Three albums and one book

Music and words I've been leaning on

Today I just want to share a few things I’ve been spending time with—three albums and one book—with some brief reflections on what’s been resonating, and when I’ve been turning to them.

ganavya — Nilam

There’s a kind of spacious unfolding in the way this album is constructed. A gently hypnotic easing-in that gradually opens up. Something about the way it moves from the second track, “Song for Sad Times,” into the third, “Not a Burden,” gives me chills every time—it feels like it calls the heart to attention, brings me to presence. Ganavya’s voice is, simply put, a balm. A few tracks later comes “Nine Jeweled Prayer” featuring her parents Ganesan & Vidya Doraiswamy, which feels like the centerpiece of the record: a long moment of grounding and transmission. The entire album is tremendously patient and beautiful, suffused with devotion and deep feeling. And the final “Sees Fire” will break your heart. I’ve been starting many of my days with it, and it’s been helping me to find something resembling a steadiness in my step, in the midst of it all.

Released May 23rd, 2025 on Leiter Verlag.

LIUN + The Science Fiction Band, Lucia Cadotsch & Wanja Slavin — DOES IT MAKE YOU LOVE YOUR LIFE?

I’m kind of addicted to this one right now. There’s a dreamy kind of alt-pop sheen to the production of this album that feels intoxicating. The melodies are catchy and the rhythms are danceable, but underneath that surface is a bed of subtle harmony, textural specificity, and a real sense of adventure. It scratches an itch for something I’ve been wanting to hear for a long time but wouldn’t have known how to name. “KATZE” is a beautiful shapeshifter of a song which evolves in cinematic ways, culminating in what I might call, hmm… an electro-Gamelan breakdown? I dunno. But I love it. I’ve been listening to this while walking around various cities on tour. There’s something broken-hearted but also uplifting in it.

Released on May 23rd, 2025 on Heartcore Records.

ØKSE - ØKSE

This record is a total banger. Mette Rasmussen’s saxophone is raging, expressive, and angular. Savannah Harris and Petter Eldh form a drum-and-bass team of doom. And Val Jeanty’s electronics are essential, serving as both glue and portal. Several tracks feature guest rappers, whose verses are razor-sharp and fully integrated into the fabric of the music, not grafted on as an afterthought. “Three Headed Axe” is the track I first become obsessed with (it’s on one of my recent playlists), but there’s so much more to explore. “Fragrance” starts out in a gnarly kind of swing before having the ground pulled out from under it multiple times in a series of disorienting but compelling rhythmic reframes. I’ve been finding myself reaching for this music during plane rides these days. It’s dizzying and cathartic.

Released on August 9th, 2024 on Backwoodz Studioz.

Each of these albums creates its own distinct world, but there are shared threads that, to my ears, somehow tie them together—enough to make them feel coherent when placed alongside one another. Give them a listen. I’d love to hear what you think.

And now: a few words about a book I just finished reading, without a smooth transition, because there isn’t one.

Omar El Akkad - One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

One of the clearest, most unsettling things I’ve ever read. It’s not just about what has been happening in Gaza—it’s a reckoning with the structures that allow it. In particular, “well-intentioned” Western liberalism, and the violence that it enables while appearing to oppose. How we’re taught to value civility over truth, optics over justice, language over life. This book made me confront things that I know, but often allow myself to forget. It brought with it the sickening recognition of how easy it is to benefit from systems I never chose—but have never fully resisted either. Reading it, I found myself filled with grief and anger. Not only for what’s being done, but for how effectively I’ve been trained to look away.

Here’s a few excerpted passages—some of the many that have stayed with me:

Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist's every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate. Any population on whom this asymmetry is imposed will always be the instigators, the cause of what is and, simultaneously, the justification for what will be. The savage outside does, the civilized center must respond.

Because, so the story goes, this is what must be done.

Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.

Please read this. It’s an essential book for our times.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/777485/one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this-by-omar-el-akkad/