constellations #113, guest star: major works

Hi again. Today’s constellations is a “guest star” edition, in which I hand the mic over to someone I love. Previous guest stars have included writer and producer Elle Mannion, poet and artist Madeline Zappala, and vintage clothing seller Sean Hagerty.

Today’s missive comes from the designer and artist Matthew Lewicki, who also happens to be the great love of my life. His commitment to art and his open-minded approach to considering creative work has shaped my life immensely, so I am very glad he agreed to write for constellations this month about his relationship to a few specific pieces. I hope you love it! Here’s Matt:

My most anticipated album of the year has been out for months, but I still haven’t given it a proper listen. Learning by Listening Vol. 9: Learning to Make Noise: Toward a Process Model of Artistic Practice within Experimental Music Scenes isn’t an album you can just hit play on. It’s like Dark Side of the Rainbow, where you need to sync up two pieces of media just so. The first part is the screen reader audio from a peer-reviewed journal article by Peter J. Woods. The other is an audio supplement from Strategic Tape Reserve on Bandcamp.

The preface to the audio supplement says you’ll need to pause and adjust the two pieces when they inevitably fall out of sync due to buffering, notification interruptions, and needing to flip the cassette (if you were lucky enough to get one). It warns that downloads of the screen reader audio don’t include captions for the article’s figures, so those need to be downloaded separately and manually spliced into the main audio with a DAW. The preface then recommends rearranging any furniture you need to in advance of listening, which is when I hit pause.

I already spend plenty of time untangling small technological problems. I could listen to the two parts separately—is that something? Why submit myself to this work of art? I’m busy.

Okay, I’m not that busy

I recently spent an entire long weekend talking with two of my dearest boys while we hid out on Cape Cod. We’d planned to catch a movie or something, but the hours passed and we stayed on the porch. All three of us had been laid off within the last two years, so there was a lot of commiserating, but we also helped each other find things to celebrate. Some rambling, but the bulk and specificity of the conversation made the weekend completely full and satisfying. Speaking for myself, there was relief in simply not feeling alone.

From the same bit of coast, in the summer of 2021, I read Moby-Dick. I am (according to Riss) a slow reader, so the nearly-700-page book was an especially large undertaking for me. I lugged that thing everywhere until the pages were encrusted with salt. I’d read it while up to my waist in Buzzards Bay, glancing up at New Bedford across the horizon, the novel’s point of departure. The book demanded a wide berth in my mind that summer, seemingly relevant to everything in my life. As I surveyed the wreckage of the pandemic, I had an infinite scaffold to make sense of and give forms to the unfathomable. It threw up a field of stars for me to trace my own constellations.

Basically nobody else in my life has read Moby-Dick. When they’d ask me what was happening in it, I’d say I was learning about “the monstrous pictures of whales,” or how to render whale oil, or about the concept of the color white. Or I would just say, “It’s awesome.”

Buzzards Bay with New Bedford on the horizon

Diamond Jubilee, Cindy Lee’s hefty triple album, isn’t on streaming, so you’ll have to listen to the whole two hours via Bandcamp’s janky and unreliable player or buy it on the artist’s website. Once you buy it, finding two hours to listen probably doesn’t fit neatly into your typical media habits. It luxuriates in the past and is a memory even as you’re listening to it. At first, you’ll feel sure you’ve heard these songs before, until you realize maybe you’ve never heard anything like this before. Its duration and palpable earnestness turn sentimental trappings into a genuinely embodied performance.

Last week, I finally saw Cindy Lee, after a year of waiting following her cancelled tour. She emerged through a curtain of fog in a gold sequin dress, white boots, fur coat, and glowing stage makeup. From my vantage, the image was cut directly from Club Silencio, or maybe it was the Bookhouse. She played a ghostly lick on a strapless Gibson SG. It slowly and slyly worked itself up as Lee laserbeamed the audience before demurring with a Dick Dale flourish. The crowd went wild. The spell was cast. She removed her coat and the crowd hollered.

I had a momentary vision of my grandmother, beehive hairdo and all, through my grandfather’s eyes. It brought me to tears. Then I was caught off guard again mid-set by a familiar litany: “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.” Backing vocals replicated the call and response from a Catholic Mass, which many no doubt recognized, but few responded to even on the second and third passes. To this Lee gave a smirk, which reminded me of screwing around with my siblings as a kid and receiving a sideways glance from our mom in a church pew. I haven’t stopped thinking about that moment. Here it is.

***

The question of music discovery came up and I repeated something I’ve said a lot in the past year. “I feel stuck.” There’s this record from a couple years ago and ever since I heard it, nothing else has really hit the same. It sounds of this world in a rare way.

The record is DJ E by Chuquimamani-Condori—another album that is not available to stream outside of Bandcamp. The artist purposefully avoids distribution on a platform that actively hates artist and listener alike and wishes it could replace both with robots trading crypto, which feels like a way of asking: If you can take this small step to encounter this music, what else might you be willing to endure? DJ E is “unmastered,” which technically means nothing is compressed or overly smooth and touched-up, but at a higher level it means the album is not made to be easily digested and commoditized. The artist is in control and they’re presenting what they want how they want. It is an overwhelming, even crushing, expression.

There are plenty of artists whose music sounds contemporary. But DJ E is genuinely built from the anxieties, epiphanies, uncanniness, and excess of our current age. It’s all mixed signals and too loud and really full of trash and distortion. There’s a pop-country song on in Target and there’s a kid playing with a light up sword and that guy’s crazy ringtone and a TV aisle blaring and once you get home you want to dissociate or find some kind of euphoria to make the overload bearable, and sometimes you do, and sometimes you watch 100 TikToks at 2x. Despite all this, DJ E leaves me feeling hopeful and glad to be alive now. Like my weekend with the boys, Moby-Dick, or Diamond Jubilee, the colossal mass of history and emotion, so big and awesome you need to supplicate yourself or be ruined, isn’t actually bearing down on you—it’s holding out a hand.

Something will pull me off this album eventually. It’s probably already been released and I just haven’t heard it yet (like this Learning by Listening tape). Or maybe I haven’t found anything I like as much as DJ E because art like that just doesn’t come around too often. In the meantime there’s a new Chuquimamani-Condori release I can almost play around normies and this video, which represents maybe my new favorite genre, which I’m calling “compressed lute with sword clatter.” Close your eyes and play the video. Doesn’t that make you feel something special? Isn’t it kind of similar to the feeling you have day to day, too?

Chuquimamani-Condori aka DJ K’oa aka DJ Uskullu aka DJ Ocelote aka DJ E

What I love about these works is that in a time of convenience and cheap cliche, they offer staggering breadth and depth, unrestrained self-serious expression, and a challenge that, for me and the way my mind works, pays off. Things that are “awesome” are rarely soothing. They are more often horrifying, intimidating, and beyond our grasp or capacity. They take effort to grapple with, but that effort forms a deeper bond that can change you irrevocably.

So, as the holidays approach, you’ll be assaulted with cheap, derivative, AI-infested media and recommendations for ways to smooth out your brain life. My recommendation here: Submit yourself to something truly awesome. Something scary and intimidating and challenging. Something (like writing this post) that you don’t know if you can do. Submit yourself to the piece, the process, something bigger than yourself. And if you do, let me know what happens.

Wow! :’) Thanks to Matt for writing that, and thanks to you for reading. If you enjoyed this newsletter, consider embarrassing Matt in public by loudly expressing your enthusiasm the next time you see him.¹ I (we) hope you get swept off your feet by an awe-inspiring piece of art this month. See you next time.

xo,
M

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P.S. This time last year I was: celebrating one hundred editions of constellations; and before that, thinking about types of guys; celebrating metonic cycles; and playing the best game I’ve ever encountered

P.P.S. Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor; Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin; Herculine by Grace Byron; the new EP from Parts Work (aka Frances Quinlan & Kyle Pulley); the new Snocaps record (which I reviewed for Pitchfork); Eliza McLamb’s Good Story (which I also reviewed for Pitchfork); the new Robyn single, to which I have been listening compulsively; this extremely moving episode of the podcast Death, Sex & Money featuring my friend Claudia Morales; a bunch of trips to the movie theater to see: One Battle After Another, Peter Hujar’s Day, and Bugonia; a bunch of shows: Wednesday at Brooklyn Steel, Radiator Hospital at Baby’s, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma at Public Records, Flock of Dimes at National Sawdust, Krill at Nightclub 101; the play Liberation, which I loved so much; this essay about the so-called masculinity crisis; this very moving essay about choosing to become a parent; the spicy sesame ramen at Pickerel in Providence, a meal I fantasize about often

1. Alternately, consider hiring him! He designs for web & print, has lots of experience in user interface and visual identity design, and is currently open to freelance & full-time work. Sorry to be a shill but I know he would do the same for me <3