of years ago, and that was one of the key tunes that brought us to the attention of the label in Manchester. But yeah, Chico is amazing. When we work with him we feel like we’re working with a vocal producer, and you don’t find that nowadays. He knows what he’s doing and how he want to hear himself. We learn a lot from him.

Equiknoxx: "The Link (Remix)" [ft. Alozade, Chico, and Kemikal] (via SoundCloud)

So thinking about how much the industry has changed since those early Equiknoxx tunes came out on 45, where is the dancehall industry headed in 2017 and where does Equiknoxx fit into that trajectory?

Jordan “Time Cow” Chung: At the moment the business is very artist-driven, but within Jamaican music we of course consider ourselves to be really in the dungeon of the dancehall. [laughs] We’re more interested in what dancehall can be. We’re trying to add uniqueness instead of just pushing out new riddims.

Who would you say are your peers or like-minded dancehall producers?

JC: You have some upcoming ones like Sky Ras, JLL, and the Wicked Wicked riddim from Young Vibez, so we try to bring those to the forefront as we’re doing what we do.

Equiknoxx Music : “Fly Away” [ft. Alozade & Gavsborg] (via SoundCloud)

There’s a wide range of obscure styles you guys are sampling—you don’t really expect a Silver Apples sample in the middle of a dancehall track. Where does that come from?

GB: I don’t own many records, but I have a few gems. Jordan is similar to me, but Jordan’s grandfather has a whole wall-to-wall room of interesting stuff, that’s where the Silver Apples would come in.

Similarly, my grandad would come across a lot of things that you wouldn’t necessarily find elsewhere living in [the Jamaican coastal city] Falmouth, even some white labels, from the Water Square record shop. I wasn’t handed down that collection, though; and a lot of them got damaged. Jamaica is like a harbor country, so just by walking downtown you hear sounds from all over. Kingston is one of the largest natural harbors in the world, so we’ve had mad ships coming in for hundreds of years, just leaving gems that have passed on through the generations. We’re definitely exposed to enough things in JA, it’s just if you choose to tap into that or not. A lot of people say it’s just take, take, take, but I disagree with that. We get a lot, too.

Sasha Perera isn’t completely sure whether music should offer a retreat from the outside world, or if it should be a tool for provoking social change. “A lot of musicians either want to make really politicized art,” she tells me via Skype in early May, “or they just make ambient music because they can’t talk about all the bad things that are happening.” On All of This, her roiling new album as Perera Elsewhere, she splits the difference with low-lit electronic pop songs that are structured but experimental, atmospheric but laced with languid vocal hooks, strange but approachable.

“In some ways, reality is so harsh that we should confront it and attempt to change things, but on the other side reality is so sick that if I don’t find a corner for me and the people I love to protect ourselves from the evil, it’ll be awful,” she continues. “So I’m in between both of these things. I’m creating an ‘elsewhere’ musically, for me and like-minded people to hide, but it also has to be a place to reflect on what’s going on in the world—we don’t want to live in a bubble, where we paint pretty pictures while everyone is dying outside the castle.”

Perera Elsewhere: "Something's Up" (via SoundCloud)

Perera first found a musical refuge of her own within the world of club music during her days as a raver in late-1990s London, as she dove headfirst into the breakbeat and jungle scenes in her teens and early twenties. The hybrid nature of those early experiences drew her in completely; the social aspect of it, the confluence of different people, technologies, and genres. “All these people would come together for this music, like some kind of ritual,” recalls the 39-year-old, sitting on the floor of her living room. “I was really touched by it.”

Perera is still a club kid at heart, but her proximity to sound system culture these days comes via her work as a DJ and general partygoer—she’s not keen on producing for it herself. Instead she loves to dabble in the jazz, hip-hop, electronic, and outré influences that converge in Perera Elsewhere.

Perera Elsewhere: "Happened" (via SoundCloud)

This rampant curiosity stretches back to her childhood in London, where Perera was born and raised, aside from a two-year stint in Singapore. At home with her parents, who are both originally from Sri Lanka, artists like Ravi Shankar, Boney M, ABBA, and Boy George provided some of the ambiance. Her mother had a penchant for classical music, and also encouraged a young Sasha to pursue her love of instruments, supporting her as she cycled in and out of piano, guitar, and violin lessons, before gravitating towards the trumpet. “I was probably the most ignorant person about the trumpet at first,” Perera admits, in her no-nonsense South London cadence, “but it was loud.”

Today, the trumpet is a staple of her live performances, and Perera handles almost all of the instrumentation on her songs, as evidenced by the brooding melodic textures of All of This; she took care of the production too. As a child she spent her free time learning the rudiments of recording by creating her own take on low-fi audiobooks, filled with narration and improvised sound effects captured on old tape decks lying around the house. Since then, of course, she has leveled up both in terms of skill and quality of equipment. Her current studio has an open-door policy, and Perera relishes having a workshop where other artists can come to work, a corrective of sorts to the lack of such a space when she was a teenager.

The lab is in Berlin, her home for the past 16 years and the place where her most important musical evolution took place. Not long after moving to Germany, Perera became the frontwoman for Jahcoozi, an experimental electronic trio that put out three studio albums throughout the 2000s. In Jahcoozi she was the MC, who would rap, sing and hype up the crowd with a band behind her. With Perera Elsewhere, she can focus more of her attention on the instruments, playing as many as she wants while keeping dance music on the cards—as an option rather than an obligation.

In the years between her debut album, 2013’s Everlast, and All of This, Perera took time to master instrumentation, songwriting, new facets of her singing voice, and the possibilities that minimalism leaves for them to flourish. The interlude also involved a good amount of travel, through India, Turkey, Africa, and beyond, as a means to see the world and broaden the space that Perera Elsewhere inhabits within it.

Pitchfork: How important is travel to your creative process?

Sasha Perera:Before I made music, when I was a student, I would work and save money to go backpacking in different countries alone. Over the years I’ve also been invited to do a lot of gigs and collaborations around the world. When I go, I take gear with me and do my best to use the situation around me to work. I really do enjoy collaborating with other people and travelling through music; it’s another way to relate to people because you have something to do together. I don’t want to limit my travels to Googling the best restaurants and hotels. Instead, I think: Why consume something when you can make something?

What prompted you to move away from London, and how did you choose Berlin as your new home?

I got so lucky, in some ways, with my version of “one thing leads to another.” I went to university in London and I didn’t know what I wanted to do initially, but I fell into doing European Politics and German purely because it was multidisciplinary and I was good at German for some reason. Then, I had to spend a year abroad in Cologne. I had no idea about Berlin but people started telling me crazy stories about this place where clubs stay open for weeks, secret underground stations where raves happen, and this creative DIY culture. I happened to go there in 1999, and saw how these people lived, and I thought, I’ve found my fucking purpose, man.

As soon as I got back from that trip I started telling people that I was going to move to Berlin by the end of the year—I don’t know if I really believed it but I said it so many times that it would’ve been so shameful if I hadn’t done it.

How was Perera Elsewhere born as a separate entity from Jahcoozi?

I was playing so much with the band, and I started to mess around with a guitar and this really nice microphone. On the recordings I would leave a lot of space for my voice, adding reverb and effects to my voice, and I was really shocked at the impact that minimalism could have, especially after being surrounded by hi-hats and massive bass sounds all the time. I was really impressed with how you could do so much with so little. I would make these tracks in my old apartment, and I enjoyed the reaction that I would get when I played them for people.

Perera Elsewhere: "The Other Side" (via SoundCloud)

In music today, three or four years is a long time between records. Did you ever feel any pressure to put out this new album any faster?

All the time. Because [musicians are] just narcissists! And you’re trying to make money from your music as well, otherwise I would just have my Bandcamp page and a job in something else, which I don’t. So you feel that pressure but you can’t really fall into it. Things could’ve happened much faster for me if I had been more clear about what I wanted to do, but it took me three years to work out that I wanted to make something that was in between an experimental noise record and a pop record.

I got much more comfortable as an artist in that time and I grew up in a couple of ways. The first version of this record had hardly any vocals, and it was just a lot of loopy experimental music. I forced myself to arrange it, and slowly realized that I could some write some songs for it.

Perera Elsewhere: "Karam" (via SoundCloud)

Right near the middle of the new album, on the song “Karam,” you put your spin on the 50 Cent song “Candy Shop.” How did that idea come to you?

It’s a really weird story, but between 2015 and 2016 I lived in Turkey. This guy I knew had a friend working for a distribution company that made one of the biggest TV shows in the world: It’s like Game of Thrones for the Middle Eastern market and almost 90 other countries around the world. I auditioned [for the show] not expecting anything, but they told me ‘You’re it!’ So I moved to Istanbul for seven months to film. The city is great, but I hated making the show because I’m used to being self-employed, and they lied to me about what I could do with my free time. The main actress was Greek so she had a translator, who was the only person that spoke any English on the set, and she hated the place as much as me. She’d sing “Candy Shop” all the time, and it sounded so sad and dark, so I got the idea from her! I recorded that track on set in Istanbul, using the microphone on my MacBook.

To what extent did you produce All of This? Was there a particular story you wanted to tell on this album?

I did all the production, except my friend did some extra work on two songs, and a few arrangement changes that taught me so much for the rest of the record. I played most of the instruments on there except for the drums. I don’t write songs with a view to making a concept album, there’s not really a formulaic approach. But in terms of the content, it usually stems from all the shit that’s happening in the world around us. Writing and making music is how I deal with it, so within the songs there are reflections on life and reality, and the reasons I want to escape it.

Anyone who has lived in New York for any significant amount of time has likely endured at least one tragicomic, claustrophobia-induced meltdown. The city is loud and endless, its citizens are frequently deranged, and it is sometimes terrifically difficult to get your little carton of half-and-half home from the grocery store without confronting one faith-shaking strain of perversion or another. Pockets of pure solace are tough to come by, which is why Robin Pecknold and I are hovering nervously outside a nondescript building in lower Manhattan, eyeing a doorbell labeled “Dream House.” As taxicabs and midday delivery trucks roar by, we exchange a long, anticipatory look. He presses the button.

We’re buzzed in and climb a staircase to the third floor, passing through several clouds of robustly scented incense en route. A moony-eyed attendant shifts a long braid from one shoulder to another and asks us to take our shoes off and tuck them under a wooden bench before entering the space—two thickly carpeted rooms connected by a short hallway.

The minimalist composer La Monte Young conceived of Dream House—an immersive sound and light installation built in collaboration with his partner, the visual artist Marian Zazeela—in the 1960s, though it has only existed in its present form and location since 1993. Each of the two rooms are filled with pink and purple lights oriented in various directions, some highlighting sculptural mobiles designed by Zazeela—little whirligigs, suspended from the ceiling, which create seemingly three-dimensional shadows. Meanwhile, sizable speakers broadcast a piece Young composed specifically for the site. He’s described it as “a periodic composite sound waveform environment created from sine wave components generated digitally in real time,” and it’s played on a customized Rayna interval synthesizer. A more sophisticated listener might be able to parse its particular tones, but to me it sounds as if a large, gray machine was meditating and got stuck on an especially dynamic “Om.”  

The experience is dramatically different depending on how you position yourself in the space. We enter, and Pecknold—who is tall and lithe, with kind eyes and short brown hair—immediately sits down on a pillow, and closes his eyes.

I was eager to visit Dream House with Pecknold in part because Crack-Up, Fleet Foxes’ new full-length record, is chiefly concerned with finding peace amid chaos. It’s also more dissonant and plainly mesmeric than anything the band has made before, and filled with these beautiful little half-admissions of inadequacy: “Was I too slow? Did you change overnight?” Pecknold wonders on “Third of May / Ōdaigahara.” It’s the kind of question a person asks when they are re-considering a failure that continues to befuddle them, hours or months or years later.

Since the last Fleet Foxes release, 2011’s Helplessness Blues, Pecknold moved from the Pacific Northwest to New York City’s Lower East Side, exchanging relative quiet for the established bedlam of Manhattan. “I felt like I was a little too West Coast—too much of a pushover,” he told me earlier in the day, over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Tribeca. “Coming here, I feel like I’ve gained some grit. It’s such a hard place to live sometimes. It steels you.”

Pecknold is gentle and intelligent, a hungry listener; talking with him, you get the sense that an antenna is always up and open, collecting new and better information about the world. After relocating to New York, Pecknold, then 26, enrolled as an undergraduate at Columbia University, where he began a major in English. He played some opening sets for Joanna Newsom. He co-wrote the score to an off-Broadway play. He participated in a note-by-note live recreation of No Other, Gene Clark’s 1974 folk-rock masterpiece. Mostly, though, he was trying to reason through the trajectory of his own life—what he wanted, what it meant, and how to get there without, well, cracking up.

Spend any time with Pecknold’s work, and it’s impossible not to hear a person carefully reasoning-through the total lunacy of being alive. Narratively, Crack-Up recounts some sort of loss; its source feels alternately romantic, political, creative, and spiritual. Pecknold sings, mournfully, of an uncertain future—until, on the record’s back half, he seems to reconcile everything.

“The record is about me going from being a solitary person, to reentering the band, reentering old relationships,” Pecknold says.

He admits that uncertainty and contradiction have been on his mind these past few years—all the ways in which two seemingly incompatible ideas can come to coexist. Wanting to be alone but needing others; feeling flummoxed by all the big existential questions, yet still wanting to live a full and generous life.

Pecknold titled the record in part after a three-part essay by F. Scott Fitzgerald that appeared in Esquire in the winter and spring of 1936. Fitzgerald understood that growing up is largely about having to reckon with oppositions in which both halves somehow prove true. “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise,” he wrote.

Of course, this requires more than a little self-deception, and Crack-Up contains multiple mentions of lies and lying: “Lies inside anyone you open,” Pecknold repeats on “On Another Ocean (January / June).” “But I know my eyes/They’ve often lied,” he admits on “Fool’s Errand.” Or, on “Third of May / Ōdaigahara”: “And as the sky would petal white, old innocent lies came to mind/As we stood, congregated, at the firing line.” Pecknold titled one song after Cassius of Rome, a leading instigator in the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar; one of the grisliest scenes in all of The Inferno is when Dante’s winged, three-mouthed Lucifer gnaws on Cassius, whose betrayal condemned him to eternal suffering, forever crammed, feet-first, into Lucifer’s maw. Cassius lied, and he was punished for it.

“I think about lying a lot,” Pecknold admits. But rather than an unforgivable sin, he figures lying as a kind of inevitable coping strategy: “Going back to the idea of balance—I’ve had a very objective mindset going into school, and at school. I was like, ‘OK, but what’s the objective right answer, in music?’ But there is no right answer,” he continues. “I can’t be this objective about everything, or about people. For example, if you were to say, ‘Life is not worth living, there’s no meaning to life,’ and you decided to take that as objectively true, then you’d need to establish something like a lie to be able to keep going—to give it meaning. One way of thinking about it is as deceiving yourself. Or, in relationships, when you’re trying to balance seeing someone as they really are versus the required romance—not necessarily romantic-romance, but the energy of romance...”

“Well, every human relationship is a kind of fiction,” I venture.

“Totally,” he says. “But in my early 20s, I was projecting my expectations onto everybody: This person is the damsel, this person is the villain, this person is my sidekick, this person is my hero. Making characters out of everyone. It’s kind of a survival mechanism, but it’s also reductive.”

On “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar,” the record’s six and a half-minute opening epic, Pecknold sings of his unfair expectations: “And the myth I made you measure up to/It was all just water, winding by you.”

Pecknold turned 31 earlier this spring. He has been writing songs since he was 15, and credits his parents with inspiring and supporting his work. His mother is an English teacher, and his father builds and plays guitars. “Music had been a dream of [my dad’s], so it felt cool to carry that on,” he explains.

After graduating from high school in 2004, Pecknold got a job at a restaurant called Bimbos Cantina, which was then a kind of epicenter of the Seattle alt-rock scene. “The music community was so accessible—every musician worked there, like, this guy was in Modest Mouse, this guy was in Band of Horses, this guy was in the Shins,” he says. “I knew that I just wanted to be playing music, and financially I didn’t really want to ask my parents to pay for college. So I was like, ‘Well, that’s my college. I can just go work with these guys and see what they play on the stereo.’ It was so clear to me what I wanted to do.”

When he was 20, he recorded a series of demos with the producer Phil Ek and his childhood friend Skyler Skjelset; these eventually became the Fleet Foxes’ self-titled and self-released debut EP. The band signed to Sub Pop, and another EP, Sun Giant, and two full-lengths followed: Fleet Foxes, in 2008, and then Helplessness Blues, in 2011. (Josh Tillman, who now records as Father John Misty, left the band somewhat acrimoniously, shortly after the promotional duties for Helplessness Blues were fulfilled; he and Pecknold have since reached a kind of quiet detente.) Pecknold moved to New York and started taking literature classes at Columbia a couple of years later.

Crack-Up is full of allusions to ancient texts: names, places, ideas. One track is titled “Mearcstapa,” a nod to a character in Beowulf, the epic, Old English poem composed sometime in the late 10th century. Grendel, one of the poem’s villains, is referred to as a mearcstapa, or a march-stepper—a figure that walks or haunts the borderlands, something between man and monster, between here and there.

“I put music aside for a while, because it was confusing,” Pecknold explains. “How do I work on the music I used to work on, while doing this other thing? I was also trying to figure out whether music should just feel good, or if it should be an intellectual problem that then gets solved through sound.”

We talk for awhile about the ways in which a university can confuse an artist—the strange tension between reason and whatever wild, alchemical reaction produces art. Music, like writing or painting or any other creative tradition, can be dissected and parsed and made sense of, but the process of breaking a craft into its constituent parts can feel alienating or misguided, too. In a classroom, it’s easy to undervalue the emotional weight of things. I tell him that during my own tenure at Columbia, I spent all my time sitting outside Dodge Hall, smoking and being mad.

“Same!” Pecknold says, laughing. “Sitting outside Dodge, smoking, being mad—that’s exactly what I wanted to be doing. I was 10 years late, but that was what I missed.”

There’s no talking or cell phone use permitted in Dream House, although it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to do either. La Monte Young believes that time is more essential to art than most of us are willing to let on—the way a work can ripen, change shape, evolve like a person does. The intensity of the environment levels nearly everything else. When you’re in Dream House, you’re in Dream House.

There are a few other people already there when we arrive—supine on cushions, sitting cross-legged, roaming—though we ultimately outlast them, posted up in opposite corners of the front room, occasionally padding toward or away from each other. The experience is somehow both incredibly loud and very quiet. Part of the thrill of visiting with an accomplice is sharing an encounter deliberately designed to be solitary, or at least interior—you lie down, you close your eyes, you move your head a little, you picture whatever it is you need to picture—and then when it’s time to leave, and you’ve laced your boots and zipped up your jacket and thanked the attendant, you immediately grab each others’ wrists and try to make sense of what just happened. You were alone, but you were in something together.

We decamp to a private listening room on the ground floor of a stereo store in SoHo, where we drink bottled water and scroll through a seemingly infinite library of songs, which we wrongly presume we can play as loudly as we want (when we crank the volume to uncivilized levels, a chiding little admonishment pops up on screen: “Wow! That’s a little loud for this room!”). Pecknold plays the Dirty Projectors’ “I See You”— singing along, beautifully, to the “Forgiveness, reconciliation!” part—and songs by Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, the Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir. He calls up a track from the Pet Sounds Sessions box set—a 50-second outtake from “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” in which Brian Wilson sings a vocal line, unaccompanied, before an engineer says, “Do it again,” and then brings in the stacked harmonies. Pecknold tells me he still listens to the clip all the time. He calls it thrilling.

We talk about the less obvious influence of minimalist composers like Young, and of Gnawa—an intensely hypnotic trance music, which is still played in the coastal cities of Morocco—on Crack-Up. Pecknold says he writes with an eye toward symbolic repetition (“All we do, this repeats,” he intones halfway through “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar”), which makes Crack-Up feel self-referential, contained. “It’s weird,” Pecknold said. “It’s weird to have a record that’s sort of just about itself.”

It seems unlikely there will be another significant hiatus in the band’s future. “I’d like to just make another album right now,” Pecknold says. Part of his impatience has to do with the strange and unsteadying process of watching a record land in the world and be consumed, parsed, judged. “I’ll pay attention to how this is received, and what people think of it, and that will inevitably change how I think about working on the next one,” he admits. “But I’d like the next one to be really glowing and ecstatic and kind of joyful. Because there’s some moodiness on this one that I feel like gets worked through by the end of the album.”

Often, Pecknold talks about the recording process itself as curative, a way of escaping his own mind and solving the exact same problems his music details and laments. “A lot of the songs were written in isolation,” he says. “And there’s a distance in some of the music, for me. Things are taking place past a window, or they’re about something that’s far away, or I’m in this one place, and then the subjects are out there. But the actual recording of those songs was like bridging that distance.”

On the lyric sheet, there’s a section from midway through “Third of May / Ōdaigahara” that’s printed in all capital letters: “TO BE HELD WITHIN ONESELF IS DEATHLIKE, OH I KNOW.” Pecknold sings the line slowly and deliberately. Anyone who has ever felt barricaded inside his or her own consciousness (or, worse, has loved someone who was) understands the grimness of the idea—the ways in which it can feel lonesome, impossible, deadly. As C.S. Lewis once said: The doors of Hell are locked from the inside.

“If the record is about any one thing, I’d say it’s just—no one can go it alone,” Pecknold finally says. “No one is an island. That’s the main take away from my experience of the last few years.”

Before we say goodbye, Pecknold and I meet up with his old friend Skjelset, who co-produced Crack-Up, to visit another solace-granting NYC institution: “The New York Earth Room,” an installation by the sculptor Walter De Maria, in which 280,000 pounds of dirt are spread across 3,600 square feet of floor space. It has been open and free to the public since 1977 and is dutifully looked after by Bill Dilworth, its lone and erstwhile steward for the past 28 years. Dilworth keeps track of daily visitors in a log book, using a curious system of notation he devised himself (he also waters and rakes the earth each week). Though De Maria has never spoken about his intentions for it, the piece seems designed to tap into some heavy, ancestral need to commune with land. It’s an idea that’s present, in one form or another, in all of Pecknold’s music.

When we arrive, Dilworth is reading a book about chopping wood. After we behold the sculpture for a few minutes—the most arresting part is the smell, dark and rich and fertile—Pecknold asks Dilworth if he can look at the log. Its pages are filled with what look like vertical scribbles—squiggly little hash marks that remind me of floaters, the translucent wisps that occasionally drift across the surface of a person’s eyeball. Sometimes, Dilworth, who is an abstract painter, will make a replica of a page from the log book. He asks Pecknold if he wants one. This seems like an honor.

“I’d love that,” Pecknold says. He pauses. “What date should I get?”

“The third of May!” I immediately suggest. I’m only half-joking. Besides being the title of one of Crack-Up’s best songs, it’s Skjelset’s birthday and the day that Helplessness Blues was released. I tell Pecknold that one of my favorite moments from an early version of the new record is a two-second introduction that precedes “Third of May / Ōdaigahara,” in which someone counts down, a guitar strums, someone else yells “Wait—” and then the song starts anyway. The entire progression seems to suggest something about the inevitability of forward motion. The way a wave crashes, the way we change.

Pecknold laughs, and agrees.

Primavera Sound brings out the gratitude in people: All weekend long at Barcelona’s seaside Parc del Fòrum, acts that played in past years sang the festival’s praises in a way that went beyond the usual lip service, while first-timers shared their excitement over finally making it there. Indeed, Primavera Sound can seem like an oasis for those who’ve tired of the overblown insanity of the American festival landscape, marred by lineup ubiquity and an overall sense of music-as-afterthought. Primavera just feels different—a little calmer, less about playing dress-up for Instagram, and more open to discovery. Here’s what stuck with us from this year’s fest, along with a gallery of portraits and live shots. –Jillian Mapes

Everything (But the New Songs) Now

I started Primavera with Arcade Fire, ended it with Arcade Fire, and spent the middle part watching their infinite content stream set the internet ablaze in hot takes. The revisionist history of this band taking place on both sides of the aisle right now is staggering. Partially it’s because Arcade Fire excel at turning their album cycles into events. For fans, it’s hard not to get at least slightly swept up with the sloganeering clues and secret shows and overwrought aesthetics they strategically drop at each LP kickoff. But even if you roll your eyes at these lifelong theater kids trying to convince you once again that they’re the biggest band in the world, you gotta give them credit for the precision of their game: At the exact moment they took a makeshift stage set up in the grass on Thursday evening for a surprise warm-up show, their fifth album, Everything Now, its lead single, and its accompanying tour were all announced. Needless to say, the kids up front lost their shit. 

For the bigness of the gesture, though, they only played two new songs at both the warm-up show and their headlining set Saturday: the ABBA-lite single “Everything Now” and the comparatively towering “Creature Comfort.” If the new album embraces AF’s apparent aspirations to continue moving towards dance music via the alluring, Suicide-like spazz of “Creature Comfort,” things could be a lot worse. Then again, I seemed to be in the minority when it came to “Everything Now,” at least among the Primavera crowds: even largely unheard, the song still swayed the audience and got them singing along to all those wordless melodies. When Arcade Fire can get people to do this—whether it’s whoa-ohhhh, woo-oh, or nah-nah-nah—their earnestness becomes undeniable to those who’ve ever been pulled to it. At this point in their career, they know when to deploy such moments of communion, opening their Saturday set with “Wake Up” and peppering in songs like “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” and “Rebellion (Lies)” at exactly the right moments. After the set, those whoa-ohs echoed dimly through the exiting crowd. And they probably always will. –JM

I Know There’s Gonna Be Good Times (Eventually)

Jamie xx didn’t make it easy on himself, agreeing to DJ on the main stage in place of Frank Ocean’s dropped set, just an hour or so after the xx headlined on Friday. So while he seemed to be conserving his energy during the first hour or so of his band’s performance, bassist/singer Oliver Sim, clad in disco sparkles, was having enough fun for the whole trio, coming out of his shell with some cheeky moves and banter. “I’m single and I’m a little bitter about it,” he shared before dedicating I See You opener “Dangerous” to all the single folks. He warned that they’d been messing up new song “Replica” live and that they may need to restart, a vulnerable moment that finally pulled the crowd close once the song got on the right track.

At their most subdued, the xx have become known as the sort of band that festival goers will talk through. The set’s initial visual subtlety didn’t do it any favors in this regard, but once the newer, more beat-based songs kicked in, things really started to hit, with techno-y transitions finally making the whole thing flow. When candy-colored strobes signaled the Romy Madley Croft-led “Loud Places,” a highlight from Jamie’s solo album In Colour, the audience was finally theirs. And though Jamie didn’t play much of his own material in his follow-up DJ set, he still won fans over with a meta nod: Frank’s “White Ferrari” met a too-short snippet of “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” to start, while “Gosh” mirrored awkwardly with “Nikes” to close. –JM 

Angel Olsen for Best Actress

Angel Olsen wanted to be an actress when she was a kid, and it’s a side of her that has manifested in its own way right alongside her music, peaking (thus far) in her “Shut Up Kiss Me” video. Nearly a year into playing songs off My Woman on the road, though, Olsen might just be outdoing the characters and comedic timing of that memorable clip in her live shows. You would think the innate intimacy of her songs would make her far more suited for smaller clubs, but those screens flanking both sides of a festival stage are ideal for capturing her subtly shifting facial expressions and mannerisms in all their glory. While Olsen’s stage banter has long been dry and amusing, very few acts in her world of tasteful indie rock are paying as much attention to the nuanced physicality of their performances as she is these days.

Throughout her Saturday-evening set, as musical epics like “Sister” settled into their natural lulls, Olsen often laughed cryptically, almost as if to herself. At other times, like on an extended version of “Acrobat,” she turned on a thousand-yard stare that deepened the already-staggering levels of depth contained within the Half Way Home highlight. I’m not saying an Angel Olsen arena tour is something that makes sense for her music (at least not right now), but if you have the chance to see her up on a giant screen this summer, take it. –JM

No One Knows Sampha Like His Three Drummers

With all due respect to Sampha’s gorgeous debut Process, it is not really the kind of album that seems to naturally fit into a festival time slot while it’s still light out. But I have to hand it to the London singer-songwriter-producer and his stellar backing band—shout-out to exuberant percussionist Pauli Lovejoy especially—for taking a deeply vibe-y record written in the wake of his mother’s passing and translating it to such a venue on Friday evening. The set’s arc was particularly effective, as Sampha and his three bandmates built the groove strategically, little by little, until the whole thing was buoyed by a vaguely tropical beat. 

Leading into “4422,” the ominous More Life standout led almost entirely by Sampha, the four musicians gathered in a circle at one corner of the stage for an energetic drum-off: one on beat pads, one on steel drum, another on snare, another on kick-drum. Sampha sang half the song from that spot, drums encasing his voice, before the band scattered across the stage to their usual positions. From there, they launched into an extended version of “Blood on Me” that made everyone in sight move, sway, or clap—a feat for such a serious song. Knowing he had the crowd in the palm of his hand, Sampha closed the set with the one Process song he couldn’t turn into a banger: solemn ballad “No One Knows Me Like the Piano.” Thankfully, it was the one point in the set where his band knew to leave him be. –JM

Bon Iver’s Distant but Oddly Engaging Stage Presence

These days, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon spends most of his set with a baseball cap and a huge pair of headphones on his skull while standing behind a bank of gear with a guitar around his neck. There’s so much going on on his stage—two drummers, a saxophone section, voices that are constantly moving between achingly pure and gnarled—that his presence makes it seem like he’s not initiating the music as much as he’s living inside of it. But that illusion always shatters whenever he starts to sing. The Vernon voice will always be his music’s most distinctive feature, what draws all fans closer and repels those who can’t deal with it, and 10 years into his career it only feels stronger, more flexible. The song selection drew heavily from new record 22, A Million, starting off with that album’s deep blasts of bass and Messina-mangled voices and then working backwards in the Bon Iver catalog, through a magisterial “Holocene” and explosive “Perth,” gradually shedding technology until it ended at an encore with Vernon alone onstage with his acoustic guitar singing “Skinny Love,” the song that put him on the map in 2008. The only logical step from there was silence. –Mark Richardson

Aphex Twin’s Infinite Flexibility

Richard James’ music is never just one single thing. Though he has a core identity as an artist, mostly based around his ear for strange but memorable melodies and his distinctively propulsive feel for rhythm, he can apply those qualities to any number of settings, from wispy piano miniatures to raging slabs of gabbafied noise. The Aphex Twin festival experience continues this trend, taking his essential aesthetic ideas—humor mixed with dark horror, uncannily physical explosions of sound—and putting them into a frame as tall and wide as a massive stage. He generally steered clear of recognizable tracks during his Primavera set (though one nearby trainspotter thought he heard elements from Jlin’s Black Origami), opting for a dense, flowing set heavy on ripping low end and general disorientation. The visuals were frequently based upon films of the front row of the crowd, which real-time processing twisted and bent until faces and bodies were distorted into Francis Bacon-like paintings in motion. The overall effect was one of sensory overload that just barely kept you tethered to James’ creative mind. –MR

Japandroids’ Two-Man Army

The wall behind Japandroids featured narrow strips of light that suggested stained glass, making the stage itself seem like a church. Their relentless commitment to rock music as a source of understanding and ultimately salvation has been evident all along, but seeing them playing in front of thousands brings their commitment into full relief. There’s no reason two guys on a stage should be able to channel this much raw energy and make this many people shout along and feel this much. Even those who didn’t get into Near the Wild Heart of Life (hand up) and mostly listen to a half-dozen or so favorites from the first two records (other hand up) could follow along. Onstage, guitarist Brian King and drummer David Prowse convince you that whatever song they’re currently playing is the one that will help you make sense of your life. –MR

When Music at a Festival Isn’t Festival Music

Large festivals bring a very specific set of expectations: crowd-pleasing, uptempo sets that generally offer some semblance of a party. William Tyler’s turn at the Pitchfork stage on Friday just as the sun was going down took a different tack. Tyler’s low-key instrumental rock, as heard on his recent album Modern Country, mixes spacey krautrock textures with slow-rolling twang—an explosion in the sky that turns out to be the aurora borealis. Though you could see people close to the front casually talking to friends during his set, the fact that the music could so easily slip into the background was not to its detriment. On the contrary, it seemed true to is spirit, a heavenly ambiance that makes you notice what’s around you.

On Saturday, Gas was similarly low-key, but to a much different purpose. Playing mostly highlights from his new album Narkopopp, Wolfgang Voigt made no concessions at all to the setting, essentially giving wired-up festival-goers only a short distance from the banging disco set of John Talabot a chance to shift to a lower gear. Where the Tyler vibe was about a chill space, Voigt’s music and visuals very much demanded attention, but in a different way. His glimmering drones, heavy on bass and sometimes with a steady 4/4 kick drum pulse, create a feeling of uneasy immersion, like you’re being pulled into something but you’re not sure of what you’ll find when you get there. The accompanying video, variations of which he’s been using in his live shows over the last decade, basically brings his spooky album covers to life, as a camera moves in long takes through a forest underbrush filled with blue, red, or green light. The entire Gas project was famously inspired by a Voigt acid trip in the Black Forest, and the arboreal motif made you think about how the woods can be both a personal refuge and a place for malevolent forces to hide. Like the severed ear that the camera drops into in the opening sequence to Blue Velvet, Gas’ multimedia show suggests that there’s always something more happening just beneath the surface. –MR

Here is a song called “Daddy’s Car.” If it appeared in some YouTube ad for Bounty paper towels, you probably wouldn’t blink. It sounds like a fourth-generation photocopy of the Beatles. Under normal circumstances, I would probably listen to it once, deem it “successfully generic” and move on.

But “Daddy’s Car” was written under highly abnormal circumstances; it was dreamed up by a computer’s brain. That brain was built by a Sony-owned software company called Flow Machines, which tapped its vast neural network to compose a melody in the “style of the Beatles,” a melody that was then tweaked and finessed by a French musician named Benoît Carré. For all its apparent unoriginality, “Daddy’s Car” is one of the most remarkable unremarkable songs ever written.

Computers are writing more and more music these days. But they’re not following a mysterious, inward-springing muse, humming melodies because they liked the way the clouds looked outside the window that day. No, like everything else machines do, they are making music because we are telling them to—and companies are investing millions of dollars in this complicated act of ventriloquism. Besides Flow Machines, which is funded by a $2.5 million grant from the European Research Council, there is also Magenta, an initiative launched by Google last year.

Here’s the thing: We really, really want our machines to talk to us. To us, for us, in our own voices, in a voice we’ve never heard before—it doesn’t matter, we just want the company. Ever since the human voice shot across telephone wires, we have been staring at cold coils and trying to animate them. By now, we’ve got the talking part pretty much down—we can wake up our computers by yelling “hey” at them, or tell them to remind us to watch the Warriors game six days from now, or ask them absently to dim the lights a little, and they’ll comply.

The next logical step is to make them sing and play to us. But giving machines a creative voice, literal inspiration (inspirare, meaning “to breathe”)—that is a much slipperier problem, tougher to program, than making them talk. To hone in on the luminous stuff coming out of a mouth or an instrument, to capture the sounds themselves, let alone ones abiding by their own internal logic and order—what’s the math for that? Where do the notes stop and the music begins?

Douglas Eck works at Magenta, an offshoot of the artificial-intelligence project Google Brain that aims to develop “algorithms that can learn how to generate art and music.” He’s an engineer as well as a musician. “The pinnacle of my career was in my early 20s, I played a lot of bluegrass and punk in coffee houses in Indiana; Johnny Cash meets Johnny Rotten. I had dozens of people see me play live,” he cracks. He’s thought a lot about the difference between the notes and the music, in a philosophical sense. 

Perhaps surprisingly, Eck rejects the fundamental idea of a Turing Test for a pop song. He doesn’t want Magenta to fool listeners, or replace musicians.  “We’re not chasing the idea that we can make a human-feeling music without humans,” Eck says. “I’m not that interested in being able to push a button and have a computer make something that is emotionally evocative by itself. While I think that’s an interesting goal, it’s not my goal.”

The biggest stumbling blocks he and his team hit, he admits, were human—and not machine-made. Good old cognitive bias reared its head: “We didn’t start by thinking about what musicians want, which is funny and surprising because we’re all musicians,” he says, laughing. “The first round of Magenta looked like it was engineered by a bunch of Googlers.” 

Poking around the open-source forum as a layperson quickly confirms Eck’s diagnosis. It’s a place of command lines and prompts, a coder’s realm. “We’re still stuck in that mode,” he says, adding somewhat comically, “and we’re kind of engineering our way out of it.”

“This kind of problem shows up everywhere,” he continues. “One challenge for self-driving cars is that you’re used to making eye contact with the driver before you know if it’s safe to cross the street. But how do you make eye contact with a driverless car? For the same reason, building machine-learning tools that musicians actually use is tough.” They have to pass “the guitar pedal test,” Eck says, presumably meaning they beg musicians to pick them up, fiddle with them, and see what kind of funny sounds they can make.

For now, though, Magenta is a playground of coders, and they are uploading their early results for each other’s perusal, often with a bracing dash of self-deprecation. “I know it’s a bit cheesy but I hope you enjoy,” writes user Jose Cano of his Magenta collaboration. It is, for sure, a bit cheesy. The piano on the piece feels clumsy, kind of like a beginner student who has just discovered the satisfying tang of noodling up and down the harmonic minor scale. When the Magenta-generated synth tries going beyond that, it is immediately out of its depth, hitting notes outside the logical framework. The vocabulary is limited, but you sense an intelligence feeling its way around some basic rules.

For his part, Eck takes a bit of a “polar bear riding a tricycle” attitude towards machines making music—it’s probably more impressive the bear is doing it at all, nevermind its skill level. He says he’s OK if some of the musical experimentation that volunteer users trade with Magenta’s team “kind of sucks.” It’s a refreshingly humble attitude from a bunch of Google engineers. “If Frank Ocean came along and said, ‘Let’s collaborate with Magenta,’ I might say, ‘It’s not the time.’”

Nonetheless, what Eck wants, and what Magenta so far lacks, is a team of musicians playing around with it, bending the software into shapes the engineers could have never imagined. “Look what happened with the drum machine,” he says. “It became brilliant when it got used for creative purposes for which it wasn’t intended. Maybe I have a Magenta model that’s trained to generate new sounds, or new sequences of melody, but what makes it interesting is that another artist comes along and plays with it.”

Around the time of our interview, Magenta unveiled a new tool called NSynth—a neural network that has been trained on nearly 300,000 instrument sounds. The way it has “learned” these sounds represents a leap in thinking: Usually, when computers reproduce sounds, they reduce the physical vibrations of sound waves into numbers that approximate those vibrations, and then the machine crunches those numbers. That’s how you end up playing flutes and trumpets and cellos on a keyboard. 

NSynth operates on a slightly higher plane. Instead of converting waves to numbers, it works from a series of “ideas” programmed into its head already about what instruments sound like—this is the stuff of cortexes, not brain cells. In effect, it’s basically a smart synth, and its neatest trick is the ability to crossfade between two sounds in its database to make a new one. So when you ask it to blend, say, the sound of a goose honk and a harp, it spits something out that indeed sounds like a strange approximation of those two things. With a little doing, you can import those sounds into your home studio.

Playing around with the dials and fader is fun, but it feels more like the past than the future: I’m reminded of my older brother’s little toy Casio in the mid-’80s, and its voice recorder. Was mixing goose honks and a harp much different from recording curse words into a microphone so I could play “Chopsticks” with them? NSynth ultimately feels more like being shown the parts of airplane wing than flying.

In the realm of musical AI, Flow Machines feels a bit more like liftoff. Click around on their website, and it will eagerly show you how it learned to write a harmony for Beethoven’s Ode to Joy that was directly inspired by Bach chorales. Then, watch a video of the Flow Machine’s in-house singer-songwriter, Benoît Carré, perform a fairly stupefying one-man rendition of the Beatles “I Feel Fine” with a “smart” loop pedal created by the company. Instead of recording what you tell it to, the Reflexive Looper “listens” to your playing and makes decisions, on its own, what to record and loop. It is also intelligent enough to take that looped material and transpose it, on its own, into a new key. Watching Carré test-drive it in real time is breathtaking.

Where Magenta bills itself as a “research project,” Flow Machine is focused on output; there will be a compilation album made by a series of artists using Flow Machines’ software soon, on its own label. François Pachet, the head of Flow Machines, isn’t ready to share specific details on the album project, but he hopes it will kick Flow Machines, and the larger project of AI-assisted music in general, into a new phase, one where the presence of AI ceases to be the talking point. 

“When we launched the original tunes, people listened to the technical artifact—now, we’d like to be judged only on the music,” he says, laughing. “It’s going to be hard.” 

Flow Machines works differently than Magenta. It is a vast database of songs and styles. You pick a few from its vault as inspirational starting points, not much different from how humans write songs on their own. Then you tell the software a few things about the music you want it to generate; not too many short notes, for example, or not too many chords; medium tempo, with some inverted chord voicing. Then Flow Machines gets to work and starts spitting out ideas: You keep the ones you like. You can even zero in on part of a melody and ditch the rest, encouraging the software to develop a single idea further. 

In other words, Flow Machines is sort of a virtual musician. It’s limber and responsive enough to extemporaneously draw on a rich base of references but it can also collaborate. It can tweak its phrasing, play it a little less like this and a little more like this, draw out a phrase or get rid of a frilly turnaround, based on a person’s input.

Flow Machines has to both learn to make music and to make music with others, and Pachet can’t think of any other machine learning that resembles it. “You give an idea, and the system fills in the blanks, but then you criticize the results,” he says. I ask him if voice texting—in which a phone has to be able to both understand and recognize every word in the English language and also be able to interpret my peculiar way of speaking it—is close. “Not really,” he says. “Unless you are asking your phone to take your voice text as a prompt and write a new paragraph in the style of William Faulkner, or Obama.”

There are a couple of well-known thought experiments about machine consciousness. One of them is called “The Chinese Room.” It was first posed by the American philosopher John Searle in 1980, and this is roughly how it goes: You are locked in a room. Someone feeds you pieces of paper with Chinese writing on them through a slot in the door. You don’t speak or understand a word of Chinese, but you have a roomful of books in your room that tell you which Chinese symbols to copy back. You dutifully copy those Chinese letters by hand and pass them back through the slot to your mysterious interlocutor. You don’t know what the Chinese letters that you’re reading say, nor do you know what you are writing back. As far as you know, you’re trading recipes, or comparing bathroom tiles, or debating the nature of the universe. 

But the people on the other side of the room would have no idea just how ignorant you are. To them, you are a sophisticated and fluent Chinese speaker participating in a meaningful discussion. This was Searle’s metaphorical argument against conscious machines, which, he argued, played the role of the blank copyists in the room. Manipulation of symbols is one thing, but innate comprehension of those symbols is another.

This is a neat metaphor for the music being made by Magenta and Flow Machines. When I ask both Douglas Eck and François Pachet about their theories of machine consciousness, both are brusquely unsentimental. “This is a technology,” Eck insists. “Try to think of an art form that uses zero technology. In every case that I’ve looked at, when we’ve used new technology, it’s always made us more creative. We should admit that our brains are not all that smart without an environment to lean on. For example, most of us can’t even do long division without technology in the form of paper and pencil.”

Pachet offers a similar answer. He thinks that Flow Machine is capable of generating “perfectly good” songs all by itself, but that truly unique ones only happen with an artist present. “There are so many choices to make when writing a piece of music,” he says. “Only an artist can make the sort of choices that result in a great piece.”

Those decisions—phrasing, timing, feeling—happen at a level that machines don’t know how to aim for, at least not yet. Truly great music is born of a burning desire to communicate, as well as good, old-fashioned accidents of misunderstanding, which humans still seem to have the market cornered on. Excitement, which has been the divining rod leading most human investigations, still seems foreign to processing systems. You can teach machines to spin sugar, but not to crave it. 

And yet, Pachet notes, sometimes the software generates stunning music anyway, all on its own. “Sometimes, it will map a guitar line onto a new song, and it works so well; it’s great, and we don’t know why. And the system, to be honest, doesn’t know either—it has no ideas on its own about what’s a ‘good’ generation or a ‘bad’ one.” This doesn’t feel so different from humankind’s relationship to music in general; we love certain sounds and decide we can’t live without them, while others repulse us. Do we really understand why? We try to explain it, to ourselves and to others, but the impulse, and the base-level attraction, occurs somewhere beneath our conscious minds’ reach.

This is why, ultimately, Pachet doesn’t have any truck with grand theories of machine consciousness. Despite working on what feels like one of the final frontiers of human behavior—is anything more irreducibly human than music?—he doesn’t see a ghost in the machine, a latent soul waiting to rise from the lines of code. He compares the modern advancements of musical AI with the birth of the digital synthesizer. “That was just a tool, and this is exactly the same thing,” he says. “The tool does not have any idea about what it creates, and this is just a new generation of tools. We just have to learn how to use them.”

It’s ironic, or maybe appropriate, that the only person I speak to who waxes mystical about the sounds these programs make is a musician. Benoît Carré’s full-time job is to collaborate with Flow Machines, exploring its quirks and taking it for test-drives every day. Intriguingly, working with this sophisticated algorithmic software has plugged him into the more subconscious side of his songwriting brain. 

Take “Mr. Shadow,” for instance, a song Flow Machines generated working from hundreds of American jazz standards. The melody was one of countless results that the program spit out—it captured Carré’s imagination, and he built the song from there. He is entranced by the way the software “reads” human voices, and is convinced it taps into something elemental about them. “It’s like if I captured the soul of the singer,” he says. “What I get is not a voice that tells me stories with lyrics. I get an emotion, a style, a way of singing—things that are the essence of the singer. It’s like an abstract song, but very emotional. That’s what I find most interesting about this tool; you recreate a sense of listening to music like if you were a child who didn’t understand every word, but you get the feeling. It’s a new kind of song.”

Music making is, at its root, a sort of dreaming—in making it, we are closer to our subconscious than we are, arguably, with any other form of artistic creation. The only substance we are pushing is air, and once that air goes still, the medium dies, and all we have are recordings. It is the most ethereal of all the arts, and as machines take over more and more of the “manual labor” of the job, musicians might very well be freed up to delve even deeper into those dreamscapes.

“When I’m playing with Flow Machines, I’m more connected with my unconsciousness and my feelings, and less with my mind,” Carré says. “It’s very instinctive. The music that you make with those tools helps you to go further inside yourself, to explore the shadow side of your creativity. I’m discovering a new way to make music, yes, but maybe I’m also discovering a style. The melodies that come out are not in your style, but they are the result of your choices. But there’s something more, something augmented, something that doesn’t seem like our reality.”

Carré is more likely to think of Flow Machine as “an intelligence,” which is the word he uses to describe playing with the Reflexive Looper. He’s made the most music with these machines, after all, and he is the one with their melodies in his head; they feel quite real to him. “When I work with Flow Machines, I feel like I’m collaborating,” he notes. “I do not feel alone. These programs are proposing melodies to me that I can sing in the shower the next morning. They are melodies that obsess me sometimes, because they are really different. It’s like when you are about to sleep: You have thoughts, but you don’t identify them; they are real, but not real. There is something otherworldly about them.”