BWV 819(a) – ["French"] Suite in E-flat Major

Plus: Cindy Castillo's Musical Offering, ONF's long 1970s, On the Calculation of Volume, and more!

I’ve referred to this in a prior post, but it’s worth spelling out: radio has long been, and still remains, a crucial way of maintaining and propagating the vitality of Native cultural forms. That includes broadcasting to the wider world: I rely on online radio programs to find music and get underexposed news (no matter how depressing), and I hope you tune in too. But surely more important is how these stations function as “electronic smoke signals.” Using radio to give constant access to oral traditions and Native languages helps keep cultural communities knit together.

Music has a key role in all of this; there’s a reason that song has an established and well-recognized role in language revitalization projects. So it’s not entirely surprising that Nuxalk Radio CKNN–FM would celebrate their 10th anniversary by releasing an album. What is surprising is that, even though there’s quite a lot written on Nuxalk music, this is the first album recorded entirely in the language. And it’s a critical time to get people listening to Nuxalk, since it’s spoken fluently by only a handful of people.¹

Nusximta certainly aims to get as many different audiences listening as it can. Even if the album contains traditionally-oriented songs like “Nusq’lst Skwanat,” none appear to be “folk songs” per se: every track has a credited writer. And the writer of that track, Nuskmata, is also credited with both the slow EDM stomper “Ista Nts Ali” and the post-revival-folk song “Ti syut-s alh Siyani.” Similarly, singer-songwriter Qwaxw is credited with both the indie rock-style opener “Susqwimtmacwaw” and the genre-defying jam “Wa skulhlxsaalhts.” But don’t think that generic diversity is all these songs or this album have to offer: these five are all great listens, especially the one-two punch that kicks off the album. The ending is great too, in the form of the hip-hop ballad “It7Nuxalkmctmacw.”

If nothing else, that song is hopefully doing its job just by making you wonder what the “7” stands for. (It’s a glottal stop; 7 looks like ʔ and is a lot easier to type.) If this orthography, the crazy sequences of consonants in names like “Qwaxw,” and the actual sounds of the lyrics pique your curiosity, then Nusximta is a success. No better way to bring attention to a language than to get it in people’s eyes and ears.

BWV 819(a) – [“French”] Suite in E-flat Major

i. Allemande

ia. Allemande (second try)

ii. Courante

iii. Sarabande

iv. Bourrée

v. Menuet I – Menuet II – Menuet I

You could call it the seventh French Suite. After all, it’s easy enough to explain away its absence from that collection. The fourth French Suite is already in E-flat and you can’t do the most obvious transposition to avoid the problem, since No.6 is in E major. In any case, it’s a crowded field. This one just didn’t quite make the cut.

Or rather, in some early manuscript compilations (P 418 and P 420), it did make the cut. This E-flat major suite was compiled alongside four or more of the French Suites, in two books whose title pages simply indicate “Six Suites.” That’s the same title you can see on the Altnikol manuscript that solidified the canonical six French Suites as a set; as often as not, this suite made the cut as one of the six. The point being that there was hardly a fixed conception of “the” French Suites. Even Bach’s own manuscript, in the first of his Notebooks for Anna Magdalena, only includes the first five. So, if early editors and copyists had decided to follow the choices embodied in P 418 or P 420 instead of taking cues from Altnikol, perhaps BWV 819 would be as famous as its cousins. It could be due to pure chance that this piece is as utterly obscure as it is now.

That’s a touchin’ good story, but maybe hold off before telling it to the world. I think there are some pretty good reasons that Bach, Altnikol, and posterity kept BWV 819 out of their final compilations of “French[-style] Suites [with no prelude].” It seems entirely possible to me that Bach was never satisfied with this piece, that he never thought it was quite finished. Truth be told, I think it’s simply not as good as the “other” French Suites, and I’m honestly not the world’s biggest fan of those either. (They have their moments!) Then again, in large part because of this lack of finish, BWV 819 is at least as interesting as any of the suites in Bach’s big collections. It’s nice to see Bach really struggle with compositional problems for once.

Not that the other French Suites came easy either. All of these pieces survive in a gazillion versions (there’s a lovely version of the E-flat French Suite with a second Gavotte and an added Prelude that I fully plan to crib from in a later post). Bach clearly found it difficult to finalize them. It could be a symptom of the style: these pieces are all written in deceptively simple keyboard textures, transparent enough to make the tiniest details really matter. It could also just be a sign of Bach’s increasing fussiness as he aged, his increasing awareness of his public reputation and developing plans for publication. (There are a lot more versions of Well-Tempered Clavier entries from Book II than those from Book I.)

In the case of BWV 819, though, I think it’s pretty obvious why Bach made his most major revision. He took a second stab at the Allemande because the original is, to put it kindly, really really boring. There is practically nothing distinctive to note about this piece, which mostly consists of rote noodling with almost no rhythmic, harmonic, or figural variety. Not that it completely lacks interest. The hands trade off roles late in each half, and there’s a fun bit of chromaticism at the end of the first (0:27):

But otherwise, the challenge in this piece is getting it to sound like anything but a long, shapeless succession of pretty sounds.

Bach knew it. You can tell because he overcorrected. His second attempt at an Allemande is in some ways a clear revision of the first: same harmonic plan, same basic figuration. But now he lets the stylistic pendulum swing back to the opposite extreme (0:32):

This passage is analogous to the excerpt above, and in some ways they do the same thing: have the hands swap parts and take a little chromatic excursion before settling down in B-flat. But in the second version, that “little chromatic excursion” is expanded to include some of the most gratuitous, outlandish music in Bach’s whole output. It’s completely jarring in context; we start out in the sound world of the First Cello Suite and then get thrown into the 25th Goldberg Variation out of nowhere. The rising thing in m.11 (0:47) might as well be from a piece by Anton Webern. It’s cool, but it also completely breaks the piece.

Maybe Bach knew that he overdid it. The second half of the new Allemande ends in a much more relaxed fashion, indeed sounding something like the luscious Allemande from the French Suite in the same key (2:40):

Further evidence that Bach could have been a bit sheepish about this new Allemande: he didn’t try to zhoosh up the Courante. And it could really use some zhooshing up. Even in its moments of slight rhythmic interest (like a good old-school Courante by Louis Couperin or Chambonnières, this one often hesitates between 3/2 and 6/4), this piece can sound something like an AI-generated painting of a French Courante, the kind of piece that you might feel sheepish about improvising because it sounds too stylistically accurate, which is to say utterly generic. The Bourrée, while still pretty rote, is better—even if it ends up being rather ungainly.

So does the Sarabande, although at least this movement is interesting. It’s also very difficult, easily the hardest music in the Suite:

This Sarabande is written almost like a transcription of a trio sonata (I can hear the flutes now). Which is to say that it’s not very nice to play on harpsichord. A cello can make those repeated notes sound like a lovely pulsing under the tune; a harpsichord is not a cello and what you hear instead is me sweating in an effort not to make it sound ugly. And all those ornamented parallel thirds and sixths in the right hand—yeesh! In the end, I wish this music were prettier. It’s a lot of work for not much payoff.

At least the minuets are a bright spot. The first one immediately endears itself by playing around with the rhythmic contradictions inherent in the minuet form (I talked about all that here):

The piece doesn’t really go much further with the rhythmic stuff, but hey, it’s just a minuet; it’s not supposed to be anything too crazy. And the second one (0:54) is a lovely little trio (it really does sound like two oboes and bassoon), with the most balanced, distinctive tune out of any of the movements of this suite. Not a bad way to end.

Oh, right: there’s no Gigue. There were Baroque composers who would happily end pieces with a simple minuet, but Bach wasn’t one of them. If it’s not a Gigue, it’s a big Capriccio like the second harpsichord Partita, or perhaps a Passepied, Badinerie, or Réjouissance like the Orchestral Suites. Bach liked to go out with a bang. To be fair, maybe the Gigue to this piece was lost. But I think it’s possible that Bach just never had the heart to write one. It couldn’t be the seventh French Suite because it was never a complete suite to begin with.

What I’m Listening To

Cindy Castillo – J.S. Bach: Musikalisches Opfer

Maybe you’ve noticed that I almost never plug recordings of organ music here. That’s not a coincidence: it’s hard to give a fair assessment to recordings by people I know personally or have worked with, and I don’t want anybody to feel left out by omission. And I have met quite a lot of organists.

But not Cindy Castillo. Really, she doesn’t seem to have much of a profile outside of Belgium, although I hope that changes soon. This is a fascinating project, beautifully executed, on a spectacular instrument. It would be a shame to let it go unheralded.

Start with the organ, by one of the contenders for the title of “best active organ builder”: Dominique Thomas. Thomas specializes in Baroque-style organs that combine warmth, full sound, absolute clarity, precise touch, and sonic variety. This one is no exception. The city of Namur is justifiably proud of it: they made a whole website for it.

Namur may not be a very big city (100,000 or so people), but it’s the capital of Wallonia, so it has its own university and music conservatory. Their local traditions seem awfully fun:

In other words, Castillo—who teaches at the conservatory and is “curator” for the organ on this recording—is embedded in a cripplingly Belgian (or rather, specifically Walloon) context. Her musical projects are deeply tied to this sense of national identity: Franck and Jongen of course, but also a whole host of contemporary composers.

It’s in this context (contemporary composers) that I think Castillo’s Musical Offering makes the most sense. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never actually listened to this piece in its entirety before: it’s basically never performed and only rarely recorded, because it’s not particularly obvious how or even if it’s supposed to be performed. The title really does say it all. The publication was a ritual gift to Frederick the Great, an anthology to be perused and dipped into. It’s not concert music. In both of the usual senses: it’s not flashy for the performers, and often not all that gratifying to listen to. Really, the Musical Offering can be downright weird. Like a lot of Bach’s later contrapuntal music, I often get the impression that some of its canons have been made to sound deliberately strange, as if to emphasize the fact that strict counterpoint is forbidding and technical.

All of which is to say that the Musical Offering is pretty avant-garde stuff, and benefits from avant-garde treatment:

(You didn’t think I was going to leave out that link, did you?) Castillo plays the music pretty straight, but makes excellent use of tone color to let the counterpoint pop and the strangeness settle. I’ve never enjoyed the canons as much as on this recording.

I also love what she does with the trio sonata. Another reason you may not have heard the Musical Offering before is that it seems to call for a somewhat strange ensemble, most of which is going to have to remain silent for large portions of any given performance. Castillo’s solution is excellent: all of this music can be played comfortably on organ (we know a little something about trio sonatas), and the unifying effect of having everything played on a single instrument really helps make the whole digestible. Even if the Ricercars are probably actually music for early piano (you won’t hear me play them on harpsichord), they sound great on organ, especially one as sensitive as this. Sometimes I found myself wishing that the playing was a little more fiery, but there’s something to be said for this kind of modernist coolness and distance in this music. It worked for Webern; it works for Castillo.

Sullivan Fortner – Southern Nights

Ambrose Akinmusire – honey from a winter stone

Neither of these videos has all that much to do with the albums under discussion…but they’re great sets, and it’s a privilege to be able to see so much of these musicians so easily.

It’s funny how vibrant, joyful music can sometimes sound completely dead. Even a really great contemporary jazz musician can fall into this trap. Learn the styles of the greats a little too well and you suddenly start to sound like the sketch artist at the museum instead of the painters themselves. (Classical musicians, of course, have this problem in spades as well: we can all think of violinists who’ve learned their Perlman impression a little too well, or singers who only ever wanted to sound like Jessye Norman.)

That’s an awfully harsh way to begin, and I should say that I actually enjoyed both of these albums. Really enjoyed them; listen to both. But Sullivan Fortner’s, despite its immense charm and panache, spooked me. He’s really good at conjuring the style of musicians that I like and listen to a lot; but his version (inevitably?) sounds taxidermied. The history of jazz, of course, constantly repeats the same story: this year’s avant-garde becomes populist fare or even background music for a future generation. And so generic post-bop has functioned as sonic wallpaper for decades.

But Fortner has absorbed a great deal more than that: it’s wild to hear such accurate evocations of later Thelonious Monk (“9 Bar Tune” in particular, but he’s all over the album) and even Cecil Taylor (the opening of “I Love You”), only performed in this utterly polished, studied, risk-free manner. I realize that the 60s were 60 years ago, but I think these styles have resisted being taken up so literally. In that sense, Fortner is quite impressive, and his album is full of great playing. Still, it’s kind of depressing to hear “free jazz stylings” deployed in the same defanged way that “sophisticated post-bop” (from Fortner’s artist bio) has been trotted out for years.

All this was really brought into sharp focus when I put on Ambrose Akinmusire’s latest immediately after Fortner’s album. I don’t even think it’s Akinmusire’s best (that’s probably 2020’s on the tender spot of every calloused moment) but it’s more than enough to bring the contrast across. I realize that the comparison is unfair—Akinmusire is very possibly the best active bandleader in jazz, and certainly the best trumpeter—but it really is startling to hear somebody who owns their own musical language right after listening to a fluent purveyor of received wisdom and styles. Especially given that those sounds are also the starting point for Akinmusire, only fully metabolized.

Personally, I’d start with the solo about 3:15 into “Bloomed.” Or with the extraordinary 30-minute long “s-/Kinfolks” that closes the album. It’s a little hard for me to know what to make of poppier moments of funk+hip-hop, and I was never quite as in love with Akinmusire’s string arrangements (although I preferred how he used both on 2018’s Origami Harvest), but even in those moments, you can hear both the musicians’ control over their musical materials, and their willingness to take serious risks. It’s a surprisingly heartfelt and intimate album. He’ll surprise us again next time. Bring it on.

AprilBlue – yura

The thing about Japanese Shoegaze is that there’s an absolute ton of it:

And most of it kinda sounds the same. That’s a feature, not a bug. Styles like shoegaze and “alternative R&B” and “chill hip-hop beats” and “minimal jazz piano” and “let’s be real, most of 18th-century music” proliferate because, once you know the basics, it takes basically no effort or creativity to put something out. In this case, you just kind of jam with the distortion cranked up; don’t be afraid to reuse a small vocabulary of drum fills, strumming patterns, and chord changes; and definitely don’t adopt the distinctive vocal layering and processing that gave original shoegaze its distinctive sound.

Now, a lot of these musicians are good, so the results can still be pretty listenable, or even downright enjoyable. But, until now, I’ve never found this music memorable. As

Patrick St. Michel

points out, AprilBlue succeed by letting in a variety of other influences. Sometimes—as with plenty of other Japanese shoegaze bands—that means the melodic structures and vocal styles of J-rock or even J-pop; but what I really love about this album is how it brings styles contemporary to shoegaze in dialogue with the swirl of distorted guitars and feedback. I love the big, bold indie choruses of “Evergreen,” and its “Sympathy for the Devil” bass line. I love how “Kureru hana” can bring pop-rock and pop-punk into the equation, with a dash of Southern Rock (even with a chorus that sounds a little like “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”). And I love the 2000s New York indie rock of “Kotonoha no kuni” and the glockenspiel grunge of “Yoru dake ga shitte iru.”

yura is not a perfect album; some of the more stereotyped J-rock gestures grate on me. But overall, by putting all of these sounds—closely related as they already were—into orbit around their core shoegaze style, AprilBlue have found new and vital musical possibilities in a genre that’s usually beyond stale. yura is melodically generous and rhythmically propulsive. I love it.

ONF – ONF:MY IDENTITY

Finally, new K-pop to get truly excited about. Honestly, I was all ready to give IVE the spotlight again until “The Stranger” came out; and if ONF hadn’t come out with this song, you might be hearing about G-DRAGON’s latest triumph.

Those are pretty high benchmarks to clear, and ONF does it by a mile. This song rules. In the current musical environment, it’s just refreshing to hear a group really sing together, and ONF (full of good voices) are given a nice, fat chorus to do just that, followed by a pleasantly goofy scat post-chorus. The album tracks (mostly) keep up the energy too, especially “Night Tale,” which sounds for all the world like an alternative option for the album’s single; maybe if WM had wanted a slightly darker theme for the comeback, they would have gone with that song instead. It’s a great complement to “The Stranger.”

In all of this, ONF is backed by a producer (MonoTree’s Hwanghyun) who really loves to mix it up. Certainly it’s a huge change from last time we heard them. I’ve seen people compare this song—extroverted and disco-inspired as it is—with “Beautiful Beautiful,” but really the only ONF song that comes close is 2021’s perpetually underrated “Goosebumps.” It’s their one song in this uptempo, dancey vein that doesn’t have the sugary melodicism of a “Complete” or “Love Effect.” I like “Complete,” but it’s sort of like the world’s best One Direction song; “The Stranger” (and “Night Tale”) represent a departure. It’s a new style

Well, a new style for ONF in particular. Much the opposite for K-pop in general. “The Stranger” targets almost exactly the same musical niche as RIIZE’s “Get a Guitar”—and RIIZE in turn are being fed songs that evoke their SM seniors SHINee. That is: these songs from RIIZE evoke almost SHINee’s whole discography; “Punch Drunk Love” is a particularly concentrated example, but this sound is everywhere in their music. And the same goes for a lot of other groups: if you like “The Stranger,” you like one of the core sounds of K-pop and J-pop boy group music. (Although it’s almost never done this well.)

Not that SHINee invented this style. As Lee Mujin puts it (in an episode well above his usual standard):

And he’s not the only one making Michael Jackson and SHINee comparisons. Everybody can hear it (and maybe see it in the choreography).

Michael Jackson, among many more notable achievements, is probably the single most important person in the history of K-pop. (Needless to say, anything positive I say about Jackson here is not intended as an endorsement of or comment upon his behavior offstage and outside of the recording studio.) Lee Sooman, creator of the first K-pop idol group (and of SHINee), was directly inspired by Jackson. Seo Taiji, typically credited with “inventing” K-pop, was a huge fan and sampled Jackson’s songs. And here’s JYP in his personal studio—the Quincy Jones room!—pointing to the first album he ever bought:

And so on. BTS’s famous love and emulation of Jackson’s music and choreography is downstream of a very long tradition in K-pop (and, more proximately, one of the many things they cribbed from SHINee).

So in some sense, “Michael Jackson” was the original K-pop. Because he came up in the Motown trainee system. Because of the emphasis on hyper-polished, jaw-dropping choreography, on dazzling outfits and stages. But above all, by being at the forefront of the ‘80s pop revolution, the invention of a dance music sound that was definitely post-disco, post-soul, rock-tinged, funk-tinged, but never any one thing in particular. K-pop’s famous stylistic hybridity is really a continuation of this legacy, a refusal to acknowledge that the ‘80s ended. Sometimes that sounds like Phil Collins doing a version of the St. Elmo’s Fire theme song. Sometimes it sounds exactly like “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” But if it’s a boy group, it often just sounds like Michael Jackson.

Given this well-known and enormous footprint, it’s easy to just chalk everything up to Jackson’s influence and leave it at that. And this SHINee/RIIZE/“The Stranger” sound undoubtedly does owe an enormous amount to Jackson. But which Michael Jackson? It’s actually a little hard to say.

“The Stranger” is clearly not disco, and it’s clearly not soul, which means that it doesn’t really sound like any of Michael Jackson’s stuff before Thriller. (I wish there were K-pop that sounded like “Don't Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.”) There’s lots of K-pop that sounds like various songs from Thriller itself, but “The Stranger” isn’t one of those either. Really, it—along with so much of SHINee—is closest to the musical universe of Bad. Pull up “Bad” or “Smooth Criminal” in your head; you can probably start to hear the resemblance. And you can really hear it with “Another Part of Me”:

But now actually listen to those songs again, and pay attention to the instrumental in “Another Part of Me.” This is hard-edged music, locked straight into the metrical grid, with an almost futuristic, mechanical tinge to it. The primary sounds are synths and drum machines. Not that ONF (or, lord help me, SHINee) lack for loud synths, but that bass line is fiercely analog, as is much of the percussion (sonically, not literally).

And the singing is hardly Jacksonian. To their credit, ONF and SHINee are two of the best vocal groups in K-pop, and they sing with passion. They have a nice vibrato, and have learned how to spit out their consonants the right way. (I think delivery is what Lee Mujin was referring to.) But it doesn’t sound like Michael Jackson at all. It lacks his edge.

I have a complicated relationship with Nelson George’s writing, but his book on Thriller permanently changed how I hear Jackson’s music. What he emphasizes above all is how angry that album is, how its dancefloor intensity often springs from singing that sounds downright paranoid. It all makes sense in the context of lyrics like those to “Billie Jean,” but you can hear the same borderline hysteria throughout much of Jackson’s discography. Yowls and screams are a staple of the best singing in popular music, but his never sounds like a lover’s desperation. Maybe it’s because he was forced to simulate that since at least the age of 11; maybe it’s because of the actual paranoia and anger that was engulfing him in the ‘80s. Regardless, by the time of Bad, Jackson’s diatribe against “Dirty Diana” sounds frankly scary.

So ONF don’t sing like Michael, and the backing isn’t exactly like any one period of his music. The melodic structures also don’t really match his style: Jackson was never one for sustained, long-note choruses. But you know who was? Stevie Wonder:

Now that sounds like a SHINee chorus. And, while we’re at it, we can note that Stevie’s brand of funk is also an awful lot closer to the mark as well:

Then consider the singing. Even on “Superstition” and “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” Stevie Wonder never really sounds angry, and certainly not paranoid. He always sings with passion—just like ONF—but it’s never scary.

In some ways, trying to make this distinction is proving a moot point, since Stevie Wonder was (obviously) such an enormous influence on Michael Jackson himself. And it’s not like Stevie Wonder’s influence on K-pop is unknown—here’s another of JYP’s prized possessions:

Still, I think it’s nice to spread the credit and talk of influences around. And let it be known: at least as long as K-pop boy groups keep going, the ‘70s never ended either.

Also liked…

Peter Somuah – Highlife

Ex-Vöid – In Love Again

Isabel Schicketanz – Seelentrost

Stewart Goodyear with Andrew Constantine and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – Mendelssohn, Goodyear & Schumann: Piano Concerti [mostly for the Schumann]

Creepy Nuts – LEGION

Acidclank – In Dissolve

What I’m Reading

There’s a genre of, let’s call it “listening fiction,” that a certain type of music scholar can’t get enough of. There’s Calvino’s “Under the Jaguar Sun” and its operatic descendant, Luciano Berio’s Un Re in Ascolto. But above all, there’s Kafka’s “The Burrow.” I’ve been assigned that story more times than seems plausible for somebody who’s never taken a course on Modernist short stories or German literature after 1850.

It’s to Solvej Balle’s immense credit that her 2020 novel On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) (published in translation by Barbara Haveland last year) matches up favorably to Kafka’s story. (Sadly, the “volume” of the title is rumfang in Danish, not the sound-centric lydstyrke.) It’s a wonderful novel, and in particular a great novel of sounds. It starts with sounds. It’s framed by sounds. It’s organised around sound. Sound is what keeps the protagonist going.

It’s also to Balle’s credit that she can take an intensely familiar premise—think Groundhog Day—and, well, not make us feel like we’re reliving the same plot again. (I couldn’t resist, sorry.) It helps that Balle adopts an utterly different tone, keeping her writing elegiac and lyrical where the Bill Murray vehicle is tragicomic. She’s Danish, he’s American.

And this is a novel, not a movie. Balle sort of turns the plot into an allegory of fiction-writing, a depiction of retracing and perfecting the same plot, making ever more minute observations. Since her protagonist decides to stay hidden for much of the book, those observations are overwhelmingly sonic; when she wants to move, she disguises her sounds with the sound patterns of the rest of the world. If you know what I study, you’ll see why I couldn’t resist this passage from almost exactly the midpoint of the book:

It is easier now. If I follow his day, if I maintain the rhythm, if I don’t disrupt the pattern. If I wake at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. If I boil water when he is printing out labels for our letters and packages. I have the sounds and his movements. It is merely time that is broken. We are together. With only some walls in a house separating us. No one’s dead, no one’s injured, and that is not something we talk about. Words are not necessary. There are syllables and there is rhythm. I hear the rhythm in the house, footsteps on the stairs. I hear stressed and unstressed raindrops on the windowpane. Music is necessary. For rhythm and rain-wet syllables. It is something that can be heard: we are a quiet orchestra and we are playing now. Listen.

Still, it’s not just listening fiction and certainly not just metafictional allegory. On the Calculation of Volume (at least this first volume) invites readings in terms of ecology, cosmology, as an allegory of depression, a commentary on the scientific enterprise, or just as a real page-turner of a novel that immaculately unspools (begins to unspool) a solid premise. I’ll pick up volume II later today, and look forward to the translations of the other five.

A few others:

• Smithsonian Magazine – For Centuries, Indigenous People Lived in These Desert Canyons. Now, New Technology Reveals Extraordinary Details About This Sacred Site

• NOEMA – The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer

• WBEZ – Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” producer says his versatility came from Chicago roots

• Texas Monthly – A Deadly Passage

• New Left Review – Why Is There the Amount of Art That There Is?

• Strong Towns – Traffic Deaths Are Down, But Not for the Reasons We’re Being Told

• Biographic² – Where the Savior Fish Still Swims

Thanks for reading, and see you again soon!

1. Although, contra Ethnologue, it is being taught in schools.

2. RIP to Hakai, and thank goodness that its staff found a new home.