Reach 17.02.25 | Updates; Radio; What's happening?
A mid-month missive bringing you up to speed on revent writings and radio shows, and a little about what's coming up next for the newsletter and social media.
It’s been a month since the last Reach update, but in spite of that there’s been a lot on the go behind the scenes/screens here. Foremost amongst these has been the end-of-January deadline for a series of five articles I’ve written for Easterndaze, the first of which — an uncut interview with the ESTROGUN collective — I shared in my previous update.
Since then two more have been released. The first is another bumper read at about 5.5k words, another interview but this time with three informants, Famalay, Temple of, and DJ/promoter TakaDumm of the Nūr event series, who share their experiences of what it’s like running cultural events in Prague for a minority non-white audience. It’s quite rich in details, and I add my own experiences and anecdotes to try to paint a picture of the music scene and political landscape in Czechia a little further than the ESTROGUN interview. There’s one more big political read from me to be published through Easterndaze, and it was a really enjoyable challenge to write a little more upscale and widescreen than I have been.
The second piece is yet another interview, but much shorter, with the excellent Gin&Platonic label based in Ostrava, Czechia. I’d been at the launch event for their new EP from Italian producer nesso, at Ankali, the night before heading to PAF (did you see the review I wrote?), and I was really impressed by all of the music I heard. The feature gives a little crash course in the label, their context in Czechia (and further), and a bit about their most recent four releases (all 5/5 in my opinion) before the label people answer some questions. Below is a snippet, describing the new nesso:
“February 2nd saw the release Italian producer nesso’s ‘Algorave Express’, and much of the substance is written on the tin: sounds, seemingly plucked off the floor after dripping through a black hole, meet various algorithmically processed particle accelerators, and nesso fashions the resultant splatter into endlessly transforming poly-everything club wreckers.”
Been ticking over on my local radio residencies as usual, and I’ve got two shows to share this month. My Radio Punctum residency continues, and as I’ve got another Re-up show for Shella Radio with a batch of club-focussed music, Punctum stays chilled out and ambient/experimental. Tracklists are a little clunky in-email, so skip to the end of this if you’re one of those people that just want to know. For those who are happier with the scenic route, I did a miniature tour of the releases from Purple Uncle that I reviewed last month to tie off that thread, and cut it up with a little dub techno segment.
I closed the show on the noisier side, with a snippet from Sarah Persico’s excellent album Sphaîra and something from the upcoming Tim Hecker record released through Kranky next week, but I started with a piece from the wonderful upcoming record by Patrick Shiroishi & Petr Kurek, which I reviewed for the previous edition of Electronic Sound magazine:
“Impeccable Polish outpost Mondoj flags down a wonderful full length album with Kurek on bass and keys, and Shiroishi's tenor sax adding lilting, lazy breaths of honed wind. Diametrically opposed to the cheetah-like speed of the greyhound, Kurek & Shiroishi paint minimalist compositions as calm as a month of Sundays, listless melancholia chasing the corners of the room on 'Shadows', and quiet evenings for two, wine and candles, on 'Now I'm Broken Into'. Something to remember music's healing qualities by.”
Flipping the energy, you’ll find new club music through the Shella show, and as before the cheaters and scrapers can find the tracklist at the end. Although I shared the previous Re-Up show last month, it’d been two months, and there was a spate of great releases.
High on that list is the new EP from DJ Strawberry, who’s unique take on footwork has him looking pretty unstoppable lately. Word on the grapevine is there’s more music from him soon as well. Other big picks include the latest from the ever-precise Piezo, a stomping new release from A.Fruit on YUKU, and the upcoming record on Accidental Meetings from footwork maestro Dj.Mc.
That’s it for the updates: the next part is a little indulgent, but you agreed to be here, so...
What's the matter with everything?! Or, riding slow in the wake of a mass movement.
2025 seems to continue in much the same way that 2024 left off: I’ve already lost track of the many different political mischiefs and uproars. I don’t think anyone is much surprised, with Trump back in office and stirring the pot, but what’s a little more surprising is the trend I’ve seen of people (fianlly) moving to (gradually) stop their usage of products, particularly from Google and Meta. I’m tentatively among them, and I’m steadily replacing my Gmail logins, apps, and so on, but I’m not really here to talk about that.
Towards the end of last year, I finally got around to launching (the premise) of Reach being a paid model newsletter. I’d always intended to get it to that point, but was swallowed entire and whole by the life events of 2023/4. The new plan, post-Easterndaze scribing, was to re-launch Reach in March, to metaphorically/physically coincide with Spring, and hopefully take on all the associations with rebirth and renewal. That’s still the goal, but the posts have shifted somewhat in the last weeks.
It can’t be avoided that Substack itself has been nurturing a poor reputation: the founder’s recently praised the free speech movements adopted by, of all people, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg, and the platform keeps a lot of Neo-Nazis who are making good money. Claire Rousay re-sounded that alarm bell in her final Substack post, wherein she also says that, becoz bizniz and Instagram’s where she reaches new listeners, she must stay posting on Meta. It’s not a correlation that so many queer and trans people are emigrating from these platforms en masse, as the founders state “cisgender” is a slur or eradicate the minimal platform-based support for queer and trans* identities online.
I don’t much know the best way forward for myself in this uncertain future, let alone the right route for others, but some things are clear for this newsletter:
Instagram has not served this Substack as a means of attracting readers or new subscribers; investing money, time, and energy into social media content and strategy to make it a place to interact with my writing is not what I’ll be doing.
Since almost all of the people following the existing Instagram account also follow my “personal” one, and I cross-post everything anyway, I’ll keep just that one. Be sure to follow me there, if the emails slip through your inbox.
The financial viability of being a full-time journalist or writer, in underground music niches at least, has apparently expired. Whatever “legacy media” this world possesses (RA, Crack, theQuietus, The Wire) are struggling to engage readers with longer pieces, and many are adapting their content strategies (and broadening their audiences) in hopes to facilitate a shift in engagement on platforms which actively suppress content on arbitrary and machine-driven rules.
What strikes me is an emergent divergency between the platforms pushing certain stories or cover stars in front of cloudy sponsorship and contracted editorial deals, and the readers who (if they want to read) are seemingly more interested in niche concepts and themes in music, or in bigger, political cuts.
During the initial drive to get paid subscribers to Reach I realised that attempting to set up a full-scale publication on the calibre of First Floor (etcetera) was not viable on either my part, in terms of work, nor on the size of my existing audience, in terms of possible growth. Importantly, I also realised that adhering to a regular and formulaic content strategy sucked the joy and creativity from my writing. For a long time I had a dream to invent some new way of writing about music from a journalistic perspective. There’s only so many times a human can read paragraphs of relentlessly uninteresting information contextualising an artist, and only so many different permutations of the same descriptive terms and techniques before they all read as derivatives of each other. Maybe conjuring or crafting a new mode of coverage is an impossible task, but I feel now is the right time to try this, or else disappear.
What all this means together is that the general strategy of Reach will change: I’ll do my best to keep it updated on a regular schedule, but there’s no more guarantees. If a big batch of work comes my way, as with the Easterndaze pieces, I’ll need to prioritise it, and the same with any more “life hurdles”. The idea of paywalling my content for all but a tiny number of people is not appealing, but the option to support my work is always there, and always greatly appreciated — which is vastly underselling the surge of emotions upon receiving a “new paid subscriber” email!
A last note on this: while Instagram and other socials have not been good for either subscribers or readers, it does somewhat remain a powerful mechanism for word-of-mouth sharing. If you’ve enjoyed reading Reach, the next best way you can repay me after subscribing is to share a quote online to your network. As I draw back from socials myself, it’ll be extra valuable to have my writing shared there by other users!
Something good does seem to stick to the wall, amongst all the shit: the glamour of so much online “content” seems to be paling, and more people are looking for the small and the niche, to fill the void that large-scale and high-budget media had perhaps previously filled. In that light, running a personal newsletter doesn’t seem as impactless as it might have done otherwise, which might be naïve optimism, but even still it might contain some truth.
In that spirit, I’d like to point you towards a friend’s publication that recently inspired me, for two reasons: first is that the author is collecting survey responses from UK queer nightlife workers survey to inform a future piece; the second reason is the shrewd and essential updating of a metaphor utterly central to online existence:
“The way we engage with the online world has dramatically shifted since the early days of the internet. The playfulness of the early web metaphor for surfing as the primary term to describe how we engage with the online world has been replaced with endless scrolling - associated with doom and entrapment.”
I’m currently teaching my students about Conceptual Metaphor Theory (start with Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By), under which the implications of this pivot in metaphor construction presents a telling tale on the autopsy table; the “deadening”, or maybe outright murder, of the online world means genuine changes to our mental schemas of the internet, and to peripheral structures like social media. Those changes take place in the imperceptible and unconscious assumptions, associations and biases that form each mind’s unique labyrinth.
Ursula K. le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest features little green humans who are able to pass consciously into the “Dreamworld”, the same place we all venture to in our dreams, but the difference between the worlds is not described accurately as “not-real” or “real”. In this aspect of her thought experiment, she challenges us to perceive that the nature and state of our subconscious minds has a direct bearing on the conscious world: as individuals, as a collective species, and as a trans-species organism surviving on a spinning rock in space. She challenges us to see that the remedy for the sicknesses in her book (racism, imperialism, genocide, colonialism, militarism) are in healing rifts in our shared and individual subconscious realms, while leaving them untreated results in catastrophic consequences for material reality.
Written in the late 60’s, it’s a startling thing to see how the metaphorical parallels emerge when comparing the concepts of the Dreamworld of the Athsheans and our own Internet of Reality; as users change from surfing to doomscrolling in the intangible world they both cause and reflect the dissolution and degradation of the material world in a reciprocal relationship. As it is in le Guin’s book, the solution is more than likely a mixture of spiritual healing and violent uprising, and there’s hardly a better note to leave on than the suggestion of a bit of good rest and insurrection.
Radio Punctum Tracklist
Patrick Shiroishi & Petr Kurek - Now I’m Broken Into [forthcoming Mondoj]
Sergei Komarov meets Purpurniy Dyadya - dawn [Surf]
Angel R - Birdie II [enmossed]
Purpurniy Dyadya - Pulse II [Souvenirs from Imaginary Cities]
J.K - Talvehtia [Vuosi]
amkarahoi - urban hate [Biardo]
Refracted - Initiation [Titrate]
Dialog - Child Was I (feat. Benji) [DOT]
Cousin - Lu’s Dub [Moonshoe]
Multicast Dynamics - Static Sensation [A Walking Contradiction]
Lifted - All Right [Peak Oil]
Racine - Comédie [Forthcoming HAUNTER Records]
Oblaka - The sun turned dim [Self Released]
Sara Persico - Kairos [Subtext]
Keru Not Ever - Mezzanine [Infinite Machine]
Tim Hecker - Sars Requiem [Forthcoming Kranky]
Kahn - Polar (Gantz Remix) [Self Released]
Shella Radio Tracklist
Xin Lie - NGALENGKAH
DJ SOSA RD - Más rápido Toño
Korzi - Off The Hook
Wata Igarashi - Steaming
Dagga & Manao - Pendiente
HYPNA & NIQH - Circuit Reflex
[anonymised due to embargo] - Sonar
Tangerine - The Shape of Leaves
R-010 - Exhaust Pipes (Absis Remix)
Piezo - Deepa
The God in Hackney - The World in Air Quotes (Etch Remix)
Dj.Mc - You Ain’t Battling (Forthcoming Accidental Meetings)
Michal Wolski - Return to the (Dis)Comfort Zone
A.Fruit - Somnambulism (YUKU)
DJ Strawberry - Versatile Pt. 2
Synkro & DYL - Last Chance
A Strange Wedding - Wormhole Breaker (Patrick Russel Remix)
Sentient - Void Treader
Valesuchi - O telefone tem que ficar fora do estudio
Gantz - Eaten
Bruce - Mimicry
Oyubi - Zylin (Hizuo Remix)
Nesso - Pinecone
Iza Basia - Formant