October 9 - Never saw you coming but I saw the smoke

It's been sort of a weird week, right? Maybe the Zuckerberg outages threw things out of whack more than I realized, but something about this week has felt off, vaguely queasy. Maybe it's nothing more than the downturn of the season, finally, into something chillier and darker.

The recommendations this week match that vibe. We're ramping up the spook factor in this batch with a few recs that are as unsettling as they are interesting. Even the lighter affair here, like the music video we're kicking off with, has an undercurrent of displacement. The real recommendation this week might be simply to linger there for a bit. Carve out a little time this week to feel the queasiness of the unfamiliar. Not so much because it's good to feel scared, but because of what lies just on the other side of the nausea of novelty - a new palate, a new muscle, a new knowledge that might have been hard to come by otherwise.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge here at the top, of course, how grateful I am for the warm welcome back into the world you all gave The Crossover Appeal this week. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for reading, thank you for following, and thank you for trying things out along with me. Nothing helps The Crossover Appeal out more than simply passing the things you take from it along to someone else - I hope you find something worth sharing here.

Watch + Listen: “Say What You Will” by James Blake

James Blake has made his name over the last decade making fragmented, often devastating electronic soundscapes and then singing deeply sad lyrics over them in his delicate, keening voice. Very little of his music could be described as having a sense of humor - it’s serious sad boy stuff for serious sad boys. Obviously I’m a huge fan.

All of this applies to the new single from his latest album, “Say What You Will”. It’s a moaning, moping affair, depicting James as a resigned failure, so used to isolation and under appreciation that he had to write a heartbreaker of a pop song to prove just how bad it feels. Which is why the accompanying music video for this track is such a shocking counterpoint of self-ironizing chuckles. It’s a gigantic music nerd in-joke written that sets Blake’s beautiful but inscrutable approach to music against Finneas - Billie Eilish’s brother and producer - for whom life and accolades just seems to come more easily. The punchline probably won’t land quite as well for anyone who pays less than too much attention to pop and electronic/dance music production credits, but it landed for me, and even if you don’t spend the whole video laughing out loud like I did, the song is still a killer.

And, incidentally, if this is your first James Blake tune and you find yourself thinking “damn, I liked this,” well check back soon, because we’re working on a more full introduction to his work for the Crossover Appeal a bit later in the month.

Read: The work of Junji Ito

Encountering the work of Junji Ito for the first time is like being introduced to a whole set of alien feelings and sensations that you weren’t aware lived inside of you. Ito has been a working mangaka since the late 80s and several of his short one-off stories have been circulating online since the Internet’s early days. For me, his stories “The Licking Woman”, about a vagrant who kills passersby with her enormous, hideous tongue and “The Enigma of Amigara Fault”, about the monstrous transformations undergone by ordinary people drawn to dive through holes revealed by a crack in the earth, are a heady mix of Cronenberg-esque body squick and Lovecraftian cosmic horror. These things are soaked in dread to the degree where reading his work is both intoxicating and transportive, like being drunk in the back of an Uber whose driver obeys none of the traffic laws.

This may not sound particularly inviting, especially if horror isn’t your thing to begin with. But it’s October, spooky times are upon us, and having just finished his latest book, Remina, I feel pretty confident that it’s a great place to start with Ito. Remina tells the story of a rogue planet that appears in our galaxy, consuming everything - planets, moons, debris, and yes Earth - on its way to our home. But the real terror of Remina lies in the obsessive violence of a desperate population who hunts down a single sixteen-year-old girl they believe is responsible for summoning the planet here. It’s a dire meditation on the things humanity will do when confronted with their own annihilation, but it’s also a full-bodied rejection of the idea that monstrous violence is all humanity has left in that moment. Though I’m still a relative Junji Ito novice, this is the kind of theme that runs through his work and keeps it from solipsistic nihilism. The dread of Ito is also a beautiful and thoughtful consideration of the limits of our experience and the value of stripping things back to the bone.

Read: “Why Do We Even Listen to New Music?” By Jeremy D. Larson

If you were to ask me this question directly, I think I’d sputter for a few blank moments before explaining in a really unsatisfying way some cross section of a responsibility to appreciate new artists and the thrill of discovery. Larson raises a good point - we are wired to love the feedback loop of familiarity, especially when it comes to the pleasure of listening to music, and most of this piece is devoted to demonstrating that pleasure across history and culture. What I like about Larson’s essay, however, is the way it frames music discovery as a healthy habit, something that helps ward off the tempting, inward spirals of our own media feeds, that, like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, pushes us forward, helps us grow, and keeps us in contact with the possibilities that always lurk just outside the things we’ve always felt and had.

“The act of listening to new music in the midst of a global pandemic is hard,” writes Larson, “but necessary. .... The choice to listen to new music prioritizes, if for one listen only, the artist over you. It is an emotional risk to live for a moment in the abyss of someone else’s world, but this invisible exchange powers the vanguard of art, even in times of historic inertia.”

And so here we are choosing to live in that abyss together.

Play: NiteCafe by Angus Russell

Speaking of abyss, remember DeepDream? The neural network program that found and dramatically enhanced patterns within images to create some truly psychedelic and unsettling stuff? Well, NiteCafe is like that if instead of image transformation we were talking about image creation. Built by Australian dev, Angus Russell, NiteCafe originally took one image and cross applied the visual style of a different image to it. You might imagine, for instance, uploading a family photo and instructing the program to repaint it in the style of Edvard Munch’s Scream. Recently however NiteCafe has added a new feature that has had me a bit obsessed this week - text-generated images.

It works like this. You type in a phrase, whatever you want, and then you instruct NiteCafe to perseverance on it a bit until the collective computational unconscious produces something that stares back at you, unblinking, and asks, “is this what you wanted?” The process is computationally expensive, so running the program costs credits but the developer provides you with a few for free to get you started and you can earn more by exploring the creations that other users have generated. For my part, I’ve made images with the following phrases:

“A planet devouring other planets.”

“The whole world at your fingertips the ocean at your door.”

“I’ve been sobered by my time on the shelf.”

And the results have consistently amused, unsettled, and lightly nauseated me. I can’t recommend it enough.

That's it for this week. We'll be checking in a little later. And, if you missed it, here's the playlist we put together for your autumn evenings earlier. Hope it keeps you comfy through the cooler months.

Jordan Cassidy