The beauty in spontaneity is captured through music much more seamlessly than in any other art form. This seems to stem from music’s temporal form, which makes the listener able to perceive spontaneity only moment by moment, fleeting and disappearing to make space for the next one. When we think about our favorite records, songs, or performances, we can’t grasp them as one would a finished painting.

More about: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Susie Ibarra, YoshimiO

The word “mesmerize” is derived from Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century physician who believed that animal magnetism could be reinforced and strengthened by sounds. Instruments, especially the glass armonica, figured notably in Mesmer’s experiments on human patients, many of whom would later report musical hallucinations. Decades later, neurologists at France’s Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital used tuning forks to induce supposed trances in their patients.

More about: Hailu Mergia

Fred Welton Warmsley III has found a home. A home! And the soothing ease of settling into space…

But what is a home? It is a building as much as it is a dwelling. The sounds of Tahoe sing the emergence of the voice, which, in the yearning for a more blissful existence, creates space in which to inhabit at the very instant it yearns for it. Or: in the beginning was the voice.

More about: Dedekind Cut

n.b. For months, I thought Ryuichi Sakamoto had died and that his masterwork async was the composer’s Dead Letter to no one sent from nowhere. “Diagnosed with cancer,” I read, still reeling from those other great love letters to life sung by those with leaden lids. I had read of his sickness, but before reading the entire story — that he overcame his sickness — the sounds substantiated my misbelief. Surely only someone peering past life’s precipice could have whispered what they saw there.

More about: Alva Noto, Andy Stott, Arca, Cornelius, Electric Youth, Fennesz, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Motion Graphics, Oneohtrix Point Never, Ryuichi Sakamoto, S U R V I V E, Yves Tumor

Profanity, especially in art, has an unusual, two-pronged appeal: grossly, profanity is socially taboo; radically, profanity connotes temporality. Profanity by nature is pervasive, yet even in profane spaces, blurting out profanities risks provoking language and morality policing. This is why Chicago rapper Elizabeth Harris, professionally dubbed cupcakKe, is as shocking as she is relatable; this shit is all commonplace, but it is also — if not novel — avant-garde in its own ostensible unspeakableness.

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As it is ever overwhelmingly loaded to be an American (let alone a patriotic one), this Toronto-based Canadian-American’s project title is all the more compelling in its estranged branding. It is huge to feel cut off from a group, and America is vast and varied enough to continuously provide horrific to transcendent answers to this common dilemma. Although we can ultimately choose with whom (or whomn’t) we align ourselves, we are nonetheless subject to fate and its accomplices.

More about: U.S. Girls